THE HISTORICITY
OF JESUS
Chapter 18
|
J |
ournalist
Louis Cassels wrote in 1973:
You can count on it. Every few years, some
"scholar" will stir up a short-lived sensation by publishing a book
that says something outlandish about Jesus...
The amazing thing about all these debunk-Jesus
books is that they accept as much of the recorded Gospels as they find
convenient, then ignore or repudiate other parts of the same document which
contradict their notions.
Why Not More First Century Non-Christian References to Christ?
Recently we received a letter from an individual who wrote, "I'm an almost believer, but I do not wish to believe on blind faith.... Can you document for me nonbiblical historical accounts of the resurrection of Christ?"
One correspondent with Professor F. F. Bruce, former
Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of
Manchester, posed the question a little more broadly:
What collateral proof is there in
existence of the historical fact of the life of Jesus Christ?
Should we in
fact expect the secular history records of
Jesus' day to have preserved any mention of the life of Jesus, and if so, what kind of references should we expect?
What About Reports
from Pilate?
If the Bible accurately
portrays the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, wouldn't Pontius Pilate, of
all people, have made some reports about it? Bruce answers:
People frequently ask if any record has been
preserved of the report which, it is presumed, Pontius Pilate, prefect of
Judea, sent to Rome concerning the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth.
The answer is none. But let it be added at once that no official record has
been preserved of any report which
Pontius Pilate, or any other Roman
governor of Judea, sent to Rome about anything.
And only rarely has an official report from any governor of any Roman
province survived. They may have sent in their reports regularly, but for the
most part these reports were ephemeral documents, and in due course they
disappeared.
It is interesting that even though today we have no reports about anything from Pilate or any other Roman governor of Judea, the early Christians apparently knew about Pilate's records concerning Jesus. Justin Martyr, writing in approximately A.D. 150, informs emperor Antoninus Pius of the fulfillment of Psalm 22:16:
But the words, "They pierced my hands and
feet," refer to the nails which were fixed in Jesus' hands and feet on the
cross; and after He was crucified, His executioners cast lots for His garments,
and divided them among themselves. That these things happened you may learn
from the "Acts" which were recorded under Pontius Pilate.
Justin
also says:
That He performed these miracles you may easily
satisfy yourself from the "Acts" of Pontius Pilate..
Bruce
continues:
Similarly both Justin and Tertullian, another
Christian apologist of a generation or two later, were sure that the census
which was held about the time of our Lord's birth was recorded in the official
archives of the reign of Augustus, and that anyone who took the trouble to look
these archives up would find the registration of Joseph and Mary there.
Justin's statement is a bold one if in fact no record existed. Can you imagine a respected scholar writing
the President of the United States a letter, which he knows will be carefully
scrutinized, and building his case on official federal documents which do not
exist? It did, however, apparently bother fourth century Christians that this
record was not available in their day. An obviously forged "Acts of Pilate"
was manufactured at that time. One indication of its falsity: It was addressed
to Claudius even though Tiberias was emperor when Pilate governed Judea.
But why would someone in the fourth century want to forge
a document from the first century? Aside from a warped view of what the
Scriptures taught about honesty, part of the reason lies in the fact that first century documents were quite rare.
Just how much survived?
How much nonbiblical material on any subject
actually survived from the first century? And of that material, in what parts
would we expect to find references to Jesus? Again, Bruce relates:
When we are asked what "collateral proof'
exists of the life of Jesus Christ, would it be unfair to begin by asking
another question? In which contemporary writers -in which writers who
flourished, say, during the first fifty years after the death of Christ -would
you expect to find the collateral evidence you are looking for? Well, perhaps
it would be rather unfair, as the man in the street can hardly be expected to
know who was writing in the Graeco-Roman world during those fifty years; the
classical student himself has to scratch his head in an attempt to remember who
they were. It is surprising how few writings, comparatively speaking, have
survived from those years of a kind which might be even remotely expected to
mention Christ. (I except, for the present, the letters of Paul and several
other New Testament writings.)
