On the Historicity of Jesus
I received this question via email: “Do you think that Jesus is a historical figure?”
So here are three disclaimers before I start this post:
1) As a secular Jew, I do not maintain a belief in any deity, Abrahamic or otherwise. I really don’t care how other people worship; everybody has the right to interpret the meaning of their existence in whatever way they choose as long as they do not try to push their beliefs on others or use their beliefs as an excuse to perpetrate violence.
2) Unless we find a Jesus equivalent to the Tel Dan Stele, we will probably never know for sure if he existed or not. Even if we do, post-modern minimalists will probably throw their collective back out trying to prove that it’s a forgery.
3) I have never studied the New Testament in an academic context, and I am not up on the scholarship and internal politics of it all the way I am with Hebrew Bible related scholarship. Thus, I come at Jesus as a student of Jewish history, and not as a wannabe New Testament scholar.
In the last century Before the Common Era and the first century of the Common Era, Judaism was going through a massive transitional stage. The priests in the Temple were having trouble keeping order, and every day a new sect was popping up. By this point, Judaism as a distinct religion had been around for about 500 years, and the Judean people—as they were then known—had a history/folklore going back nearly 1200 years. So they were established, and they were starting to question the manner in which they worshiped.
In 66 CE, a group of upstarts within Jerusalem threatened a great deal of the population into revolting against Rome; this is the war Josephus wrote of in his work, The War of the Jews. This war culminated in the destruction of the Second Temple, the expulsion of the majority of the Jewish people from Judea, and the renaming of that province from “Judea” to “Palestina” (after the Phillistines, the Biblical enemies of the Israelites).
The destruction of the Second Temple changed Judaism forever, and resulted in the emergence of two systems of worship: Rabbinical Judaism*, and Christianity. When I say “resulted” I do not mean that those two things suddenly happened; I am speaking in historical terms, meaning that the development of those two forms of worship can be traced directly back to the destruction of the Second Temple. A line from a book review in the New Yorker sums it up best: “Mark—which, coming first**, might seem to be closest to the truth—was probably written in the ruins of the Temple and spiritually shaped to its desolate moment.”
I cite that sentence because when I read it a few years ago, it was the first time I realized how perfectly Jesus fits into the first century Judean context. Jesus may have been a fairly popular religious leader before the revolt, but it was the aftermath of the revolt which caused his followers to record his ideas and seek strength and guidance from his teachings. And it was from there that the religion we now know as Christianity began to form.
So yes, I do think that Jesus existed. That is to say, that, considering the historical context, I do think that there was a young man named Joshua (ben*** Miriam and Yosef) walking around first century Judea, and pissing off the establishment with new ideas about the relationship between the Jewish people and god. But if the revolt had not happened, I don’t think his ideas would have taken off; he just would have been another radical preacher in first century Roman Judea.
As is the case with King Arthur, we will probably never know for sure, but he certainly makes a heck of a lot of sense within his context.
*There is evidence that Rabbinical Judaism existed, in some form, long before the destruction of the Second Temple, but for the purposes of this post we will say that as a widely practiced form of worship, Rabbinical Judaism did not develop until after this period.
**The Gospel of Mark is generally accepted by New Testament scholars as the oldest of the gospels available to us.
***Hebrew for “son of”
