Jesus Quests
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An Undeceptions Podcast. In 2010, Canada's Centre for Inquiry began its Extraordinary Claims campaign. It was a series of atheistic billboards and bus ads that likened the Jesus of the Bible to Bigfoot, of course.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," the ad reads, followed by the list: Allah, Bigfoot, UFOs, homeopathy, Zeus, psychics, Christ. That campaign was part of a worldwide atheistic push at the height of the so-called "new atheism."

Well, 12 years on, new atheism has waned significantly. It is feeling a bit old, but some of their most sensational claims have had a cultural impact. In late 2021, only half of Australians, 49%, viewed Jesus as a real person who actually lived.

In England, a survey in 2015 found that 43% of people don't believe Jesus ever actually walked the earth. This is obviously terrible news for Christianity. One of the unique selling points of the Christian faith, in the mind of believers anyway, is that it centers on real events that occurred in time and space.

Christianity isn't based on someone's solitary dream or a private vision. It isn't merely a divine dictation in a holy book that has to be believed with blind faith. Jesus was a real person, crucified under Pontius Pilate, the fifth governor of Judea, as the Apostles' Creed puts it. It seems many Australians and Brits really don't agree.

Well, our guest today is one of the world's foremost scholars on the historical Jesus. And he's just completed a huge two-volume project about the various quests throughout history to figure out who Jesus really was. And we're going to travel back in time to where the quests for the historical Jesus first began.

We'll find out what scholars throughout history have thought about who Jesus was and what they concluded about his significance in their own time. And we're going to hear about some new research and archaeological findings that are telling us some really fun things about Jesus today. I'm John Dixon, and this is My Kind of Undeceptions. ♪

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics Master Lectures, a streaming service to satisfy your curiosity and help you understand the Bible with the world's leading Christian scholars. And you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

Undeceptions to get 50% off for your first three month subscription. Just put in the code UNDECEPTIONS50. Honestly, this is a cracking series of lectures. Each episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. I attended a session at the Society of Biblical Literature just the other day, and that was the topic.

How do we know one phase of the quest has ended and a new phase has begun? What does it even mean? Why should we say quest? Maybe we should just talk about Jesus research.

or historical research. That's Professor Craig A. Evans, and he's a bit of a legend in the world of studying the historical Jesus. He is Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins at Houston Theological Seminary. Professor Evans has published over 70 books. I'm looking at a couple of them right now over on my shelf, including Jesus and His Contemporaries and Fabricating Jesus, How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels.

And we're talking to Professor Evans today primarily about his latest endeavor, a two-volume monster called A History of the Quests for the Historical Jesus. Another wonderful scholar, Colin Brown, had worked on the manuscript for this book for many years. Brown was professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, but he sadly died in 2019 before finishing this work.

Professor Evans, who was Brown's friend, was able to complete the manuscript. And as someone with more than a passing interest in the historical Jesus myself, I was excited to speak to him about what is already being lauded as the definitive history and assessment of the quests for the historical Jesus. So these questions, there's no real simple answer that's going to win approval from everyone.

But I think I can say something about that that nobody would disagree with. It is research. It's historical research. So it'd be like asking questions about the historical Napoleon or asking questions going further back, the historical Julius Caesar. What was he up to? What motivated him? His decision to cross the Rubicon. What was in that? What was he trying to achieve? And of course, we ask contextual questions.

the Roman Republic began to shift into what became the era of the Roman Emperor. And that's a very important contextual question. Well, we ask the same questions about Jesus. It's not enough to just say, "Well, okay, let's read the Gospels. So what did Jesus say and do?" Well, that's hugely important. The Gospels are the most important source, but they don't tell us everything, and we have to put it into context. And so what is that context? And one of the big changes

is that since the scholarly quest, as it has been called, of the historical Jesus got underway in the late 18th century, so it's been going on for about almost 250 years, we have huge amounts of new data. The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the company is true.

We can't do an episode about a quest without referencing Lord of the Rings. At least producer Kayleigh and director Mark were always going to insist on including that.

And now I'm supposed to tell you that that was a clip from the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. According to director Mark, you haven't lived until you've watched the extended versions, 12 hours, which should have been the actual versions, is what he said. And someone wrote here in my script, and I'm willing to say it.

Before we move on, it's true that quest implies some sort of long, difficult search. And Professor Evans says that the quest for the historical Jesus has certainly been a long one, starting with Jesus himself. But there have been phases in that quest, which we'll get to in a moment.

The point, though, is that there are many twists and turns in the quest for the historical Jesus. Just when we thought we had solved one challenge, say the language Jesus spoke or how Jewish Jesus' home district of Galilee was, we discover evidence that challenges things and changes scholarship.

The difference between what we know now about Jesus, historically speaking, compared to what we knew just 50 years ago is mind-boggling. Just winding back though, some of my listeners might say there's no point in having a quest for the historical Jesus because he probably didn't live anyway. A recent poll in Australia found that half of Australians don't think Jesus was a real historical figure. So what do you say about the quest historically?

to these listeners who just don't think we're dealing with a historical figure. Yeah, that's tragic. It shows that gross ignorance, widespread ignorance is still very much a possibility even in the modern era where we have so much better communication. You can go online and find like encyclopedic type information, acquire all kinds of basic information right away and a lot of it is perfectly legitimate.

but it also is an opportunity to disseminate some of the most outrageous ideas. And the problem is, most people, intelligent, university-trained people, they may know a whole lot about dentistry or a whole lot about engineering, but that doesn't mean they know a whole lot about ancient history. That doesn't mean that they know the legitimate, bona fide scholarship relating to historical Jesus.