One prolific writer and contemporary of Jesus was Philo. He was born circa 15 B.C. and lived in Alexandria, Egypt, until his death sometime after A.D. 40 His works consist primarily of philosophy and commentary on Jewish Scripture and religion as they relate to Greek culture and philosophy. His family was one of the wealthiest in Alexandria. A reading of the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on Philo will readily confirm Daniel-Rop's conclusion: "It is not unduly surprising that such a person should not pay much attention to an agitator sprung from the humblest of the people, whose doctrine, if he had one, had no connection with philosophy."
E. M. Blaiklock has catalogued the non-Christian
writings of the Roman Empire (other than those of Philo) which have survived
the first century and which do not mention Jesus. As you will see from our
summary of Blaiklock in the following paragraphs, there is very little.
From the decade of the thirties practically nothing
has survived. Velleius Paterculus, a retired army officer of Tiberias,
published what was considered an amateurish history of Rome in A.D. 30. Only
part of it has survived. Jesus was just beginning His ministry. Considering the
time of the writing, and especially the segregation between Jewish and Roman
towns in Galilee, it is unlikely that Paterculus ever even heard of Jesus. The
Gospel writers give no evidence that Jesus ever set foot in Tiberias or any
other Roman town in Galilee. Also surviving from the thirties is an inscription
of Caesarea bearing two-thirds of Pilate's name.
All that is left from the forties are the fables
written by Phaedrus, a Macedonian freedman.
Of the fifties and sixties, Blaiklock says:
Bookends set a foot apart on this desk where I
write would enclose the works from
those significant years. Curiously, much of it comes from Spanish emigrants in
Rome, a foretaste of what the Iberian peninsula was to give to her conqueror-
senators, writers, and two important emperors, Trajan and Hadrian. Paul had
foresight when he set a visit to Spain in his program.
The works of this period include the philosophical
treatises and letters of Roman statesman, writer and tutor of Nero, Seneca; the
long poem of his nephew Lucan on the civil
war between Julius Caesar and Pompey; a book on agriculture by the retired
soldier, Columella; and large fragments of the novel Satyricon by the voluptuary, Gaius Petronius. Also surviving from
this period are a few hundred lines of Roman satirist, Persius; the Elder
Pliny's Historia Naturalis ("a
collection of odd facts about the world of nature"); some fragments of
Asconius Pedianus' commentary on Cicero; and the history of Alexander the Great
by the little known Quintus Curtius. Blaiklock
asks:
Of this handful of writers, would any have been
likely to mention Christ? Perhaps Seneca, if in fact he met and talked with
Paul. But there is small likelihood that this pleasant medieval legend is true.
Besides, in A.D. 64, in the summer of which year Nero took hostile note of
Rome's Christians, Seneca was a distracted and tormented man. A year later he
was dead, driven to suicide by the mad young tyrant whom he had sought in vain
to tame.
Check the works of the seventies and eighties to see if they might be candidates for mentioning a Jewish religious rabble-rouser now dead for forty years: Tacitus, who would become a great historian, published a minor work on oratory in A.D. 81. Several hundred witty poems or epigrams written by Martial in Rome survive but do not clearly mention the Christians. After Nero's mass killing of Christians in A.D. 64, it is no wonder that few Christians wanted to remain in Rome.
Josephus wrote during this period, and we will look
at his comments about Jesus shortly. Two of his works, for good reasons, do not
mention Jesus: Against Apion, an apologetic
work contrasting the Jewish faith with Greek thought, and Wars of the Jews, a general history of the
Jewish Wars from the time of the Maccabees to A.D. 70. A reading of both works
is enough to show that any reference to Jesus in either one would have been out
of place.
In the nineties, the poet Statius published Silvae, Quintilian published twelve
books on oratory and Tacitus published two small books, one a monograph of his
father-in-law, Agricola, and the other a monograph about what is now Germany.
The subject matter of none of these would be expected to include anything about
Jesus. Juvenal began his writings of satire just prior to the turn of the
century. He does not mention the Christians. This again is not surprising. They
were outlawed in Rome and therefore had to keep out of sight. A writer always
increases his popularity by poking fun at those in the limelight rather than at
those whom nobody knows.
There were, in addition, some writings from Qumran in
the first century. Again, it is no big surprise - but expected - that they fail
to mention Jesus. F. F. Bruce observes:
The Qumran community withdrew as far as possible
from public life and lived in its wilderness retreat; Jesus carried on His
ministry in places where people lived and worked, mixing with all sorts and
conditions, and by preference (it appears) with men and women whose society
pious men like those of Qumran would rather avoid. And, more important still,
practically all the Qumran texts dealing with religious topics (so far as they
have been published to date) are assigned on paleographical grounds to the
pre-Christian decades.
