Conclusion
Conclusion
Apart from minor comments about Jesus, the extracanonical sources scholars have used to reconstruct the story or teachings of Jesus date from the second century or later. These sources tend to be significantly later than the first-century Gospels that early Christians chose to preserve. Although the Gospel of Thomas may contain some authentic traditions, the Gospel of Peter may be very late and Secret Mark appears to be a modern forgery. The apocryphal gospels are novels mostly from the late second and early third century; the gnostic “gospels” differ starkly in genre from our canonical Gospels, and in any case reflect gnostic elements underlining their later date. These features are quite in contrast to the abundance of Palestinian Jewish elements that we shall note (e.g., chs. 11-16) in our canonical Gospels. The pre-Gospel source we can probably reconstruct to some degree, “Q,” is helpful, but cannot easily be divided into “authentic” and “inauthentic” stages. It can be reconstructed only on the basis of our canonical Gospels. It is, then, the canonical Gospels to which we must look for our most secure information about the historical Jesus.
The rest of the book divides into two sections. First, we must examine the question of the canonical Gospels’ genre and its implications for discovering substantial historical information in them. (This may be our most distinctive contribution to the discussion of historical Jesus research.) Second, we must explore sample forms and passages within these Gospels to evaluate how well their picture of Jesus fits his time and place (often in contrast to the time and place of their writing). (We will focus on the less controversial issue of the “Synoptic” Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — and their sources, rather than on John.) In the process, we will also ask how the most historically certain elements of their story about Jesus cohere to tell us something about the Jesus who lived in history.