And so I can tell your listeners that the vast majority of historians, people who actually are trained in history, it's almost 100%, but not quite.

The vast majority of historians, I don't care if they're Jewish or Christian, agnostic, atheist, whatever. The vast majority of historians don't have any doubt that there was a historical Jesus. And so what you have is like the reverse of Bigfoot or something. This dissemination and the mythicists is what they're called. These people who say Jesus is a myth.

And the arguments are so absurd, but the average person, unless they know early history and ancient comparative religious studies, that sort of thing, they're not in a position to assess that. They don't know. And so you get a guy who says, well, I have a PhD and I know something about Egyptian mythology and that Jesus is just this grandiose parable, but he's not a real person. The average person cannot evaluate that.

And because we have a society that is increasingly ahistorical, they don't know much, a church that is shrinking, and illiterate, and I don't mean they can't read, but people who don't read good stuff and history and other things like that,

it creates a population that's vulnerable to that kind of nonsense. Normally the textbooks speak of three quests or three phases in the quest for the historical Jesus, and we can talk about whether that's valid in a moment. But was there any serious questing before the 18th century Enlightenment?

Oh, of course. The quest of the historical Jesus gets underway while Jesus is doing things. People are asking, "Who is he? Who are you? What are you all about?" And so, you might say a quest for the identity of Jesus is underway. The context is pretty clear. They live there. They know the language. They know the lay of the land. But the quest initially was all about who Jesus is.

You can see the roots of the quest begin with Jesus himself, and people are interpreting his activities and asking questions. What is the significance? If Jesus just did a few miracles, so what? Others allegedly have done that.

So is it really all about Jesus the miracle worker? No, not really. Or exorcism, is that what it's all about? No, not really. So what is it really about? And so in a sense, Jesus's ministry is the very beginning of the quest and the disciples are asking, who is he? And with the resurrection, they get it. And with his resurrection, they realize you are the son of God. You are Israel's Messiah, anointed one, which is what that means.

You are the turning point in history. Now we do have a message, and we're willing to run the risk, even dying if necessary. We will proclaim you. So the quest begins there, and of course it continues because the Gospels have to be written. And that's what they're doing. The Gospels are addressing the question of, well, who really is Jesus, and how should we understand him? Well, that's what the quest is. So in a way, when we talk about

some of these German scholars in the 18th century, you might say what's different now is after centuries of Christendom, being accepted at face value and not a whole lot of critical thought. There are exceptions, of course. What happens in the 18th century, the 1760s, a scholar named Reimarus, he wasn't alone. There were others who were saying, maybe it's time to take a new look at the Gospels

and interpret them the way a critical historian would look at any document alleging to be history. That's what really launched it. It was just a new attitude, a new thought. Academic tomes on Jesus often begin their account of previous scholarship with the great German scholars, Hermann Samuel Ramaris and David Strauss, and their attempts to apply the critical insights of the Enlightenment to the study of the central figure of Western history.

Rymarus epitomized the Enlightenment spirit. He insisted that there was a significant difference, even a contradiction, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Many echo this sentiment today without realizing where it came from.

Reimarus also argued that the historical Jesus was a failed political revolutionary and that the born-again saviour of the world narrative was made up by his followers after his death, who were kind of in denial that their leader had failed and the revolution didn't come.

David Strauss sort of picks up on this skepticism with his extremely influential book, The Life of Jesus. Strauss argued that the Gospels should be understood as myth, with a capital M. He didn't really mean untrue, but a device to express the inexpressible longings of the human soul. So accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, according to Strauss,

aren't out-and-out lies, they're just not historical reports. They are poetical images, myths of the divine life which the early Christians longed for. Now, someone like Bishop John Shelby Spong in the US is a modern example of a theologian in the Straussian model.

We'll put links in the show notes for more on these 18th, 19th century scholars, Rhymaris and Strauss. But it'd be wrong to think that historical questions about Jesus began to be raised only two centuries ago, as if our own modern or postmodern era was the first to think critically about the topic. It's a conceit of every age, actually, that it has discovered the most important questions and answers.

But Craig Evans points out the quest for the historical Jesus really began pretty much as soon as he left the scene around the 30s AD. Even the author of one of the four New Testament gospels shows an interest in searching out the facts rather than opinions about the man from Nazareth. The Gospel of Luke opens with these telling words:

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. Luke chapter 1 verses 1 to 4

We go into a lot more detail about the quests for Jesus that happened before the so-called first quest of the Enlightenment in the extended episode for our Plus subscribers. If you're interested in that beautiful nerdiness, head to underceptions.com forward slash plus to see how you can get access to that.

Enlightenment scholarship of the, say, 1800s was absolutely confident in its ability to separate fact from fiction in the Bible. It could do this using linguistics, historiography, archaeology, and philosophy without recourse to the dogmas of the Christian church. Here we are at the first quest, the first modern quest for the historical Jesus.

What it all boils down to is there's respect for Jesus, there's a desire to stand within Christendom. There's no desire to say, "Oh, I'm an apostate. I'm not a Christian anymore," or "I'm an atheist," or something. But there's also skepticism. So that's really what gets it underway. It's sort of a, "How can I be a Christian in good standing in the church and yet at the same time buy into the growing, rising secular assumptions and worldview?"

