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Was the man who crucified Jesus a tyrant, an anti-Semite or just a guy trying to do his job? Helen Bond portrays him more sympathetically than most.

by James A. Bacon

Pontius Pilate has gotten uncommonly bad press over the past half century. Some interpreters of the historic record have described the Roman governor as a murderous anti-Semite bent upon crushing the Jews. Others have dubbed him the agent of Roman imperialism: brutal, callous and determined to uphold an oppressive social and political order. The scholars who regard him as a tough but competent administrator, doing his best to govern a willful and independent people, remain a distinct minority.

Given the intense interest in the Historical Jesus and Pilate’s role in the trial of Jesus, Helen K. Bond’s treatise on Pilate, published in 1998, seems long overdue. “Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation” is the first book-length treatment of Pilate in English. Bond, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, strips away the polemic of the ancient sources and exposes the flaws of modern conjecture to reach the historical Pontius Pilate. The resulting portrait, Bond concedes, is a tad bland. Pilate did not plot with Sejanus to exterminate the Jews. He was not especially brutal, at least if judged by the standards of his own time rather than our own. Although he made mistakes early in his tenure as governor, he later made an effort to accommodate Jewish religious sensitivities. Unfortunately, she argues, there is little we can reliably glean from the Gospels about Pilate’s actions during Jesus’ trial.

Those readers craving a Rembrandt-like rendering of Pilate may find her minimalist sketch unsatisfying. Bond makes no apologies: She’s a historian, not a storyteller. She found it necessary to correct the uncritical use of Philo and Josephus whose negative portrayals of the Roman governor, though colorful, were thoroughly biased. “Everything Philo said was absolutely truthful and everything the evangelists said was geared to theology — I came across this assumption time and time again,” she says. “People were ultra-critical of the evangelists, but they would read an extremely tendentious passage in Philo and say, ‘Ooooh, there you go, Pilate was a bit naughty, wasn’t he?’”

Her other significant contribution in Pontius Pilate was rethinking how the Gospels – Mark and John in particular – intended to depict Pilate. Scholars often perceive in the passion narratives a weak and vacillating governor who bargained, even pleaded, with the Temple priests to spare the life of Jesus. But Bond reads the accounts of Jesus’ trial differently. Mark, she says, was describing a shrewd and manipulative official who maneuvered the Jewish crowd into demanding Jesus’ crucifixion – displacing the blame for ordering the execution of a popular figure from himself to the people themselves. Likewise, John’s Pilate used the trial of Jesus to extract a vow of loyalty from the Temple priests to the Roman Emperor. Though closer to what the evangelists meant to convey to their readers, Bond notes, these interpretations aren’t necessarily accurate descriptions of what actually happened.

The image of Pilate has evolved through the years as each generation and nationality reinterpreted New Testament characters in light of its own experience. Early 20^th-century British scholars, Bond observes, tended to regard Pilate as a colonial governor with a handlebar moustache — “a decent chap trying to deal with the natives.”

Then in 1948, E. Stauffer wrote a book, “Christus und die Caesaren,” that has defined the debate over Pontius Pilate ever since. Recoiling from the horror of Nazism, the German scholar depicted Pilate as an appointee of Sejanus, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard. As executor in Judea of Sejanus’ anti-Semitic program, Stauffer’s Pilate tried to provoke the Jews into a rebellion that would provide the justification to annihilate them. Sejanus’ execution in 31 C.E., however, left Pilate dangling with no political support in Rome. Two years later, the governor found himself in a confrontation with the high priests over the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. The indecisive behavior described by the Gospels, Stauffer contended, reflected Pilate’s precarious political situation.

Although subsequent scholars have downplayed the idea that Pilate intended to exterminate the Jews, important elements of Stauffer’s “Provocative Pilate” hypothesis have gained widespread acceptance. Drawing upon the ancient testimony of Flavius Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, more recent scholars have treated the governor as an agent of Roman imperialism. They characterize him as indifferent to the religious sensibilities of the Jews and brutal in suppressing their dissent. For those entranced with the idea of a Jesus leading a social protest movement, the imperialist Pilate makes the perfect foil.

Not everyone accepted the Provocative Pilate Pilate caricature, however. In 1981, J.P. Lemonon questioned the influence of Sejanus over Pilate in his book “Pilate et le gouvernement de la Judee,” in which he attributed Pilate’s conflicts with the Jews to political miscalculations rather than deliberate provocations.

Other scholars have emphasized that conflict was intrinsic to the relationship between the domineering Romans and independent-minded Jews, regardless of the particular governor in power.

Debate over Pilate centers on four interwoven controversies:

• Sejanus. Did Pilate owe his appointment as governor Judea to Sejanus, the head of the Praetorian Guard? Did the downfall of Sejanus in 30-31 C.E. weaken Pilate in his dealings with the Jews, or were events in Rome extraneous to the situation in Judea?
• Provocations. Josephus and Philo describe four main confrontations between Pilate and his subjects: displaying the emperor’s effigy in Jerusalem, funding the aqueduct with Temple funds, erecting the votive shields to honor Tiberius, and quashing the Samaritan messiah. Did Pilate deliberately goad his subjects in these incidents, possibly as part of an anti-Semitic program orchestrated by Sejanus in Rome? Or did Pilate act out of ignorance or political miscalculation?
• Brutality. Was Pilate excessively heavy-handed in his dealings with the Jews and Samaritans? Or did he, in fact, employ violence judiciously and with restraint?
• Trial of Jesus. Should we interpret the behavior of Pilate during the trial of Jesus as dealing from a position of political strength or weakness?

Bond rejects Stauffer’s notion that Sejanus and Pilate engaged in an anti-Semitic program, and she sees no connection between Sejanus’ execution and Pilate’s behavior during Jesus’ trial. She finds no contradiction between the governor portrayed by Philo and Josephus on the one hand and the gospels on the other: Pilate governor comes across as a strong ruler who does not shrink from violence yet applies it judiciously.

Lastly, Bond finds the portrayal of Pilate in the Gospels to be unconvincing. The Gospel narratives are too contradictory and theologically tainted, she says, to trust as accurate accounts of what transpired. But she doesn’t adopt the radical skepticism of Dominic Crossan and others who suggest that the Gospel authors fabricated everything. Jesus’ disciples, she says, “would have known certain basic facts: that he was arrested, taken to the High Priest’s House, taken to the governor, then crucified.” The disciples might have hidden themselves after his arrest, but others in Jerusalem would have taken an interest in Jesus’ fate. “As soon as he was arrested, you’d think people would immediately start making inquiries,” she says. “They didn’t know for sure that he’d be crucified. … Maybe it’s because I’m a nosy person, but if I were there, I would have wanted to know what happened.”

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Helen Bond has evinced a curiosity about Jesus since she was a teenager. She’d heard the Sunday-school stories growing up in a village near Durham, but it was exposure to the Synoptic Problem at a Catholic convent school  that whetted her interest. At the age of 15, she found the puzzle of deducing the relationship between the Synoptic gospels — Mark, Matthew and Luke — to be a gripping intellectual exercise. “It was fascinating that two of the Gospel writers had copied from another,” she says. “You could almost see Matthew working with Mark and see what he’d done with it.”

Her mother, a teacher, took great interest in her religious instruction and would tell her, “Well, we don’t believe that.” Hearing one thing from her teachers and another from her parents, Bond learned to be skeptical of received religious wisdom. Today, she believes very strongly in God but she doesn’t go to church – and she’s still trying to decide how Jesus fits into the picture.

After graduating from secondary school, Bond enrolled in St. Andrews, a small university north of Edinburgh with a good reputation in theology and Biblical studies. The environment suited her well: not too conservative, not too radical but intellectually stimulating. Her studies there fed her interest in the New Testament world. “The more you know, the more questions you have,” she explains. “I really enjoyed studying for the exams. When it was all over, there was a big gap in my life. I knew quite a lot, but there was so much I didn’t know about. I couldn’t bear the thought of not learning more.”

Her next stop was the University of Durham, not far from home. She entered the PhD. Program under the guidance of J.D.G. Dunn, an expert in Pauline studies. Jimmy Dunn was a brilliant supervisor and very enthusiastic, Bond recalls. “After an hour or so with him, I came out thinking I could climb mountains, write six theses.” In an exchange program, she also spent a year at the University of Tubingen, where she studied under Martin Hengel. “He has a phenomenal knowledge of the whole 1^st century – all of the ancient literature at his fingertips.”

In graduate school, Bond shifted her focus from the Synoptic Problem to the trial of Jesus. Although she had a “moderate” view of the historicity of the Gospels, she says, she questioned whether there was much historical material in the trial narratives. She became consumed by a desire to know more about the events leading up to Jesus’ death. In particular, who were the men – Pilate and Caiaphas – who decided upon his execution? Dunn steered her dissertation research towards Pilate. Other than Lemonon’s book, in French, no one had written a monograph on the Roman governor. The research she conducted for her thesis became the basis for “Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation.”

Still enthralled with the subject, Bond made New Testament studies her career. Earning her doctorate in 1994, she taught briefly at a theological school in Manchester and then moved back north to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

At the Kings College divinity school at Aberdeen, Bond worked with Francesca Murphy, a reader in systematic theology. As the only two female scholars in the school, they became great friends. Murphy recalls Bond as “very sporty,” with an interest in tennis and running, but most of all as unpretentious and down to earth. “She is extremely warm, very loyal,” Murphy says. “She sticks by you when times are bad as well as when they are good.”

Although she’s English, Bond feels quite at home in Scotland. “I’m a northerner,” she declares. “I don’t want to move back south.” Part of that sentiment may be due to the fact that she married a Scotsman, whom she met at a Burns Night supper. (For those unfamiliar with this peculiar institution, the Scotch gather every Jan. 25^th to eat haggis,[1] turnips and potatoes, usually to the accompaniment of a bagpipe. Says Bond: “You say grace, toast the haggis – preferably in a broad Scotch dialect – and drink a lot of whisky.”)

Last year Bond took a job as a lecturer at the New College, University of Edinburgh. Her husband Keith works in Glasgow, and they live halfway between in Falkirk. Having completed her book on Pilate, she’s researching Joseph Caiaphas, the high priest of the Jerusalem Temple and accomplice of Pilate in the crucifixion of Jesus.

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In his work The Embassy to Gaius, Philo of Alexandria composed a graphic character sketch that has colored the reconstruction of the historical Pontius Pilate. While governor of Judea, Pilate dedicated gilded shields to the honor of the Emperor Tiberius and set them up in the old palace of Herod the Great, where he maintained his Jerusalem residence. Taking offense at the inscription, which probably referred to Tiberius as the “divine Augustus,” the Jews assembled a delegation of leading citizens to ask Pilate to remove the shields.

Pilate refused, wrote Philo, describing him as “a man of inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition.” When the Jews threatened to appeal the case to the emperor himself, according to Philo, the governor feared that they would publicize “his venality, his violence, his thefts, his assaults, his abusive behavior, his frequent executions of untried prisoners, and his endless savage ferocity.” Unable to resolve their differences with Pilate, the Jews wrote a letter to Tiberius. The Emperor responded by rebuking the governor and ordering him to move the shields to Caesarea.

Although she regards the incident with the votive shields as historical, Bond finds little value in Philo’s description of Pilate. Philo probably composed “The Embassy to Gaius” early in the reign of Gaius’ successor, Claudius, with the aim of persuading the new emperor to follow the pro-Jewish policies of Gaius’ predecessor, Tiberius. Philo’s rhetorical strategy, Bond observes, was to praise Emperor Tiberius for his enlightened attitude toward the Jews by contrasting him to the depravity of the local official responsible for the incident. To denigrate Pilate, Philo trotted out a series of stereotypical adjectives and misdeeds, every one of which he had used elsewhere in his historical writings. “Philo’s description of Pilate is not a personalized attack but a patchwork of set words and expressions regularly used by this writer to describe the enemies of the Jews.” [2]

Flavius Josephus also wrote confrontations between Pilate and his subjects over the emperor’s effigy, the aqueduct funds and the massacre of the Samaritans. He addresses these incidents quite differently in separate works, “The Jewish War” and “The Antiquities of the Jews.” Josephus says little about Pilate’s motives in War, preferring to focus on the reaction of the Jews. In Bond’s analysis, his objective in this earlier work, written shortly after the revolt against Rome and the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., was to demonstrate that resisting the Romans with force was futile while respectful appeals to authority could succeed.

When writing Antiquities years later, Josephus had quite a different goal, Bond says: He wanted to show that anyone who transgressed Jewish law — God’s law — eventually suffered God’s retribution. Consequently, he attributed to Pilate the motive of “subverting Jewish practices” when he dispatched a cohort of soldiers to Jerusalem bearing the image of the emperor upon their legion’s standards. Thus Josephus reinforces the impression created by Philo that Pilate acted in a deliberate and provocative manner.

But Bond sees the incident as a rookie mistake. Having just arrived in the province, Pilate did not appreciate the Jewish abhorrence of graven images. Every Roman squadron in the Empire carried its own sacred standards, which helped define and maintain the unit’s identity. Out of practical military considerations, she suggests, Pilate probably ordered a changing of the guard in Jerusalem. He dispatched a cohort from Caesarea to Jerusalem without a thought that its standards, bearing the image of the emperor, would cause offense. Unaware that he was about to precipitate a crisis, he remained in Caesarea.

The rest of the story is well known to readers of Josephus, and Bond accepts it largely as written. A throng of Jews promptly descended upon Caesarea in protest. Pilate refused to yield. After six days of demonstrations, he surrounded the crowd with soldiers and threatened them with death, but the Jews threw themselves prostrate to the ground and said they would accept death rather than see their laws violated. Upon this display of devotion, Pilate relented. It is worth noting that, although Pilate meant to intimidate the Jews with the prospect of violence, he spilled no blood that day. “Pilate puts law and order in the province above personal pride,” writes Bond. “He shows enough flexibility to rescind his orders and replace the troops.”[3]

A third confrontation arose from a dispute over the use of Temple funds to finance construction of an aqueduct to Jerusalem. Josephus is vague about how the disagreement originated; there seems not to have been a specific incident that triggered the tumult. As Bond reconstructs events, the Jews had precedents for dipping into the Temple treasury to meet the needs of the surrounding city, so the priests acquiesced in providing Pilate the funds to augment Jerusalem’s water supply. However, the construction project encountered cost overruns, Bond suggests, and Pilate continued to make demands from the Temple treasurers for payment. The priests objected and the dispute escalated. According to Josephus, “tens of thousands” of Jews assembled in Jerusalem to protest his designs. Pilate ordered his soldiers to dress in Jewish garments and conceal staffs under their robes. Upon his signal, they set upon the crowd to disperse it. The crowd-control strategem went awry, however: The soldiers “inflicted much harder blows than Pilate had ordered, punishing both those who were rioting and those who were not,” Josephus says.