When you consider the quantity and content of
first-century writings which have survived, you can understand why we do not
possess more non-Christian references to Jesus. R. T. France puts it this way:
From the point of view of Roman history of the
first century, Jesus was a nobody. A man of no social standing, who achieved
brief local notice in a remote and little-loved province as a preacher and
miracle-worker, and who was duly executed by order of a minor provincial
governor, could hardly be expected to achieve mention in the Roman headlines.
Some first-century works which did not survive
almost certainly did not contain any references to Jesus. The one work with the
best opportunity of mentioning Jesus but which apparently did not was the Chronicle by Justus of Tiberias. He was
born at about the time Jesus died. Photius, in the ninth century, comments that
his silence was due to his non-Christian bias as a Jew. When a writer of
antiquity sought to discredit someone, he often used the common device of not
mentioning him. As a result, his memory would not be preserved. In some areas
of the Middle East, especially in Egypt, new rulers commonly attempted to erase
all evidence of a previous ruler's existence by destroying all inscriptions and
writings about him. Whether Justus consciously chose to ignore Jesus of
Nazareth is impossible to tell since his work can't be analyzed. Living in
Tiberias may have colored what he viewed as important. He may also have ignored
Jesus along with a host of other messianic pretenders common in that day.
So one reason it is surprising that we have any
non-Christian references to Jesus in the first century at all is that not much
about anything of that day has survived to the present time. What did survive
indicates the writers would not have known about or been interested in the
person of Jesus.
What News Was Hot?
If the biblical description of Jesus' activities is
accurate, wouldn't Jesus have attracted sufficient attention to be mentioned in
first century writings? Aside from what was said above, we can also agree with
G. A. Wells when he says, "Today Christianity has been so important for so
long that one is apt to assume that it must have appeared important to educated
pagans who lived A.D. 50-150."
The journalists of the first century, at least those
whose works have been preserved to the present day, indicated they were
concerned about such things as the major political events of the day. Read
through portions of the works of Tacitus, Suetonius, even Josephus and others
of that time period, and you will notice very quickly that they concerned
themselves almost completely with the major political and international events
of the day. When it came to religious events, only those which had bearing on
the 46 more important" national and international affairs were mentioned.
A perfect example is Acts 25:19 where Festus, one of
the closest political figures to the events of first-century Christianity,
says, in speaking of the Jews and Paul, "They simply had some points of
disagreement with him about their own religion and about a certain dead man,
Jesus, whom Paul asserted to be alive." What Luke preserves here is the
relatively small degree of importance which ruling officials attached to the
religious events in first-century Palestine, at least those which seemed to
have no political consequences. As a result, we ought to expect that the
secular press of the day in Rome concerned itself more with the Roman attempts
to protect its borders than with what was considered to be minor disagreements
about religion. As France puts it:
Galilee and Judaea were at the time two minor
administrative areas under the large Roman province of Syria, itself on the far
eastern frontier of the empire. The Jews, among whom Jesus lived and died, were
a strange, remote people, little understood and little liked by most Europeans
of the time, more often the butt of Roman humor than of serious interest. Major
events of Jewish history find their echo in the histories of the period, but
was the life of Jesus, from the Roman point of view, a major event? The death
of a failed Jewish insurrectionary leader was a common enough occurrence, and
religious preachers were two a penny in that part of the empire, a matter of
curiosity, but hardly of real interest, to civilized Romans. 29/20
There is another factor which pushes Christianity
even further down the list of priorities in terms of hot news items. More
conflicts are recorded in the Gospels between Jesus and the Pharisees than
between Jesus and any other group of people, yet increasing discoveries reveal
that Jesus' teaching was closer in content to at least one of the schools of
the Pharisees than to any other group in Israel at that time. We may therefore
reasonably conclude that even a major confrontation between Jesus and the
Pharisees probably was only a meaningless religious squabble to any first-century
historian -including Josephus.
Was Christianity a hot news item in the first century? For Christians it was -but for those in government and for the press, not really.
