Is Jesus of History the Same as the Jesus of Faith?
Interview #5: Gregory A. Boyd, Ph.D.
The Jesus Seminar
- The Jesus Seminar represents an extremely small number of radical-fringe scholars who are on the far, far left wing of New Testament thinking. It does not represent mainstream scholarship.
- They’ve discovered what they set out to find. A Jesus that must be naturalistic, not the supernatural son of God. His death had no special significance. Stories of his resurrection came later as a way of trying to deal with that sad reality.
- Their major assumption is that the gospels are not even generally reliable. They conclude this at the outset because the gospels include things that seem historically unlikely, like miracles. These things, they say, just don’t happen. That’s naturalism, which says that for every effect in the natural or physical world, there is a natural cause.
- They operate under the assumption that everything in history has happened according to their own experiences, and since they’ve never seen the supernatural, they assume miracles have never occurred in history.
Critiquing the Criteria
- Historians usually operate with the burden of proof on the historian to prove falsity or unreliability, since people are generally not compulsive liars. Without that assumption we’d know ver little about ancient history.
- The Jesus Seminar turns this on its head and says you’ve got to affirmatively prove that a saying came from Jesus. Then they come up with a questionable criteria to do that.
Jesus the Wonder Worker
- One approach taken by naturalistic scholars has been to look for parallels between Jesus and others from ancient history as a way of demonstrating that his claims and deeds were not completely unique. Their goal is to explain away the view that Jesus was one of a kind.
- But any parallels between Jesus and other ancient rabbis who did exorcisms or prayed for rain all break down rather quickly when you look closely.
- First, the sheer centrality of the supernatural in the life of Jesus has no parallel whatsoever in Jewish history.
- Second, the radical nature of his miracles distinguishes Jesus. It didn’t just rain when he prayed for it. He cured blindness, deafness, leprosy, and scoliosis. He commanded storms to cease, multiplied bread and fish, cast out demons, and raised sons and daughters from the dead.
- Third, Jesus performed miracles on his own authority. He gives God the Father credit for what he does, but you never find him asking God the Father to do it—he does it in the power of God the Father.
Jesus and the Amazing Apollonius
- Apollonius of Tyana was a philosopher from the first century who was said to have healed people and to have exorcised demons; who may have raised a young girl from the dead; and who appeared to some of his followers after he died.
- If you’re going to admit that the Apollonius story is legendary, why not say the same thing about the Jesus story?
- His biographer, Philostratus, was writing a century and a half after Apollonius lived, whereas the gospels were written within a generation of Jesus. The closer the proximity to the event, the less chance there is for legendary development.
- We have four gospels, corroborated with the letters of Paul, that can be cross-checked to some degree with non-biblical authors, like Josephus and others. With Apollonius we’re dealing with only one source.
- Philostratus was commissioned by an empress to write a biography in order to dedicate a temple to Apollonius. She was a follower of Apollonius, so Philostratus would have had a financial motive to embellish the story and give the empress what she wanted. On the other hand, the writers of the gospel had nothing to gain—and much to lose—by writing Jesus’ story, and they had no ulterior motives such as money.
- The gospels write with a very confident, eye-witness perspective. Philostratus includes many tentative statements, like “It is reported that…” or “Some say this young girl had died; others say she was just ill.”
- Philostratus was writing in the early third century in Cappadocia, where Christianity had already been present for quite a while. So any borrowing would have been done by him, not by Christians.
- Finally, even if you were to grant the evidence of Apollonius, you’re still left with having to deal with the evidence for Christ.
History Versus Faith
- According to the Jesus Seminar, the historical Jesus was a bright, witty, countercultural man who never claimed to be the Son of God, while the Jesus of faith is a cluster of feel-good ideas that help people live right but are ultimately based on wishful thinking.
- But Jesus is not a symbol of anything unless he’s rooted in history. The theological truth is based on historical truth.