Bond grants that Pilate might have fueled the controversy by dealing with the Temple authorities in an “overbearing, demanding manner.”[4] But he can hardly be faulted for having attempted to address the municipal needs of Jerusalem, and there is no suggestion that he precipitated the crisis deliberately. Although deaths ensued from excessive force applied by the soldiers, Pilate clearly had hoped to minimize bloodshed by equipping his soldiers with staves rather than swords.

In the fourth confrontation, a would-be messiah assembled a crowd at Mount Gerizim, the holy mountain of the Samaritans, saying he would show them the sacred vessels that Moses had buried there. Many in the crowd were armed, creating legitimate concerns among the Romans that the messianic excitement might turn into an insurrection.  Pilate dispatched a detachment of cavalry and infantry to block the mob’s path up the mountain. A pitched battle ensued. Putting the multitude to flight, the Romans took many prisoners and executed the ringleaders.

Bond regards Pilate’s acts as fully justified, at least from the Roman point of view. The governor would have been remiss in his duties had he allowed the Samaritans’ messianic fervor to escalate into a full-scale revolt. Rather than crushing the crowd and arresting its leaders, Pilate chose simply to block their path up the mountain. Although Josephus does not say so explicitly, it was the Samaritans who apparently resorted to arms. In dispersing the mob and executing its leaders, Bond notes, “He was well within his rights as provincial governor to judge and execute anyone threatening the stability of the province.”[5]

Bond concludes her analysis of Josephus as follows: “The historical reconstructions of the events behind Josephus’ stories … show a governor intent on inaugurating his government with a firm hand, reluctant to take any nonsense from the people he is to govern. Yet at the same time he can show flexibility and an ability to stand down in the interests of preserving peace. … Faced with potentially difficult political events … Pilate appears to fulfill his duty of effectively maintaining Roman order in the province without recourse to undue aggression.”[6]

*                  *                  *

Each of the four Gospels treat Jesus’ hearing before Pontius Pilate in its own way, but all follow the template established by Mark: The Temple priests brought Jesus to Pilate and accused him of various charges; Pilate questioned Jesus but found no grounds to execute him; the governor offered to release Jesus in his annual act of clemency at the feast of the Passover, but the multitude chose Barabbas instead; Pilate then handed Jesus over to be scourged then crucified.

“The majority of scholars regard the Pilate of Mark’s gospel as a weakling, convinced of Jesus’ innocence, vainly engaging in successive attempts to release him but forced to go along with the wishes of the chief priests and the crowd,” writes Bond in summarizing the Provocative Pilate school of thought. Contrasting Mark’s weak Pilate to the domineering and brutal Pilate described by Philo and Josephus, these scholars either find the Gospel portrayal totally out of character, hence unhistorical, or seek some explanation for Pilate’s weakness, such as the execution of his patron, Sejanus, back in Rome.

Without trying to defend the historicity of Mark, Bond takes issue with such thinking: She sees no sign of weakness at all. Rather, she believes that Mark intended to portray Pilate as shrewd and calculating. “Far from being a tool in the hands of the chief priests and crowd in these verses, Pilate is very much in control,”[7] she writes.

Mark’s Pilate perceives that the priests were handing over Jesus out of “envy” of his popularity. Yet he also regards Jesus as a potential threat to law and order. His dilemma, as Bond describes it, is to avoid a heavy-handed approach that could provoke rioting later. His solution is to swap roles by offering to release Jesus as his annual act of clemency and letting the people judge his fate. Rather than ordering Jesus crucified himself, Pilate skillfully converts the hearing into a popularity contest between Jesus and Barabbas. But in making the offer, he stacks the deck against Jesus by referring to him as the “King of the Jews.” In effect, he challenges the crowd to accept or deny Jesus as their king. Says Bond: “The people are cornered; they know what penalty Rome inflicts on political agitators and they accordingly cry out for the crucifixion of Jesus.”[8]

Bond concludes: “The Roman governor is now in a strong position: as a messianic claimant, Jesus had to be eliminated. The people could hardly riot over someone whose death they had demanded. … Pilate is satisfying the demands of the crowd, but these are demands which he has engineered and which suit his own purposes.”[9]

Matthew’s narrative of the trial differs from Mark’s mainly in its emphasis on assigning responsibility. Each actor – most visibly Pilate in the famous scene in which he washes his hands – attempts to evade guilt for the decision to crucify Jesus. Luke, Bond notes, emphasizes Jewish culpability. Of the four Gospels, Luke portrays Pilate as the weakest: He comes across more as Jesus’ advocate — an ineffectual one, admittedly — than his judge. Pilate’s decision after proclaiming Jesus innocent to let Herod Antipas judge him seems particularly spineless.

The Gospel of John offers the longest, most detailed account of the trial before Pilate, offering details lacking in the others. John mentions the location of the trial — inside the praetorium — the reluctance of the priests for purity reasons to enter the judgment hall, and the necessity of Pilate to shuttle between Jesus inside and the priests outside. Commentators have tended to see weakness in Pilate’s running back and forth in a vain attempt to release Jesus. But Bond interprets John’s Pilate as a strong character goading the Jews into rejecting their nationalist aspirations. In the climactic scene, he asks, “Shall I crucify your King?” And the chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.”[10]

Pilate serves John’s apologetic purpose by declaring Jesus’ innocence three times, but John leaves no doubt that he is arrayed with the forces hostile to Jesus. The machiavellian magistrate does not aim to free Jesus but uses him as a pawn in his dealings with the priests. As Bond concludes, John’s Pilate exacts a high price for agreeing to Jesus’ crucifixion: “[The Jews] must not only renounce their messianic hopes but unconditionally accept the sovereignty of Caesar.”[11]

Concluding her survey of the Gospels, Bond finds agreement over basic facts: that Jesus was arrested, that Jesus had some kind of hearing before the priests, that the priests took Jesus before Pilate, and that Pilate ordered Jesus’ crucifixion. She accepts these events as historical. The authenticity of the Barabbas episode is impossible to determine, as are the specific exchanges between Pilate, Jesus and the priests. “The above reconstruction, though only in its barest outline,” writes Bond, “gives the impression of a competent governor working alongside the Jewish hierarchy in executing a suspected political agitator.”[12]

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When working on Pontius Pilate, Bond wasn’t writing with the Historical Jesus debate in mind. “It was a stand-alone thing,” she says. But as she delved more into the HJ literature, she saw the scope for a similar work on Joseph Caiaphas. The high priest is even more of a cipher than Pilate – the ancient sources say very little about him—but she hopes to supplement the sparse literary references with archaeological evidence. Caiaphas’ tomb was discovered in 1991, and some believe that that his house in Jerusalem – the “palace of the high priest” in the gospels — has been uncovered.

Bond remains fascinated by the trial of Jesus, especially the role of the Jews. People ask who was responsible for killing Jesus – Pilate or “the Jews,” as if the Jews were a monolithic force. “Why,” she wonders, “don’t we ask if it was Pilate or Caiaphas?” As she analyzed the gospels, it struck her that the Gospel of Mark never mentions Caiaphas by name: Mark blames the entire Jewish leadership. Many scholars have argued that Mark was trying to absolve the Romans of blame for crucifying Jesus as a way of distancing his Rome-based community from the Jews, whose homeland was in revolt between 66 and 70 C.E. But Bond suspects that Mark was writing for an internal audience, not Roman officialdom, and may have been reacting to disputes between early Christians and the Jews in the synagogue.

Her approach to writing about Caiaphas will follow that of Pontius Pilate: She will analyze how each Gospel characterizes the high priest in light of its apologetic and theological motifs. Also, she will situate Caiaphas in his historical context, as the head of an immensely rich and powerful priesthood functioning in a complex relationship with Roman authority.

Contemporary scholars have treated Caiaphas almost as shabbily as Pilate, often describing him as a Roman toady clinging to power by cooperating in the suppression of his people. Bond’s view will be more sympathetic. “I tend to see people in the best possible terms,” she says. “Just because he’s an aristocrat and living in a swanky mansion in the upper city doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the best interests of the people at heart.”

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[1] Haggis, for the uninitiated, is made from the lungs, heart and internal organs of a sheep or calf, mixed with suet, oatmeal, and boiled in the animal’s stomach. You can now order haggis online and have it delivered directly to your door! Visit http://www.scottish-haggis.com/.

[2] Bond, Helen K.; Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation; Cambridge University Press; 1998; p. 32.

[3] Pontius Pilate; p. 85

[4] Pontius Pilate; p. 89

[5] Pontius Pilate; p. 91

[6] Pontius Pilate; p. 91

[7] Pontius Pilate; p. 111

[8] Pontius Pilate; p. 115.

[9] Pontius Pilate; p. 116. Bond’s reinterpretation is not without its problems. While Pilate’s political considerations seem plausible when she lays them out as she does, they would have been less evident to readers of Mark’s Gospel.  She supplies political context that readers may not necessarily have assumed 30 to 40 years after the event. Furthermore, she overlooks a crucial phrase in which Mark addresses Pilate’s motivation explicitly: “And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas to them.” This implies that Pilate was appeasing the crowd, not manipulating it.

[10] John 19:15.

[11] Pontius Pilate; p. 193. One difficulty with Bond’s interpretation is that she does not address the priests’ charge, “If thou let this man go, thou are not Caesar’s friend: Whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar” (John 19: 12). In light of the incident involving the votive shields, which occurred only a year or two previously, the priests appear to be making a veiled threat to complain to Tiberius if Pilate ruled against them. Having earned one rebuke from the emperor, one could argue, Pilate could ill afford another, especially now that his patron Sejanus was dead and his associates were being executed.

Bond quite rightly rejects Stauffer’s theory that Sejanus and Pilate were motivated by anti-Semitism. But in scorning that theory, she dispenses with Sejanus as a factor in Palestinian politics altogether. That may not be justified. Pilate assumed the governorship of Judea in 26 C.E., replacing a governor who had served without incident for 10 years. That same year, Tiberius retired to Capri and Sejanus assumed the powers of emperor in all but name. The conclusion seems unavoidable that Sejanus appointed Pilate to the post. If we accept this proposition, we can deduce that Pilate, after the execution of Sejanus and purge of his associates in 31 C.E., was dealing with the priests from a position of tremendous vulnerability.

The historical Jesus according to the dean of Catholic scholars

by James A. Bacon

In 1988 John P. Meier sat down with a representative of the Doubleday publishing company to discuss writing a book about the historical Jesus. As the conversation unfolded, both assumed the project would be a single volume. “Little did we imagine it would be a tetralogy,” Meier recently told an audience at Virginia Commonwealth University, whimsically comparing the resulting product to Wagner’s four operas, the Ring of the Nibelungen.

Fourteen years later, Meier can visualize the end of his epic project. Having published last year Part 3 of “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus,” he has commenced writing the fourth and final volume. But don’t expect to see it any time soon. Meier, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, has left the most intractable problems of historical-Jesus scholarship for last.

Much like Wagnerian opera, the Marginal Jew series may seem endless and formidably dense to the uninitiated. But also like the Nibelungenlied, Meier’s tetrology is the work of a powerful intellect that will withstand the test of time. Some of Meiers’ peers are proclaiming the Marginal Jew series the most thorough and comprehensive work of scholarship on the historical Jesus in this generation. Critics may quarrel with Meier’s reasons for characterizing Jesus as an eschatological prophet, but no one disputes the extraordinary erudition of his scholarship.

It is axiomatic among contemporary New Testament scholars that Jesus was a Jew, noted Meier in his April address to the VCU history department. That represents an advance over the so-called “first” and “second” quests for the historical Jesus in the 19^th- and mid-20^th-centuries. Early scholarship, dominated by German Protestants with strong theological biases, emphasized Jesus’ distinctiveness from a supposedly legalistic and decaying religion. The great contribution of the current, “third” quest for the historical Jesus – as exemplified by the work of Geza Vermes and E.P. Sanders – has been to root him in the mainstream of 1^st-century Judaism.

The Jewishness of Jesus is now an academic cliché. But strangely enough, Meier noted, a number of modern scholars – especially those associated with the highly publicized Jesus Seminar — have tendered interpretations that submerge Jesus’ Jewish identity. In recent years, Jesus has been portrayed as a religious iconoclast, a social revolutionary, a generic Mediterranean peasant, even an itinerant philosopher in the mold of the Greek cynics.

“To be sure, words like ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ adorn the works, and politically correct noises are made about his Jewishness,” said Meier, “but one searches in vain for treatment of the ways that Jesus interacted with and reacted to other Jewish groups.”

The influence of the Jesus Seminar was pervasive in the popular media when Meier began writing in the late 1980s. By entitling his work, “A Marginal Jew,” Meier cast himself in opposition to the Seminar, planting Jesus firmly back in Judaism’s mainstream. By employing the adjective “marginal,” he did not mean to imply that Jesus was only marginally Jewish, but to pose a question, inspired by the style of Jesus’ own riddle-speak and parables, that would focus on Jesus’ relationship to Judaism.

Jesus certainly was not marginal in same literal way as those who dwelled in the desert monastery of Qumran, Meier noted: The Qumranites deliberately isolated themselves from what they regarded as the corruption of the Temple cult in Jerusalem. Rather, Jesus was marginal in the sense that he moved in circles outside the centers of power and influence. As a Galilean, he lived on the periphery of the land of Israel. Indeed, he may have marginalized himself politically by criticizing the Temple priesthood and prophesying the Temple’s demise.

The first three volumes of A Marginal Jew endeavor to frame a coherent answer to the question posed by the title. In Vol. 1, Meier took readers through a survey of the sources and an explication of his methodology for determining if a Gospel verse reflects an early source, perhaps capturing an authentic saying or deed of Jesus. Vol. 2 aimed the spotlight on Jesus himself, focusing on key sayings and deeds, with special attention to Jesus’ miracles and his relationship to John the Baptist. Most notably, Meier concluded that Jesus presented himself to Israel as a prophet of the end of time, patterning himself after the miracle-working Old Testament prophet Elijah.

In the third volume, Meier said, he deemed it time to “widen the circle of light” around Jesus. No person is adequately understood in isolation from others. A charismatic individual such as Jesus is defined largely by his relationships with his followers and his opponents. In Meier’s estimation, contemporary scholars have often neglected this perspective. “The full range of Jesus’ relationship with Jewish groups has not been a thrust of modern academic research lionized by the media.”

Meier categorizes Jesus’ followers in three circles defined by degree of intimacy with the prophet. The outer circle consisted of the crowds who flocked around him. The middle circle was comprised of the disciples called to follow him. An inner circle of the Twelve symbolized his mission to the 12 tribes of Israel. Like any academic model, Meier conceded, his scheme does not capture all the nuances. Relationships were fluid; people moved in and out of different circles. Furthermore, certain people do not fit into the construct: Think of stay-at-home disciples such as Martha and Mary. Or think of Mary Magdalene, an ever-present companion who did not belong to the Twelve.

