The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  “When we announced the discovery, I speculated that some popular writers would produce fanciful tales about the ‘true story’ behind this gospel—and apparently that’s happening to some extent,” he answered. “Unfortunately, it’s a reflection of what we’ve seen with some of these other gospels. Just because something’s on a screen or in a book doesn’t mean it’s true. I’d caution people to apply the historical tests I mentioned earlier and then make a reasoned judgment instead of being influenced by irresponsible conspiracy theories and other historical nonsense.”

  TESTING THE BIBLE’S FOUR GOSPELS

  I took a moment to assess how far we had come. I had started with the question of whether six “alternative” gospels could tell me anything new about the real Jesus. Contrary to the claims of a few far leftwing scholars, however, all of them failed the tests of historicity. The Gospel of Thomas could tell me something about second-century mysticism and Gnosticism, but nothing about Jesus beyond a few quotes lifted from the New Testament. The Gospel of Peter, with its talking cross and giant Jesus, flunked the credibility test. The gospels of Mary and Judas were written too late to be meaningful. The Secret Gospel of Mark is a hoax and the Jesus Papers are a joke.

  All of this brought me back to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. How would they fare when subjected to a historian’s scrutiny? I asked Evans what he considered to be the best criteria for assessing their reliability.

  “One criterion historians use is multiple attestation,” he replied. “In other words, when two or three of the Gospels are saying the same thing, independently—as they often do—then this significantly shifts the burden of proof onto somebody who says they’re just making it up. There’s also the criterion of coherence. Are the Gospels consistent with what we know about the history and culture of Palestine in the 20s and 30s? Actually, they’re loaded with details that we’ve determined are correct thanks to archaeological discoveries.

  “Then there’s the dating issue. The Synoptics were written within a generation of Jesus’ ministry; John is within two generations. That encourages us to see them as reliable because they’re written too close to the events to get away with a bunch of lies. And you don’t have any counter-gospels that are repudiating or refuting what they say. We have, then, a treasure trove from any historian’s point of view. Julius Caesar died in 44 BC, and the historian Suetonius is talking about him in 110–120 AD. That’s about 155 to 165 years removed. Tacitus, same thing. The Gospels are much better than that.”

  “When would you date them?”

  “Very cogent arguments have been made for all three Synoptics having been written in the 50s and 60s. Personally, I’d put the first Gospel, Mark, in the 60s. I think Mark had to have been within the shadow of the Jewish-Roman war of 66–70. Jesus says in Mark 13:18, ‘Pray that this will not take place in winter.’ Well, it didn’t. It happened in the summer. This statement makes sense if Mark was published when the war was underway or about to occur. But if it was written in 71 or 72, as some have speculated, that would be an odd statement to leave in place.”

  I interrupted. “But whether Mark was written in the 50s or 60s, you’re still talking very early.”

  “Absolutely. Jesus died in 30 or 33 AD, and a lot of scholars lean toward 33. That means when Mark’s Gospel was composed, some of Jesus’ youngest followers and disciples would be in their 50s or 60s. Other people in their 30s and 40s grew up hearing stories about Jesus from firsthand eyewitnesses. There’s a density of witness that’s very significant. And, of course, don’t forget that most of Paul’s writings were composed before the Gospels.”

  Seeking to clarify a key issue, I said: “When you say Mark was written some thirty-five years after Jesus’ ministry, you’re not suggesting the author had to think back and remember something that happened more than three decades earlier.”

  “No, there’s no one individual who had to try to remember everything. We’re not talking about the story of Jesus being remembered by one or two or three people who never see each other. We’re talking about whole communities, never smaller than dozens and probably in the hundreds, that got together and had connections, villages filled with Jesus people in Judea and in Galilee and immigrating throughout the Jewish Diaspora—lots of people pooling and sharing their stories. People were meeting frequently, reviewing his teaching, and making it normative for the way they lived. The teaching was being called to mind and talked about all the time.”

  “Then,” I said, “this would protect the story of Jesus from the kind of distortion we see in the children’s game of telephone, where people whisper something, one to another, until at the end the original message is garbled?”

  Evans nodded. “Unlike the telephone game, this is a community effort,” he said. “It’s not one guy who tells it to one other guy, who weeks later tells it to one other person, and on and on, so that with the passage of time there would be distortion. This was a living tradition that the community discussed and was constantly remembering, because it was normative, it was precious, they lived by it. The idea that they can’t remember what Jesus said, or they get it out of context, or they twist it, or they can’t distinguish between what Jesus actually said and an utterance of a charismatic Christian in a church much later—this is condescending.”

  Glancing at my notebook, I said, “Richard A. Horsley, head of the religion department at the University of Massachusetts, commented recently: ‘I think it would be a consensus among the New Testament scholars that none of the four Gospels is reliable, if what we mean by that is that we have an accurate historical report of Jesus.’54 What’s your response?”

  “I disagree with Richard completely,” Evans retorted.

  “So your assessment of their reliability is—what?”

