The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (28 page)

One of the most important references to Jesus in the Babylonian Talmud states:

On the eve of Passover they hanged Jesus the Nazarene. And a herald went out before him for forty days, saying: “He is going to be stoned, because he practiced sorcery and enticed and led Israel astray. Anyone who knows anything in his favor, let him come and plead in his behalf.” But, not having found anything in his favor, they hanged him on the eve of Passover.
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The passage is important for several reasons. First, it is identified as a
baraita
, a tradition that arose during the Tannaitic Period (AD 70–200). Thus the reference probably preserves a tradition that is earlier than many of the other references to Jesus in the Talmud. Second, the passage probably emphasized a 40-day waiting period before Jesus' execution in response to Christian claims that the Jewish leaders did not follow proper procedures in the rushed hearings that led to Jesus' condemnation. Third, the execution of Jesus on the eve of the Passover fits with the chronology of Jesus' passion in the Gospel of John (John 18–19).

The Babylonian Talmud also contains one clear and one probable reference to Jesus' resurrection. One manuscript of the Talmud states: “He then went and raised Jesus by incantation.”
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Another text says: “Woe to him who makes himself alive by the name of God.”
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Several texts also refer to disciples of Jesus miraculously healing others in Jesus' name. They forbade Jews to heal or to receive healing in Jesus' name.
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Several conclusions can be drawn from these rabbinic references. First, Jesus of Nazareth is not a myth or a legend. He was an actual historical person. As R. T. France noted:

Uncomplimentary as it is, this is at least, in a distorted way, evidence for the impact Jesus' miracles and teaching made. The conclusion that it is entirely dependent on Christian claims, and that “Jews in the second century adopted uncritically the Christian assumption that he had really lived” is surely only dictated by a dogmatic skepticism. Such polemic, often using “facts” quite distinct from what Christians believed, is hardly likely to have arisen within less than a century around a non-existent figure.
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Second, Jesus performed works that could only be described as supernatural feats. It is significant that the rabbinic literature does not deny Jesus' resurrection, his miracles, or the healings performed in Jesus' name. Instead, the literature ascribes such events to
magic or sorcery. These charges are identical to Jewish claims in the second and early third centuries preserved in the writings of early church fathers such as Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165) and Origen (c. 185–c. 254).
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This strategy for dismissing the implications of Jesus' supernatural works suggests that both Christians and Jewish opponents of the second century recognized that no one could reasonably dispute Jesus' miracles. The evidence for these acts was simply too compelling.

Instead, opponents of Christianity in the second century continued the strategy of Jesus' earlier opponents (Matt 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15; John 10:19–21) and ascribed his miracles to Satan's power that he obtained through magic or sorcery. The admission in non-Christian sources that Jesus performed supernatural works constitutes convincing evidence not only for Jesus' historical existence but also for the historicity of his miracle-working ministry. Although the rabbinic testimony is questionable and clearly is often the imaginative creation of opponents of the Christian faith, the core of the descriptions of Jesus in the NT Gospels is confirmed by this rabbinic testimony.

References to Jesus by Roman Writers

Pagan writers generally showed little interest in Jesus of Nazareth. In a world teeming with a multitude of religions, Christianity and its founder were viewed as just another bizarre faith hardly worthy of mention. However, two Roman historians, a political official, a chronicler, a satirist, and a father referred to Jesus in their writings.

The Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56–after 113) wrote his
Annals
in the early second century. His work originally covered the history of Rome (AD 14–68). Unfortunately, some of the books of the
Annals
have been lost, including the section discussing the years 29–32. Thus, if Jesus had been crucified in the year 30 as many believe, the very section that may have described these events is no longer extant.
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But Tacitus did discuss the great fire of Rome that Nero blamed on the Christians to divert attention away from his own involvement in the arson. He wrote:

Therefore, to squelch the rumor, Nero created scapegoats and subjected to the most refined tortures those whom the common people called “Christians,” [a group] hated for their abominable crimes. Their name comes from Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Suppressed for the moment, the deadly superstition broke out again, not only in Judea, the land which originated this evil, but also in the city of Rome, where all sorts of horrendous and shameful practices of every part of the world converge and are fervently cultivated (
Annals
15.44).