And so this early phase of, you know, which later gets called, well, that's the old quest, but whatever you want to call it, this phase that is taking place in the late 18th century, early 19th century, is to try to rationalize the Gospels. We want Jesus who's a teacher. We want Jesus who's somebody we can admire, we can follow, we can call ourselves Christians.

meaning we follow him, but we are embarrassed by the supernatural elements. So how can we dispose of them? And you could just say, oh, well, they're all false, or you can be far more sympathetic. You say, no, no, no, Jesus did things wrong.

which people thought were miraculous. And so you get these rationalizing attempts. And that's where Strauss comes from, because, you know, this isn't really working. They've been doing that for 60 years. And Strauss writing in the 1830s says, no, you know, this doesn't really work. These miracles that the gospel writers say Jesus did,

That's why in their mind Jesus is important. And so, oh, and a whole new debate got underway. And now you have to refute Strauss or answer him or whatever. And the pendulum just keeps swinging on through the 19th century.

as scholars debate these points. But I think in my view, it's all about, I want to be a Christian. I want to say I believe in Jesus. But at the same time, I want to embrace a secular worldview that is not very sympathetic to theism or revelation and not very sympathetic to supernatural acts of power.

that are alleged to have happened. Yeah, and this is where the great distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith really kicks off. And that's still something people talk about today. What were they trying to do there? Because that seems like entirely distancing ourself from the church and theology.

Well, that of course, that is a tricky question. I mean, Rudolf Bultmann in the 20th century wrote a famous essay called "Mythology and the New Testament."

And so he thought he found a solution, say, okay, let's recognize the presence of myth, namely Jesus walking in water, healing people, raising the dead, or casting out evil spirits or something like that. However, it still reveals or tells us something. So there's a hermeneutic there. It still tells us something that is really good for faith.

A hermeneutic, by the way, at least what we're talking about here, is a way of interpreting the Bible. So things like the plain reading or literal readings of the Bible versus moral interpretation versus allegorical interpretation and so on. These are all hermeneutical approaches. And while I'm here, Craig mentions Rudolf Bultmann.

who actually is part of the, spoiler alert, no-quest period in the search for the historical Jesus. That's a little period in between the first and second quests. Following the first quest, which sort of collapsed around 1910, many scholars adopted a pretty pessimistic attitude toward Jesus studies, deciding that almost nothing could really be known about the historical Jesus, so we should just focus on New Testament theology and philosophy.

Rudolf Bultmann was a theological giant in the early 20th century, swimming in the strong existentialist philosophical current of the 1920s and 30s. And he argued that the Christ of faith was more important to Christianity than the Jesus of history, especially since we couldn't really know that much about the Jesus of history. We'll hear more about him in a moment.

But before Bultmann and the no-quest period, there was William Rader. In 1901, Rader, a Polish scholar, dealt another major blow with the publication of The Messianic Secret. Rader drew attention to the fact that in Mark's gospel, Jesus occasionally asks people not to tell anyone that he's the Messiah. If you read the gospel, it is a weird part of his story.

Then Rader further noted that the New Testament frequently pins Jesus' messianic credentials, his claim to be the Son of God and so on, not on his earthly ministry, but on his supposed resurrection from the dead. From this, Rader surmised that Jesus himself never said he was the Messiah.

He was simply a great teacher. The disciples invented the Messiah bit. And to cover their tracks, they had Jesus telling people to keep it a secret for a little while. This was a super popular view for about 50 or 60 years. But there are pretty good reasons for thinking it was really just an ingenious speculation, not history. Anyway, the strident skepticism of Enlightenment scholarship skeptics

seemed unstoppable. That is, until Albert Schweitzer, who's often credited with ending the first quest. We have to talk about Albert Schweitzer.

and his significance for this so-called first quest. So tell us something about him. I mean, some people may have heard of him as a musician, perhaps as the jungle doctor, but who was Schweitzer and what was his significance for this early phase of researching Jesus? - Albert Schweitzer in a way was like a Renaissance man, a great humanitarian. He had three earned doctorates, philosophy, theology, and medicine.

for which he became famous if I'm not mistaken I believe his dates 1875 to 1965 something like that I mean he lived 90 years and he's a polymath really a genius

And so he found Jesus fascinating, wanted to understand him better, and he did something that was quite monumental. He assessed hundreds of volumes, dozens of leading scholars in English, in German, and in French,

who had important things to say about the historical Jesus. And so when he wrapped this all up, his own solution was so strange psychologically. Jesus, almost like a misguided fanatic and doesn't quite have his feet on the ground, dies in despair on the cross. And yet somehow in that, Schweitzer sees a turning point in human history. A lot of people said, you know, if he's right, I'm not sure I see that.

And a lot of people said, "You know what? I think we've kind of done this now. There's been enough scholarly questing after Jesus. Maybe we need to just explore what it means to believe in the gospel." And that's when this period following Schweitzer is sometimes called the "No Quest." But it's a very insightful book. I have read it, and boy, he saves all of us a lot of trouble. But you have to remember, it's selective. It's looking at 125 years of history

through his eyes. And we have to be careful about that. It's just a slice, a big important slice, but it's a slice of the scholarship that went on.

