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.
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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.
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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.
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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 1st 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 1st 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