Is Absence of
Evidence Evidence of Absence?
No one denies that the Christian church existed in
the first century. Scholars recognize that even though Christianity did not
attract much attention from first-century writers, it still would be impossible
to deny its existence. Some scholars, therefore, are inconsistent when they
argue for the lack of historicity of Jesus. As France brings out:
Those who suspect the historicity of the Jesus of
the Gospels on the grounds that there are so few early non-Christian references
to Him, must surely, by the same argument, be even more skeptical as to whether
the Christian church existed in the first century. But not even George Wells
wishes to deny this! As has so often been noted, absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence.
In view of what has been discussed in this chapter, consider two questions: (1) What kind of reference to Jesus by a non-Christian would need to exist to incontrovertibly prove His existence? (2) Is it likely that any such reference survives today?
An incontrovertible reference to Jesus would first
of all have to be from an eyewitness. But outside of Christian testimony, no
surviving historical literature could even be expected to contain eyewitness
references to Him. So the modern historian must seek non-Christian evidence for
Jesus the same way he does for every other person of antiquity who was
considered insignificant by the authorities of his day. He must analyze the
credibility of secondhand reports.
Combine secondhand reports of Jesus (both
non-Christian and Christian) with the eyewitness accounts recorded in the
Gospels, and you will find that Jesus compares extremely favorably with other
people in history whose historicity is not doubted. Professor of Philosophy and
Religion at Liberty University, Gary Habermas, states concerning Jesus:
We can perceive all the more how groundless the
speculations are which deny His existence or which postulate only a minimal
amount of facts concerning Him. Much of ancient history is based on many fewer
sources which are much later than the events which they record.... While some
believe that we know almost nothing about Jesus from ancient, non-New Testament
sources, this plainly is not the case. Not only are there many such sources,
but Jesus is one of the persons of ancient history concerning whom we have a
significant amount of quality data. His is one of the most-mentioned and
most-substantiated lives in ancient times.
Blaiklock
adds:
Historians would be glad to have authentic,
multiple, congruent evidence on more personalities and events of ancient
history.
Early Non-Christian
References to Jesus
Ancient Secular Writers
CORNELIUS TACITUS (born A.D. 52-54)
A
Roman historian, in A.D. 112, Governor of
Asia, son-in-law of Julius
Agricola, who was Governor of Britain
A.D. 80-84. Writing of the reign of Nero, Tacitus alludes to the death of Christ and to the existence of Christians at Rome:
But not all the relief that could come from man, not
all the bounties that the prince could bestow, nor all the atonements which
could be presented to the gods, availed to relieve Nero from the infamy of
being believed to have ordered the conflagration, the fire of Rome. Hence to
suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt, and punished with the
most exquisite tortures, the persons commonly called Christians, who were hated
for their enormities. Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by
Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius: but the
pernicious superstition, repressed for a time broke out again, not only through
Judea, where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also
(Annals, XV. 44).
Tacitus
has a further reference to Christianity in a fragment of his Histories, dealing
with the burning of the Jerusalem
Temple in A.D. 70, preserved by Sulpicius Severus (Chron. ii. 30. 6).
LUCIAN
OF SAMOSATA
A
satirist of the second century, who
spoke scornfully of Christ and the
Christians. He connected them with the synagogues of Palestine and alluded to Christ as
the man who was crucified in Palestine because He
introduced this new cult into the world.... Furthermore, their first lawgiver
persuaded them that they were all brothers one of another after they have
transgressed once for all by denying the Greek gods and by worshipping that
crucified sophist Himself and living under His laws (The Passing Peregrinus).
Lucian also mentions the Christians several times in
his Alexander the False Prophet, sections
25 and 29.
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS (born A.D. 37)
A Jewish historian, became a Pharisee at age 19; in A.D. 66 he was the commander of the Jewish forces in Galilee. After being captured, he was attached to the Roman headquarters. He says in a hotly contested quotation:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if
it be lawful to call Him a man, for He was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher
of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to Him both many
of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ, and when Pilate, at
the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned Him to the cross,
those that loved Him at the first did not forsake Him; for He appeared to them
alive again in the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten
thousand other wonderful things concerning Him. And the tribe of Christians so
named from Him are not extinct at this day (Antiquities,
xviii. 33. [early second
century]).