I just want to give you a tiny side quest. After all his work on Jesus, Schweitzer completed a medical degree and devoted himself to medical missionary work in Gabon in West Africa. It earned him the moniker Jungle Surgeon and won him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. True to form, he gave the prize money to a leper hospital. Pretty cool.

Schweitzer published his Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906. It was a stunning critique of the previous 150 years of research, from Reimarus to Vreda. In fact, they were both in the subtitle.

In short, he demonstrated that the portraits of Jesus offered by these supposedly objective scholars were basically projections of what they already believed to be the ethical ideal. The characterization of Jesus as a simple, noble teacher, for instance, is just a construct born of the humanism of the Enlightenment.

Such a Jesus is a figment of the scholarly imagination, or as Schweitzer himself put it, "a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb."

Ouch. It was a simple observation, but once made, it became impossible to read Rhymaris, Strauss and the rest of the gang without seeing wishful thinking on almost every page.

Schweitzer's own analysis of the historical Jesus was really quite odd. He just offered what he called a sketch toward the end of his book. His Jesus wasn't a charming teacher of timeless wisdom. He was an apocalyptic Jewish prophet who proclaimed the end of the world and believed that he was destined to suffer for his people to save them from the coming apocalypse.

That analysis was a little more historically compelling. But for decades after him, scholars wondered whether Schweizer's Jesus could be of any relevance to the modern world. As Schweizer himself noted, he had made Jesus a stranger and an enigma. Almost single-handedly then, Schweizer destroyed the first quest for the historical Jesus.

Behold, Arthur, this is the Holy Grail. Look well, Arthur, for it is your sacred task to seek this grail. That is your purpose, Arthur, the quest for the Holy Grail.

Another episode, another Monty Python reference. Because it is brilliant. But also because King Arthur's quest for the Holy Grail is another of those epic and most famous quests. It was always going to make it into this episode with Director Mark around. And apparently finding Nemo almost made it into this serious study of the quest for the historical Jesus. Just shows what my team thinks of these serious academic questions.

Anyway, we're moving on to the next stage of the quest for the historical Jesus. This new quest or second quest mainly focused on the Gospels and how to reconcile the lofty Christ, Savior of the world with the Jesus of history. For Bultmann, whom I just mentioned, the death of Jesus is just about all that mattered for theology. Things like Jesus' birth and healings and even his teaching were thought to be inconsequential for modern faith.

The really important thing about the Jesus story is that behind the mythical garb lies a divine call to an existential decision to say yes to the love of God in Christ. That is Bultmann, and that is the no-quest interlude. But Professor Evans says it was only a matter of time before the pendulum began to swing back to the historical study of Jesus.

In fact, it was one of Bultmann's most famous students who got the thing going. You've already sort of tipped us into the so-called second quest or new quest to be too neat about it. So you've mentioned there was this period of no quest. There were questers, of course, but everyone was a little bit shell-shocked after Schweizer.

And the traditional story is 1953, Ernst Casman gives a famous essay, paper and calls people to just begin questing a little bit and seeing what minimal facts we can determine.

Tell us about the phase that followed that famous paper. Yeah, that's a good question. And my own doctoral studies put me right into the middle of that because my professor, who was in fact for a time my supervisor, James Robinson, was part of that circle. And in fact, he talked about it in a publication that he had no idea would make him so famous.

a thin little book about 110 pages called A New Quest of the Historical Jesus. So he ended up naming this as the second or new quest. And so he personally was acquainted with Rudolf Bultmann and all of his pupils, including the one you just mentioned, Ernst Kazemann, who read that paper in 1953. It was entitled The Problem of the Historical Jesus in German and then translated and published in English as well.

And basically what he was saying was we just can't leave it the way it's been for half a century. This idea that, well, you know, it's enough, as Bultmann himself famously said, it's enough to know the that, that Jesus existed. And after that, you embrace the proclamation of the good news, what God has done decisively in Jesus. You read Paul, whatever, you read John, but you don't take any of it as history. You don't have to do that.

And Kazerman said, you know, we run the risk of emerging almost like Gnostics who are pinning our faith in God, our faith in Jesus on somebody who didn't exist, at least not that way. And of course, I can just imagine Bultmann biting the stem off of his pipe. Everybody was an uproar.

And that's what is considered launching a new phase of the quest. Following Keserman, scholars in this second quest devised rigorous tests for working out what is historical in the Gospels and what isn't. One test was called the "Criterion of Double Dissimilarity," and it highlights something of the character and limitations of this second quest for the historical Jesus.

The criterion of double dissimilarity states that only things in the Gospels that are different from both Judaism on the one hand and the early Christian church on the other can be confidently said to have come from Jesus. The logic went like this:

Teachings of Jesus with strong parallels to Judaism could easily, so it was thought, be the result of the gospel writers trying to make Jesus fit with the Jewish culture of their day. And teachings of Jesus with strong parallels in the early church could be attempts to justify certain ecclesiastical traditions by having Jesus say it first.

So only things that are doubly dissimilar from Judaism and from Christianity can be said reliably to come from Jesus. Let me offer you two examples of how this test was thought to sift out the historical from the unhistorical in the life of Jesus. Okay, Jesus famously insisted that we mustn't swear oaths. It's right there in the Gospels. Instead, our yes should be yes and our no, no.