Jesus was defined as well by those he opposed, Meier noted. Several Jewish groups competed for power in 1^st-century Palestine; religious influence was a hotly contested commodity. The fact that Jesus persuaded a number of people to follow him put him in competition with others, even if he did not engage them directly. The most prominent of these groups were the Pharisees who, like Jesus, were active among the common people. The difficulty in dissecting Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees lies as much with the Pharisees as with Jesus.

“The dirty little secret of New Testament exegesis,” said Meier, “is that nobody is sure who the Pharisees were. … In the end, the quest for the historical Pharisee is even more difficult than the quest for the historical Jesus.”

Data on the Sadducees is even scarcer: The party of the Jewish aristocracy left no self-descriptive literature.  As Meier observed: “They were described only by their opponents. We all know the Sadducees were the bad guys… because their opponents tell us so.”

The vast majority of Jews in Palestine shared basic common beliefs, according to Meier. They worshiped one God, believed that God had a covenant with the children of Israel, and accepted the Temple in Jerusalem as God’s sanctuary on earth. Most Jews were happy to practice the basics of their religion: the Sabbath, circumcision, the food laws and the pilgrimage to the Temple. Whatever their feelings about Annas or Caiaphas or other high priests in power, they followed the Temple calendar and liturgy and looked to the priests as the divinely constituted leaders of their generation. Within the parameters of this mainstream, there were many expressions of Judaism – of which Jesus’ movement was one. Jesus emerged from the mainstream tradition, Meier said, and he addressed other Jews within it.

With the first three volumes, Meier said, he has laid the groundwork for the final book, which explores what he considers to be the four greatest enigmas posed by the study of Jesus. These include:

• Jesus and Jewish law. Scholarly treatment swings between two extremes. Either Jesus opposed or abolished the Mosaic law, or his attitude toward the law was largely uncontroversial. Jesus was a devout Jew, Meier said, but his attitude towards the law – as made clear, among other things, by his prohibition of divorce and oath taking – was hardly uncontroversial.
• Jesus’ parables. Many scholars have used the parables as the starting point for understanding the historical Jesus. But many have accepted the parables uncritically, Meier said. Favorites such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son get “free passes.” He intends to approach the parables with the same strict criteria of authenticity he has applied to other Gospel material.
• Jesus’ self designation. Scholars have been consumed by what kind of titles – Son of God, Son of man, messiah etc. – that Jesus might have applied to himself. Meier is not so sure that Jesus had a clear meaning in mind: He suspects, for example, that he might have used the term “Son of man” as enigmatic, riddle-speak to tease the mind of the audience into active thought.
• The crucifixion. Why did this Elijah-like prophet from Galilee wind up crucified in Jerusalem on grounds of claiming to be king of the Jews? Any reconstruction of the historical Jesus must be judged adequate or inadequate based on its ability to explain how Jesus came afoul of the Temple priests and Roman authorities.

*****

Meier still has plenty of questions, but he has reached some firm conclusions as he nears the end of his task. First, contrary to a number of theories that would identify him with any of the well-known groups active in 1^st-century Palestine, Jesus was not a Pharisee, Sadducee, Essene or a Zealot.

Jesus did bear significant similarities to the Pharisees, Meier said. He, like they, enjoyed a base of support among the common people. Both shared a desire to call all of Israel to the doing of God’s will, and both believed that God would guide his people to the end of times. Some scholars perceive a likeness between Jesus and the “liberal,” or tolerant, strain of Hillel: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Others suggest that his uncompromising attitudes toward divorce bear greater resemblance to the stricter Pharisaic school of Shammai.

Unlike the Pharisees who saw God as the principal agent of the end of time, however, Jesus made himself a key figure in the eschatological drama. Also, unlike the Pharisees, Jesus performed remarkable deeds. No individual Pharisee was identified in his own lifetime as a miracle worker. Furthermore, Pharisees were punctilious in their observance of tithing, purity laws and temple ritual. Jesus, by contrast, forbade his disciples from fasting. He was a friend of toll collectors and sinners. “Jesus loved a good party,” Meier observed. Conversely, Jesus also appears to have been celibate – which the Pharisees certainly were not.

Jesus had even less in common with the Sadducees, a small group concentrated in Jerusalem and consisting mainly of Temple priests. Jesus and the Sadducees perhaps would have found common ground in rejecting the body of oral tradition – the so-called tradition of the elders – esteemed by the Pharisees. But there is little evidence that they interacted. In the only encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees recorded in the Gospels – the incident in which the Sadducees disputed Jesus’ teaching on the resurrection — the confrontation was marked by vigorous disagreement, even hostility.

How about the Essenes, or the Qumranites, who are widely held to be Essenes? Jesus and the dwellers in the Qumran monastery did share an eschatological mindset, Meier noted: They awaited the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth. Jesus, like the Qumranites, practiced a fiercely radical moral ethic in anticipation of God’s imminent intervention. Jesus advocated restrictions on divorce and, like some of the Essenes, apparently practiced celibacy. But while the Qumranites had withdrawn from the Temple, Jesus regularly attended Temple festivals. For all of his criticism of the Temple priesthood, he followed their lunar calendar for dating the festivals. He even participated in the feast of Channukah, a relatively recent innovation of the Jerusalem priesthood. Likewise, while the denizens of Qumran practiced an intensive – some might say obsessive – concern with ritual purity and the Mosaic law that exceeded even that of the Pharisees, Jesus advocated a more relaxed view: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Far from focusing on the minutiae of purity rules, Jesus dined with the toll collectors and outcasts. Finally, noted Meier, Jesus did not display the scribal proclivity of the Qumran monks to pore over the sacred texts. Jesus typically spoke on his own authority in a charismatic manner, rarely citing scriptural justification. The Gospels never once mention the Essenes or the Qumran community, Meier said. In all probability, Jesus never spoke of them. “Jesus and Qumran did not occupy the same spiritual universe.”

Meier reserved special scorn for the depiction of Jesus as a revolutionary Zealot, an image that periodically surfaces in Hollywood and historical fiction. Serious scholars long ago abandoned the notion, bandied about in the 1960s, that Jesus advocated the violent overthrow of the Romans. When Flavius Josephus, whose writings comprise the main source for 1^st-century Palestine, used the term “zealots,” he referred to a group of armed revolutionaries who fought the Romans in the great uprising of 66 C.E. – 40 years after Jesus was crucified.

There is no hard evidence that any organized armed rebellion against Rome took place during Jesus’ ministry. There were protests and bandits, but the homeland of the Jews, administered by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem and the Jewish potentate Herod Antipas in Galilee, was relatively pacific, Meier observed. “You can count on one hand the number of significant protests and demonstrations of passive resistance. There was not a single instance of armed rebellion.” By the standards of the ancient world, Pontius Pilate, working in collaboration with the high priest Caiaphas in Jerusalem, did a good job of keeping a lid on things – in contrast to later governors, who did much worse. “In the ancient Near East, you had two choices: a cruel and efficient ruler or a cruel and inefficient ruler. Pilate, Caiaphas and Herod should have been canonized.”

If Jesus wasn’t a Pharisee, Sadducee, Essene or Zealot, what kind of Jew was he? It is a difficult question to answer, Meier said: He combined so many contradictory roles: He was a prophet, a son of David, a spinner of parables, an exorcist and a miracle worker. No one of these attributes was unique. There were other prophets, other teachers, other exorcists, other wonder workers. But no other figure, Meier said, combined all these talents.

Despite the uncertainties in New Testament exegesis, the outlines of Jesus’ ministry seem clear enough. He emerged from an obscure and ordinary life as a woodworker in Nazareth, a hill town in Galilee, then joined John the Baptist. Jesus broke away to start his own movement, poaching some of John’s disciples, practicing his form of ritual immersion and preaching his eschatological message. But Jesus emphasized the good news, that God was coming to save all of Israel. Performing exorcisms and practicing faith healing, he patterned himself after another prophet from Northern Israel, the miracle-working Elijah, whom the Jews associated with the coming kingdom of God. Jesus appointed an inner circle of 12 disciples symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel, reinforcing the idea that salvation would come to all Jews.

Despite the lack of formal training, Jesus taught his own interpretation of the Mosaic law. He elevated the humanitarian aspects of Judaism to the fore, preaching a radical ethic of love, mercy and forgiveness. It is nonsense, as some Christians have done, to suggest that Jesus wanted to abrogate or nullify the Torah. The Jewish law was a given – “the sacred canopy” of his teaching, Meier said. Jesus’ radical insistence upon doing God’s will completely and without compromise may have conflicted with other interpretations, particularly the practice of divorce, but his logic and symbolism were thoroughly Jewish.

Somewhere along the line, Jesus angered the Temple aristocracy. Around the year 30 C.E., Meier said, Jesus went to Jerusalem in a “make it or break” confrontation with the people in power. A belief had spread among his followers that he was descended from King David. After the attack on the moneychangers in the Temple, Caiaphas and the other high priests might have seen Jesus as a Davidic claimant and a threat to public order. Launching a pre-emptive strike, they arrested Jesus before things got out of control. Pontius Pilate crucified him on the charge of claiming to be King of the Jews.

What sort of Jew was Jesus? He defied simple categories. He fit no formulas. But the total pattern, “the gestalt,” was unique, Meier said. Such a conclusion is not entirely satisfying, he conceded. “I can well imagine Regis Philbin asking, ‘Is that your final answer?’ … That sort of answer will have to do for now.”

*****

Meier’s study of the historical Jesus has consumed more than 14 years. As a benchmark of his thinking, Meier said, he occasionally refers to an article he wrote about the historical Jesus for the New Jerome Biblical Commentary in the mid 1980s. The outlines of his interpretation have remained consistent, but he has refined his outlook in a number of areas.

As a result of his inquiries, Meier says, he has elevated the importance he attaches to John the Baptist as the mentor of Jesus. Also, his examination of Jesus’ miracles led him to the view that Jesus modeled himself as an Elijah-like prophet of the end time. There were only three miracle workers in the Old Testament – Moses, Elijah and Elisha. Elijah was an itinerant prophet from Northern Israel; so was Jesus. Elijah called a disciple, Elisha, to follow him; Jesus summoned disciples to follow him. Elijah was expected to return at the end time; Jesus saw himself as an end-of-time prophet. “That’s not where my quest was supposed to go,” Meier said, but the evidence was compelling. “My arms were twisted to come to that conclusion.”

Meier also revised his thinking about the parables. There is no question that Jesus taught in parables, but there is reason to suspect that many of his best-loved stories were either invented or altered by the early church. As he writes his fourth volume of Marginal Jew, he said, he will rethink the parables from the start.

Meier is modest about his own contribution to the study of the historical Jesus. He commenced his work around the same time as the Jesus Seminar. And, though he certainly hadn’t intended such when he began, “in one sense, my work has been a detailed argument against every single thing the Jesus Seminar ever said.” On a more positive note, he has taken the Jewishness of Jesus with utter seriousness. Previous quests for the historical Jesus denied his Jewishness or made Judaism a negative foil against which the positive Jesus could be defined. One of the delights of working at Notre Dame has been the ability to collaborate with “an incredibly international, ecumenical group” of Catholics and Protestants — and Jews. If he can advance the appreciate of Jesus as a Jew, Meier said, it’s all the contribution he could hope for.

As Meier winds up his study of the historical Jesus, he is looking forward to future projects. His next project will focus on the Gospel of Matthew. After that, he may return to the historical Jesus. He has kept his historical study “militantly untheological,” he said, but he looks forward to engaging in theology. “I’ll begin dialoguing with my theological colleagues and ask if they see [the historical Jesus] as useful for contemporary Christology.”

– May 1, 2002

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 1^st 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, 21^st-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.”

Paula Fredriksen reappraises the story of Jesus and the moneychangers in her reconstruction of his last days in Jerusalem.

by James A. Bacon

For much of her career as a historian of early Christianity, Paula Fredriksen accepted the story about Jesus’ chastisement of the moneychangers in the Temple as an historic event. By overturning the tables in the outer court, she believed, Jesus symbolically enacted the destruction of Herod’s Temple and its imminent replacement by God’s Temple at the End of Time. As she saw it, the action alarmed the Temple priests and triggered the events leading to his arrest and crucifixion.

Not everyone has interpreted the incident the same way. Based on the accusation in the Gospel texts that the merchants had turned God’s house into a “den of thieves,” the church traditionally has referred to the incident as the “cleansing” of the Temple, as if Jesus intended to purge it of corrupt commerce. Modern scholars have put their own spins on what Jesus meant to accomplish in the one act of violence ascribed to him, but few have questioned the authenticity of the underlying story.

After completing her book From Jesus to Christ, in which she committed her belief in the “symbolic enactment” interpretation to print, Fredriksen spent a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She worked on archaeological digs in Galilee and visited excavations on the Temple Mount. The experience of living in the land of Jesus gave her insights that had eluded her back home in the United States. It was humbling, but she realized that she’d gotten the moneychangers story all wrong and, as a consequence, much else.

Walking around Temple Mount drove home just how vast Herod’s Temple had been — nearly a mile in perimeter. In her mind’s eye, she recreated how the structure would have appeared during the Passover festival 2,000 years ago. The moneychangers, she thinks, would have conducted their business not in the middle of the plaza, as depicted in Western art, but underneath the colonnades, shaded from the sun and protected from the rain. Had Jesus raised a ruckus with the vendors — cloistered by a wall on one side, columns on another — only a handful of people nearby on the fringe of the crowd would have seen him. “When you look at the vast space, it shrinks the action,” Fredriksen tells The Jesus Archive. “It began to erode my confidence in the earlier, imagined explanation of the story.”

In his modern classic Jesus and Judaism, E.P. Sanders argued that any reconstruction of Jesus’ life had to stand upon one historical certainty, the one fact attested to by Roman and Jewish sources outside the Christian tradition: Pontius Pilate ordered the crucifixion of Jesus. Furthermore, he noted, Pilate did not round up and execute Jesus’ followers. Building upon these two pillars of evidence, Sanders portrayed Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet who enacted Zechariah’s prophecy by entering Jerusalem seated upon a donkey then enacted the overthrow of the earthly order by chasing the moneychangers from the Temple. At the instigation of the priests, Pilate executed him for sedition as a would-be king. But the prefect spared his disciples because they had not participated in any public disorder themselves.

Fredriksen freely admits her intellectual debt to Sanders. In From Jesus to Christ, she reconstructed the images of Jesus found in Paul and the Gospels then, adjusting for the apologetic motifs of the authors, she pieced together her own version of the historical Jesus. Drawing heavily from Sanders, she treated the “temple tantrum” — as she irreverently refers to the story — as a symbolic enactment.

