Undeception

A fascinating discussion from two conservative evangelical scholars on the subject of the historical Jesus took place on last weekend’s episode of Unbelievable.

Adam Bradford, defending his book The Jesus Discovery, presented some interesting arguments in favor of the idea that Jesus was a lifelong participant in the religious community, trained from adolescence and recognized as an authority right up until the events that unraveled his rapport among the Jewish leadership and got him killed. David Instone-Brewer countered that Jesus, as a simple itinerant peasant from backwater Nazareth, was always an outsider to the Jewish leadership, as is commonly inferred from the Gospel of Mark especially.

Both sides were engaging and respectful. A brief pericope representative of the exchange: Bradford was arguing that Jesus would only have been allowed to drive out the money-changers and continue teaching within the temple habitually afterward (Lk 19.47) if he were recognized as having authority as a teacher, whereafter the host iterated, “Must have been some kind of authority he had then,” prompting Instone-Brewer’s quick and dry response, “Well, he had a whip in his hand…” All in all, I found most of Instone-Brewer’s rebuttals to be the more convincing, but there definitely seems to be something to Bradford’s contention as well.

Also coming available over the weekend was the ninth podcast in Dr. Phil Harland‘s enjoyable series on Historical Jesus studies, this one entitled Jesus in the Context of Educated Groups and Leaders, in which he described Jesus’ affinity, but not necessarily his identification with, first century groups such as the Essenes.

It’s intriguing to hear all the ways of approaching the topic, “Who was the man Jesus?” Conservative evangelicals typically react to this question with an indignant, “I can tell you who he was — the Bible tells us all about him!” But even conservative evangelical scholars such as Bradford and Instone-Brewer answered a basic question of Jesus’ background, whether he was a self-taught peasant preacher or a learned maverick rabbi, in completely different ways based upon indistinguishable hermeneutic sets approaching the same biblical data. The other expected response, “Does it matter? He’s Lord either way,” is not so easily answered, either: his background is a vital piece in determining what Jesus’ idea of his own mission was, which then informs our understanding of what it was he was sent to do, how exactly he accomplished it, and how we are to emulate him to our world.