This teaching is radically different from the Judaism of the first century, and it's different from the later practice of the early church. Both continued to use oaths. Since it's unlikely that the gospel writers would invent something so dissimilar from Jewish and Christian culture, this teaching is regarded as authentic. That bit gets to stay. Okay, so here's a negative example.

The famous Last Supper of Jesus obviously has strong affinities with the church's later ritual, the Lord's Supper or communion. It may therefore be an invention designed to ground a later ceremony in the life of Christianity's founder. It also has a lot in common with the Jewish Passover festival, the high point of the Jewish calendar. Perhaps then the Gospels are simply trying to make Jesus sound more Jewish at that point.

The Last Supper is thereby called into question by the criterion of double dissimilarity. But contemporary scholars have severely criticized this particular test for historicity. For one thing, suggesting that something is authentic only if it wasn't picked up by the early church assumes that Jesus had no lasting impact on his followers. And that is just ridiculous.

Author after author in the New Testament affirms Jesus as the foundation of the Christian life. The idea that he didn't influence them with some thoughts and rituals and practices is just crazy. Just as strangely, the suggestion that Jewish sounding teachings are unhistorical ignores one of the most obvious details of Jesus' life. He was a Jew living in Jewish Galilee. How could the historical Jesus not have sounded Jewish?

The harshest criticism comes from the pen of the great Jewish scholar, Professor Geis of Amish of Oxford University. How then can anyone imagine that a saying of Jesus, in order to be authentic, had to distance itself from every known expression of Jewish morality and piety? Such an angle of approach is quite close to the old-fashioned anti-Semitic attitude, according to which the aim of Jesus was to condemn and reject the whole Jewish religion. I want to ask you about an interesting...

accusation Geyser Vemesh made about the second quest. He once wrote that there was something almost anti-Semitic about both the first and second quests. Do you agree? Is there a truth in that accusation? There is some truth in that, I regret to say. You see an incipient or latent anti-Semitism in much of the work in the 19th century.

But let's just stick to the 20th century. Let's talk about that no quest period after Schweitzer's book came out in 1906. Let's talk about Bultmann and some of his students. And it's orients around a very important criterion for determining authenticity, and it's the infamous double dissimilarity criterion. Why? Let me explain it. What it means is, well,

If there's a saying in the Gospels that you can't explain as coming from a Jewish source, from another rabbi, and at the same time the saying can't be explained as a Christian formulation that promotes faith in Jesus, then it must go back to Jesus.

Well, when you think about it, this is crazy. You end up eliminating the context of Jesus. Of course, he's going to sound like other teachers. How can he not? He's appealing to the Old Testament and so on and interpretation. He's engaging Jewish. He doesn't reject all Jewish thought.

And how do you get rid of, you know, everything that Jesus says that happens to be something that Christians love and articulate? It just doesn't make any sense. It's assuming he had no influence on anyone. Well, yeah, exactly. And so you ended up with a quirky Jesus that doesn't have much of a context, and he isn't very Jewish. And that's what Geza Vermesh was talking about. And so I would never say that Bultmann or his followers didn't

were anti-semitic but there is this whatever it is this element that wants to turn jesus into something other than a fully jewish human being it's a denial of a vital aspect

of incarnation. It's bad theology. And bad history. Imagine trying to understand Augustus without Roman history or Churchill without British history. It's slightly crazy. When I teach my students about the double dissimilarity criterion,

they're scratching their head going, how did smart people ever come up with that one? Well, I think you have to be smart to have come up with that one. In a PhD seminar, this is in the 1970s, the seminar was the historical Jesus. I thought, man, this is great. And he's articulating this, and I was scratching my head. Quite literally, I said, and he insisted we all call him Jim. I said, Jim, I don't understand this. Jesus is Jewish, was Jewish.

Sure. And he says, well, he says, I know, I know what you're saying, but it's the material that we can be confident that Jesus really said. And that's what he was trying to say. And I thought, oh my goodness. So in my own work, the double dissimilarity sometimes comes up where the, you know, other rabbis did not say this.

And it's kind of radical, and the church isn't real comfortable with it. Okay. Like the ban on vows or something like that would be a good example. Jesus' ban on vows. That's right. And so you could say that's got to come. So I use that criterion only in a positive sense. But to eliminate material because Jesus somehow fails that test, that to me is bad history. Absolutely.

Gaze of Amish died in 2013, and one obituary ran with the headline, "'Gaze of Amish, the man who noticed Jesus had been Jewish.'"

The Jewishness of Jesus kicked off a third quest, which will bring us up to the present day. I would place myself within this third quest space, sort of. But what makes this quest different from the others? And does it really bring us closer to discovering the real Jesus of history? We'll explore that after the break.

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There are still a few scholars operating in the mode of the second quest, not this third quest. The so-called Jesus Seminar is a group of American scholars mainly, led by Robert Funk. Members of the seminar continue to apply the criterion of double dissimilarity and some other tests. And then they vote on whether a certain saying or deed of Jesus is authentic. They literally get together and took votes.

The result was a revision of the Gospels, published for the popular market in 1993, complete with colour coding. Black text for the parts that Jesus definitely didn't say. Grey for those that he probably didn't say. Pink for those that may correspond to something he said or did. And red lettering, of course, for the authentic words of Jesus.

Needless to say, very little red ink was required in the printing. Here are a few of their determinations. Mark 8. Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Nope, Jesus didn't say that. Luke 18.

