Introduction
Introduction
Some more skeptical scholars consider “uncritical” other scholars who believe that much of the story of Jesus happened anything like how it appears in the traditional Gospels. Yet these skeptical scholars have often uncritically accepted sources or hypotheses on far less evidence than the reports available in our traditional Gospels. (Some of these scholars built much, for example, on the Secret Gospel of Mark, now shown to be a recent forgery.)
For a scholar who disagrees with more skeptical scholars to be genuinely uncritical would mean that she is unaware of the skeptical scholars’ arguments and has never thought through her own. For more skeptical scholars to deride less skeptical scholars as uncritical simply because the latter do not find the former’s arguments persuasive is to substitute name-calling for dialogue. This is what we call an “ad hominem argument,” and ad hominem arguments certainly are not good logic (sometimes employed most vociferously, in fact, where the evidence is weakest). Some leading scholars in the field warn that no one is free from assumptions, and that the presuppositions of skeptics are no more value-free than those of believers.1
In fact, as most scholars recognize, we cannot know anything very specific about Jesus (excluding, say, his Palestinian Jewish environment) apart from the earliest documents that tell us about him.2 Reports about Jesus include a brief report in Josephus, mention in two Roman historians, perhaps a few snippets of information here and there, but especially and at significant length early Christian tradition. That is, those most apt to preserve reports about Jesus were those to whom he most mattered — his followers. (We know far less about various other Judean prophets like Theudas precisely because no movement persisted interested in preserving their teachings. Why a movement persisted in the case of Jesus rather than Theudas is a different question worthy of mention in ch. 22.) We may talk about his followers’ “biases” toward him, but ultimately we have little beyond these sources to work with, and if we want to talk about the “historical Jesus,” we must focus on the nature of our sources.
In the end, our most complete sources are the traditional ones, though we must approach them with critical acumen. How historically reliable are these “best” sources? That question is the primary subject of this book.