by James A. Bacon
The Jesus Archive caught up with Boston University scholar Paula Fredriksen one recent Sunday afternoon. We managed to ask a few questions about her new book, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, before she and her brood rushed off to the opera.*
JA: In any work, a scholar builds on the work of others but seeks to contribute something of his or her own to the store of knowledge. Where, in your opinion, does Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews make the greatest contribution to the quest for the historical Jesus?
PF: I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants: Ed Sanders, Geza Vermes, Krister Stendahl. Where I’ve tried to push the edge of the envelope is to reconsider the Gospel of John — not its presentation of the figure of Jesus, with its high Christology, but its chronology. A Jesus whose mission takes him to Jerusalem as well as to the Galil makes a lot more sense. Also, I’ve tried to get people away from the “temple tantrum” as the key to understanding Jesus, his mission and why he was killed.
JA: You seek to understand Jesus in the context of 1st century Judaism. In your book, you make the observation that “the quest for the historical Jesus has given rise to equally fraught, equally contentious, quests for the historical Galilee and the historical Temple.” What’s going on? What is the fault line in scholarship?
PF: We have such sparse data [in New Testament studies] that the methods people use end up constructing the historical reality they’re looking for. The ’60s are over, but there’s still an academic romance with Marxism. In our culture, we give economic reasons causal priority. We see politics and economics as fundamental to human motivation, and religious things as disguised versions of political or economic things. There’s a reductionism: A religious movement doesn’t happen for religious reasons; it’s a disguised economic protest. The Temple ends up as Rome’s proxy, something foreign to Galilee. I don’t buy it.
Q. If Galilee and Judea weren’t experiencing unprecedented socio-economic stress, why did the Jews experience such intense yearning for supernatural deliverance?
PF: We have a huge apocalyptic tradition, from 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. We don’t know who the authors were, but some of it was produced in Greek. It could have come from anywhere in the Jewish diaspora. Do we have to hypothesize that all Jewish communities were oppressed to explain the appearance of all these texts? I don’t think so. There was a sense that things were wrong, that evildoers flourished and the righteous went to their graves early, that horrible things happened and it wasn’t right — especially given that God made the world. If we have this articulate stream of thought over 400 years, it becomes something other than a response to oppression. I like to take what people are saying at their word. If they say God is going to change this because God is good and this is evil, they’re not saying that there’s an unequal distribution of wealth.
JA: The Gospels portray Jesus contending with the Pharisees. Some scholars have interpreted these exchanges to mean that Jesus rejected the Judaism of his day. Conversely, others maintain that the Gospel passages are inauthentic, written by the evangelists to reflect the religious tensions of their own time. But you accept the Gospel picture of Jesus arguing with the Pharisees while also insisting that Jesus was a devout Jew.
PF: Right. He was well within the bounds of normal observance. Jesus and the Pharisees fight over everything: what the Sabbath means, whether you have to wash your hands before you eat. In Matthew he fights with the Pharisees over how long their prayer fringe should be. If Jesus had said, “Let’s forget about the phylacteries,” it would be one thing. But instead he’s saying, “Do it like this, not like that.” You don’t have an argument about something that’s not important to you. Late Second Temple Judaism is full of different types of Jews arguing with one another about the right way to be Jewish. When you put Jesus against that wallpaper, it’s just Jewish business as usual. That’s one of the most reliable things in the Gospels.
JA: If Jesus was a devout Jew and loyal participant in the Temple cult, how do you explain his prophecies regarding the destruction of the Temple?
PF: There are prophecies of destruction in the Jewish Bible. A prediction that the temple is going to be destroyed doesn’t mean that you’re saying, “I don’t like it.” It’s a trope within prophetic discourse. But given the dating of the Gospels, I have a hard time deciding. I suspect that most of the prophecies about the destruction of the Temple [were written after the fact], post-70 C.E. The fact that Paul, writing before the destruction of the Temple, says nothing about the prophecies strikes me as a ringing silence. When he gives lists of things to look for [at the End of Time], he never says that Jesus said the Temple would be destroyed. Given the way Paul uses Temple imagery positively, praising God for giving Israel the cult, he is unselfconsciously a happy second-temple Jew. For him to be in a movement in which the founder preached against the Temple doesn’t make sense to me. There’s another thing: the fact that the apostles settled in Jerusalem. The Temple was the only reason to be in town. They were loyal to the Temple, too.
