A new wave of scholars, a number of them from New Zealand, are uncovering more details about who Jesus really was, using scene-setting texts of the time to explain his popular appeal.
The number of certainties about possibly the most famous person in history are few. But a new generation of scholars is trying to cut through the mists of faith and speculation to better behold the man.
Jesus (c6BCE-c30CE) has been called everything from Almighty God himself to an itinerant Palestinian exorcist, a revolutionary bent on overthrowing Roman imperial rule, an economic disruptor with an egalitarian message, a deranged faith healer, a pale Galilean, and a prophet of the Apocalypse. After 2000 years, there seem to be as many questions around him as ever.
Before attempting to disentangle some of those, another question has to be asked: Why do we still care? Why is this individual still the focus of so much attention?
Joan Taylor, Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London, says lots of students – Muslim, atheist, Buddhist or from other religions – are fascinated by Jesus as a personality when she teaches on historical Jesus. “They want to really get to what he was about. He is the most famous man in history, really.”
Cambridge University’s James Crossley agrees, saying: “Jesus is a figure of obvious cultural importance globally. People have reactions to and construct him in different ways, and there is an ongoing fascination for these reasons alone.”
Crossley is co-editor with fellow biblical historian Chris Keith of The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus, a 640-page tome published in November, in which 34 writers examine aspects of Jesus’s life and times.
“We were both sick and tired of the same repetitive books on the historical Jesus,” says Crossley, who is academic director of the Centre for the Critical Study of Apocalyptic and Millenarian Movements at Cambridge. “They’re not necessarily wrong. It’s just that people were saying the same things over and over again, and we were saying: ‘Well, why can’t we think of doing something new?’”
He got crowds because he was a healer. He was doing phenomenal things in terms of making people well.
Such as seeing Jesus’s healing ministry in the context of the wider public health system. Taylor, a contributor to The Next Quest, has studied this closely. “Galilee was very, very densely populated,” she says. “There would have been a huge strain on resources. We know that there were, at different times, famines in the area. Sometimes villages would be built in areas that really shouldn’t support a village.”
These areas would be deprived of productive farmland and a viable water source. Malaria and other diseases were circulating in Galilee. People would have been worried about food, clothing and disease, says Taylor. “And that gives you the background for Jesus’s immense success. He got so many crowds because he was a healer. He was doing phenomenal things in terms of making people well.”
Taylor has explained elsewhere that Jesus’s use of physical touch in his healing, given what many scientists now accept are the positive effects of touch on the immune system, would have been a large part of his success.
She has also given us a reliable account of his appearance in her 2018 book, What Did Jesus Look Like? Her conclusions were summed up in one review as “of an average height of 166cm, likely bearded, with brown eyes, olive-brown skin and [short] black hair. Jesus probably appeared unconcerned about his appearance as he walked the dusty roads and slept wherever he was welcome. He would have been clothed appropriately for the time, wearing leather sandals, a simple undyed knee-length tunic and an average-sized mantle with tassels on the four corners.”
Has she had much pushback on her description? “I get lots of emails from people saying Jesus was white, Jesus was very tall and handsome, and they know because they’ve seen him in a vision.” But no historical scholars have disputed any of her claims.
Taylor also edited Jesus and Brian: Exploring the Historical Jesus and his Times via Monty Python’s Life of Brian, a 2015 collection of essays that do just what the title says. Her next book, Boy Jesus: Growing Up Judean in Turbulent Times will be released in February and is again highly anticipated.
After the fact
It appears we know a lot about Jesus, but how do we know what we know? If you’re looking for verifiable eyewitness accounts or documentary records, the pickings are slim. But there are certainly enough references – notably glimpses in the writings of early historians Josephus and Tacitus – to discredit claims that the whole story is propaganda put about by the Jesus movement.
The biblical gospels gain in credibility when seen in the context of other biographies of the time. “Since the 90s, there’s been some very important work saying the gospels are ancient biographies,” says Paul Trebilco, professor of New Testament studies at the University of Otago.
“The evangelists had historical intentions. They want to give the details of who Jesus was and what he said and did. It’s not wrong to look at them historically. You wrote a life of Caesar or a life of Socrates because you thought they were important.
“The evangelists are obviously deeply committed to Jesus and want to commend him. That makes some people suspicious about historicity, but ancient biographies were like that.”
Crossley notes Jesus has had far more scrutiny than other classical figures in history, and apart from the fantastical incidents, there is no good reason not to believe what is in the gospels. Their credibility also gained ground thanks to better understanding of oral tradition.