We are going up to Jerusalem and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. He will be delivered over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him, and spit on him. They will flog him and kill him. On the third day, he will rise again. Nope, he didn't say that either. John 14 I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Jesus definitely didn't say anything like that, according to the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar also emphasized alternative Gospels, particularly the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. In these Gnostic Gospels, which we've touched on before in other episodes, so check out the show notes, Jesus is stripped of his Jewish identity and his preaching of a future kingdom. And instead, he appears as a simple teacher of universal wisdom.

Now, very few scholars buy any of that nowadays. It's just too obvious from too many lines of evidence that Jesus really was a devout Jew. A devout Jew of particular kind, for sure, but certainly a Jew. Jesus has once again been modernized by the Jesus Seminar, wrote the late, great James Dunn of Durham University. Or should we rather say, he added, post-modernized.

So this brings us very happily to the so-called third quest, which by contrast, emphasised the Jewishness of Jesus. Can you tell us what prompted this? Was it partly post-World War II shame at the treatment of Jews? Or was there other sort of more evidential stuff that propelled this new movement? I think there were three things and you've touched on them.

Yeah, there was this shame post-World War II, but what it did was it created a more receptive environment. I think the real positive driver was that there were Jewish scholars. In a sense, Joseph Klausner, whose book on Jesus of 1922 in

Hebrew 1925 and English translation. He was a precursor. And so you ended up with in the 60s people like Flusser and David Flusser. - Extraordinary book. Amazing. - Very perceptive and what they were doing because Protestant and Catholic too, Christian scholars had blinkers on and had not seen a lot of these Jewish elements. And you get this, hey, you know what?

Jesus is one of us coming through with David Flusser. And I knew David Flusser. Wow. And Gaze of Vermesh. And so there was this groundswell among some Jewish historians and scholars who were saying, Donald Hagner called it the Jewish reclamation of Jesus. Hey, he's one of us.

He's a rabbi. Whatever the Christians say about him, he's one of us. And they're not getting some of this right because they're not interpreting him in context. However, there is this contextual thing, which is the third element, and that is lots of material are coming to light. The Dead Sea Scrolls. After the Six-Day War in 1967, now all of Jerusalem is in Israeli hands. Well, archaeology just exploded.

In 1947, Bedouin men herding goats in the hills to the west of the Dead Sea entered a cave near Wadi Qumran in the West Bank and stumbled on clay jars filled with leather scrolls. Ten more caves were discovered in the next ten years, containing tens of thousands of fragments belonging to over 900 scrolls.

Included among the scrolls are the oldest copies of the books of the Hebrew Bible, and it's considered possibly the most important archaeological find of the 20th century. Actually, the story of how they were accidentally found is likely untrue, but it's the story tour guides tell, and it's a really nice one. The scrolls themselves, though, are real and important.

We have the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hey, Jesus' teaching in fact makes sense in this Jewish context, first century. Look at that. Look at these parallels in these scrolls. And so those were the real factors that drove it. And so there was a big surge forward. Can we be specific? You've mentioned the Dead Sea Scrolls and how important that was for understanding the Jewishness of Jesus. And you've mentioned archaeology. All right, I want to take them in turn. Can you be specific? Tell me something from the Dead Sea Scrolls

that has helped us think of Jesus afresh and then give us some archaeology. One of the most amazing scrolls, it was published when all these fragments began to come out 1990 and 1991. These were unpublished fragments and there were thousands of fragments. So listen, it was hard sorting this stuff out. Scholars have put it this way. Imagine a puzzle with 5,000 pieces

3,000 of the pieces are missing. And the box lid that shows the picture is gone too. Good luck. Put this together. Well, that's what they were doing. And one of these texts, we call it number 521 from K4. So it's 4Q521. It was a bombshell.

If you know the Gospels, you know John the Baptist is in prison. He's discouraged. He sends messengers to Jesus saying, are you he who is to come or do we look for somebody else? Now, man, that smacks of authenticity. No Christian is going to invent a story about John wondering if Jesus is it. Yeah.

Jesus then replies, and this also strengthens the authenticity. He doesn't say, yeah, go back and tell him yes. He replies indirectly. He says, go back and tell John what you're hearing and seeing. And then he says, the blind receive their sight, the dead are being raised up, this and that are happening, and the good news is being proclaimed to the poor. Matthew says,

Matthew 11 and Luke 7 both have that, but when Matthew introduces it, he says, "When John's in prison and he heard about the works of the Messiah." You know what some critics used to say? "Well, okay, here's this non-messianic exchange between Jesus and John, and Matthew's bumping it up a little bit." Well then along comes 4Q 521, Dead Sea Scroll text, dates to the middle of the first century BC. So maybe almost a hundred years

before Jesus and John have this exchange. And what does it say? Here's this fragment: "His Messiah, whom heaven and earth will obey," oh man, it goes on to say, "He will open the eyes of the blind." Ellipsis, ellipsis, ellipsis. It's fragmentary, right? It's fragmentary, but it's not that fragmentary. "He will open the eyes of the blind, He will raise the dead, He will heal the injured, and He will proclaim good news

Craig loves 4Q521. So do I, actually. It made it into my doctoral dissertation on page 158, to be precise. The point is that here is a bunch of Jews just before the time of Jesus, but long after the Old Testament was written.

talking about what's going to happen when the Messiah comes. And it contains some of the same things Jesus said about himself in the Gospels.