The
Arabic text of this passage is as
follows:
At this time there was a wise man who was called
Jesus. And His conduct was good, and [He] was known to be virtuous. And many
people from among the Jews and the other nations became His disciples. Pilate
condemned Him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become His
disciples did not abandon His discipleship. They reported that He had appeared
to them three days after His crucifixion and that He was alive; accordingly, He
was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.
The above passage is found in the Arabic manuscript entitled: "Kitab Al-Unwan Al-Mukallal Bi-Fadail Al-Hikma Al-Mutawwaj Bi-Anwa Al-Falsafa Al-Manduh Bi-Haqaq Al-Marifa." The approximate translation would be: "Book of History Guided by All the Virtues of Wisdom. Crowned with Various Philosophies and Blessed by the Truth of Knowledge."
The above manuscript composed by Bishop Agapius in
the tenth century has a section commencing with: "We have found in many
books of the philosophers that they
refer to the day of the crucifixion of Christ." Then he gives a list and
quotes portions of the ancient works. Some of
the works are familiar to modern scholars and others are not.
We also find from Josephus a reference to James the
brother of Jesus. In Antiquities XX 9:1 he describes the
actions of the high priest Ananus:
But the younger Ananus who, as we said, received the high
priesthood, was of a bold disposition and exceptionally daring; he followed the
party of the Sadducees, who are severe in judgment above all the Jews, as we
have already shown. As therefore Ananus was of such a disposition, he thought
he had now a good opportunity, as Festus was now dead, and Albinus was still on
the road; so he assembled a council of judges, and brought before it the
brother of Jesus the so-called Christ, whose name was James, together with some
others, and having accused them as law-breakers, he delivered them over to be
stoned.
SUETONIUS (A.D.120)
Another Roman historian, a court official under
Hadrian, annalist of the Imperial House, Suetonius says: "As the Jews were
making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus [another spelling
of Christus], he expelled them from Rome" (Life of Claudius, 25.4).
He also writes: "Punishment by Nero was
inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and mischievous
superstition" (Lives of the Caesars,
26. 2)
PLINIUS SECUNDUS, PLINY THE YOUNGER
Governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor (A.D. 112), Pliny was writing the emperor Trajan seeking counsel as to how to treat the Christians.
He explained that he had been killing both men and
women, boys and girls. There were so many being put to death that he wondered
if he should continue killing anyone who was discovered to be a Christian, or
if he should kill only certain ones. He explained that he had made the
Christians bow down to the statues of Trajan. He goes on to say that he also
"made them curse Christ, which a genuine Christian cannot be induced to
do." In the same letter he says of the people who were being tried:
They affirmed, however, that the whole of their
guilt, or their error, was that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain
fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to
Christ as to a god, and bound themselves to a solemn oath, not to any wicked
deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, adultery, never to falsify their
word, not to deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up
(Epistles, X. 96).
TERTULLIAN (Regarding Pilate and Tiberius)
Jurist-theologian of Carthage, in a defense of Christianity (A.D. 197) before the Roman authorities in Africa, mentions the exchange between Tiberius and Pontius Pilate:
Tiberius accordingly, in whose days the Christian
name made its entry into the world, having himself received intelligence from
the truth of Christ's divinity, brought the matter before the senate, with his
own decision in favor of Christ. The senate, because it had not given the
approval itself, rejected his proposal. Caesar held to his opinion, threatening
wrath against all the accusers of the Christians (Apology, V.
2).
Some historians doubt the historicity of this passage. Also, cf. Justin Martyr (Apology, 1. 35).
THALLUS, the Samaritan-born historian
One of the first Gentile writers who mentions Christ
is Thallus, who wrote in A.D. 52. However, his writings have disappeared and we
only know of them from fragments cited by other writers. One such writer is
Julius Africanus, a Christian writer about A.D. 221. One very interesting passage
relates to a comment from Thallus. Julius Africanus writes:
"Thallus, in the third book of his histories,
explains away this darkness as an eclipse of the sun -unreasonably, as it seems
to me" (unreasonably, of course, because a solar eclipse could not take
place at the time of the full moon, and it was the season of the Paschal full
moon that Christ died).