  “I would say the Gospels are essentially reliable, and there are lots and lots of other scholars who agree. There’s every reason to conclude that the Gospels have fairly and accurately reported the essential elements of Jesus’ teachings, life, death, and resurrection. They’re early enough, they’re rooted into the right streams that go back to Jesus and the original people, there’s continuity, there’s proximity, there’s verification of certain distinct points with archaeology and other documents, and then there’s the inner logic. That’s what pulls it all together.”

  “What about the argument that the Gospels are inherently unreliable because they are basically faith documents written to convince people of something?”

  “In other words, if you have a motive for writing, then it’s suspect?” he asked. “What does that do to the Jesus Seminar publications? There’s always a purpose behind anything that’s written. Some people will say this is not just historiography for its own sake—but I don’t know too much historiography that’s written for its own sake anyway. I think that’s simply a red herring. Faith and truthful history aren’t necessarily at odds.”

  I issued another challenge. “The Gospels report Jesus doing miraculous things,” I said. “To the twenty-first-century mind, doesn’t this lead to the conclusion that these writings lack credibility?”

  “I say let historians be historians. Look at the sources. They tell us that people in antiquity observed that Jesus could do things far better, far more effectively, far more astoundingly than the scribes could in dealing with healings and exorcisms. In their mind, there was only one way to explain it—it’s a miracle. For us to come along and say, ‘Unless we can explain it scientifically, metaphysically, and philosophically, we should just reject it,’ is high-handed arrogance. Bruce Chilton of Bard College says it’s enough for the historian to simply say that the documents tell us this is the way Jesus was perceived by his contemporaries.”

  “What about the allegation that the reason we don’t have any competing gospels from the first century is because they were gathered and burned?”

  Evans has little patience for such claims, which he has heard all too often in recent years. “For crying out loud, the Christians had no control ov
er the city. They couldn’t command or coerce anyone to burn anything,” he said. “The idea that there was some sort of culling process or purging that took place in the first century is really absurd.”

  “How about the claim we see in The Da Vinci Code that Constantine collated the books of the Bible in the fourth century and burned all the alternative gospels?”

  “That’s just nonsense,” he said. “The idea of Constantine telling Christians what ought to be in the Bible and gathering up gospels and burning them—that’s fictional material in Dan Brown’s book. It isn’t legitimate history written by historians who know what they’re talking about.”

  THE IDENTITY OF JESUS

  As we approached the end of our interview, I found myself admiring Evans’s passion. He isn’t some dry academic. He’s bluntly critical of sloppy scholarship and unsubstantiated theories, but at the same time he speaks with heartfelt conviction about the facts that history clearly does support—and that’s where I wanted to steer our conversation: if the biblical Gospels contain our best information about the earliest Christian experience, then what do they tell us about the real Jesus?

  “There is no question in my mind that Jesus understood himself as being the figure described in Daniel 7 and that he was anointed to proclaim the Good News—the rule of God,” Evans began. “He sees himself as one with more than just prophetic authority to proclaim it, but as one who has actually stood before God on his throne and received power and authority to proclaim it.

  “He is Israel’s Messiah as he defines it, but not as others did. Others saw the Son of David as coming to kill Romans, including the emperor. That was the popular view. Jesus then shocks everyone by saying, no, actually he wants to extend messianic blessings even to the Gentiles.

  “So we’re on very, very solid footing that Jesus has a messianic self-understanding, but, again, that means more than the fact that he was anointed. Any prophet or priest could claim that. No, the anointing is more than that—there is a divine sense. He is God’s Son.

  “That’s the importance of the parable of the wicked vineyard tenants. In that story told by Jesus, the vineyard owner leased his place to tenant farmers, but when the landowner would send servant after servant to collect his share, the tenants would beat or kill them. Finally, the owner sends his ‘beloved son,’ and they kill him too. When the parable is interpreted in its context, we see that the vineyard owner is God, the tenants represent ancient Israel, and the servants represent prophets. The point is clear: God sent his son. Otherwise, he would just be one more messenger, one more prophet. No—now he has sent his son, and that’s Jesus himself.

  “So the high priest Caiaphas asked Jesus under oath: ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of God?’ Jesus said, ‘Yes, I am. You will see the Son of Man’—Daniel 7—‘sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One’—Psalm 110—‘and coming on the clouds of heaven’—back to Daniel 7. Caiaphas understood what he meant. He was outraged! ‘You’re going to sit next to God on his chariot throne? Blasphemy,’ he said. ‘We have no need of further witnesses. You’ve heard it yourselves. What do you say? He’s worthy of death.’

  “The scandal of Jesus’ answer to Caiaphas, resulting in the crucifixion, is not that Jesus was just claiming to be anointed by God, as some mere messenger of some sort. That could have gotten him a good beating perhaps, especially if he criticized the ruling priest or made threats. But the calls for his execution had to do with him claiming to be God’s Son. That’s what makes it blasphemous. Not irresponsible, not reckless, not dangerous—it was blasphemous to say, ‘I will sit on God’s throne.’

