The view is called “apocalyptic” from the Greek word apocalypsis, which means a “revealing” or an “unveiling.” Jewish apocalypticists believed that God had revealed to them the heavenly secrets that made sense of mundane realities. The short version is that God, for mysterious reasons, had temporarily ceded control of this world over to powerful cosmic forces that are opposed to him, his purposes, and his people. That was why the people of God experienced such pain and misery. But God would soon reassert his sovereignty over this world and destroy the forces of evil to vindicate his people, restore them to a place of privilege, and bring in a good, utopian kingdom that would last forever.
This point of view can be found in a number of Jewish writings from the period, including, for example, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jewish apocalypses that did not become part of the Bible. An examination of these works shows that most Jewish apocalypticists subscribed to four major tenets of thought.
Dualism
Most basically, apocalypticists were dualists. They believed there were two fundamental components of reality, the forces of good and the forces of evil. The ultimate source for all that was good, of course, was God. But God had a personal enemy, called by various names: the Devil, Satan, Beelzeboul. (Before the development of apocalyptic thought, Jews did not subscribe to the idea of a personal Devil as God’s archenemy. He is not found in Jewish scripture. Apocalypticists, by contrast, very much believed he existed.) Moreover, just as God had angels who did his will, the Devil had demons who did his. And there were other cosmic forces in the world—principalities, authorities, and powers. God had the power to give life while the forces of evil had the power of death, not to mention all the pain, misery, and suffering en route to it.
The struggle between the forces of good and evil had radical and dire consequences for humans. A cosmic battle was going on, and the powers of evil were in the ascendancy. That is why this world was such an awful place, with all its famines, droughts, epidemics, earthquakes, poverty, injustice, and war.
This cosmic dualism worked itself out in a historical scenario, also dualistic, involving this age and the age to come. The present age was controlled by the powers of evil: the Devil and his minions. But there would be a future age in which all that is opposed to God would be destroyed and a good kingdom would appear. Then God, along with all that is good, would reign supreme. There would be no more famine, drought, natural disaster, war, or hatred. Those who entered into this new age would be rewarded with eternal peace, joy, and bliss. They would be able to love and serve God without fear, and they would live in harmony in a world of rich abundance forever.
Pessimism
Even though for apocalypticists the long-term picture looked very good, the short-term looked very bleak. Apocalypticists were thoroughly pessimistic about the prospects of life in the present age. The forces of evil would soon gain greater and greater power, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. It would not help to develop new technologies, to reform the welfare state, to build up national defense, to put more cops on the beat or more teachers in the classroom. There would be more disasters, more wars, more hunger, more poverty, more oppression—more and more until at the end of this age, when literally all hell would break out.
But then this age would come to a radical end, and God would reassert himself.
Vindication
Many apocalypticists did not dream of conquering the powers of evil by their own efforts. God would conquer them. This would not happen gradually over a long period of time, as good eventually gained back ground ceded to evil. The end would come suddenly and cataclysmically. God would intervene in the course of human and worldly affairs to overthrow the forces of evil and bring in his good kingdom. He would redeem this world and vindicate both his good name and his people. When things got just as bad as they could possibly get, God would send a savior figure who would make right all that is wrong.
Apocalyptic thinkers called this savior by various titles. We have already seen that some referred to him as a messiah; others, basing their views on the earliest surviving apocalyptic text that we have, the book of Daniel, referred to him as the Son of Man (see Daniel 7:13–14). This cosmic figure would destroy the forces that aligned themselves against God along with all the people on earth who joined with them. In the present age it was the rich and powerful who had obviously sided with the forces that controlled this world. They were the ones, then, who would be destroyed when the Son of Man arrived. The weak, the poor, the oppressed, and the righteous were suffering—in the present age—because they had sided with God. But they would be vindicated when the end came and God reasserted himself to establish a good kingdom on earth.
This future judgment would apply not only to those who happened to be living at the time, but to the dead as well. At the end of this age, when the Son of Man arrived, there would be a resurrection of the dead. All who had previously died would be revived and returned to their bodies to face judgment. Those who had sided with the forces of evil would be punished, or at least annihilated; those who had sided with God would be rewarded and granted a share of the coming kingdom. Among other things, this meant that no one should think that they could side with the forces of evil and prosper as a result, causing others to suffer so as to become rich and powerful, and then die and get away with it. No one could get away with it. God would raise everyone from the dead, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop him.
