Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Problems with the A Primer for the Study of the Historical Jesus Part 2 by Marco Marina read by John Paul Middlesworth, introduced by Bart Ehrman.
[00:00:14] This now is the second part of the Primer on the Historical Jesus prepared by Marco Marina, which deals head on with the hardest question of how do scholars deal with the gospels of the New Testament? Critically not criticizing them, but providing an honest assessment of their historical value, Marco provides a very clear summary and set of insights, as you'll see.
[00:00:36] To begin with, for me as a historian, it's self evident that no narrative source from the ancient world can be taken at face value. All texts reflect the perspectives, interests and cultural assumptions of their authors, even ones that are discussing historical events.
[00:00:53] This is all the more true for writings that come from a time and place so distant from our own.
[00:00:58] When we turn to the canonical Gospels from a historical perspective, we must therefore be prepared to recognize both their immense value and their serious limitations.
[00:01:09] Canonical Gospels and their Historical Value on the side of value, the Gospels remain our earliest extended narratives of Jesus life, composed between roughly 65 and 95 cell. Despite being written decades after his death, they preserve traditions that circulated in the earliest Christian communities.
[00:01:29] Many of these traditions bear traces of a Semitic background, pointing to origins in first century Palestine. For example, certain awkward Greek constructions appear to be literal translations of Aramaic phrases suggesting that some stories go back to the language Jesus himself spoke.
[00:01:47] The Gospels are also valuable because they aren't isolated creations but but the end products of earlier traditions and sources.
[00:01:54] The most widely accepted explanation is the so called four source hypothesis. According to this model, Mark was the earliest Gospel used independently by both Matthew and Luke.
[00:02:06] In addition, Mark and Luke drew upon a now lost saying source that scholars call Q from the German kvela or source.
[00:02:16] Each also had unique material of their own, often labeled M and l.
[00:02:21] This means that within the canonical Gospels we can glimpse even earlier traditions behind the final compositions.
[00:02:27] For historians, this layered structure provides invaluable opportunities to probe beneath the surface and trace the development of Jesus traditions over time.
[00:02:39] Challenges and Problems yet despite their value, the Gospels are also deeply problematic as historical sources.
[00:02:47] The first difficulty is their chronological distance from the events they narrate. While they are our earliest narrative accounts, they were still written some 35 to 60 years after Jesus death.
[00:02:59] As the French scholar Ernest Renan once observed, it is the greatest of errors to suppose that legendary lore requires much time to mature.
[00:03:09] Sometimes a legend is the product of a single day.
[00:03:14] And indeed, within the gospels themselves we already encounter exaggerations and legendary elements. The triumphal entry into Jerusalem, for instance, with crowds hailing Jesus as king, reflects theological motifs more than plausible historical circumstance.
[00:03:30] A second problem involves authorship. The titles we see today, the Gospel According to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were added later.
[00:03:40] The Gospels were originally anonymous. Most critical scholars agree that the authors weren't eyewitnesses to Jesus ministry and likely had no direct contact with his immediate disciples.
[00:03:51] This raises the issue of access.
[00:03:54] How did they obtain their information?
[00:03:56] The prevailing answer is that most material comes from oral tradition stories passed on by word of mouth over decades.
[00:04:03] And anthropological studies of oral transmission, especially in traditional societies, indicate that such processes involve continual adaptation.
[00:04:13] Details are added, omitted, or reshaped as stories are retold.
[00:04:18] A third issue is language. Jesus himself almost certainly spoke Aramaic. While the Gospels were written in Greek, translation always involves interpretation. The meaning of a passage shifts noticeably once retranslated back into Aramaic.
[00:04:34] A classic example comes from the Gospel of John, where Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again.
[00:04:42] In Greek, the word can mean either again or from above. The pun works in Greek, but it wouldn't work in Aramaic at all.
[00:04:52] Finally, there is the matter of genre and ideology.
[00:04:55] The Gospels aren't biographies in the modern sense, written to present a neutral account of Jesus life.
[00:05:02] Even the term gospel means good news.
[00:05:06] These works were crafted as proclamations of faith, aiming to persuade readers that Jesus was the risen son of God.
[00:05:13] Their theological agenda shapes what events they include, how they narrate them, and what significance they attach to them. As such, historians must always ask, where does proclamation end and authentic memory begin?
[00:05:28] When one takes all of this into account, it's not surprising that the four Gospels contain discrepancies and contradictions. Just compare the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke or. Or the portrayals of Jesus during his arrest and trial in Mark and John, and very different pictures emerge.
[00:05:45] This leads directly to the central how can we peel away layers of tradition, legend and theological interpretation to arrive at the historical figure himself?
[00:05:56] Is it even possible?
[00:05:58] And if so, to what degree?
[00:06:00] That is the challenge before us. And in the next section, we'll consider the ways scholars over the past 60 years have developed methods for approaching the Gospels critically in the search for the historical Jesus.