Did he see himself as a promised Jewish Messiah who would overthrow Roman domination of his people?
Trebilco says, “There’s been a lot in the last 20 years about the vitality of oral memory and its ability to pass things on accurately. Jesus studies had been working in a very Western book-focused paradigm. There are different ways of passing on traditions.”
Parallels aren’t hard to find. “In class, I talk about the Waitangi Tribunal and say we have a court of the land that accepts oral testimony as the highest evidence.”
When seen in this tradition, the gospels give us a lot of information about what Jesus did and said, who his associates were and what he cared about.
For Crossley, they give us a “Jesus who was dedicated to Jewish law, argued about it, and was seen by probably himself and others as a serious interpreter of the law. I would see him as a product of the change in economic circumstances in Galilee at the time. There’s a very strong message in the early material that Jesus, or his followers, wanted the very wealthy to repent, give up their wealth and turn to the coming kingdom of God. Rather than the emphasis on a mission to the poor, which I think is there, there is a mission to the rich.”
There’s no denying, one way or the other, Jesus spends a lot of time talking about money in his parables and other teachings.
Galilee in turmoil
The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus focuses on many aspects of Jesus’s life and times that the gospels omit, ignore or neglect. You wouldn’t know it from reading them, but Galilee was in all sorts of turmoil at the time of his ministry. Two huge public building projects, at Sepphoris and Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, were having all sorts of downstream effects. One of the reasons they are not mentioned is probably that they were so conspicuous they were simply taken for granted by the writers.
Described as the crown jewels of Herod Antipas’s reign, the projects were so disruptive that Jesus’s itinerancy may have been an economic necessity rather than the mendicant’s lifestyle choice it has long been seen as – in much the same, neoliberal way that homeless people today are seen as exercising a lifestyle choice rather than being the products of a system.
Theologian Robert Myles says, “We know from the broader study of history that when these things happen, they exacerbate class divides, people get shifted off their lands, all this kind of stuff.” The associate professor of New Testament at the University of Divinity at Wollaston Theological College, Perth, adds that in this time of upheaval, “The promise of a new kingdom on Earth where God would be in control, rather than the Romans, would have had a lot of allure for those who had been caught up in those changes.”
Crossley says another contemporary Jewish custom that throws a light on the life of Jesus is that of the eldest child taking over as head of the household when the father dies, which Joseph is presumed to have done during Jesus’s childhood as he is not mentioned later. “They were supposed to run things, and it seems that he goes off and wanders around the countryside.
“We’ve got these stories about the family tensions between Jesus and his mother, in Mark, chapter three, because he should have been at the house doing the work rather than wandering around with his band of irregular types.”
Was Mary a slave?
Then there’s slavery. “Slavery is everywhere in the ancient world,” says Crossley. “Yet it has really not been taken that seriously in historical Jesus studies. What roles did slaves play in Judea or Galilee? Did Jesus interact more than we see? Are they just not discussed because people took it for granted?”
One chapter in The Next Quest asks whether Jesus’s mother might have been a slave. The suggestion is based on Mary’s use of the word doulē to describe herself. That is usually translated in scripture as handmaiden or servant (Luke 1:38) but is actually a word most often used to mean slave.
If the book gets some media cut-through, it will almost certainly be thanks to this chapter and the opportunity it provides for the headline: “Was the mother of God a slave?”
A more traditional question is: did Jesus think he was divine? His followers do now. Those who followed him when he was alive didn’t necessarily think so but they appear to have begun to develop a very high opinion of him shortly after his death.
It’s an issue that tends to lack interest for the newest wave of historians. The word “divinity” appears just seven times in the pages of The Next Quest and historically, scholars have been frustrated by the lack of a clear statement from the man (or God) himself.
Asked for his own connection to faith, Myles, who contributed a chapter to The Next Quest, says the book “attempts to move beyond questions about confessional commitments”.
What are we to make of this person who rode into Jerusalem attended by an enthusiastic crowd at Passover, a religiously significant time of the year? Why did his executioners put a mocking sign that said “King of the Jews” at the top of his cross? Why was he given a form of execution reserved for insurrectionists? Did he, as many think, see himself as a promised Jewish Messiah who would overthrow Roman domination of his people when he talked about his kingdom?
He turned people’s expectations on their heads with the idea that the first would be last and the last would be first.
“My view would be that he was talking about a kingdom that was both divine, but also for this world,” says Myles. “So it would be ruled by, or on behalf of, the God of Israel, but it was specifically understood [as this] concrete, material, kingdom on Earth. And I think this comes through in the tradition.