Thus, from this reference we see that the Gospel
account of the darkness which fell upon the land during Christ's crucifixion
was well known and required a naturalistic explanation from those non-believers
who witnessed it. 10/113
PHLEGON, a first-century historian
His Chronicles
have been lost, but a small fragment of that work, which confirms the
darkness upon the earth at the crucifixion, is also mentioned by Julius
Africanus. After his (Africanus') remarks about Thallus' unreasonable opinion
of the darkness, he quotes Phlegon that "during the time of Tiberius
Caesar an eclipse of the sun occurred during the full moon." 60/n.p.
Phlegon is also mentioned by Origen in Contra Celsum, Book 2, sections 14, 33,
59.
Philopon [De. opif mund. 11 211 says: "And
about this darkness ... Phlegon recalls it in the Olyinpiads [the title of his history]." He says that
"Phlegon mentioned the eclipse which took place during the crucifixion of
the Lord Jesus Christ, and no other [eclipse], it is clear that he did not know
from his sources about any [similar] eclipse in previous times ... and this is
shown by the historical account itself of Tiberius Caesar."
LETTER OF MARA BAR-SERAPION
F. F. Bruce records that there is
in the British Museum an
interesting manuscript preserving the text of a letter written some time later
than A.D. 73,
but how much later we cannot be sure. This letter was sent by a Syrian named
Mara Bar-Serapion to his son Serapion. Mara Bar-Serapion was in prison at the
time, but he wrote to encourage his son in the pursuit of wisdom, and pointed
out that those who persecuted wise men were overtaken by misfortune. He
instances the deaths of Socrates, Pythagoras and Christ.
What advantage did the Athenians gain from putting
Socrates to death? Famine and plague came upon them as a judgment for their
crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a
moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from
executing their wise King? It was just after that that their kingdom was
abolished. God justly avenged these three wise men: the Athenians died of
hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by the sea; the Jews, ruined and driven
from their land, live in complete dispersion. But Socrates did not die for
good; he lived on in the teaching of Plato. PythagDras did not die for good; he
lived on in the statue of Hera. Nor did the wise King die for good; He lived on
in the teaching which He had given.
References From the Rabbis
Comments
in the Baraia are of great historical value:
On the eve of Passover they hanged Yeshu (of
Nazareth) and the herald went before him for forty days saying (Yeshu of
Nazareth) is going forth to be stoned in that he hath practiced sorcery and
beguiled and led astray Israel. Let everyone knowing aught in His defence come
and plead for Him. But they found in Him naught in His defence and hanged Him
on the eve of Passover (Babylonia Sanhedrin
43a). -"Eve of Passover."
The Amoa
"U1la " ("Ulla" was a disciple of
R. Youchanan and lived in Palestine at the end of the third century) adds:
And do you suppose that for (Yeshu of Nazareth)
there was any right of appeal? He was a beguiler, and the Merciful One hath
said: "Thou shalt not spare neither shalt thou conceal him." It is
otherwise with Yeshu, for He was near to the civil authority.
The Jewish authorities did not deny that Jesus
performed signs and miracles (Matthew 9:34;
12:24; Mark 3:22) but they
attributed them to acts of sorcery.
"The Talmud,
" writes the Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner, "speaks of hanging
in place of crucifixion, since this horrible Roman form of death was only known
to Jewish scholars from Roman trials, and not from the Jewish legal system.
Even Paul the apostle (Galatians 3:13) expounds
the passage 'for a curse of God is that which is hanged' (Deuteronomy 22:23) as applicable to Jesus."
Sanhedrin 43a also makes references to the
disciples of Jesus (Yeb. IV 3. 49a):
R. Shimeon ben Azzai said [concerning Jesus]: "I
found a genealogical roll in Jerusalem wherein was recorded, Such-an-one is a
bastard of an adulteress."
Klausner adds to the above:
Current editions of the Mishnah add: "To support the words of R. Yehoshua" (who,
in the same Mishnah, says: What is a
bastard? Everyone whose parents are liable to death by the Beth Din). That
Jesus is here referred to seems to be beyond doubt.