This then is the period in which Jews began to affirm the doctrine of the future resurrection, to occur at the end of this age, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Before apocalyptic thinking came to be in vogue, most Jews thought either that after death a person continued to live on in a shadowy netherworld called Sheol or that the person simply died with his or her body. But not apocalypticists. They believed in a coming eternal life for the righteous, and it would be lived in the body, in the future kingdom of God that was to arrive here on earth.
Imminence
And when was that kingdom going to arrive? Jewish apocalypticists believed it was coming very soon. It was right around the corner. It might happen at any time. Apocalypticists believed that things were as bad as they could possibly get. The powers of evil were out in full force. Now was the time for God to intervene to destroy these powers and set up his good kingdom. “Truly I tell you,” as one famous apocalypticist is recorded as saying, “some of you who are standing here will not taste death before you see that the kingdom of God has come in power.” These are the words of Jesus, from our earliest surviving Gospel (Mark 9:1). Or as he says later in the same Gospel, when asked when the cosmic cataclysm that he had predicted would occur, culminating in the appearance of the Son of Man: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mark 13:30).
As a Jewish apocalypticist, Jesus believed that the world was controlled by evil powers that were present in full force. But God would cast judgment on this world by sending the Son of Man from heaven. This one would bring about a cataclysmic change in all things, a day of reckoning for all that is evil and for everyone who had sided with evil. And the kingdom would then arrive, in which the powerful and mighty would be taken down and the poor and oppressed would be exalted. This was to happen within Jesus’s own generation. Jesus, like many other Jews of his time and place, was an apocalypticist who expected the imminent end of history as he knew it.
But how do we know that Jesus said these words—or in fact, any of the other words of the Gospels? How can we know that he represented an apocalyptic point of view? Or more generally, how can we know anything beyond the mere fact of his onetime existence?
This question takes us directly to the matter of historical method. Scholars have devised criteria for detecting historically authentic tradition, even within such problematic sources as those we have that discuss the life of the historical Jesus. These criteria apply, in fact, to any figure of the past described in any kind of historical source. But our
interest here is obviously with Jesus and with what we can establish, with good probability, about what he said and did. In earlier chapters I broached these issues more or less in passing. Now I need to address them head-on. What methods do historians use in order to establish the words and deeds of Jesus, either apocalyptic or otherwise?
Methods for Establishing Authentic Tradition
AS I HAVE STRESSED throughout this book, doing history, at least ancient history, means abandoning any hope of absolute certainty. But even though we can rarely be completely certain about a past event, some things are far more certain than others. It is far more certain that Julius Caesar fought the Gallic Wars (he wrote about them and we still have the books) than that Apollonius of Tyana raised a genuinely dead person back to life (apart from the inherent improbabilities of the case—as a miracle—our one source dates from long after the fact and is thoroughly biased). Historians deal for the most part in probabilities, and some things are more probable than others.
Earlier I mentioned the historians’ wish list when it comes to sources of information about the past. This wish list certainly applies to the historical Jesus. To establish the historical probability of a saying, deed, or experience of Jesus, we want a large number of independent sources that can be shown not to be incorporating their own biases in the account in question and that corroborate one another’s reports without showing any evidence of collaboration. And the closer these sources are in time to the events they narrate, the better.
More specifically, the probability that a tradition about Jesus—or anyone else, for that matter—is historically accurate is increased to the extent that it passes the following criteria.
Contextual Credibility
I spent some time in the preceding pages talking about Judaism during the days of Jesus for one principal reason. If there is a story about Jesus—for example, an account of something that he allegedly said or did—that does not fit into his known historical context, then it can scarcely be historically accurate. I should stress that simply because a tradition can be plausibly situated into Jesus’s context does not mean that it is historically reliable. It simply means it is possible. Probability will need to be established on other grounds (that is, those of the following two criteria). But if a tradition does not fit into a first-century Palestinian context, then it almost certainly can be discounted as a later legend.
For example, in an earlier context we saw that scattered throughout the Gospels are sayings of Jesus that at one time must have circulated in Aramaic, Jesus’s native tongue. Sometimes that is because they make better sense when translated back from the Greek of the Gospels into Aramaic (“Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath,” Mark 2:27–28). At other times it is because an Aramaic word or phrase from the original form of the story has been left untranslated, requiring the Gospel writer to explain its meaning (“Talitha cumi,” which translated means, ‘Little girl, arise’” Mark 5:41). Since Jesus lived in rural Palestine, he would have spoken Aramaic, and these sayings can plausibly be connected with him. That does not mean that he said them. But he may have said them.