The passage gives a far too negative depiction of Christianity to have come from the pen of a Christian scribe. Moreover, all the manuscripts of the
Annals
contain it. Thus the passage is clearly authentic. Tacitus's statement comports with the claim of the Gospels that Jesus was executed during the reign of Tiberius (14–37) and the governorship of Pontius Pilate (26–36). Although it is possible that Tacitus derived his information regarding Jesus from Josephus, important differences between the accounts in Tacitus and Josephus suggest that Tacitus was dependent on another source. For example, although Josephus identified the founder of the tribe of Christians as Jesus, Tacitus identified him as “Chrestus” and evidently misunderstood the title “Christ” as a proper name. Tacitus may have derived his information from common knowledge about Christians in the second-century Roman world or from the Roman archives.

Another Roman historian who referred to Jesus was Suetonius (c. 120), who reported that “Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome who, instigated by Chrestus, never ceased to cause unrest.”
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This expulsion is probably the expulsion of the year 49 mentioned in Acts 18:2. Suetonius seems to have confused the name “Chrestus” (a name common among Roman slaves) with “Christus,” a messianic title with which he was unfamiliar. Suetonius also assumed that Jesus was alive and in Rome at the time of the expulsion. He probably made this assumption because it was unusual for people to have the kind of devotion for a dead or distant figure that Christians in mid-first-century Rome expressed to Christ. The unrest to which Suetonius referred was likely tension between Jews and Jewish Christians over the claims of the Christian gospel.

In a letter to his son that compared Socrates, Pythagoras, and Jesus, Mara bar Serapion (c. AD 73) asked, “For what advantage did…the Jews gain by the death of their wise king?” The letter added that it was just after the execution of their wise king that the kingdom of the Jews was abolished and they were ruined and driven from their land. The letter also claimed, “Nor did the wise king die for good; he lived on in the teaching he had given.” The letter describes the execution of Jesus at the instigation of the Jews some time not long before the fall of Jerusalem.

In a letter to the Emperor Trajan, Pliny the Younger (c. 110), proconsul of the province of Bithynia in Asia Minor, sought the emperor's approval of his handling of Christians. He mentioned that Christians gathered before dawn on a particular day to chant hymns “to Christ as to a god” and to partake of a meal together (
Ep
. 10.96).

Although his work is no longer extant, Thallus, who wrote a history of the eastern Mediterranean world around AD 52, was quoted by Julius Africanus (c. 230) as claiming that the darkness that accompanied Jesus' crucifixion was related to an eclipse of the sun. Africanus dismissed Thallus's explanation since Passover occurs at the time of the full moon and a solar eclipse at this time is impossible.
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Assuming that Africanus represented
his source accurately, Thallus offered early independent verification of the phenomenon of darkness during Jesus' Crucifixion.

Finally, Lucian of Samosata (c. 115–200) wrote a satire titled
The Passing of Peregrinus
, an account about a Christian convert who eventually abandoned the Christian faith. The satire refers to Christians' worshipping “the man who was impaled in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world.” Lucian later described Christians as “worshipping that crucified sophist himself and living under his laws.”
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The references acknowledge Jesus' death by crucifixion, his Palestinian origin, and his founding of a new faith.
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Some scholars see these descriptions of Jesus in Roman writings as offering little help for understanding Jesus of Nazareth or confirming NT accounts. In general, these accounts seem to reflect secondhand knowledge about Christ that could have been derived from the Gospels, opponents of Christianity, or contemporary Christians. However, at the very least these references demonstrate that Jesus was widely regarded by Romans as a historical person who espoused controversial teachings and was executed by Crucifixion.