“Within the Lord’s Prayer, you’ve got ‘our Father in heaven’, ‘your kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in heaven’. So, it’s clearly for this Earth.”
Trebilco has no doubts. “Jesus goes into Jerusalem, acting as king, as Messiah, and then cleanses the temple like it’s his temple. I think there’s very strong evidence that Jesus saw himself as Messiah, and I think there’s also strong evidence he saw himself as the son of God.”
Some contemporaries believed his loyalties lay elsewhere, says Trebilco. “In the Gospels, those opposing Jesus argue that his miracles are done through the power of Satan. So they’re not disputing that he’s doing these miraculous deeds, they’re disputing their source. They could have said he was just a con man. But they didn’t say that. They said he’s doing these things, but from the dark side. It’s strong evidence that Jesus did miracles.
The chosen one
Taylor has no doubt that “Jesus thought he was something special. In Boy Jesus, I talk about the whole family as thinking that they were something special, as being descended from David.
“There was an expectation that those who were descended from David would do something meaningful for [the Jewish people]. And I think he was quite primed to do that by his family and by his father, Joseph.”
In the Gospel of Matthew, there is a lot from Joseph’s point of view. Notably, an angel explains to him – twice in three verses – that his wife has been made pregnant by the Holy Ghost.
“The story we have in Matthew is really Joseph’s story [that] ‘My boy, Jesus, is going to do something amazing. He’s a special boy,’” says Taylor. “So that would have given Jesus an idea that he had an auspicious birth, there was something special about him. But then what did he do with it?”
What was interesting was that he went about things in a pardoxical way, she says.
“He turned people’s expectations on their heads with the idea that the first would be last and the last would be first, and that he had come to serve and not be served. That was the original, exciting thing about Jesus. He’s not saying, ‘I’m nothing.’ He’s saying, ‘I’m something. And listen to me, I’ve got a totally different way of living that you can follow.’”
And so it came to pass. As to how these paradoxical teachings – and the social circumstances that shaped his life and cruel death in an obscure part of the Roman empire – made this man the centre of a movement that has exerted such an enduring influence, that’s another story.
ILLUSTRIOUS WHAKAPAPA
In a chapter of The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus entitled Whakapapa and Genealogy, Wayne Te Kaawa, lecturer in theology at the University of Otago, focuses on the two genealogies of Jesus given in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and shows how the concept of whakapapa helps us understand the historical Jesus.
“First of all, whakapapa locates you in a specific place, specific time, specific geography, specific ancestors,” says Te Kaawa (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Awa, Tūhoe). “The genealogy of Jesus is doing exactly the same thing.” Moreover, whakapapa and the genealogies both have larger narratives embedded in the names they contain.
In most genealogies, only men are named but in the genealogy given in Matthew, among Jesus’s ancestors there are Canaanite women. “So they’re trying to highlight something here. Jesus was challenged left, right and centre, but his genealogy was never, ever challenged.”
Te Kaawa expands on this. “First, the inclusion of the encounter between a [Canaanite] woman and Jesus cannot be ignored (Matthew 15:21-28; Mark 7:24-30). Second, at some stage Jesus must address his own identity as a descendant of Canaanite people [traditional enemies of the Jews]. Third, Jesus must realign his … mission to include the Canaanite people. Fourth and most critically, as an advocate of justice and reconciliation, Jesus must address the suffering and oppression of Canaanite people.”
This has led him to see the story of the Canaanite woman Jesus meets as about the “suggestion that Jesus was racist and was unaware of his history and she brought him back to that history. He had his mission to the people of Israel, but she won her place at the table, and at the end of the day, challenged Jesus to extend his mission to include others.”
THE VIEW DOWNUNDER
You don’t have to be a New Zealander to study the historical Jesus but it certainly doesn’t hurt. Three of the five historians spoken to for this story – Paul Trebilco, Robert Myles and Wayne Te Kaawa – are New Zealanders and Joan Taylor moved here as a child. And there are others who would have an equal claim to be included. Maybe there’s something in our water? Or wine?
Given our national predilection for proclaiming our per-capita pre-eminence in any field going, it’s surprising this hasn’t had attention drawn to it before now.
Most historians seem bemused by the phenomenon and at a loss to explain it. Perhaps it’s just arithmetic throwing up an anomaly. But Myles has an explanation, for his own case, at least.
“My being a New Zealander has, I think, informed my approach and perspective into this topic. It’s been dominated by North American and European interests for so long. My interests are shaped from doing historical Jesus research Downunder, it’s these questions of history from below – seeing things askew or a bit differently.”