Undeception

I was remiss in not sooner noting the recent completion of a podcast series by York University’s Philip Harland. It’s a recently completed set of fourteen lectures on many of the issues surrounding historical Jesus studies entitled The Historical Jesus in context.

Those brought up never questioning any aspect of the New Testament’s historicity should find it interesting to see how an historian approaching those texts without a presupposition of their divinely ensured accuracy, that is, as an ancient text, will evaluate the evidence about Jesus. (Hint: this type of historian won’t exactly come to the same conclusions as Josh McDowell or Lee Strobel!) This series is invaluable for giving you a glimpse into the ways that students of academic historical study approach the subjects of their inquiry, shedding some light on the kinds of historical information scholars find most compelling and the various ways of weighing evidence, in this case the evidence of the New Testament.

The series examines the evidence for Jesus as messianic figure, Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, Jesus as exorcist, and several other aspects of Jesus’ ministry that we find in the Gospels, attempting to situate him amongst other known religious leaders and groups in first century Judea. It will no doubt trouble some conservative listeners to realize the similarities between Jesus and other Jewish prophets, exorcists, and would-be Messiahs from the period, but I leave more aware of how astounding and suggestive the success of this particular peasant from backwoods Nazareth actually was.

I wish more instructors and professors would find ways of publishing their lectures for such wide consumption. It’s supposed to be fairly easy, I hear!

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.