  “So the evidence, fairly weighed, concludes that Jesus understood himself as the Messiah, the Son of God. From a historian’s point of view, that explains why all his followers thought that. I mean, after Easter you didn’t have people running around saying, ‘Jesus was a prophet.’ ‘No, actually he was a rabbi.’ ‘No, he was the Son of God.’ All of them believed Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God—why? Because that’s what they believed before Easter.

  “Easter did not generate that perspective. One of the worst errors in logic on the part of so-called critical scholarship throughout most of the twentieth century was the idea that it was the Easter proclamation that led people to decide Jesus was the Messiah or God’s Son. If Jesus had claimed neither of those things, if his disciples had not thought those things prior to Easter, then his postmortem appearances wouldn’t have led them to think that.

  “Why in the world did they say he’s the Messiah and the Son of God? Because that’s what they thought before Easter—based on his own teachings and his own actions.”

  DEITY AND HUMANITY

  I intended to wrap up our interview by asking Evans to expand upon his own personal convictions. I anticipated that he would further elaborate on the divinity of Jesus—and yet our discussion ended with an unexpected turn.

  “How have your decades of research into the Old and New Testaments affected your own view of Jesus?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s much more nuanced, but at the end of the day it’s a more realistic Jesus. Personally, I think a lot of Christians—even conservative, Bible-believing Christians—are semi-docetic.”

  That took me off-guard. “What do you mean?”

  “In other words,” he said, “they halfway believe—without ever giving it any serious thought—what the Docetic Gnostics believed, which is that Jesus actually wasn’t real. ‘Oh, yes, of course, he’s real,’ they’ll say. But they’re not entirely sure how far to go with the incarnation. How human was Jesus? For a lot of them, the human side of Jesus is superficial.

  “It’s almost as though a lot of Christians think of Jesus as God wearing a human mask. He’s sort of faking it, pretending to be human. He pretends to perspire, his stomach only appears to gurgle because, of course, he’s not really hungry. In fact, he doesn’t really need to eat. So Jesus is the bionic Son of God who isn’t really human. This is thought to be an exalted Christology, but it’s not. Orthodox Christology also embraces fully the humanity of Jesus.

  “What I’m saying is that the divine nature of Jesus should never militate against his full humanity. When that part gets lost, you end up with a pretty superficial understanding of Christology. For example, could Jesus read? ‘Of course he could read! He’s the Son of God!’ That’s not a good answer. At the age of three days, was Jesus fluent in Hebrew? Could he do quantum physics? Well, then, why does the book of Hebrews talk about him learning and so forth?”

  I was listening intently. “So we miss his humanity,” I said, half to myself and half to Evans.

  “Yeah, we do,” he said. “We find ourselves fussing and fuming over the divinity, but we miss the humanity. And from the historic point of view of the early church, that’s just as serious an error as, say, the Ebionite direction, which was to deny the divinity.”

  Wanting him to explain further, I asked, “What is it we miss about his humanity?”

  “Well, a big part of the atonement. He dies in our place as a human being who dies in our place. God didn’t send an angel,” he replied. “And, of course, there’s the identification factor. We can identify with him: he was tempted as we are. How was he tempted if he was just God wearing a mask—faking it and pretending to be a human? Again, that’s Docetic Gnosticism—Jesus only appeared to be incarnate, only appeared to be human—and a lot of evangelical Christians come pretty close to that.”

  “Is there something about his human nature you’d want to emphasize?”

  Evans reflected for a moment, then replied. “Yes, Jesus’ own faith,” he said. “He tells his disciples to have faith. Jesus has a huge amount of credibility if we see him as fully human and he actually, as a human, has faith in God. Otherwise, well, that’s easy for him to say! Good grief—he’s been in heaven, and now he’s walking around telling me to have faith? But I take the teaching of Jesus’ humanness, which is taught clearly in scripture, very seriously.”

  “Taking everything
into consideration,” I said, wrapping up our discussion, “when you think about the identity of the real Jesus, where do you come down as an individual?”

  “I come down on the side of the church,” he said. “Doggone it, bless their bones, I think they figured it out. They avoided errors and pitfalls to the left and to the right. I think the church got it right. Even if you only consider the Synoptics, you find that Jesus saw himself in a relationship with God that is unique. The Son of God is the way that’s understood. And then he goes further and demonstrates that he was speaking accurately. If you have any doubts, the Easter event should remove them.

  “That’s where you always wind up: the Easter event. Otherwise, you have a Moses-like or Elijah-like figure who’s able to do astonishing miracles—but so what? Yet the resurrection confirmed who he was. And the resurrection is, of course, very powerfully attested, because you have all classes, men and women, believers, skeptics, and opponents, who encounter the risen Christ and believe in him.”

  He looked me straight in the eyes. “As I do.”

  FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION

  More Resources on This Topic

  Bock, Darrell L. The Missing Gospels. Nashville: Nelson, 2006.

  Carlson, Stephen C. The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2005.

  Evans, Craig A. Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospel. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2006.

  Jenkins, Philip. Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

  Witherington, Ben, III. The Gospel Code. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2004.

  Witherington, Ben, III. What Have They Done with Jesus? San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

  Wright, N. T. Judas and the Gospel of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2006.