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Introduction: from Christianity to Jesus

I believe . . . in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. He suffered and was buried, and the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father. And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead: whose kingdom shall have no end.

The Creed, especially the Nicene variety from which the quotation derives, is regarded by believers and non-believers alike as a genuine, consecrated, shorthand expression of the quintessence of the Christian faith. Not unexpectedly, three-fifths of the document are concerned with the focus of this faith, Jesus the Messiah, the person thought to be the link between heaven and earth, and between time and eternity. The remarkable feature, however, of the resulting portrait of the Jesus of Christianity is its total lack of proportion between history and theology, fact and interpretation. In formulating her profession of faith, the Church shows passionate interest in Christ’s eternal pre-existence and glorious after-life, but of his earthly career the faithful are told next to nothing, save that he was born and died. For its historical anchor, the Creed relies, not on Jesus of Nazareth himself, but on the second-rate and notoriously cruel Roman civil servant, Pontius Pilate.

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.