After surveying the Temple Mount, however, she began rethinking the incident, and the story began to unravel. By disrupting support services in the Temple, Sanders and others have argued, Jesus pushed the chief priests to seek his crucifixion. But this line of thought requires a preference for the Gospel of Mark’s version of the event over the Gospel of John’s. By placing the incident at the climactic end of Jesus’ life, the Gospel of Mark connected this action to his subsequent arrest and crucifixion. But Fredriksen noted that John, who described the incident as part of an earlier visit to Jerusalem, made no such connection. The more she pondered the story, the more she doubted its historicity.

The new perspective opened up exhilarating new avenues of inquiry. A student of Saint Augustine by training, Fredriksen had never intended to delve so deeply into historical-Jesus studies. But she couldn’t help herself: The material was too fascinating to let go. Taking her research in a significant new direction, she spent the next five years on her own quest for the historic Jesus. The result, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, was published in late 1999.

Fredriksen fans will find much of the book familiar. She builds on her own previous work on Jewish purity laws, and she follows Sanders and others in portraying Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. But some of the book’s conclusions are new and bound to be controversial. Among the most notable: The Temple Tantrum story in Mark and John is probably based upon an early, free-floating Christian tradition. The original context is impossible to reconstruct, therefore all but impossible to evaluate. Finding the story unusable, she jettisons it. 

Fredriksen also addresses Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Sanders had struggled with the story because he realized that any public proclamation of Jesus as messiah, or king, would have prompted an immediate response by the Roman cohort stationed in the city. His solution was to propose that Jesus entered the city on a donkey as a symbolic act but soft-peddled the event: “There was no large public hue and cry about it,” he wrote.[1]

Fredriksen’s interpretation of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem sticks closer to the Gospel storyline: Jesus had proclaimed throughout his mission that the Kingdom of God was about to appear, but this year he predicted its arrival this Passover, right here in Jerusalem. In all likelihood, his entry into Jerusalem did generate tremendous excitement. Pilate did not arrest Jesus at this time, she contends, because he knew from Jesus’ previous appearances in Jerusalem that the Galilean holy man was not a threat to the public order. But Jesus lost control of his audience. Agitated by the immediacy of his prophecy, the pilgrim crowds mobbed him in the days that followed and proclaimed him the messiah — a designation he had never taken openly for himself. Only then did Pilate perceive Jesus as a problem.

This reconstruction sets up her elegant solution to the quandary: Why Jesus was crucified but not his followers?  Pilate ordered Jesus’ crucifixion not to punish Jesus, Fredriksen suggests, but to make a forceful point to the multitude: There was only one king in Judea, and that was Caesar. Knowing that Jesus had not headed a seditious movement, however, the governor saw no need to execute his followers as well. 

*        *          *

It never occurred to Fredriksen, growing up as a Roman Catholic in suburban Rhode Island, that one day she’d be preoccupied with such issues. As a youth, she never gave much thought to the historical Jesus. But a new world opened up to her when she attended college at Wellesley in 1969.

The elite women’s college had a strong religion department faculty, and she took a course upon the recommendation of older students. She read the Bible seriously for the first time. “The Bible was pretty much a Protestant book — every Catholic kid knows that,” she quips. But she found it fascinating. “You can’t go wrong reading Genesis as a homework assignment.” She took nearly every religion course the college offered. Double majoring in history, she also learned to approach religious studies with a historian’s mindset.

Her next step was a theology program at Oxford. The switch from an American academic culture to a British one was quite a shock. In the early 1970s, Oxford maintained segregated colleges for women. Fredriksen had just come from a women’s school, but she was surprised to find the women’s colleges at Oxford to be so “disenfranchised.” Her studies there also coincided with the Yom Kippur war, and she was appalled by the strong anti-Israeli sentiment. Americans feel a strong affinity for Israel; the English, influenced by their colonial ties, have more sympathy for the Arabs. In a similar vein, she recalls a professor, an Anglican cleric, leading the class in prayer before giving the lecture. “I wondered, what are the Jewish kids doing?” She looked around then realized there were no Jewish kids. “Why would a Jewish kid do theology?”

The most striking contrast was the English system of learning: “You don’t do research until you master the classic languages,” Fredriksen explains. It was rigorous, but it was rigid. And as a child of the ’60s, she found it stifling. “I chafed. I didn’t appreciate the opportunity it presented me.” So she settled for a one-year diploma in theology rather than a degree.

Heading back to the States in 1974, Fredriksen entered the Religion program at Princeton. There she worked under John Gager, who had recently written the path-breaking work Kingdom and Community, which placed Christian origins in the social context of the Roman world. The Princeton program was “energetically interdisciplinary,” drawing heavily upon anthropology and sociology. Fredriksen was in her element now, and she thrived. Under Gager’s tutelage, she studied ancient Christianity. But he was the only scholar in the religion department who specialized in pre-Reformation Christian history. To pursue her work on Saint Augustine, begun at Wellesely, she worked under Karlfried Froehlich in the theological seminary.

By the time she completed her degree in 1979, Fredriksen thought of herself as a student of “early Christianity.” Although Augustine lived more than 300 years after Jesus and the formative years of Christian doctrine, he was a pivotal figure in the evolution of Catholic Christian doctrine. Augustine lived in the tumultuous period of Christianity’s transition from a heterodox movement, consisting of diverse denominations, into an imperial Roman religion. Once the government decided to favor one denomination — the one Augustine joined, as it turned out — it persecuted all the others. As a result, the West owes its understanding of Jesus the Christ not only to Paul — but also to the version of Paul as understood by Augustine. “Western theology,” she says, ” is a footnote to Augustine’s Paul, the Paul that Augustine presents to Western Christianity.”

In her research for her first book, Augustine on Romans, Fredriksen examined one of the Western assumptions deeply embedded in Augustine and Paul, the notion of conversion. As most Christians are taught, Paul “converted” to Christianity on the road to Damascus. That’s Augustine speaking. A convert from a heretical sect, the Manichees, to Catholicism, Augustine saw Paul as likewise making a high-contrast conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Paul did embrace the Jesus movement that he had been persecuting, Fredriksen says, but he wasn’t converting to “Christianity.” At the time, only a few years after Jesus’ crucifixion, no such separate religion existed. Paul switched allegiance from one school of Judaism, the Pharisees, to a different branch of Judaism, one that proclaimed Jesus the messiah.

The subject was of more than academic interest to her. Immersed in the world of history and the Bible, she had made her own decision to convert from non-practicing Catholicism to Judaism. Her conversion was an intellectual process, a slow sea change. “I never had a Road-to-Damascus experience,” Fredriksen says. “It was more like making a beef stew. I was putting in a little of this, adding a little of that. It was a slow-cooking, organic process.” In 1971, she decided to formally embrace orthodox Judaism. 

*        *          *

It was serendipity that launched Fredriksen into a new line of scholarly inquiry, the quest for the historical Jesus. After Princeton, she pursued her post-doc studies at Stanford, then visited Paris. A friend, Guy Lobrichon, was working on the project of a French publishing house: “Jesus Since Jesus,”a series of books exploring different views of Jesus through history. Lobrichon was concerned that so many of the authors were theologians. Thinking that the series needed a historian’s perspective, he prevailed upon Fredriksen to write one. Thus was conceived De Jesus au Christs or, in its English title, From Jesus to Christ.

Writing the book was a stretch, but not an immense one. Fredriksen had immersed herself in the world of Paul already during her study of Augustine. This time, she examined the relationship between Paul and the four Gospels. In the perspective she adopted, the New Testament works had much in common: They were all Hellenistic Jewish documents. They reflected the worldview of Jews living in the Mediterranean diaspora, not that of the Jews in the land of Israel. Yet each author created a very distinct image of Jesus. Starting with John, she worked her way back through the Gospels then to Paul. Then she capped off her reverse-chronological trajectory with her own brief reconstruction of the historical Jesus.

That book took seven years to write. During that time, the 1980s, Fredriksen moved from Palo Alto to Paris to New York, then to Pittsburgh, and then to Boston, where she took a post in the Religion Department of Boston University. It was an exceptionally busy period of her life. Among other accomplishments, she gave birth to three daughters. Each one, she recalls with some amusement, was born in one city and toilet-trained in another. “It took less time to conceive, birth and nurture three babies than one book!”

When finally published in 1988, From Jesus to Christ was well received, and it propelled Fredriksen to international prominence as a New Testament scholar. She served as historical consultant for the BBC production The Lives of Jesus andU.S. News and World Report’s “The Life and Times of Jesus.” She was featured prominently in PBS Frontline’s documentary on Christian origins From Jesus to Christ. And she began appearing on panels with the most eminent scholars in the New Testament field.

Yet all the while, she was rethinking the historical Jesus. Looking afresh at Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, she questioned a fundamental precept of much New Testament scholarship: the preference for the synoptic tradition over the Gospel of John. “I’d never looked seriously at the Gospel of John for information about the historical Jesus,” Fredriksen says. “We [New Testament scholars] instinctively don’t do that because the speeches there are so theological, so clearly anachronistic.” By contrast, the Jesus of Mark, Luke and Matthew seems more historically plausible: They talk like a Jew.

Yet the synoptic chronology, based upon the Gospel of Mark, has tremendous problems. Perhaps the greatest is that Mark largely restricted Jesus to Galilee and neighboring districts. Unlike other Galilean Jews, Mark’s Jesus didn’t seem to visit Jerusalem until his final triumphal entry. By contrast, Fredriksen found the activities of John’s Jesus much more plausible: Jesus traveled frequently between Galilee and Jerusalem to attend the Jewish festivals at the Temple.

Accordingly, in Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Fredriksen penned a portrait of Jesus as a devout Jew who visited Jerusalem regularly. His last trip was significant, she speculated, in that he prophesied that God would consummate the Kingdom of Heaven that Passover. This prophecy contributed to a build-up of feverish anticipation among the pilgrims to the festival. A crowd may have greeted Jesus when he arrived at Jerusalem, but Fredriksen did not trust the Triumphal Entry traditions enough to conclude with any certainty what took place. She does not believe that Jesus  entered Jerusalem proclaiming himself the messiah by enacting Zechariah’s prophecy. The messianic title, she insisted, came from the Passover crowd.

Fredriksen excised the Temple Tantrum from her reconstruction of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem. No such event was needed to explain his arrest. The fact that the crowds of Jerusalem were proclaiming Jesus the messiah was reason enough. Following the implications of this insight, she gave the Temple priests a far less significant role in the drama than she had in From Jesus to Christ. In the earlier book, she had postulated that the priests had taken the initiative in arresting Jesus and turning him over to Pilate. But in Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, she recast the priests as auxiliaries to the drama who provided Pilate with necessary intelligence. Like many scholars, she was highly dubious that Caiaphas convened a meeting of the Sanhedrin at the peak of the Passover holiday to formally try Jesus. Her old Princeton advisor John Gager quotes her as saying, “Taking as historically accurate the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin is like imagining the U.S. Supreme Court meeting on Christmas Eve to debate a parking ticket!” 

In all likelihood, Fredriksen suggested, Caiaphas and Pilate would have sensed the growing agitation of the crowds in the Temple; they would have heard the excited talk of Jesus as a messiah and the momentous events about to unfold. The Roman governor would have reacted forcefully. With the assistance of the high priests perhaps, he arrested Jesus by stealth then crucified him with no formal hearing. The pilgrims yearning for divine liberation woke up Friday morning to the sight of their would-be messiah — under a sign proclaiming him King of the Jews — dying on a cross.  

*        *          *

With Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Fredriksen takes on all comers. Evangelical Christians will object to the book because she denies that Jesus regarded himself as the messiah, much less the “son of God” as understood in Christian doctrine. Liberal scholars, both secular and Christian, may find offense in her accusations of anachronism –inappropriately projecting their modern-day concerns about imperialism, social injustice and sexism back onto a 1^st century person to whom such concerns were totally alien.

“A lot of Jesus scholarship is just awful,” she says. “The best you can say about some of it is that it’s awful in interesting ways.” In particular, she shows no mercy to the Jesus Seminar, whose scholars rule out much of the Gospel material as late and distorted accretions to the historical record. They reconstruct their Jesus from the fragments that remain, she says, and they amplify it with social-anthropological theory. The Seminar’s Jesus emerges as a charismatic social critic rather than an apocalyptic prophet.

John Dominic Crossan, the most visible of the Jesus Seminar scholars, is affable and charming, Fredriksen says, and he offers a compelling moral vision. But for that very reason, his Jesus, who shows a marked 20th century political sensibility, “is not a credible 1^st century person.” Marcus Borg, another prominent Jesus Seminar scholar, misconstrues the important distinction between impurity and sin. “If you don’t understand second-temple Judaism,” she says, “you’ll have a hard time getting anywhere with historical Jesus work. Jesus, just like his Jewish contemporaries, worshiped God by slitting the throats of animals at the Temple.” Some people today might be uncomfortable revering such a person. “The problem with a genuinely historical Jesus for a lot of people is not just that such a Jesus seems ‘too Jewish.’ What’s worse is, he’s just too different from us. [But] you have to let Jesus be an ancient Jewish person, or you’re cheating.”

Fredriksen levels no such charges against E.P. Sanders, despite her differences with him. Indeed, she still regards him as one of the giants of New Testament scholarship. By emphasizing Jesus’ teachings, which are as hard to pin down as quicksilver, previous scholars had failed utterly to reach a consensus about whom Jesus was and what he aimed to accomplish. Sanders by contrast chose to build on the bedrock of a handful of historical certainties — Jesus’ baptism by John, his calling of the disciples, his preaching mainly to other Jews, his crucifixion by Pilate — then erect a superstructure of near certainties, probabilities and possibilities. His Jesus, too, was a devout Jew and an apocalyptic prophet who thought the End of Time was very near. In many ways, Fredriksen’s Jesus is Sanders’ Jesus. “Jesus and Judaism was a landmark in the field,” she says. The book had a tremendous influence on her thinking. “I have been privileged for being mistaken for one of Ed’s graduate students.”

But even the master is not infallible. Fredriksen cannot accept Sanders’ reconstruction of the Temple Tantrum, the Triumphal Entry and the motives the authorities had for crucifying Jesus. Sanders was kind enough, she says, to read her manuscript closely and make numerous comments. He’s never commented publicly on her arguments, however. “I know I haven’t convinced him.” (Sanders declined an interview with The Jesus Archive on the grounds that he would have to re-read Fredriksen’s book, which he did not have time at that moment to do.)

Fredriksen may not have converted Sanders, but there’s no question that she’s making a mark on Jesus studies. “She is a major figure,” says Gager. “Her books on Jesus are a major contribution.” Passionate in the expression of her beliefs, she makes as much of an impression in person as in print. When delivering a public lecture on early Christianity at Princeton last fall, Gager says, she was “a huge success.”