[00:06:13] CANONICAL GOSPELS and CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP the modern study of the historical Jesus traces its beginnings to the Enlightenment and especially to the work of German scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus, Critically examined from 1835, shocked the 19th century world by subjecting the Gospel narratives to rigorous historical scrutiny.
[00:06:36] From those beginnings, the field has developed in many directions. Looking from today's vantage point One can say, speaking in simplified terms, that two major methodological approaches have dominated.
[00:06:49] The first, and still the most widely recognized, is the approach built on the so called criteria of authenticity.
[00:06:57] This method was given its clearest articulation and popularization by Norman Perrin in his influential book Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus.
[00:07:07] The basic idea was to develop objective, transparent rules that could help historians decide which sayings or deeds attributed to Jesus in the antique Gospels were most likely to be genuine.
[00:07:20] Among the most important criteria are the criterion of embarrassment. That is, if a tradition would have been awkward or potentially damaging for the early church, it's more likely to be authentic.
[00:07:31] The criterion of multiple attestation. That is, if a saying or event appears in multiple independent sources, it carries greater weight and the criterion of dissimilarity. If a teaching is unlike typical Jewish ideas of the time and unlike later Christian beliefs, it may well go back to Jesus himself.
[00:07:52] Other criteria, such as contextual credibility or coherence with already established authentic material, were also part of the toolkit.
[00:08:02] Just to give you one example, all four gospels agree that Jesus was betrayed by one of his closest disciples.
[00:08:09] This tradition would then pass both the criterion of multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment.
[00:08:16] Consequently, virtually all scholars today agree that Jesus was indeed betrayed by Judas Iscariot.
[00:08:23] For decades these criteria dominated historical research, and they produced a number of influential portraits of Jesus.
[00:08:31] Yet they were never a foolproof solution.
[00:08:33] In recent decades, therefore, a growing number of scholars have expressed skepticism about relying too heavily on these tests and have sought alternative approaches to the Gospels as historical sources.
[00:08:45] To these newer directions we now turn criticism of criteria of a different approach.
[00:08:54] The quest for the historical Jesus is an ever changing and dynamic endeavor, and perhaps the best illustration of that is the growing number of scholars who have sought new ways of approaching the Gospels as historical sources.
[00:09:07] Over the last several decades, many have become dissatisfied with the older reliance on the criteria of authenticity. These tools once promised a kind of scientific certainty, but they have failed to deliver consensus.
[00:09:19] Instead of yielding a stable portrait of Jesus, they often produced radically different reconstructions depending on who was applying them.
[00:09:27] Scholars have noted that these criteria frequently conflict with each other, that they can be applied selectively, and that they sometimes create an artificial all or nothing judgment on individual passages.
[00:09:39] For example, what one scholar views as embarrassing may not have been embarrassing at all to early Christians.
[00:09:46] What another scholar calls dissimilar from Judaism or Christianity might only reflect gaps in our knowledge of those traditions.
[00:09:54] In short, the criteria turned out to be pliable, easily shaped by the assumptions of the interpreter and thus less objective than originally hoped.
[00:10:04] As an alternative, more recent approaches emphasize the broader patterns within the tradition.
[00:10:10] Instead of asking whether one particular saying or story can be authenticated, the focus shifts to recurring motifs and consistent impressions across diverse sources.
[00:10:20] This turn has been enriched by insights from psychology, anthropology, and especially memory studies.
[00:10:27] Research on collective memory suggests that while details may shift or become legendary, the larger contours of a person's activity, their characteristic themes, the way they were remembered by communities, tends to endure.
[00:10:41] This means that Jesus historical significance is more securely grasped at the macro level of repeated themes than at the micro level of isolated sayings.
[00:10:51] Personally, I find this approach very interesting.
[00:10:54] It acknowledges the limits of our evidence while still allowing us to reconstruct a historically grounded portrait.
[00:11:01] Work in this vein continues to expand. One of the best recent illustrations is the collection the Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, edited by James Crossley and Chris Keith. It showcases the diverse ways scholars today are building on memory theory, social history, and interdisciplinary insights to rethink how we approach the sources.
[00:11:23] The quest is far from over, and this methodological shift shows just how much potential still lies ahead in the ongoing effort to understand the historical Jesus.
[00:11:33] Conclusion by Bart Ehrman There it is, a primer laying out the basic sources, the problems they pose, and the methods scholars use when trying to make sense of the historical Jesus.
[00:11:45] The goal here wasn't to give you all the answers, but to sketch the landscape, explaining what evidence we actually have, why it's both invaluable and tricky, and how scholars today go about handling it.
[00:11:57] With this background in mind, you'll be better equipped to appreciate the nuances and challenges as you dive into the specific lectures lined up for this year's nint.
[00:12:07] And trust me, they're worth it.
[00:12:09] In my next posts, I'll give Marco's synopsis of these lectures.