An early Baraita,
in which R. Eliezer is the central figure, speaks of Jesus by name. The
brackets are within the quote. Eliezer speaking:
He answered, Akiba, you have reminded me! Once I
was walking along the upper market (Tosefta
reads "street") of Sepphoris and found one [of the disciples of
Jesus of Nazareth] and Jacob of Kefar Sekanya (Tosefta reads "Sakkanin") was his name. He said to me,
It is written in your Law, "Thou shalt not bring the hire of a harlot,
etc." What was to be done with it -a latrine for the High Priest? But I
answered nothing. He said to me, so [Jesus of Nazareth] taught me (Tosefta reads, "Yeshu ben
Pantere"): "For of the hire of a harlot hath she gathered them, and
unto the hire of a harlot shall they return"; from the place of filth they
come, and unto the place of filth they shall go. And the saying pleased me, and
because of this I was arrested for Minuth. And I
transgressed against what is written in the Law; "Keep thy way far from
her" -that is Minuth; "and come not nigh
the door of her house" -that is the civil government.
The
above brackets are found in Dikduke
Sof'rim to Aboda Zara (Munich
Manuscript, ed. Rabinovitz).
Klausner, commenting on the above
passage, says:
There can be no doubt that the words, "one of
the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth," and, "thus Jesus of Nazareth
taught me," are, in the present passage both early in date and fundamental
in their bearing on the grounds of the slight variations in the parallel
passages; their variants ("Yeshu ben Pantere" or "Yeshu ben
Pandera," instead of "Yeshu of Nazareth") are merely due to the
fact that, from an early date, the name "Pantere," or "Pandera,"
became current among the Jews as the name of the reputed father of Jesus.
Encyclopedia Britannica
The
fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica uses 20,000 words in describing this person, Jesus. His
description took more space than was given to Aristotle, Cicero, Alexander,
Julius Caesar, Buddha, Confucious, Mohammed or Napoleon Bonaparte.
Concerning
the testimony of the many independent secular accounts of Jesus of Nazareth, it
records:
These independent accounts prove that in ancient times
even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus,
which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several
authors at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the
20th centuries.
The Jewishness of Jesus
Just
after World War II, a Scottish minister, R. A. Stewart, wrote: "A proper
historical understanding of the New Testament is impossible without a detailed
knowledge of Jewish literature and thought."
His
words proved almost prophetic -many Jewish scholars today are in the forefront of affirming the
historicity of Jesus. Geza Vermes, David Flusser, S. Safrai and Pinchas Lapide
lead the way in reclaiming Jesus as a striking Jewish person of the first
century. Vermes even asserts that "no objective and enlightened student of
the Gospels can help but be struck by the incomparable superiority of
Jesus."
Professor Donald A. Hagner, Associate Professor of
New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, has written a detailed analysis
of the current reclamation of Jesus in Jewish scholarship. Concerning the
contributions provided from the Hebrew perspective, he states:
It will be obvious that Jewish scholars are in a
particularly advantageous position to understand the teaching of Jesus.
Familiar with the Bible (Old Testament), the development of early Judaism, the
Jewish background of the Gospels, and often learned in the difficult world of
rabbinic literature, they are often able not only to place Jesus in historical
context but also to enter the mental world of Jesus and to capture every Jewish
nuance in His words.
The Jewishness of Jesus and the pervasive Hebraic
quality of His surroundings repeatedly surface in the Gospel accounts. Yet much
of past New Testament scholarship has failed to deal with this critical aspect
of the life of the historical Jesus. If one is to see Jesus of Nazareth as He
actually was when He traversed the land of Palestine, then one cannot ignore
the evidence of His Jewishness.
Jewish scholarship has helped most to identify Jesus' Jewishness by showing the parallels between His teaching and rabbinic teaching. When you compare these teachings, you can begin to see how far-fetched the idea is that the life of Jesus was made up by zealous churchmen of the second and third centuries. As the leadership of the church shifted from Jerusalem to Antioch to Rome between the first and fourth centuries, there also was a predominant shift from a Jewish Christianity to a Gentile Christianity. In fact, the history of the first two centuries of the church confirms that it was primarily Gentile in character by the beginning of the second century A.D. It would therefore be highly unlikely for a Gentile of the second century or later to mold an account of the life of Jesus which so thoroughly reflected the first-century Hebrew culture.
