This Book’s Genesis
This Book’s Genesis
A range of ancient sources from treaties to forensic speeches often opened with a narrative explaining the events leading up to the present situation. Such an explanatory narrative seems in order here.
This book would not exist apart from conversations with Richard Bauckham and Craig Evans in April 2007. This book rests especially on detailed research into the Gospels, research with which some of my earlier readers will be familiar. I had already invested considerable time in historical Jesus scholarship, but (despite a publisher’s urging) had long refused to add to the plethora of books on the subject. Instead, I published my research on the subject in my Matthew and John commentaries (in the introduction and appropriate passages). 2 Nevertheless, I hoped that my research would provide useful fodder for others working in the discipline, including those addressing some of the misinformation popularly propagated about Jesus in recent years, which has often ignored his Jewish setting.
Over the years, though, I discovered that new historical Jesus research often neglects commentators’ contributions (sometimes even while offering the same arguments). It took me a few years to realize that the field is too overwhelmed with explicit discussions of “Jesus research” for many specialists to have time to explore most commentaries in depth, despite the textual nature of most of our best sources.3 As I myself am learning, it is impossible for a readable book to engage all that has been published on the subject.
Soon after I began to recognize this situation, James Charlesworth kindly invited me to present a paper synopsis on “Luke-Acts and the Historical Jesus” at the Second Princeton-Prague Symposium on the Historical Jesus. I profited from dialogue with many other scholars there (too many for me to mention here individually, though the published works of some are cited in this book), but it was a stray comment behind me that compelled me to write on the topic. “He just writes commentaries,” one scholar noted. “If you want those in the historical Jesus field to read your work, you don’t stick it in commentaries.” I am not certain that he was referring to me; I was not the only commentator present. But I found the remark’s truth applicable to myself in any case.
As I conversed afterward separately with Craig Evans and Richard Bauckham, I suggested that the usefulness of my historical Jesus research was proving limited because I had dealt with it only text-by-text in commentaries, or in my commentary introductions. I had written more than a single book’s worth of discussion on the subject, but not in a discrete book devoted to the topic. These two friends each honestly challenged me to put such research into a “historical Jesus” book. Their urging proved persuasive, against my prior inclination (I had been hoping to start work on another project, now unhappily deferred).
This book at numerous points thus often develops, sometimes at greater or lesser length, research found in my commentaries on Matthew, John, and Acts, as well as adding newer material focused on this topic. (I am grateful to both Eerdmans and Hendrickson for permitting me to recycle and augment relevant material in my commentaries published by them.) Some of my insights, put into this book now in 2008, may not seem as “new” or “fresh” as they would have in the mid-90s (e.g., on matters of oral transmission in Mediterranean antiquity or ancient historiography).4 I ask the reader only to keep in mind that most of those particular insights do appear in my earlier commentaries, although I have since developed them. I believe that the combination of arguments here will in any case prove useful.
When I began planning this work, I had intended a style in some ways comparable to John Dominic Crossan’s Historical Jesus, except much shorter and with much fuller documentation. Although providing fuller documentation would not be difficult, I have failed to achieve the brevity I had intended, despite some limitations noted in the following introduction. I might thus revisit this material in a more popular work at a later time.