Nearly two thousand years after Jesus died on the cross, Christians and non-believers alike look to Jesus for moral authority. They seek a Jesus who speaks to their times. But Fredriksen says scholars must not succumb to such temptations if they want to write history. Her Jesus is not the product of wishful thinking. “So many others are anxious to make Jesus relevant,” notes Krister Stendahl, a retired Harvard Divinity School professor and former Lutheran bishop of Stockholm. “She is at the other end of the spectrum. She is, in a way, a loner.”

The wheels of New Testament criticism move slowly. Although Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews was published in late 1999, Fredriksen couldn’t say in February 2001 how the book was being received by the guild. She still hadn’t seen any reviews in the New Testament journals. But she’s not waiting around. She’s moved back to her original passion. On sabbatical from Boston University, she’s writing again about Augustine.

Sometimes it’s exhausting juggling the demands of wife, mother and scholar — running the carpool, matching socks, nuking the fish-sticks, meeting publishing deadlines, and entertaining visiting scholars from other countries. “But on good days, I feel exhilarated, I feel privileged,” she says. “I can’t believe I get paid to do this job.”

---

[1]  Sanders, E.P.; Jesus and Judaism; p. 306

How do we know what to believe?

By James A. Bacon

Who was the historical Jesus? An apocalyptic prophet who foretold the imminent coming of the kingdom of God? A social reformer seeking to better the lives of the poor and dispossessed? A revolutionary bent upon overthrowing the Romans and their Jewish puppets? Or something else entirely?

To separate fact from legend, scholars over more than 200 years have subjected the writings of the four Gospels, our primary source material, to close examination. Consensus in the field is uncommon. New Testament scholars have proffered so many interpretations that scarcely a word in the Gospels has gone uncontested. It is standard practice to attribute inconvenient passages to scribes who, long after Jesus lived, altered texts to advance their own agendas. Frustratingly, it is difficult for a newcomer to the field to know what to believe.

In researching and composing “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb,” I have given considerable thought to which testimony in the Gospels reflects a reasonable facsimile of the historical truth and which is 1^st-century spin or fabrication. I don’t pretend to possess greater insight than scholars who have devoted their careers to the matter. But I do feel that I owe it to the reader to make clear how I drew the portrait of Jesus that I did. Much of my logic can be found in the footnotes in the book as well as the words I have put in the mouth of my protagonist Nicolaus of Caesarea. But there is much more to be said about the sources.

Among the Gospels, I draw most heavily from Mark and John, and a bit from Luke. (Mathew, as I shall explain is almost worthless as a historical source for the life of Jesus.) In contrast to the radical skeptics who contend that little escaped the hand of scribes, editors and mythmakers and that, therefore, that little can be known with confidence about the life of Jesus, I find that Mark, John and Luke contain much reliable testimony. Here, for the edification of readers, I offer my assessment of the Gospels as historical sources.

The Gospel of Mark

Our knowledge of the Gospel of Mark derives largely from the words of Papias of Heirapolis (c. 60 to c. 130 C.E.), and those who later commented upon (and sometimes contradicted) them. Wrote Papias, who claimed to have made a practice of interviewing and recording the words of travelers through his city who knew “the Lord’s disciples”:

Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory—though not in an ordered form—of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of chreiai [a type of anecdote], but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia [words] of the Lord. Consequently, Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything.

Some scholars believe that the name of John Mark, a companion of Paul and Barnabas on their missionary journeys, was given to the Gospel to link the Gospel to an authoritative figure and, thus, to enhance its credibility. I find such arguments unconvincing and, for our purposes, irrelevant. Regardless of who the author was, he clearly obtained his material from Peter. Peter was an uneducated man, most likely illiterate. He left no written testimony. (Few scholars attribute to others authorship of the New Testament epistles bearing his name.) But he was charismatic and one of Jesus’ closest followers, and it is natural that others deemed his stories about Jesus worthy of preserving after he died. His crucifixion is usually dated to the mid-60s A.D. The Gospel of Mark was composed only a few years later, most likely right after the 70 C.E. destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Someone wrote down his words and organized them into a coherent narrative. Whether or not the scribe went by the name of Mark is of peripheral interest.

The individual stories (or pericopes as New-Testament scholars term them) have the ring of authenticity. If they do not always reflect historical reality – did Jesus really perform healing “miracles”? – they faithfully reflect how the apostle Peter perceived that reality. The Gospel contains few of the legendary elaborations found in the later Gospels, such as the birth narratives or angels at Jesus’ tomb. Most telling of all, the Gospel contains much material that would later prove embarrassing to Jesus’ followers, such as his estrangement from his family and his summoning of demons to perform exorcisms. These stories were too notorious to ignore — and we can be all the more certain of their authenticity because of that.

While writing “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb,” I ranked Mark as the most credible of all the Gospels. Peter was an eye-witness source, and his words were written shortly after his death, meaning they had less time to drift due to the telling and retelling. When Mark’s account conflicted with other Gospels, I almost always deferred to his version.

The Gospel of Luke

The Gospel of Luke was the first of two volumes in a two-volume work, the second of which was Acts, a chronicle of the early deeds of the apostles after Jesus’ death. The author is not named in either book, but according to Irenaeus writing in the mid-late 2^nd century, authorship was ascribed to Luke, a traveling companion of the apostle Paul. As with almost everything else in New Testament studies, scholarly opinion regarding authorship differs. But, as with Mark, what matters for our purposes is not the name of the author but where he got his material.

There is widespread (though not unanimous) agreement that the author of Luke took Mark’s Gospel as the foundation for his own work, weaving in additional material available to him. Thus, we find that roughly 65 percent of the verses are very similar, and they appear in roughly the same order. Luke adopted the Marcan material to suit his own literary style and tone down material that became embarrassing in the years that had passed since the composition of Mark. (More about that below.)

A second source has been termed the “sayings” Gospel or Q (for the German word for source, quelle, used by German scholars who first developed the theory). Noting that the Gospel of Luke differed from that of Matthew in the same way, containing many Jesus sayings that don’t appear in Mark, scholars theorized that an unknown scribe wrote down collections of Jesus sayings, and that these sayings circulated for many years before Luke and Matthew inserted them into their reworked versions of Mark. There is endless disputation over how the anonymous compilers might have altered the sayings to suit their own didactic purposes but the hypothesis that collections of Jesus sayings were an actual literary form received resounding confirmation with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in Egypt in 1945. The best known of these is the Gospel of Thomas, a compilation of Jesus quotations with no connecting narrative, just like the hypothesized Q. The Q sayings were much earlier in origin than Thomas, however, they underwent less transformation at the hands of theologically minded scribes, and thus they can be more reliably ascribed to Jesus.

For what it’s worth, my working assumption is that is that the scribe or scribes who wrote down the quotations reflected Jesus’ meaning with fair accuracy. However, I did not draw heavily upon the Q sayings for “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb.”

I relied far more upon the source unique to Luke: a person or persons in the court of Herod Antipas. Luke has much more to say about Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, than the other Gospels. Examples include his detailed description of John the Baptist and Antipas’ fear of him, as well as the parlay between Antipas and Pontius Pilate during Jesus’ trial. Luke also takes note of two women, Joanna and Susanna, who supported Jesus and his disciples financially. Joanna, the wife of Antipas’ steward Chusa, undoubtedly was a prominent figure in Antipas’ court and might well have been Luke’s source. Thus, in matters pertaining to Herod Antipas, who assumes an important secondary role in “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb,” I usually defer to Luke.

The Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel of Matthew, according to Papias of Heirapolis, was written by Matthew, an apostle of Jesus. Very few modern scholars accept that assertion, however. Citing internal evidence in the text, they suggest that the Gospel was composed by a man who belonged to a community of Jewish Christ followers in the late 1^st century, possibly in the great metropolis of Antioch. Like Luke, it is widely thought, “Matthew” used Mark as the template for his Gospel — 600 of 661 verses are similar — and that he supplemented it with the Q source as well as his own material, referred to as the M source.

Material unique to Matthew includes eight parables, which likely came from one version or another of written Jesus sayings and has value to anyone trying to reconstruct the words of Jesus. By contrast, the beginning and ending of Matthew – the birth narrative and the angels-at-the-tomb narrative – have no analogue in the other Gospels and cannot be attributed to any plausible eye-witness source.

Matthew’s birth narrative cannot be reconciled with Luke’s. Matthew’s story contained wisemen; Luke’s had shepherds, but no wisemen. Matthew’s had a star; Luke mentions no astrological phenomena. Matthew said Herod wanted to slay the baby Jesus and the family fled to Egypt. Knowing nothing of that, Luke told stories of a precocious Jesus holding forth in the temple. Even the genealogies attributed to Jesus differed. The miraculous-birth narratives in both Gospels likely arose after the destruction of the temple in response to accusations that Jesus was born of fornication. At the time of their writing in the late 1st century, both evangelists had to confront the taunts of the Jews, and both adopted the same scheme of arguing that Jesus was conceived by the holy spirit. Otherwise, their narratives bore few similarities. I exclude them from “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb.”

Luke and Matthew also added miraculous elements to their accounts of the empty tomb not found in Mark. Luke described the disciples visiting the tomb after the sabbath and encountering two men “in shining garments,” presumably angels, who said the Jesus had risen. In modern vernacular, it can be said that Matthew said, “Hold my beer.” At the behest of the high priests, he wrote, Pilate posted guards at the tomb. They witnessed an earthquake and angel of the Lord who descended from heaven and moved the stone at the entrance. Not yet done, Matthew described how Jesus appeared to his disciples briefly afterwards and then how the chief priests paid the guards to say nothing of what they had seen. “And this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day,” he added, illustrating clearly the polemical contest in which he was engaged.

Although these extraordinary events at the tomb had escaped the notice of Mark and John (more about John in a moment), both of which were based on eye-witness accounts, they were picked up and elaborated upon in later apocryphal gospels. According to the so-called Gospel of Peter, not only did Pilate assign guards to the tomb, but the soldiers saw two angels supporting Jesus as he left the tomb and then watched as all three ascended into the heavens! This was too fantastical for even the early church to accept into its New Testament canon.

The Beelzebub controversy

Critical to my interpretation of the historical Jesus is the evidence in Mark, downplayed by Luke and Matthew, of how Jesus exorcized demons. In the hearing before Pilate, the high priests charged Jesus with “sorcery” – performing miraculous acts through the power of demons. In their polemical battles against Jesus followers and later the Christians, the Jews reiterated that accusation. The Gospel of Mark contained numerous passages attesting to Jesus’ conjuration of demons, which seemed to confirm the Jewish indictment and proved an embarrassment. Accordingly, both Luke and Matthew modified the Marcan passages to attribute Jesus’ healing to the power of God.

This is an important though underappreciated point in Biblical scholarship, and I beg the reader’s forgiveness for documenting it at some length.

Here is how Mark (chapter 3) treated the controversy over his exorcisms:

And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils.
And he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan?
And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.
And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.
No man can enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his house.

Notice that Mark (meaning Peter) did not deny that Jesus cast out demons by Beelzebub — he justified the practice. In the parable, the strong man was Beelzebub. By binding him, Jesus was able to enter and loot his house – expel lesser demons. This power, Mark said, was a sign that the reign of demons was coming to an end and that the kingdom of God was imminent.

Now look how Luke (chapter 11) reworked the pericope.

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.
If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebub.
And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges.
But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.
When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace:
But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted, and divideth his spoils.

Luke acknowledged the accusations that Jesus cast out demons by Beelzebub but turned the accusation around. If Jesus performed exorcisms by Beelzebub, he asked, how did his accusers perform exorcisms? Then he suggested that Jesus performed his miracle empowered by “the finger of God.”

We see a similar rhetorical gambit in Matthew.

If Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?
And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges.
But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.
Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil his house.

Jesus, Matthew implied, performed exorcisms by “the Spirit of God.”

As I see it, Mark was the closest to an eye-witness source. He faithfully retold the stories of Jesus’ exorcisms and healings as Peter had. Luke and Matthew came along a generation later when rhetorical battles with the Jews focused on Jesus’ use of “sorcery.” The latter two evangelists reinterpreted Jesus’ power as coming from God, not Beelzebub, thus absolving him of the sorcery charge. One man’s sorcery was another man’s power of God. Accordingly, I treat Mark’s account as authentic and the reinterpretations by Luke and Matthew as apologetics.

The Gospel of John

The authorship of the Gospel of John was attributed in early Christian tradition to the apostle John, the brother of James and son of the Galilean fisherman Zebedee. Modern scholarship leans heavily toward the unnamed “beloved disciple” mentioned in the Gospel as the primary source but suggests that the Gospel, which contains a heavy theological overlay, was written by an unnamed scribe in the city of Ephesus around 90 to 110 C.E.

My interpretation departs somewhat from the mainstream consensus. It is evident to me that there are three voices within the Gospel of John — one a Galilean voice, which describes Jesus’ activities in Galilee; a Jerusalem voice, which recounts his activities in Jerusalem; and a scribal voice who melded the two and injected his own commentary which was infused by Greek philosophy. The opening words of the Gospel — “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God — introduced concepts that were alien and unfamiliar to the Jewish eye-witness sources whose testimony the Gospel was based upon. Some see the Gospel as having similarities to the offshoot of the early Jesus movement known as Gnosticism, which also borrowed heavily from Greek philosophy. The scribe who composed John has little to tell us about the historical Jesus.

The Jerusalem narrative, I believe, rested upon the eye-witness testimony of “the beloved disciple,” whom I believe was named John and after whom the Gospel was named. Most likely, this John was a priest and a member of the temple hierarchy, as made evident by his detailed knowledge of the deliberations of the high priests in any number of encounters with Jesus and above all by his detailed description of events leading up to Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. John’s account contains considerable detail not found in the other Gospels and, as I note in “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb,” dovetails with what we know from Flavius Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and the Roman historians about Pontius Pilate.

The eye-witness account comes to life most vividly in the rump trial of Jesus in the house of the old high priest Annas: “Simon Peter followed Jesus, and so did another disciple: that disciple was known unto the high priest, and went in with Jesus into the palace of the high priest.” Thanks to this unnamed disciple we know that the thoughts and motives attributed to the high priests described in John were not idle speculation but informed by personal knowledge. Whether the man “known unto the high priest” was one and the same as the beloved disciple, we can only conjecture. But for purposes of “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb,” I accept the Jerusalem narrative of the Gospel of John as the most authoritative account of Jesus’ last days.

One way or another, the beloved disciple left Jerusalem — perhaps as a refugee after the 70 C.E. destruction of the temple — and made his way to the thriving community of Jesus followers in Ephesus (whom the apostle Paul addressed in his letters to the Ephesians).

What of the Galilean tradition that I hypothesize? The clue is the presence of Hermione, a prophetess revered by the early church and said to be the daughter of a certain “Philip.” Early Christian tradition equated this Philip with Jesus’ apostle of the same name. Philip plays a prominent role in the Gospel of John; indeed, other than Peter’s, his name appears in that Gospel more frequently than any other’s. Some scholars have suggested that Hermione’s father Philip was a different man entirely from the apostle and have dubbed him “Philip the evangelist.” However, I believe the nexus of links between Philip the apostle, John the Baptist, Samaritans, and Simon Magus — a theory that would require a full scholarly treatise to defend — provide ample reason to accept that Philip the apostle is Hermione’s father.