Many scholars used to imagine that the things said by and of Jesus in the Gospels were the result of decades of Christian reflection and exaggeration long after Jesus. But 4Q521 makes clear that this is exactly what a messianic figure in the early first century might have said and exactly what his followers might have said about him at that time. Here's the interesting thing.

Jesus' reply is heavily freighted with words and phrases from Isaiah. That, no doubt, Isaiah the prophet, that was Jesus' favorite book. Well, there are Isaiah phrases in 4Q 521 also, but the framework of this answer is right out of Psalm 146. And if you read Psalm 146, the holy name is used, Yahweh, the Lord. The Lord made heaven and earth and all that's in them.

The Lord will open the eyes of the blind. Yahweh will heal. He will do all this. And good news will be proclaimed and so on. And you realize, oh my goodness, 4Q 521 is saying that when God's Messiah comes, heaven and earth, which God made, and all that's in them, obey the Messiah.

and the Messiah will do what Yahweh says He does in Psalm 146. So Jesus' reply to John isn't just, "Oh yeah, Matthew got it right. It is Messianic." It's a very exalted understanding of Messianism. It implies the Messiah acts with God's power. Now that's an example. There are others, but that's a big example. And you know, I've been around long enough. My career started way before 1990.

and i'm not going to name any names i don't want to embarrass anybody but skeptical scholars say now yeah yeah that's non-messianic well then this text comes out and of course that everything pivots and they don't want to admit they ever said that also a small room with the shelf in

There they put the scrolls and from there they took the scrolls to the synagogue and they were reading and studying in this beautiful house. And actually what's very important here is that we're excavating also the western neighborhood of Magdalen. And it's a huge place, it's a huge neighborhood. We have roads and buildings and maybe shops and so on.

In December 2021, just over a year ago, archaeologists discovered a 2,000-year-old synagogue in the ruins of the ancient Jewish community of Migdal, or Magdala, the likely home of Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus' early followers and benefactors. I was just in Israel last week and got to stand in the newly found synagogue at Magdala. Not the one they found four years ago, the one they found yesterday.

four months ago and Incredible That they're still finding stuff. Well John, let me tell you something about that. Just a moment You mentioned the synagogue

And so it'll be confirmed, I'm sure, as pre-70. So that'll be 11 synagogues that archaeologists have confirmed as pre-70. Do you realize 30 years ago there was a New Testament scholar who said there weren't any synagogues at all in the time of Jesus? Now, when I talk about archaeological discoveries and new material, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah.

And so we've gone from zero, at least in his mind, not too many people agreed with him. There were three or four that we were pretty confident were pre-70. But look, here we are now. You just mentioned a second synagogue found at McDonald's. By the way, that's the first time two pre-70 synagogues have been found in the same village. And I say pre-70 because that's what scholars usually talk about.

The big war that went from 66 to 70 in Rome crushed Israel, destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. That happened in 70. So we usually talk about archaeological evidence and documents and so on that predate that as having relevance for Jesus. Stuff that postdates that we don't think necessarily has any relevance for Jesus. And so that's why from time to time you'll hear me say something like, well, this is pre-70 or this is post-70.

And so you have archaeology finding all kinds of things that cohere with gospel accounts. Hey, wait a minute. The gospels are talking about real people, real places, real things. And archaeology is supporting that. All of this is really cool. But how much closer are we now to understanding the historical Jesus in comparison to the people centuries ago? Dale Allison is an American New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary.

He has one or two quibbles about the third quest. Basically, he reckons third questers have become too confident. Yes, Jesus fits his background. Yes, we have way more evidence in our hands today than the first and second questers ever did. But we have to be careful not to run too far down the track of historical certainty.

Actually, his argument is really interesting, kind of twofold. He doubts that we have much of Jesus' exact words in the Gospels. He relies heavily on modern memory studies, and he thinks it's unlikely the Gospel writers could have preserved verbatim all that material. I've got a little research project at the moment that calls that into question, but Allison isn't being unreasonable in this from a historical point of view.

But just when you think he might be taking a really skeptical route, like the first and second questers, Allison actually thinks we can be super confident about the vibe or gist of what Jesus said and did. Because we find that gist in so many different lines of evidence across our sources. The precise details might be lost, he says, but the core is more solid than ever.

Dale Allison has sounded some warnings to what he would describe as overconfident third questers. And he has as good as said, we might not be able to know specific things Jesus said, specific things he did. We should really focus on the gist. Recurring motif, not recurring sayings, should be the focus. So I want to ask you, to what extent do you agree with that? To what extent

Can we hope to know more than the gist, the vibe, as Australians would say, of the historical Jesus? I think the way I would put it is we certainly have the gist, and it's a very important gist. Historians evaluate documents, and when the document is seen to be credible, and they have good criteria for determining that,

then the burden of doubt, the burden shifts, the burden of proof shifts to the skeptic. And so rightly done, and the Gospels pass very well because they exhibit verisimilitude. Any archaeologist will tell you that.

In fact, it's really funny. The Christian scholar might be the one that's unreasonably skeptical, not the Jewish archaeologist. He has no dog in the fire. This is what my colleagues at Macquarie University, Ancient History Department, always used to say. There's no one more skeptical than a New Testament scholar. Yeah, and so what real historians do, they evaluate the document. If it's a good document, they don't blindly say, I will accept anything it says. But the burden of proof shifts...

to somebody who wants to say, yeah, okay, it is a good document, but I don't think that Alexander the Great said that. Okay, why do you not think so? You have to show why. And maybe you can't.