JA: According to Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Jesus saw himself as an End-of-Time prophet, but not the messiah. Did he see himself as playing any role in precipitating the Kingdom of God?
PF: There seems to be a lack of modesty in his insistence on authority. John the Baptist seems to have no self-esteem conflicts. Neither does Paul for that matter. These people are very sure of themselves. I think Jesus sees himself as the definitive spokesperson. One of the things that gives Christian tradition its emotional and ethical torque is the ethics. The ethics are so extreme: Turn the other cheek. It’s not because God likes suffering. It’s because the guy who is pounding you is very soon going to get pounded by God. It’s not an ethic for victims. It’s an ethic for people who say, “God is going to straighten this out and in the meantime, I’ll be the best person I can.” I don’t think Jesus thinks he’s causing the Kingdom of God. He’s announcing the word of God.
JA: In Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, you embrace E.P. Sanders’ methodology of constructing the historical Jesus upon the foundation of two indisputable facts: (1) Pontius Pilate crucified Jesus, yet (2) he did not persecute his followers. But your reconstruction of Jesus’ last days — his entry into Jerusalem, his activities there, his arrest and trial — differs on at least two major points: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, and his chastisement of the moneychangers in the Temple. Let’s address each in turn.
You agree with Sanders that the Gospel of Mark’s version of the entry into Jerusalem is implausible. If Jesus had proclaimed himself messiah by riding on a donkey and entered the city as a king greeted by thousands of pilgrims, the Romans would have descended upon him swiftly and mercilessly. Sanders suggests that the entry was probably pretty low key: designed to fulfill Zechariah’s prophecy, but not to draw attention. What’s wrong with that picture?
PF: This is where my reconstruction differs with Sanders’: I think that Jesus did make a grand entrance into Jerusalem. There were these dancing pilgrims coming in, people following him from Judea and Galilee. It’s an incandescent moment in the narrative and, I think, probably also in the historical movement. But Pilate didn’t move against him. My view is that Pilate rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, brother, that guy’s in town again.” Why didn’t he take him out? Because if Jesus had been back and forth to Jerusalem any number of times — the picture we can sketch from John — then Pilate knew that Jesus was not a political agitator. “It’s that guy from Galilee who works miracles and talks about the kingdom of God and is a real pain. But he’s harmless.”
But he wasn’t harmless. The procession was the spark that lit the fuse. In the days before the feast — there were seven days until Passover — Jesus was teaching in the Temple and the crowd was getting wilder and wilder. The temple was absolutely congested. It was an airport the day before Thanksgiving. It was the mall parking lot before Christmas. It was absolutely jammed. These people were proclaiming him as the messiah. The crucifixion wasn’t addressed to Jesus. A knife in the back would have done the job. They could have put him in jail until the holiday was over. But Pilate was speaking to the crowd. The point was for the crowd to know that he was dead.
JA: Pilate is not known for his keen understanding of the Jews. How do you suppose that Pilate acquired intelligence about Jesus’ teachings and activities? Did he maintain some kind of intelligence-gathering apparatus?
PF: He had those soldiers standing like birthday candles on the roof of the stoa. They were looking right down into the Temple courtyards. If some of the troops were drawn from the indigenous Gentile population, they might have been able to speak some local Aramaic. If this were the case, some of the soldiers might have understood what was being said. And some of the Jewish crowd would have been speaking Greek. I also see the priests as providing a middleman function. Pilate couldn’t have arrested Jesus if the priests hadn’t cooperated. They knew the city and he didn’t. The priests are definitely part of the equation. They were on the same page as Pilate as far as the holidays. They wanted the streets to stay calm.
JA: You question the historicity of the story about Jesus’ assault on the tables of the moneychangers. Mark places the event in Jesus’ last days, John says it happened during an earlier trip to Jerusalem. You argue that the story was probably a free-floating tradition, and we have no way of knowing if either John or Mark got it right. Good point. But then you say, because we don’t know the story’s context, we’ll treat it as if it didn’t exist at all. Fess up: Isn’t that a cop-out?