If we accept that premise, admittedly a controversial one, then it logical to conclude that Hermione drew upon the testimony of her father, Philip the apostle, which in turn became the basis of the Galilean narrative that appears in the Gospel of John. Because the ultimate source of Gospel of John for the Galilean stories can be traced to Philip — not Peter as for the Gospel of Mark — it should surprise no one that there is little overlapping material. Whether one accepts my hypothesis or not, one has to account for how Galilean material originated from a source who lived a privileged life as a temple priest in Jerusalem. If not from Philip, who?

Rightly or wrongly, “The Temple of the Empty Tomb” assumes that the Gospel of John’s Galilean narrative originated with Philip the apostle, and was transmitted through his daughter Hermione who became a leading figure in the Christian community in Ephesus. She was the one who conveyed the Galilee narrative to the unknown scribe who authored the manuscript. Based upon this theory of two eyewitness sources, I give a prominent role to John the beloved disciple and a smaller but significant one to Philip in “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb.”

The Apocryphal Gospels

The early Christian community gave birth to innumerable texts attributed to celebrated figures associated with Jesus that scholars have dubbed “apocrypha”: of doubtful authenticity. While there may be a few historical needles buried within this haystack, they are exceedingly rare and for most apocryphal works are not worth the effort. However, two lengthy texts contain shadows of authenticity: the Clementine Homilies and Clementine Recognitions. Modern scholarship describes these 3rd-century works as fictitious accounts of the conversion of Clement of Rome to Christianity and his travels with the apostle Peter. It is conjectured that these novels were based upon a 2nd-century work referred to as the “Preaching of Peter.” They convey details that, though clearly fabricated, likely contain nuggets that shed light on the Jesus movement.

The Clementine literature focuses on the rivalry between Peter and Simon Magus, a Samaritan figure referred to derisively in other Christian literature as a sorcerer. They contain rich material laying out how Simon and another Samaritan, Dositheus, were followers of John the Baptist who contended over leadership of the Baptist’s followers after his death. There are kernels of historical authenticity here, largely overlooked by scholars, that I have integrated into “The Mystery of the Empty Tomb.”

Robert Eisenman; Viking Penguin; New York, NY; 1997

by James A. Bacon

James, the brother of Jesus, has never captured the imagination of scholars studying the origins of Christianity. It is commonly acknowledged that he succeeded Jesus as first “bishop” of the Jerusalem church, and that he contested with Paul the Apostle for leadership of the early Christian community. Martyred at the instigation of the High Priest Annas, he also is one of only three Christian icons – the others being John the Baptist and Jesus himself – deemed significant enough to warrant mention in the chronicles of Flavius Josephus. But his activities, notable though they were, have stimulated only a fraction of the scholarly interest of, say, Paul, John the Baptist or any of the Gospel authors.

If we are to believe Robert Eisenman, however, James may be the most under appreciated personage in the study of both the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism – and the key to understanding early Christianity. In Eisenman’s interpretation, James was far more than the leader of the nascent Christian church in Jerusalem: He was a leader of the Essene sect and probably the Teacher of Righteousness alluded to in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Functioning as an opposition High Priest, he served as the lynchpin of resistance to the rule of Rome. His call for the expulsion of foreign “pollution” from the Temple of Jerusalem inspired the lower ranking priests, shortly after his death, to halt sacrifices to Caesar and precipitate the Great Revolt  in 66 AD.

Although his views are radically unorthodox, Eisenman commands our attention. As Professor of Middle East Religions and Archaeology at California State University in Long Beach, he ranks among the leading experts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He led the worldwide campaign to make the scrolls, long guarded by their academic caretakers, more accessible to the public. In his volume A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he caused a sensation by reproducing photographs of scrolls that had theretofore gone unpublished. This treatise on James follows two previous works exploring the relationship between the Qumran texts, the Essenes and the early Christians.

In traditional Christian iconography, James has been a shadowy, peripheral figure. He barely warrants a mention in any of the Gospels or the Acts of the Apostles. A rich lore about him survives in the writings of the early church fathers, but so much of the literary evidence is contradictory, obviously mythical and of such a late date – 3^rd and 4^th centuries, mostly — that scholars have dismissed it as having little historical value.

Approaching the material afresh through the lens of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, Eisenman makes a powerful case that James, known as “the Just” or “Righteous,” hewed to the doctrine of the Essenes. A lifelong ascetic and Nazirite, James ate no meat, drank no wine, kept celibate and bathed daily in cold water. His writings – the Epistle of James in the New Testament and two “apocalypses” found amid the Gnostic Nag Hammadi texts – resonate with the images and vocabulary of the Dead Sea scrolls. James preached the imminent overthrow of the Romans and their Jewish collaborators by an angry God “coming in power on the clouds of Heaven with the Heavenly Host.” 

Zealous in his observance of the Law of Moses, James refused to admit gentiles into his movement unless they embraced every aspect of the law themselves. His hard-line position on circumcision and dietary rules put him in conflict with the Apostle Paul who, as a missionary to the gentiles, fought to relax the restrictions. Eisenman traces the conflict as Paul struggled to wrest the churches in gentile lands from the control of James in Jerusalem. Paul’s faction won in the end, but only after the high priests executed James and the majority of the Jewish Christians perished in the Great Revolt. 

As the saying goes, the winners — or, in this case, the survivors — write the history. The authors of the canonical Gospels, all of whom were in Paul’s camp, dealt with James by ignoring him. From the beginning, they depicted Jesus as rejecting his family. Then, as the doctrine of the virgin birth emerged, they downplayed Jesus’ siblings by describing them as the children of Joseph, not of Mary – making them step brothers and step sisters. The evangelists obscured James’ close association with Jesus – as one of his apostles and successor of his movement — by referring to him as James the Lesser or James the son of Alphaeus. Most tendentiously of all, Eisenman contends, Luke virtually wrote James out of the history of the early church in the Acts of the Apostles. In just one example among many, Luke turned on its head the martyrdom of James by retelling it as the martyrdom of Stephen, a fictional character sympathetic to the gentiles.

Eisenman explores James’ perspective by roaming outside the New Testament canon. A pro-James spin appears in the Clementine Recognitions, a late-dated work of Jewish-Christian provenance that scholars have downplayed as a work of fiction. Eisenman argues plausibly that the Recognitions incorporate an authentic early tradition. He also finds James’ point of view expressed in the Qumran texts. James, he believes, appears as the “Teacher of Righteousness,” Paul as the “Spouter of Lies” and the High Priest Annas as the “Wicked Priest.”

Such arguments, though controversial to varying degrees, are at least defensible. Had Eisenman limited his book to the points outlined above, he would have left a work of enduring significance. Unfortunately, he undermines his genuine contributions to the study of early Christianity by pushing his material too far. Over and over, Eisenman seizes upon any coincidence or similarity in names to equate characters found in the New Testament with those appearing in the works of Josephus and, then, to reinterpret their historical significance. To cite but one of many examples, he suggests that Paul the Apostle (formerly Saul) may be identical with an obscure kinsman of King Agrippa II whom Josephus refers to as “Saulus.” This Saulus and his brother led a riot in Jerusalem around the time of James’ death. Later, during the Great Revolt, Saulus acted as an intermediary between the Jewish peace faction and the Romans. Taking this and other coincidences of equally dubious significance, Eisenman builds a case that Paul actively schemed and collaborated with the Romans and – most incredibly — that he may have participated in the stoning death of James!

Such consistent overreaching might be forgivable if it were the only flaw in his work. But Eisenman treats those who disagree with him much as the evangelists dealt with James: by totally ignoring them. Conventional scholarship dates the Dead Sea Scrolls to the era of the Hasmonaean priest-kings some two centuries before James’ era. He would have enhanced the credibility of his own interpretation had he elucidated, even briefly, the problems he found with the conventional view.

Finally, Eisenman imposes an artificial polarity on Jewish politics. In one camp, he places the Romans and their collaborators: the Herodian princes, the priestly aristocracy, the scribal Pharisees and the agitator (and self-proclaimed apostle) Paul. Arrayed in the other camp were the anti-Roman nationalists: Zealots, sicarii, Essenes and early Christians, not to mention the poor and downtrodden. There is no room in Eisenman’s vision of 1^st century Palestine for a kaleidoscope of mutating factions and philosophies that fell in and out of favor with one another, nor the notion that some groups might have been ambivalent about Roman rule. Nor, finally, does Eisenman acknowledge the existence of Jewish mysticism – surprisingly, given its prominence in the Dead Sea Scrolls – which might lead some Jews to seek salvation through spiritual means rather than through earthly action.

Still, despite the mind-numbing redundancy, wild conjecture and simplistic analytical framework, there’s plenty to reward the reader who slogs through this 1,000-page tome. Many of Eisenman’s speculations may be utterly without foundation, but he makes so many connections that only a handful of them need be well grounded to change our thinking about key New Testament figures. He argues quite convincingly, for instance, that James was the unnamed companion of Cleopas on the road to Emmaus who shared the encounter with the resurrected Jesus. Eisenman also draws upon sources largely ignored in mainstream scholarship – the Clementine Recognitions, for instance; the Helen of Adiabene material in Josephus; the apocryphal Edessa documents. Perhaps his bold use of these materials will encourage others to approach them with fresh perspectives.

In the end, one cannot help but agree with Eisenman’s conclusion: If we ever hope to understand the historical Jesus, we must understand the historical James. As Eisenman puts it, “Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus.”

June 4, 2000                             

Paula Fredriksen; Yale University Press; New Haven, Conn.; 1998

by James A. Bacon

The quest for the historical Jesus leans heavily upon the writings of five men: Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Though drawing upon many of the same early Christian traditions, each author presents a distinct image of Jesus. Indeed, these portraits are so startlingly different that the aims and biases of the authors must be taken into account by anyone employing evidence from the New Testament to limn the life of Jesus.

In From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, Paula Fredriksen illuminates the five portraits of Jesus. She writes crisply and briskly, employing a minimum of footnotes and sidestepping many scholarly controversies. She spends little time, for instance, speculating about the identity of the authors. She does not especially care about their geographic origins or the socio-religious circumstances of their churches. She makes no effort to uncover different layers of source material such as Q. Fredriksen simply approaches each Gospel (or, in the case of Paul, the epistles) as a cohesive literary work reflecting the author’s perspective on Jesus at a given point in the evolution of early Christianity.

Among the more  interesting features of From Jesus to Christ is the way Fredriksen develops two recurring issues: the timing of the parousia, and the relationship between the Jesus movement and the synagogue. She shows clearly how each author’s perspective on those two unavoidable questions shaped his image of Jesus.

For anyone who believed Jesus was the messiah, there was no evading the question of when the Kingdom of God would appear. Jesus had prophesied that the End of Time was at hand and that God would transform the world. He passed along this expectation to his followers. Paul lived shortly enough after Jesus that he could maintain a feverish expectation of the messiah’s return throughout his entire life. Mark wrote some 40 years after Jesus, but the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in a seemingly apocalyptic war with the Romans rekindled hope that the End of Time was nigh. However, that expectation diminished over the succeeding decades. Writing 10 to 20 years later, Matthew and Luke downplayed the imminent coming of the Kingdom. By the turn of the century, John transmuted the apocalyptic expectation into a doctrine that claimed the Kingdom had already arrived but existed only among believers. Resolving this cognitive dissonance — the conflict between Jesus’ prophecies regarding the Kingdom of God with the fact that the prophecy, to all outward appearances, remained unfulfilled — required a reinterpretation of Jesus with each passing generation.

The writings of Paul and the evangelists also reflected the evolving relationship between the Jesus movement and the Jews. According to Fredriksen, Paul wrote from the perspective of a devout Jew who differed from other Jews mainly in that he accepted Jesus as the messiah. He embraced the Jewish law and worshiped at the Jewish Temple. Although Paul saw it as his mission to take his message of salvation to the Gentiles, the Jesus movement started as a Jewish movement. Over time, however, a rupture developed between the Gentiles and the Jews. When Mark wrote around 70 A.D., tensions were already evident. Mark’s Jesus attacked the law and challenged the leading elements of Jewish society: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the scribes and the Temple priests. Matthew, who drew heavily upon the Jewish scriptures in order to legitimize the idea of Jesus as messiah, could not repudiate Judaism to the same degree. As Fredriksen sees it, Matthew saw a “good” Judaism, the prophetic tradition in touch with God, and a “bad” Judaism which violently rejected Jesus as it did the rest of the prophets. 

When Luke wrote towards the end of the 1st century, the split between the Jews and Gentile Christians was well advanced, yet he portrayed the Jews fairly sympathetically in his Gospel. Luke’s Jesus was a traditionally pious Jew, and the people accepted him eagerly; only their leaders rejected him. In Acts, he presented the disciples as observant Jews worshiping in the Temple. His villains, Fredriksen argues, were the Jews of the Diaspora, whose persecution of Paul and others caused the split between the followers of Jesus and other members of the synagogue. The author of the Gospel of John was so estranged from Judaism that he referred to “the Jews” as alien and distinct from Jesus. In John’s theology, Fredriksen notes, the Jews were virtually predestined to reject him.

Despite her emphasis on the biases of each author, Fredriksen is optimistic that it’s possible to sketch the outlines of the historical Jesus. Inspired by E.P. Sanders’ monumental work Jesus and Judaism, published three years previously, she builds around those traditions that appear to be most historically certain. Like Sanders’ Jesus, Fredriksen’s Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, preached that the Kingdom of God was at hand, alarmed the Temple priests with his actions in Jerusalem, and was crucified by the order of Pontius Pilate.

In a later book published in 1999, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Fredriksen revised her account of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, particularly taking issue with Sanders’ interpretation of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and the chastisement of the moneychangers in the Temple. Where Sanders had regarded the Temple priests as the instigators of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, Fredriksen shifted more of the onus to Pilate.

One might might quibble with Fredriksen for a bias of her own: a clear preference for canonical over non-canonical sources. It’s one thing to limit a work to the New Testament images of Jesus; it’s quite another to reconstruct the historical Jesus purely on the basis of those sources. To be sure, Fredriksen sets her historical Jesus in the context of Judaism and the broader Hellenistic world, but she makes no use of the apocryphal writings and she ducks the Q controversy entirely.

Nevertheless, From Jesus to Christ stands as an insightful and readable overview of what are clearly the most important sources, if not the only ones, for uncovering the historical Jesus. Adopting Fredriksen’s framework for deciphering these critical texts —  how they explain the delay of the parousia and the rejection of Jesus’ message by the Jews — will prove helpful to anyone hoping to uncover the Jesus of history.