The Jews of Jesus' day were meticulous educators, as
they have been throughout most of their history. A passage from the Mishnah (Aboth 5.15) demonstrates their active
concern about what their students absorbed:
There are four types of people who sit in front of
the sages: The sponge, the funnel, the strainer and the sifter. The sponge -it
soaks up everything; the funnel -it takes in at one end and lets out at the
other; the strainer-it lets out the wine and retains the dregs; and the
sifter-it lets out the bran dust and retains the fine flour.
In order to stimulate the student not to just
"memorize the right answers," the teacher, or rabbi, would ask questions of his students. Not only were the
students expected to be able to answer the questions, but they also were
expected to answer them by phrasing equally good questions, showing that they
had thought through the original questions thoroughly. Perhaps this is why
Rabbi Hillel said, "A timid student does not learn." Aboth 2.6) David
Bivin, the director of the Jerusalem School of
Synoptic Studies, writes:
This pattern of answering questions with questions
was so common that in the Hebrew of Jesus' day the word for
"question" came to be a synonym for "answer."
Biven
gives several examples which illustrate the deep Jewish roots of Jesus' learning and teaching styles:
Twelve-year-old Jesus was lost and finally
discovered by His parents, "sitting in the Temple among the rabbis,
listening to them and asking them questions" (Luke 2:46). The Gospel
writer comments in the following verse, "And all those listening to Him
were amazed at His wise answers." If Jesus was only asking questions, how
is it that the listeners were impressed by His answers? This would seem very
strange indeed if one did not know that in the rabbinic world in which Jesus
lived, a student's answers were given in the form of questions....
Jesus answered a question with a question on other
occasions as well. When He was asked by the Temple authorities what right He
had to do "these things" (cleansing the Temple), He answered by
saying, "I will also ask you something. Now tell me, was John's baptism of
God or of men?" (Luke 20:3-4) ...
The best example in the teaching of Jesus of the
kind of question a rabbi commonly would ask his students is found in Luke
20:41-44, in which he asked:
How can one say that the Messiah is the descendant (literally "son") of David? David himself says in the book of Psalms, "the LORD said to my lord, "Sit here at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool." David calls Him Lord, so how can He be His descendant?
This is a typical rabbinic riddle
based on a seeming contradiction in a passage of Scripture.
The
first of Hillel's rules of interpretation was called kal vachomer (simple and complex). This principle has to do with
deducing something that is not very apparent from something that is apparent or
already known. It often uses the words how
much more as in "Silence becomes a scholar; how much more a fool" (Tosefta: Pesachim 9:2). Mishnah: Sanhedrin 6.5 is another example:
Rabbi Meir said, "While the man is in agony, what
does the Tongue say? 'My head is hurting! My arm is hurting!' If the Scripture
has thus spoken: 'I agonize over the blood of the wicked,' how much more over
the blood of the righteous that is shed?"
Jesus used this same rabbinic device in His teaching.
One example is found in
Matthew 7:9-11 where He says:
Or what man is there among you, when his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone? Or if he shall ask for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!
In Matthew 6:28-30, Jesus says:
But if God so arrays the
grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace,
will He not much more do so for you, 0 men of little faith?
Jesus,
being Jewish and thoroughly acquainted with the teachings of the rabbis, makes a number of
statements which have close parallels in the rabbinic literature. Professor
Gustaf Dalman, founder of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity in the Holy
Land, gives the following among many others:
————
And by your standard of measure, it shall be
measured to you (Matthew 7:2, Mark 4:24, Luke 6:38).
vs.
With the measure with which one measures, it will
be measured unto him (Sot. 1. 7; Tos. Sot. 3.1,2; Siphre, 28b).
————
Therefore whatever you want
others to do for you, do so for them; for this is the Law and the Prophets
(Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31).
vs.
What is hateful to thee, do
it not unto thy neighbor. This is the whole Law and the rest is the
interpretation thereof (Hillel. b. Sab. 31a). [The "Golden Rule" has
been taught in many different forms. Jesus' version is unique in that it is a positive
rather than negative approach. He does not say "Don't do what you don't
want others to do to you," like Hillel. This approach only keeps one from
doing harmful actions. Rather, Jesus says, "Do what you would like others
to do for you." This approach, while eliminating harmful actions, also
adds the responsibility to do acts of kindness, benevolence, etc. to others.]
————