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Historical Jesus: Gospels
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The Historical Jesus reveals the true Jesus--who he was, what he did, what he said. It opens with "The Gospel of Jesus," Crossan's studied determination of Jesus' actual words and actions stripped of any subsequent additions and placed in a capsule account of his life story. The Jesus who emerges is a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it.
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The “Historical Jesus” movement holds that the Gospels were fabricated or seriously distorted as the stories of Jesus evolved into the late 1st or early 2nd century. However, this theory is not supported by the evidence. Time and again the New Testament writers claim to be eyewitnesses to the facts, giving detailed geographic, political and cultural details to bolster the record. All of the manuscript evidence presented above is dramatic, because it establishes that basic Christian doctrine developed far too quickly for a myth to intervene and distort the historical record, especially when so many witnesses were still alive to contradict the alleged errors or myths.
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[T]hese traits of the historical Jesus are in one sense unmollified by other dimensions of the New Testament tradition which are central to parish councils. Why? Because the other dimensions do not represent what modern scholarship defines as the Jesus of history. The sharing of mission, a sharing implicit in the instruction to go and make disciples of all (Mt. 28:19), is marked by an interest in baptism which emerged after Jesus' death. The farewell discourses in John's gospel, in which Jesus prays for unity (13:34) and identifies his mission with those of his followers (17:18), are likewise part of a later tradition.
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The most "authoritative" accounts of a historical Jesus come from the four canonical Gospels of the Bible. Note that these Gospels did not come into the Bible as original and authoritative from the authors themselves, but rather from the influence of early church fathers, especially the most influential of them all: Irenaeus of Lyon who lived in the middle of the second century. Many heretical gospels existed by that time, but Irenaeus considered only some of them for mystical reasons. He claimed only four in number; according to Romer, "like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures-- the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, the eagle of John (see Against the Heresies). The four gospels then became Church cannon for the orthodox faith. Most of the other claimed gospel writings were burned, destroyed, or lost." [Romer]
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Now if the historical Jesus is not the Jesus of the gospels, the supernatural Jesus, then how do sceptical scholars figure out who the historical Jesus really was? Well, that leads to the second presupposition which I wanted to discuss, namely, sceptical critics presuppose that our most primary sources for the life of Jesus are not the Gospels, but rather writings outside the New Testament, specifically the so–called apocryphal gospels. These are gospels forged under the apostles’ names, like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Philip, and so forth. These extra–biblical writings are said to be the key to correctly reconstructing the historical Jesus.
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Bruno Bauer was the most anti-Christianity scholar up to this point in historical Jesus study. Bauer believed that Mark wrote first, and that Mark was a purely literary work, and an unreliable one at that. Since the other Gospel accounts were highly dependent on Mark, there is nothing historical about any of them. He believed that Christianity originally met a need within the people of that time, and the gospels had no foundation in history, Jesus never existed and therefore Christianity was a fairy tale with no historical foundation. His was by far the most radical viewpoint of his day. "Baur simply fails to deal with the evidence.
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