— March 3, 2001

Jack Pastor; Routledge; New York and London; 1997

by James A. Bacon

Students of Second Temple Judaism have long been struck by the extreme stratification of Palestinian society. Observers of the Herodian era, in particular, have remarked upon the plethora of taxes, tithes, custom duties, rents, debt and other obligations that weighed upon the poor. Invariably, scholars have attempted to explain the spasms of unrest under Herodian and Roman rule by pointing to deteriorating economic conditions. The chain of causation typically goes something like this: As the rulers increased the burdens upon their subjects, independent landowners borrowed money to meet their obligations. Debt led to foreclosure, swelling the ranks of the dispossessed. Landless tenants and day laborers swelled the ranks of social bandits, Zealots and anyone else bent upon challenging the established order.

This mantra is repeated so frequently that Jack Pastor’s work, Land and Economy in Ancient Palestine, comes as a necessary corrective. Pastor traces the evolution of land-holding patterns from the origins of the Second Temple under Nehemiah to the Bar Kokhba revolt against Rome. Frequently, he concludes, the evidence is too scanty or too ambiguous to make the kind of sweeping generalities of which many scholars are so fond. Some readers may find Pastor’s reading of the sources to be unadventurous. Indeed, anyone looking for grand, overarching theories will not find them here. But Pastor does provide a useful framework for examining land tenure in ancient Palestine. And readers looking for novel interpretations may find his spirited defense of Herod the Great’s economic policies to be especially incisive.

Pastor contends that land-holding system put into place by the Ptolemies persisted throughout the Second Temple era. Successive regimes — Seleucids, Hasmonaeans, Herodians and Romans — accepted the premise of the Hellenistic monarchies that all land belonged to the king. The monarch could either hold land directly and reap the revenue from it, or he could dispense it as a reward to his followers and tax it. The monarch could repossess land at any time, and title theoretically reverted to the king upon the retainer’s death. There were only two important exceptions to this pattern. First, cities founded as a Greek-style polis acquired rights over surrounding territory. Secondly, colonies settled by a king’s soldiers tended to retain their rights in perpetuity.

To students of the historical Jesus, Pastor’s observations about landholding patterns under Herod the Great, Herod Antipas and the Roman prefects are of particular interest. Despite Herod’s abysmal reputation, Pastor contends, his Jewish subjects benefited immensely from his rule. There is no evidence that Herod engorged his personal domains beyond what previous kings had claimed for themselves. Although he stripped Hasmonaean aristocrats of their lands, which he used to reward his own friends and retainers, the object of his depredations were large landholders, not the peasantry. 

The Jews prospered under Herod. His massive building projects employed thousands of laborers and craftsmen. Trade increased. Pottery manufacturing expanded. Jews moved into gentile cities and settled what had been gentile lands. Belying his reputation for callousness and brutality, Herod depleted his treasury during a major famine to purchase grain from Egypt and distribute it to his starving people. Historians should look to non-economic causes, says Pastor, to explain the revolts that broke out after Herod’s death.

Pastor does find evidence that the policies of Archelaus, Herod’s successor in Judaea and Samaria, pursued policies that augmented his wealth at the expense of the people. But it is worth noting that he was removed not by a popular uprising but by a delegation of disaffected aristocrats to Rome. His brother, Herod Antipas, pursued policies in Galilee reminiscent of his father’s — and there is no evidence of serious unrest or public dissatisfaction in his domains.

No historian can discuss the connection between socio-economic conditions and social unrest without tackling one of the biggest issues of Second Temple historiography: the causes of the Great Revolt. The economic situation in Judaea was deteriorating in mid-century, says Pastor, but the cause wasn’t a change in landholding patterns. Following the interpretation of Flavius Josephus nearly 2,000 years ago, Pastor contends that the economic crisis resulted from the extortionate demands of a series of corrupt Roman governors.

Pastor does briefly examine the role of money lending and the dynamics of debt in the Herodian era, but he draws no strong conclusions. He cripples his inquiry into the topic by ignoring the Talmudic commentaries about interest and debt forgiveness on the grounds that they are too difficult to date. Yet the evolution of legal rulings during the Herodian era regarding money lending — especially the logical contortions employed to circumvent the prohibition against interest and the forgiveness of debts — are critical to understanding landholding dynamics.

In sum, Land and Economy in Ancient Palestine exhibits sober, solid scholarship that weighs many perspectives, but Pastor does not propel the reader with big themes or passionate argument. Those disposed to agree with him will find some novel interpretations: The analysis of Herod’s famine policy is a gem. Those committed to economic-determinist views of history are unlikely to change their minds or, for that matter, even feel compelled to respond. Pastor produced a useful monograph with many small insights, but not a work that will change the course of debate.

— June 2000

John P. Meier; Doubleday; 2001

by James A. Bacon

John P. Meier, a Catholic priest and professor of New Testament at Notre Dame University, continues his magnum opus, A Marginal Jew, with the publication of the third volume, Companions and Competitors.

In the first volume, Meier laid out a rigorous methodology for identifying the genuine words and deeds of the historic Jesus. His five criteria of authenticity, widely employed by New Testament scholars today, were useful for stripping away the legendary accretions of the early church. Meier devoted his second volume to establishing what he believed to be the core historical truth of Jesus: that he was an eschatological prophet who, after a sojourn with John the Baptist, patterned his ministry on that of the miracle-working prophet Elijah.

Meier fleshes out his portrait of Jesus in Companions and Competitors by defining him in relationship to his followers and his opponents. To tell the story of Jesus, he observes, is to tell the story of his interaction with his followers – the Twelve, his disciples and the enthusiastic crowds of Galilee – as well as his foes, the competing religious groups in 1^st-century Palestine. In focusing on Jesus’ followers, Meier espies a primitive organizational structure to his movement that is often overlooked in New Testament scholarship. Then, by shifting his magnifying glass to Jesus’ opponents, Meier brings clarity to Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees. For a fourth and final volume, he defers his analysis of Jesus’ parables, his messianic self consciousness, his attitude toward Mosaic law and the reasons why he was crucified.

In Meier’s appraisal, contemporary historic-Jesus scholarship is divisible into two camps: one which emphasizes the Jewishness of Jesus, seeking to understand him in light of Judean culture and religious practice of the 1^st century C.E., and another that uses alien frames of reference, typically socio-economic or politico-nationalistic. As the title of his series implies, Meier stands solidly with the Jesus-as-1^st-century-Jew party. In Companions and Competitors, he casts himself explicitly in opposition to members of the Jesus Seminar whose depictions of Jesus as a social iconoclast, a social revolutionary or generic Mediterranean peasant obscure his Jewishness.[1]

Meier devotes the first half of Vol. 3 to describing Jesus’ followers, whom he divides into three concentric circles in differing degrees of intimacy to Jesus: the crowds, the disciples, and the Twelve. He defines the “crowds” as those people drawn at least intermittently to Jesus’ mission and message. Contrary to those who interpret Jesus as a social revolutionary concerned mainly with the poor and dispossessed, Meier maintains, Jesus appealed to a broad cross-spectrum of the population. The Gospels tell of Jesus interacting with numerous people of substance.[2] However, as Meier also observes, the enthusiasm of the crowds did not often translate into enduring commitment to his movement. Only a tiny fraction of the people who flocked to see him became dedicated followers.

One of the most distinctive features of Jesus and his movement was that he recruited a group of committed “disciples.” As Meier notes, the use of the Greek word for disciple, mathetes, was rare in Jewish literature, found only in the writings of Philo of Alexandria prior to the time of Jesus. John the Baptist, it appears, was the first person in Palestine to gather disciples around him, and Jesus imitated him. In later years, rabbis also would gather disciples who ate, slept and traveled with their masters. But Meier emphasizes a key distinction between Jesus and the others. In apparent imitation of Elijah’s call to Elisha, Jesus “called” his disciples. They did not seek him out: He took the initiative in selecting them. Says Meier: “Jesus’ mode of acquiring disciples does seem to have been unusual, if not unique, in the Palestinian Judaism of his time.”[3] Likewise, Jesus was radical in accepting women into the ranks of his closest followers, and in demanding total commitment, including a willingness to sacrifice personal wealth and family obligations. The boundaries of discipleship were not hard and fast, however: The Gospels cite a number of well-to-do individuals – Zacchaeus the publican, Lazarus and his sisters, the anonymous host of the Last Supper – who stayed at home but supported Jesus with their hospitality.

Meier then shifts his attention to Jesus’ inner circle. Taking issue again with Jesus Seminar scholars, many of whom dismiss the 12 apostles as a creation of the early church, he contends that Jesus did, in fact, designate a select group of 12 companions to represent the 12 tribes of Israel, which would re-gather at the end of time. The symbolism of the Twelve coheres with the notion that Jesus addressed the whole people of Israel, not just the poor and downtrodden. The surest evidence of authenticity, Meier suggests, is the tradition of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas, one of the Twelve. The betrayal is multiply attested by the Gospels of Mark and John, as well as the M source embedded within Matthew and the L source within Luke. “There is no cogent reason,” he says, “why the early church should have gone out of its way to invent such a troubling tradition as Jesus’ betrayal by Judas, one of his chosen Twelve. Why the church should have expended so much effort to create a story that it immediately had to struggle to explain away defies all logic.”[4]

Wrapping up his discussion of Jesus’ companions, Meier focuses on the individual members of the Twelve. There is enough material to draw a minimalist portrait of Simon Peter, he concludes, and there are shards of reliable evidence about James, John and Judas. But we know little more about the others than their names — and we can’t even be sure about a number of those. Meier does believe, however, that the elevation of the Twelve implies that selected individuals enjoyed a higher status and greater authority than the rest of Jesus’ followers. The movement was not “egalitarian,” as some historians have fancifully supposed. “What a present-day historian must not do,” reminds Meier, “is retroject modern thought about social classes, revolutionary, utopian egalitarianism, and theoretical anarchy into the mind of a 1^st-century Palestinian Jew for whom Israel always had been and always would be, in one way or another, an ordered society.”[5]

Meier’s analysis of Jesus’ friends and companions comes across as measured and authoritative. He applies his criteria of authenticity with discipline, consistently distinguishing between Gospel material that can be attributed to the historical Jesus and that which originated with the early church. His command over hundreds of strands of scholarly debate is astounding: His footnotes read like mini-historiographies on even the most arcane of topics.

Yet Meier falls short of at least one stated objective: that of correcting the perspectives perpetuated by the Jesus Seminar. Meier restricts his discussion to the crowds, the disciples and the Twelve, overlooking groups that don’t fit comfortably into his classification schema. While commendably rejecting anachronistic rhetoric of class warfare and social activism, he writes as if socio-economic issues were of no import at all. To confront the Jesus-as-social-revolutionary school of thought head on, he must address the widely propagated view that Jesus’ message and mission was geared mainly to the most downtrodden elements of Palestinian society. If Jesus’ followers were not the poor and dispossessed, who were they? Who was his audience? Which elements of society did his ministry most appeal to? Meier does not address these fundamental questions.

As a glaring for instance, Meier gives short shrift to Jesus’ relationship with publicans and sinners. Who were these “sinners”? Did the term simply apply to people who had committed sins of one kind or another, a group so broad and amorphous as to be meaningless? Alternatively, was the term shorthand for a quasi-underworld assortment of chronic sinners such as pimps, prostitutes, money lenders, leg-breaking enforcers and other social undesirables who kept company with toll collectors? Or, as others have argued, did the term “sinner” describe those who were in debt? Jesus’ relationship with the publicans and sinners goes to the heart of his mission. Jesus clearly distinguished himself from other religious figures by partaking in scandalous table fellowship with these disreputable elements and then recruiting followers from among them. Was Jesus embracing the social underclass as part of his outreach to the whole nation of Israel? Or was he aligning himself with the indebted and dispossessed? Meier does not tell us.

Take another instance: In the so-called sermon on the mount, Matthew’s Jesus said, Blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit and they that mourn. Who was Jesus referring to? A vast body of secondary literature has arisen around the assertion that the ruling class, through the exploitative mechanisms of taxes and money lending, were dispossessing the peasants of their ancestral lands on a massive scale. Jesus, in this view, directed his message of earthly social reform to this legion of disinherited, landless laborers. Although Meier argues in passing that Jesus appealed to a broad cross-section of the Judean population, he never tackles directly this socio-economic interpretation of Jesus’ mission.

In the second half of his volume, Meier shifts his attention to Jesus’ competitors, commencing with the Pharisees. The difficulty of talking about the Pharisees, he notes, is that historians are no more in agreement about their identity than they are about Jesus’. We have only three substantive sources about the Pharisees: the works of Flavius Josephus, the Gospels and the rabbinical writings. Each presents tremendous problems. Josephus’ attitude toward the Pharisees evolved over his literary career, Meier contends, and his changing biases must be taken into account. The Gospels offer a polemical view of the Pharisees, whose successors after the fall of the Temple were locked in opposition to the early church. As for the rabbinical sources, they were written so late, 200 years or more after the Second Temple era, that they are hopelessly entangled with legend.

Nevertheless, Meier concludes that it is possible to draw some useful conclusions about the Pharisees. Originating as a religious-political around 150 B.C.E., they emphasized the zealous study and practice of the Mosaic law and the careful observance of legal obligations in the areas of purity, tithing, marriage, Temple ritual and the keeping of the Sabbath. They developed a body of tradition, the so-called “traditions of the fathers” which went beyond the Mosaic Law but, even so, was incumbent upon the people of Israel to obey. And they had an eschatological bent: They believed that those who were faithful to God’s law would be resurrected from the dead on the last day and acquitted at the judgment. The Pharisees also were notable for propagating their views among the common people. Although they had lost power in the court of the Hasmonaean kings a century before, they retained a number of partisans in the upper echelons of society during the 1^st century C.E. and enjoyed some influence among the broader population. They never lost their desire for power.

To Meier, it seems indisputable that Jesus interacted with the Pharisees, though the historicity of individual encounters described in the Gospels may be open to dispute. As a charismatic figure moving among the people, Jesus was far more likely to have encountered Pharisees than either the aristocratic Sadducees or the reclusive Essenes. Meier finds a number of Gospel passages involving the Pharisees to be probably historical: Jesus’ clashes over marriage and divorce, the woes he pronounced upon the Pharisees and others who rejected his message, the parable using Pharisees and toll collectors as antithetical figures, and the sympathetic reception given to Jesus by individual Pharisees. While Meier finds it likely that Jesus did engage in rhetorical combat with the Pharisees, he does not subscribe to the view advanced in the Gospel of Mark that makes the Pharisees complicit in Jesus’ death. “There is a remarkable ‘disconnect’ in the Gospels,” he says, “between Jesus’ disputes with the Pharisees during the public ministry and his arrest and execution at the end of his life.”[6]

Even less is known about the Sadducees than the Pharisees, but Meier feels comfortable in describing them as “a religious movement and a political party, made up mostly of old-time aristocratic priests and laymen, focused on Jerusalem, its temple and its high priesthood.”[7]  Their doctrine was more conservative than that of the Pharisees, tending to reject laws not explicitly rooted in the Pentateuch, but it was not ossified. The Sadducees undoubtedly developed their own legal traditions in areas, such as temple liturgy, not specifically addressed by the laws of Moses.