PF: What I’m saying is, as you reconstruct the events, the Temple Tantrum is not necessary to account for everything else — the ambush, the ugly, public Roman execution. If you bracket it out, the action goes smoothly. You don’t need the Temple Tantrum to explain why things happened the way they did. I’m also saying it’s a very confusing story. As the narratives present the episode, both John and Mark have Jesus condemning what would have been a completely normal function of the temple, which was to change money and provide sacrificial birds. The temple provided the goods and services needed to facilitate the transaction of temple worship. By the way, as Sanders has pointed out, John’s description of quadrupeds in the temple is extremely unlikely. Can you imagine trying to herd them up the Temple steps, or to keep the Temple clean? Taken together — Jesus condemning the moneychangers and pigeon sellers, herd animals in the Temple court — Mark and John as they stand make no historical sense.
Sanders argued in 1985 that the historical Jesus’ action — overturning the tables — was in fact a prophetic gesture encoding the coming destruction of the Temple. He was very persuasive and, as a result, for a long time I held this view too. But it seemed increasingly odd to me that two early — and I think probably Jewish — evangelists would have so missed the point. Especially Mark, who has no problem clearly enunciating Jesus’ prophecies of the Temple’s destruction elsewhere in his story. So, what then? I don’t know. Something happened. But who knows what happened? Who knows what the point was?
JA. In Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, you question the portrayal in the Gospels of the Temple priests badgering Pilate into crucifying Jesus. What was their role, if any, in Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion?
PF: The priests played a key role in enabling Jesus’ arrest. But they didn’t go to Pilate and say, “There’s this man named Jesus of Nazareth, and we don’t like him. Will you please kill him for us?” It was more like this: The crowd was getting progressively more unruly as the feast approached. Pilate knew it. He called the priests. The priests said the crowd was proclaiming Jesus as the messiah. The fact that they didn’t just murder him means that the crowd was the object of the lesson.
JA. You aren’t one to shy away from contentious issues. But Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews ducks a couple of big ones. Perhaps you can fill in the blanks. After the crucifixion, did Jesus’ disciples find an empty tomb?
PF: I think the empty tomb stories are late. I would prefer Paul to the Gospels. He said Peter saw Christ, and then the Twelve saw Christ. He was talking about christophanies.
JA: Do you think he was buried at all?
PF: I don’t know what happened to the body. Dom Crossan has a haunting chapter about the dogs at the foot of the cross. I don’t have any particular reason to credit that story either, but it is poignant. Fundamentally, though, I think the empty-tomb stories are beside the point. For the earliest tradition, it’s the resurrection appearances that count. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15 that Peter and the original apostles and all those other people saw Jesus. And I think that’s what they thought happened. And Paul said he saw the risen Christ. I think he thought he did.
JA. Last question: Nearly a century ago, Albert Schweitzer observed that everyone who looks at the historical Jesus sees a reflection of himself. Twenty years ago, you converted from Roman Catholicism to orthodox Judaism. When you look at the historical Jesus, you don’t see a nationalist Zealot. You don’t see a Cynic sage or social critic. You don’t see a practitioner of ritual magic. You don’t see a Christian messiah or Son of God. You see a devout Jew. Does Schweitzer’s observation apply to you?
PF: My historical Jesus is not much different from Ed Sanders’, to name the most prominent exemplar. Does Ed’s Jesus have Methodist overtones that I’ve not detected? Seriously, coming up with a Jewish figure is what a historical approach will usually lead to. Besides, I’m not a “devout” Jew. I’m a spiritually inarticulate, 21st-century, post-Italian Catholic giorit, who converted not from Christianity but from atheism, and who was a Zionist back in grade school. Do you really see that transcript informing my portrait of the historical Jesus?
JA: Touche!
* The opera was The Marriage of Figaro. Lest anyone reach the mistaken conclusion that she lives in a household of pointy-headed intellectuals, Fredriksen later hastened to point out that on the way home, her teenage daughters were struck by the parallels between Mozart’s disguised-lover motif and the Tom Hanks movie, You’ve Got Mail! Says Fredriksen: “There’s a lot more Buffy the Vampire Slayer than Mozart in this household.”