Yet according to basic church doctrine, Christianity is a historical religion in which knowledge of the divine Christ and the mysteries of heaven springs from the words and deeds of a first-century AD Galilean Jew, a man firmly situated in time and space. Everything told about him originates, not in the Creed, but in the Gospels, and specifically – from the point of view of history – in the earlier Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Admittedly, not even they were conceived as an objective record of events, nor even as popular chronicles. Nonetheless they are generally less remote from the Jesus of history in time and style of presentation than the last of the four, the spiritual Gospel of John the Divine.1
The believing Christian is convinced that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same. For him there is coherence – identity even – between the Gospel picture and that offered by the Creed: though he may concede that the former is a first sketch preceding the artist’s final masterpiece, an imperfect portrayal leading to the perfect by means of an inward, direct and legitimate development.
By contrast to these imperatives of faith, the issues which writer and reader will explore together are concerned with the primitive, genuine, historical significance of words and events recorded in the Gospels. What they are believed to signify is the business of the theologian; the historian’s task is to discover the original meaning of their message. In pursuit of this aim, the utmost use will be made of the literary legacy of Palestinian and Diaspora Jews from the last two hundred years of the pre-Christian, and the first few centuries of the Christian era: the Apocrypha, and Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus and Jewish inscriptions, the manuscript discoveries from the Judean desert and early rabbinic writings. These sources will not be treated merely as a backcloth, however, but as witnesses. They will not be employed simply as aids in answering queries arising from the New Testament, but as independent spokesmen capable, from time to time at least, of guiding the enquiry, either by suggesting the right angle of approach, or even the right questions to ask.
It should be emphasized that the present historical investigation of the Gospels is motivated by no sentiment of critical destructiveness. On the contrary, it is prompted by a single-minded and devout search for fact and reality and undertaken out of feeling for the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth. If, after working his way through the book, the reader recognizes that this man, so distorted by Christian and Jewish myth alike, was in fact neither the Christ of the Church, nor the apostate and bogey-man of Jewish popular tradition, some small beginning may have been made in the repayment to him of a debt long overdue.
PART ONE: THE SETTING
1
Jesus the Jew
Most people, whether they admit it or not, approach the Gospels with preconceived ideas. Christians read them in the light of their faith; Jews, primed with age-old suspicion; agnostics, ready to be scandalized; and professional New Testament experts, wearing the blinkers of their trade. Yet it should not be beyond the capabilities of an educated man to sit down and with a mind empty of prejudice read the accounts of Mark, Matthew and Luke as though for the first time.
The basic Gospel is presented in the form of a record of the life of Jesus from the time of his appearance in public in the company of John the Baptist till the discovery of his empty tomb, a biographical framework into which are incorporated extracts from sayings attributed to him. This primary structure has survived in Mark. The other two evangelists preface it with stories relating to the birth and youth of Jesus which are on the whole theologically motivated; they are distinct from the main Gospel body, which at no stage pays any regard to them. All three Gospels have also an epilogue elaborating on the apparitions of Jesus to his disciples after his resurrection, an afterthought which failed to make its way into the earliest manuscript tradition of Mark,1 but was inserted without difficulty into Matthew and Luke.
Since it is always an arduous, and often almost hopeless, task to try to establish the historical value of the Synoptic story, the plan here is not to attempt to reconstruct the authentic portrait of Jesus but, more modestly, to find out how the writers of the Gospels, echoing primitive tradition, wished him to be known. What did they think was important about him, and what secondary? On what did they expatiate fully, and what did they gloss over? Who, in brief, was the Jesus of the evangelists?
Personal Particulars
The main Gospel – that covered by Mark – provides the following personal information.
| Name: | Jesus |
| Father’s name: | Joseph |
| Mother’s name: | Mary |
| Place of birth: | not mentioned |
| Date of birth: | not mentioned |
| Domicile: | Nazareth in Galilee |
| Marital state: | not mentioned |
| Profession: | carpenter (?); also itinerant exorcist and preacher |
A death certificate can be filled in somewhat more fully.
| Place of death: | Jerusalem |
| Date of death: | ‘under Pontius Pilate’, between AD 26 and 36 |
| Cause of death: | crucifixion by order of the Roman prefect |
| Place of burial: | Jerusalem |
Family Background
Apart from the infancy stories,2 which in any case inject an element of doubt into the issue of paternity, the name of the father of Jesus appears only in Luke and in a variant reading in Matthew.
‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’3
‘Is he not [Joseph] the carpenter’s son?’4
The same passage contains also the Greek form of his mother’s name, Maria or Mariam, and (unless the reader’s judgement is affected by the later belief in the perpetual virginity of Mary) the names of his four brothers, Jacob, Joseph, Judah and Simon, and mention of his several sisters.5
The main Gospel, as opposed to the birth stories in Matthew and Luke, does not state where Jesus was born. If anything, it implies that his birthplace was Nazareth, the unimportant little Galilean locality where he and his parents lived. The only indirect evidence on his date of birth is concealed in the verse describing him as being of about thirty years of age when John baptized him in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, probably in AD 28/29.6
Although several women were included in his group during his ministry, no wife is ever mentioned. He does not seem to have left one behind at home, as he advised his would-be disciples to do,7 or as did certain mature Jewish ascetics, the Therapeutae, according to Philo of Alexandria.8 The Gospels do not depict him as a widower either, so one is to assume that he was unmarried, a custom unusual but not unheard of among Jews in his time, as will be shown in a later chapter.9
Jesus the Carpenter
His secular profession remains uncertain. Tradition has it that he was a carpenter and learned his trade from his father, but this on the fragile evidence that after his first