Although there is little evidence that Jesus interacted with the Sadducees to a significant degree, Meier does find the story in Mark 12:18-27, in which Jesus debated the Sadducees over the resurrection of the flesh, to be rooted in a historical controversy. In this pericope, Jesus elaborated upon his view that in the resurrection, people would be like the angels of heaven. Meier regards this as yet another confirmation that Jesus hewed to an eschatological view of the kingdom of God. “The historical Jesus believed that, at some point in the eschatological drama, past generations would rise from the dead and that faithful Israelites would share in a new type of life similar to that of the angels. … The final state of the kingdom would thus entail a transcendence of this present world, not simply an improvement of it.”[8]

Another chapter focuses on Jesus and the Essenes. Meier acknowledges that Jesus bore similarities to this group: He was celibate, embraced poverty, prohibited oaths, expressed disapproval of the ruling Temple authorities and believed fervently that God would bring his kingdom of justice and plenty at the End of Times. But Meier rejects the idea that Jesus himself was an Essene or closely affiliated to the movement. Jesus lectured against excessive concern with the minutiae of the law, an Essene obsession. He did not share the Essene preoccupation with the religious calendar. Rather than commanding his followers to shun their enemies, Jesus urged them to love them. Finally, Jesus’ movement, though not devoid of hierarchy, lacked the elaborate organizational structure of the Essenes. “Jesus and his movement were one expression of a larger phenomenon in Palestine at the turn of the era: Jewish eschatological groups with radical lifestyles, fervent hopes for Israel’s future, and tense or hostile relations with the priestly establishment in Jerusalem.”[9]

In his final chapter, Meier also clears the field of dubious claims made about Jesus with brief treatments of the Samaritans, the scribes, the Herodians and the Zealots. He provides a helpful overview of the Samaritans, an offshoot of the ancient Israelite religion never absorbed by the Jerusalem Temple, but concludes that Jesus had little interaction with them. He analyzes the role of scribes in 1^st-century Palestinian society, but dismisses the impression created by the Gospel of Mark that these functionaries constituted a coherent interest group that opposed Jesus. Scribes, he says, were an occupational category that cut across all political and religious groups. The mysterious “Herodians,” referred to only fleetingly in Mark, probably referred to the officials, servants and partisans of Herod Antipas. Although they undoubtedly monitored Jesus’ activities, the incidents recounted in Mark probably were not historical. Finally, Meier dismisses the possibility that Jesus had any interaction with the Zealots, the militant revolutionaries who played a major role in the 66 A.D. revolt against Rome. The Zealots simply did not exist as an organized force in 30 C.E.

Meier’s conclusions regarding Jesus’ competitors come across as measured and reasonable. In contrast to many scholars, Meier does not force his evidence into a preconceived framework. Rather than build elaborate, speculative hypotheses, he commendably keeps his conclusions modest and restrained. But, as with his analysis of Jesus’ companions, one cannot help but be struck by his oversights. Arguably, Jesus’ most potent competitors were not the ill-defined political-religious sects such as Pharisees and Sadducees – they were the high priests of the Temple cult who instigated his execution. United by their loyalty to the Temple cult, which would have overridden any legal or doctrinal differences between Pharisees and Sadducees, the priests would have perceived the popular, charismatic figure of Jesus as threatening to their legitimacy and disruptive to public order. Jesus prophesied the destruction of the Temple and disrupted the transaction of Temple commerce, or at least the Gospels indicate that he did. Likewise, the high priests Caiaphas and Annas arrested Jesus, interrogated him and pressed for his crucifixion. The omission of the high priests in Companions and Competitors is so glaring that we can only hope that Meier has deferred discussion of Temple priesthood until his fourth volume, when he proposes to address the critical issue of why Jesus’ life ended as it did, “namely, by crucifixion at the hands of the Roman prefect on the charge of being the King of the Jews.”

Finally, one other group is conspicuous by its absence: the gentiles. If we seek to define Jesus in terms of his relationship to other groups, should we not examine his interaction with gentiles as well as his fellow Judeans? The Gospels recount several incidents in which Jesus expresses indifference or even contempt towards the Greek-speaking pagans living in the environs of Galilee — accounts which, given the desire of the early church to appeal to Gentiles, would have survived in narrative form only if they were substantively true. Surely, it would illuminate the nature of Jesus’ ministry to establish the extent to which Jesus shared the ethnic prejudices of his fellow Judeans and excluded Gentiles from his mission.

As a reviewer who sympathizes with Meier’s portrait of Jesus as an eschatological prophet in the tradition of Elijah, I do not mean to be harshly critical. Companions and Competitors represents solid, learned scholarship and introduces some novel perspectives. But, as one of the deans of New Testament scholarship, Meier has set the highest expectations for his work. I had hoped to see him lay utter waste to the views of those who see Jesus as having an earthly, reformist agenda. I’ll have to settle, it seems, for hoping that he will complete the task in Vol. 4.

— Jan. 2, 2002

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[1] Among his like-minded companions, Meier cites Geza Vermes, E.P. Sanders, Dale C. Alison, Bart D. Ehrman, Paula Frediksen, Bruce Chilton, Jurgen Becker, N.T. Wright and Jacques Schlosser. Among his competitors, he includes John Dominic Crossan, Burton Mack and Robert W. Funk.

[2] These include the toll-collector Levi; a hemorrhaging woman who had spent her wealth on many doctors; Jairus, ruler of the synagogue; a centurion in the employ of Herod; Zacchaeus, a rich Jericho toll collector; a woman who anointed him with ointment worth the annual wages of a day laborer; and various householders who hosted him and his disciples at festive meals.

[3] Companions and Competitors, p. 52

[4] Companions and Competitors, p. 142

[5] Companions and Competitors, p. 250

[6] Companions and Competitors, p. 339

[7] Companions and Competitors, p. 395

[8] Companions and Competitors, p. 443.

[9] Companions and Competitors, p. 532

Louis H. Feldman, Princeton University Press; 1993

by James A. Bacon

Louis Feldman commences his book with a simple question: If the Jews were as widely hated in antiquity as many scholars have insisted, how did they win over so many sympathizers and proselytes? The answer, he suggests, is that they weren’t as despised as is commonly held. Rejecting what he terms the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” as a narration of unending suffering,[1] Feldman maintains that the Jews in the ancient world were strong, self-confident and growing in numbers and influence.

At the time of the Babylonian exile in 586 B.C.E., Feldman says, the Jews numbered only 150,000 people huddled in a tiny homeland centered on Jerusalem. By the mid-1^st century of the Common Era, they had grown to eight million in a diaspora stretching from the Euphrates to Rome – an extraordinary demographic feat not likely accomplished through natural increase alone. Despite sanguinary revolts in the 1^st and 2^nd centuries C.E. in Egypt and the Land of Israel, the Roman emperors extended strong protections to the Jews, forming, in effect, a vertical alliance with one of the most populous peoples of the empire. Although intellectuals such as Apion wrote vicious polemics against Judaism, other writers found much to admire in the religion. And, although the Jews inspired enmity in certain quarters, they won many adherents in others. Gentiles became God-fearers and converts in significant numbers.

Jew & Gentile in the Ancient World spans nearly 1,000 years, from Alexander the Great to the early Byzantine Empire, but it is useful nonetheless to students of the Historic Jesus and late Second Temple Judaism. Feldman emphasizes perspectives that are typically underplayed in scholarship of the era. First, despite the restiveness of the inhabitants of the Land of Israel, from a Mediterranean-wide perspective, the Jews were a favored people. Augustus Caesar had granted them significant corporate privileges – exemption from participation in imperial and municipal religions, exemption from serving in the military, the right to transmit specie to the Temple in Jerusalem, and the right to judge themselves by their own laws – which subsequent emperors honored with only brief and episodic interruption. Furthermore, as Feldman notes, Herod the Great and his progeny enjoyed tremendous clout in the imperial court. The Jews frequently prevailed against Greek petitioners and local Roman officials in their appeals to the legate in Syria and the emperor in Rome.

Secondly, Judaism in Second Temple era was a missionary religion. The success of the Jews in Rome prompted the authorities to expel them twice, although the Jews returned each time seemingly stronger than before. A Jewish merchant converted the monarchs of Adiabene, a kingdom in the marchlands between the Roman and Persian empires. And abundant evidence in the literary and epigraphic record indicates that the Jews drew to their synagogues numerous sympathizers and converts in cities throughout the Diaspora.

Of Feldman’s main conclusions, his insistence that Jews in antiquity aggressively sought converts in the Second Temple era is one of the more controversial. At least two scholars – Scot McKnight and Martin Goodman — had recently taken the position that Judaism was not a missionary religion. As Feldman frames the key issues, “Was Judaism in the Hellenistic-Roman period (from Alexander the Great to Bar Kochba [336 B.C.E.-135 C.E.] a missionary religion? And … if it was, how can we explain this fact when we neither know the names of any Jewish missionaries (other than a few who preached the Gospel) nor possess, as it seems, a single missionary tract?”

Although Jewish authors do not write overtly of converting gentiles, Feldman contends, a missionary orientation is implicit in many statements. Philo, in one of many examples he cites, declared in De Vita Moses that Jewish institutions had gained the attention of all, Greeks and barbarians alike, in the cities of Europe and Asia. Aristeas spoke of showing liberal charity to opponents of the Jews “so that in this manner we may lead them to change.”[2] Taking pride in the spread of Judaism, Josephus boasted that there was not a single city or nation to which it had not spread. Citing other examples in the Sybilline Oracles, 2^nd Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Testament of Joseph, Feldman demonstrates that some Jews felt an impulse to share the “light of the Law” with the gentiles.

Given the vast scope of Jewish literature, the explicit evidence Feldman finds is surprisingly scant. But he finds much stronger proof from gentile writers, especially those who resented the Jews’ success. The satirist Horace referred to the missionary proclivity of the Jews who “shall force you to join our throng.” Seneca the philosopher observed bitterly of the Jews, “The vanquished have given their laws to the victors.” The historian Tacitus criticized the proselytes of Judaism who were taught “to despise the gods, to disown their country, and to regard their parents, children and brothers of little account.” And Juvenal lambasted those who sympathized with the Jews, revering the Sabbath, avoiding pork, undergoing circumcision and observing all their laws.[3] These were not isolated observations. The authorities twice expelled the Jews from Rome, in 139 B.C.E. for “attempting to transmit their sacred rites to the Romans,” and in 19 C.E. for “converting many of the natives to their ways.”[4]

Unlike Christians, who sought complete conversions, the Jews apparently accommodated a spectrum of associations. Sympathizers, or “God fearers,” worshiped the Jewish deity – perhaps as one among many gods — and adopted specific Jewish customs such as observance of the Sabbath or abstention from pork. Proselytes embraced the rites and laws of Judaism fully, going so far as to getting circumcised.

Many scholars suppose that Jewish proselytizing ceased after the destruction of the crushing defeats of the Jewish revolts in Egypt culminating with the Bar Kokhba Rebellion. Presumably, hatred of the Jews drove them into isolation. With Christianity ascendant, the Jews looked inward and kept to themselves.

But Feldman finds no evidence to support the notion of Jewish decline. To the contrary, repeated imperial decrees banning Jewish proselytizing and repeated denunciations by Christian authorities from 200 C.E. onward demonstrate the Jews continued to attract many admirers and converts. Indeed, the elimination of an autonomous Jewish state in the Land of Israel probably made it easier for gentiles to convert, Feldman suggests, for proselytes could adhere to Judaism without any conflict in loyalty to the Roman government.

On the whole, Feldman builds a convincing case. The cumulative weight of literary and archaeological evidence over the centuries appears overwhelming. Indeed, Feldman succeeds despite ignoring the most compelling body of evidence of all – the early Christian writings. Although he briefly acknowledges that Christian missionaries such as Peter, Paul and Barnabas were Jews, he treats Christianity as a movement opposed to Judaism. Yet, as most Christian and Jewish scholars alike have emphasized for some time now, Christianity originated as a Jewish messianic movement within the Land of Israel and spread first to the Jewish Diaspora. The missionary impulse apparently did not come from Jesus, who took his message of salvation only to Jews in Land of Israel, specifically excluding gentiles and Samaritans. If the urge to win converts did not start with Jesus, then, where then did it originate? Surely, missionary activity was something that many Jews already engaged in or, at least, found to be a natural extension of their beliefs. New Testament scholars have suggested that the early Christians associated conversion of the gentiles with the onset of the messianic era in fulfillment of scripture. Feldman might have benefited from asking whether asking whether Jewish missionary activity also displayed a messianic component.

Another significant flaw in Feldman’s book is his naive treatment of demographic data. A fundamental assumption in Jew & Gentile is that natural increase alone could not have accounted for the phenomenal increase in the Jewish population – from an estimated 150,000 to 8 million — over the Second Temple era. But, in fact, it could have. As Feldman acknowledges, Jewish law and custom promoted childbearing. Jewish women married at a young age and immediately began having children. Assuming fertility rates were comparable to those of Third World societies today, the natural rate of population increase could well have exceeded two percent. Growing at the rate of 2 percent annually over 600 years, 150,000 Jews would have become 21 billion Jews. Even after allowing for abundant slaughter and mayhem during the Maccabean revolt, the wars of the Hasmonaean kings and the civil wars preceding Herod the Great, and accounting for the periodic mass starvations due to famine, it’s not implausible to think that the Jews could have reached a population of 8 million without converting a single gentile.

Yet the fact remains that Jews did convert gentiles and win over many sympathizers, as Feldman amply demonstrates. Given the demographic realities and the success of the Jews in winning converts, an interesting question arises: Why were there only 8 million Jews by the end of the Second Temple era? The demographic devastation wrought by war, famine and pestilence must have been horrendous. But that’s an issue far removed from Feldman’s study.

Despite the drawbacks noted here, Feldman successfully challenges the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history in antiquity as a chronicle of never-ending suffering and persecution. Far from being pitiful and powerless in the Greco-Roman era, the Jews were one of the great races of the ancient world — not only in terms of cultural accomplishment but in their vast numbers. Over the centuries, the Roman rulers made accommodations to the power and influence of the Jews in their midst. For students of the New Testament, the spread of Christianity must be examined afresh in the context of a strong, confident, expanding and missionizing Judaism.

Oct. 5, 2000

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[1] Jew & Gentile; xi

[2] Jew & Gentile, p. 294

[3] Jew & Gentile, ps. 299-300

[4] Jew & Gentile, p. 301-302