Summary

The early non-Christian references to Jesus should be regarded as testimony about Jesus from hostile witnesses. Nevertheless, and significantly, this testimony at some points confirms the accounts of Jesus' life penned by his own followers. These corroborating testimonies offer strong evidence for the historicity of the general contours of Jesus' life as described in the NT. Although the non-Christian references add nothing new to the knowledge about Jesus gleaned from the Gospels, they do verify the NT at important points.

THE QUESTS OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Prior to the rise of the Enlightenment—during the “precritical” era—historical-grammatical research dominated the study of Jesus. It was widely assumed that the Jesus presented in the Bible was the man who lived and died—and rose—in Palestine in the first century. Thus to study Jesus was to study what
the Bible
had to say about Jesus. But the intellectual climate of the late 1700s set in motion a series of movements that called this approach to the study of Jesus into question, launching what is widely termed “the Quests of the Historical Jesus.” This post-Enlightenment quest, which unfolded in a series of successive quests, was characterized by four basic configurations.
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The First Quest

The first quest (1778–1906) was spawned by the posthumous publication of H. S. Reimarus's book released serially as
The Wolfenbüttel Fragments
.
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Reimarus disputed the connection between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” He proposed a radically different Jesus who was nothing but a Jewish revolutionary but who was made by the apostles the centerpiece of their new religion, “Christianity.”
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The firestorm ensuing from the publication of this book set off a whole series of books carrying the title “Life of Jesus,” the most infamous being D. F. Strauss's
Das Leben Jesu
(German for “The Life of Jesus”).
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Virtually all of the early exemplars of the first quest endeavored to show that Christianity stood in contradiction to historical reality and sought to introduce a new freedom for humanity.
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Later works of the first quest typically propagated a Jesus who in essence constituted an expression of Protestant liberal theology.
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Liberal theology, which was rooted in deism, advocated a religion that derived from reason alone. Such a theology, in turn, of necessity entailed an antisupernatural bias.

According to this kind of “enlightened” mind-set, miracles simply did not happen. Therefore, the Gospels, which were thoroughly infused with the miraculous, must be stripped of their miraculous content in order to make them palatable to a more “reasonable” approach to interpretation. This mind-set then gave birth to various historical-critical methodologies. One such method was source criticism through which biblical scholars hoped to be able to determine the earliest stratum of Gospel material. This was done in an effort to discover the “historical Jesus”—who he really was before the early church transformed him into a figment of its own imagination, the “Christ of faith.”
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The inevitable result of the first quest was that Jesus looked more like the questers themselves than the first-century Jew Jesus was. According to many of these first questers, Jesus taught the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, promulgated the ethics of the kingdom, and died a death that was exemplary in its self-giving, sacrificial nature
rather than truly redemptive. Thus for first questers, the challenge was not to have faith
in
Jesus as much as it was to recover the faith
of
Jesus.
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The Abandoned Quest

The first quest came to an end in the first decade of the twentieth century. A series of works sent Jesus scholars looking in different directions. The chief among these was A. Schweitzer's
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
.
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This period is commonly called “the Abandoned Quest” (1906–1953). According to these scholars, many of whom were existentialists, virtually nothing of the Jesus of history could be known. But this was not an important loss since it was not the “Jesus of history” but the “Christ of faith” who had impacted the world.
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As a result, virtually no important “life of Jesus” was written from the 1900s through the 1950s.
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Thus the Jesus of history became largely irrelevant to theological inquiry. Instead, scholars employed form criticism in order to investigate the early church that had preserved and adapted the stories of Jesus. For figures such as R. Bultmann, the important task was to demythologize the early church's stories about Jesus in order to isolate the kernel of truth they contained for Christian faith. As Tatum aptly summed up, for Bultmann a “faith which needed the external props of historical research into the life of Jesus was simply not faith. To Bultmann, therefore, both the nature of the Gospels and the nature of faith made the writing of a life of Jesus impossible and illegitimate.”
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