6. THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Was Jesus a real person, and not a myth? If so, how much of the "real" Jesus can we know from the Bible? What evidence do we have that Jesus lived, taught, died, and rose again as presented in the Bible?

Even if we accept that the Bible itself is reliable, it makes some extraordinary claims about this man, unlike no other person that ever lived.

Our faith is based upon the person and upon these claims in the Book - how can we evaluate these claims to find the truth?

This lessons will focus on the evidence for the historicity of Jesus Christ, and of the extraordinary claim of Jesus rising from the dead.

Goals

Goal 1: We shall find out whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure who actually lived in Palestine during the first century A.D. by examining the evidence

Goal 2: We will look at criticisms of the basic foundation of the Gospel story - Jesus’ resurrection - and uncover the implications

In His Constant Care, by Greg Olsen

Skeptical Ideas

Do people really question whether or not Jesus really lived? What do the skeptics say? Perhaps you have heard some of these claims:

1. The historicity of Jesus is not supported by modern scholarship
   
   
   1. The Search for a "Historical Jesus" by religious scholars has confirmed that the Bible is mostly made up
      
      
   2. Josephus’ quotations and other contemporary external evidences are thought of as forgeries, added by sympathetic editors.
      
      
2. The story of Jesus is just a myth or legendary tale
   
   
1. Jesus never said the things that the Bible says He did, it is a compilation of popular wisdom of the time.
   
   
3. New Testament accounts of the Resurrection cannot be accurate, and are not supported by evidence.
   
   
   1. The disciples stole Jesus’ corpse and lied about the resurrection appearances
      
      
   2. Jesus never died, He just "swooned"
      
      
   3. The resurrection account can be explained by hallucinations
      
      
   4. The resurrection account developed much later than the supposed event
      
      
   5. The women probably visited the wrong tomb

Quests for the Historical Jesus

There have been several movements, or "Quests", in the last two centuries to find the historical Jesus by religious scholars that seem to undermine the miraculous nature and reliability of NT account.

Enlightenment – First Quest

The First Quest for the historical Jesus began in the late 1700s and ended in the early 1900s, by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), a German professor. Reimarus was a German deist and rationalist, and represented the Enlightenment's first approach to Jesus research.

In his text, which was published after Reimarus’ death because he feared the consequences of its publication, Reimarus argues that there was a difference between the real Jesus and the portrait of him we find in the Gospels:

"I find great cause to separate completely what the apostles say in their own writings from that which Jesus himself actually said and taught, for the apostles were themselves teachers. . . ."

He believed that this difference existed because the disciples wrote their own views about Jesus, and felt that Jesus reaffirmed Judaism and had no intention of starting a new religion or doing away with the Law.

Reimarus argued that Jesus thought of himself as a political messiah, and that after his death the disciples created a scheme to preserve Jesus’ movement by stealing his body and proclaiming his resurrection.

Redaction and Form Criticism – Second Quest

The Second Quest began after World War I in Germany, and continued until around 1970. Proponents include Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann.

The aim of this quest was to "reconstruct" the original message of Jesus, then compare this with the proclamation of the early church to find out where they agreed, and where they differed. The approach to literary criticism focused on:

• Redaction Criticism (editing)
  
  Investigates the way in which each Gospel writer pieced together his book from various written and oral sources.

• Form criticism
  
  Form Critics propose that the New Testament Gospels were not written originally as complete units, but were collections of separate episodes or oral traditions, myths, and parables that were "glued" together to form an artificial framework that aided preaching and promoted the practices of the early church. Form criticism attempts to reconstruct these original episodes by removing the artificial framework.

Jesus Seminar – Third Quest

The Third Quest began in the 1970s and continues to this day. The most well-known member of the movement is John Dominic Crossan (The Historical Jesus, HarperCollins, 1991), but this movement also includes a loose coalition of other liberal scholars called The Jesus Seminar, organized in 1985 by Robert W. Funk, who produced The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (1993) and The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds (1998).

Their approach to Bible criticism relies on a hypothetical sayings source "Q" (Quelle, German for "source"), and the apocryphal Book of Thomas. The Third-Quest movements have two goals:

• Examine archaeological, historical, and textual sources from the first century and applies the findings of sociology and anthropology to these sources to attempt to understand Jesus
  
  
• Emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus and the necessity of understanding him in the context of first-century Judaism

This excerpt is from a page on the website of the Jesus Seminar:

"They [the scholars of the Jesus Seminar] have concluded that the Jesus of history is very different from the icon of traditional Christianity: Jesus did not walk on water, feed the multitude, change water into wine, or raise Lazarus from the dead. He was executed as a public nuisance, not for claiming to be the son of God. And in the view of the Seminar, he did not rise bodily from the dead; the resurrection is based instead on visionary experiences of Peter, Paul, and Mary."