That's the approach I take to the Gospels. This is actually how mainstream classicists and ancient historians operate with their non-Jesus material. They take an account, say the account of Tacitus about Emperor Nero, and they assess the way it fits with the background of everything else we know from the period, all the inscriptions, the archaeology, and other written sources. They're

They don't look to try and prove or disprove Tacitus line by line. They assess whether it fits the rest of what is known. And if it does, they approach Tacitus with a level of broad acceptance, even where Tacitus' individual statements can't be immediately verified.

The reason they do this is that Tacitus reads, broadly speaking, like a good faith account of someone who is in a position to report the best available Roman information. Now that's how the best Jesus scholars approach the Gospels against the Jewish background. Okay, so Craig, what would you say are the most secure facts about the historical Jesus?

In my book, Fabricating Jesus, that came out in 2006, I actually list about 10 or 12 items. That he existed. Yeah, of course. That he grew up in Nazareth, in Galilee. That he headquartered in Capernaum. That there was tension between himself and family members. That he was known for proclaiming the kingdom. That he was known...

for using parables a whole lot, that he was known for appointing 12 people as his key disciples who become apostles, that he was linked with John the Baptist, who came to be understood as a forerunner and even confessor of him, that he had a reputation as a remarkably successful

healer and exorcist. So much so that in his lifetime during his ministry, other healers and exorcists invoked his name. That is really interesting. They weren't part of his following, but they invoked his name. These things are as close to a certainty that any historian can talk about. That he died on a Roman cross.

for acknowledging his role as the anointed king in this kingdom he's been proclaiming. I think that's a virtual certainty. That his own disciples, family and disciples, found the tomb empty and testified that the risen Jesus appeared to them. I think they were telling the truth. I think it's extremely strained and problematic to say they're just lying. They all got together and said, let's just make this up.

And you know why this isn't articulated very well sometimes? They're Jewish people. They have an eschatology. They have a narrative. They have a sacred book. They have a sacred story. They know who they are. They don't need a fraud. There were plenty of others who said, "I'm important. At my command, the waters of the Jordan will be parted, or at my command, the walls of Jerusalem will fall down, or come out to me in the wilderness and see signs and wonders." And they get killed.

There is no following. There is no attempt to rehabilitate any of these guys. There is no church created because some fraud died in the wilderness. So if Jesus died and stayed dead, which I think a lot of his followers assumed would be the case, where was he buried? Right over there. Okay, in 12 months we gather up his bones and take them back so his grieving mother has them in Nazareth. That's what they would have done.

They would not make up a story. This idea, we do this armchair psychologizing that, "Oh, poor Peter didn't know how to get on with life." Sure he did. He's disappointed. He's not the first Jew to be disappointed when something doesn't pan out. He knew how to get along. He's not going to make up a lie so he feels better. And so I think that's a very important point to make. It goes to motive. What is the motive to create a fiction?

How does that somehow compensate for the disappointment? It doesn't. So I would argue the certainty of Jesus's life, his public ministry, his style of teaching, the theme of his teaching, the kingdom of God, continuity of his ministry. He had disciples, learners that he taught, and the belief that he was indeed raised up. No fraud here.

on the part of His family and His disciples. And that's why they were committed to continue proclaiming His message, even at great personal hurt and loss. That's our last episode for season eight of Undeceptions. I hope you've enjoyed.

Sorry, keep going. Oh, God. So close to the end. I need to find some upbeat Americans to work with, clearly. We hope you've enjoyed it more than the team has. We're working hard on season nine already and we're tackling some pretty fun topics that we've been promising for a while. Things like the Reformation, the Venerable Bede, woohoo,

Islam and crucifixion and much more. If you like what we're doing, you might consider heading to Apple Podcasts and leaving us a review or just tell people you know about the podcast. It really helps to get the word out about what we're doing. You can head to our website and ask me a question that we'll consider answering in the next Q&A episode for next season. I love hearing your voices and what you've been mulling over as you listen to the podcasts.

While you're there, you might consider making a donation to help our work here at Undeceptions. We still really need you. We have some very cool things to do in 2023 and in the years ahead. You can click on the donate button on our website and I'm really grateful for your support. So, see ya. Music

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hobbit-Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher and the house drummer. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveson remains my wonderful assistant. Editing is by Richard Humwe. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan Academic, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out.

But actually, Al, can you go over to your drum kit and give me that drum roll that you never gave me? Come on. Open mic. I want to hear you. I was going to get my snare out. Sorry. I packed it away. It'll take me two seconds. Sorry, everyone. Love the spontaneity. There you go. I just put a fresh skin on it, actually. Oh, cool. It's a go. Drum roll. Al, go. Boom.

Give me a heavy metal. Give me a classic heavy metal drum beat, will you? Oh, I'm not trying to make excuses, but I've actually packed away all my cymbals as well. Oh, my goodness. I don't think I can right now, but next recording session, I'll make sure I'm fully set up, ready to go. Okay. Sorry. Very disappointing. Sorry, boss. One more drum roll. One more drum roll, please. All right.

Fantastic. Excellent. You can keep the job. Oh, thank you. House drummer is yours. It all came down to that. Got to be ready to go at all times.