By contrast, if there is a saying that clearly cannot be translated back into Aramaic, then Jesus almost certainly did not say it. That is true of the example I gave earlier from John 3, where Jesus says that a person must be born anothen to enter the kingdom. Did he mean “from above” or “a second time”? The entire conversation is predicated on the peculiar meanings of the double entendre, which works in Greek but not in Aramaic. So Jesus almost certainly did not have this conversation, at least as recorded, with Nicodemus.
We will see in the next chapter that there are solid reasons for thinking that Jesus was an apocalypticist. Traditions about Jesus that make sense in an apocalyptic context, therefore, have a chance of being authentic. At the same time, we have nothing to suggest that the beliefs embraced by later Gnostic Christians were present in first-century rural Palestine. And so the Gnostic sayings of Jesus found in such Gnostic Gospels as the Gospel of Philip or the Gospel of Mary almost certainly do not go back to Jesus himself but were placed on his lips by his later (Gnostic) followers.
I need to be clear that of the three criteria of authenticity I will be discussing here, this one alone is negative. It shows, not what Jesus probably did say or do, but what he almost certainly did not. If a tradition of Jesus passes this first criterion, it is possible. But it is not necessarily probable. To establish probability, we need recourse to the other two criteria. And a tradition is even more probable if it can pass not just one but both of them.
Multiple Attestation
I have repeatedly stressed that a tradition appearing in multiple, independent sources has a greater likelihood of being historically reliable than a tradition that appears in only one. If a saying or deed of Jesus is found in only one source, then it is possible that the source simply made it up. But if a word or action is found in several sources and they did not collaborate with one another, then none of them made it up; the tradition must predate them. If it is found independently in a number of sources, the probability of its being reliable is increased, assuming, of course, that it is contextually credible.
Any story that is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, of course, is not multiply attested, even though it is found in three of our sources. Matthew and Luke took a number of their stories from Mark, and so a story found in virtually the same words in all three simply comes from Mark, one source alone. But there are plenty of traditions that are found in different ones of our early independent sources—Mark, Q, M, L, John and its sources, Paul, other authors of other epistles, Thomas, and even Josephus and Tacitus—all from within a century of Jesus’s death.
We have already seen a few obvious examples. The crucifixion of Jesus under Pontius Pilate is, of course, contextually credible. The Romans crucified lots of people all the time. And this is one tradition that is abundantly attested—in Mark, M, L, John, and the speeches in Acts, not to mention Josephus and Tacitus. It is alluded to, independently, in 1 Timothy. The crucifixion itself is attested (without Pilate) throughout Paul and in a range of other independent sources: 1 Peter, Hebrews, and so on. This is one of the best attested traditions about Jesus and one, as we will see, that passes the next criterion as well with flying colors.
Or take the issue of Jesus’s brothers. As we have seen, in multiple independent sources Jesus is said to have brothers, and most of those sources name one of these brothers as James; this is true of Mark, John (doesn’t name James), Paul, and Josephus. Paul, as we have seen, actually knew James. This establishes reasonably good probability in favor of the tradition.
Moreover, again, Jesus is said to have come from Nazareth, not just in Mark and John but also in independent stories from M and L. Here too, as we will see, this tradition passes both of our other criteria and so seems highly probable.
The Criterion of Dissimilarity
The most controversial criterion that scholars use to establish historically probable traditions about Jesus is one we already discussed, the “criterion of dissimilarity.” This criterion is rooted in the idea that the biases of a source, and those of the source behind the source, need to be taken into account. So the stories about Jesus the miracle-working five-year-old who could wither his playmates when they irritated him—as found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—are not historically reliable, since these stories serve a Christian purpose of showing that Jesus was a powerful Son of God even before his public ministry. We saw how the story of Jesus’s birth in Luke does not make historical sense for there is no record of a worldwide census and it could not have been when Quirinius ruled Syria if Jesus was actually born during the reign of King Herod since their reigns did not overlap. And it contradicts Matthew (not that Matthew is necessarily right either; but it is worth knowing that they both can’t be right). So where did the story come from? It seems most likely that Luke, or his source, simply made it up to make sure t
hat Jesus was born where the prophets—in this case Micah—indicated that the Jewish savior would come from, Bethlehem (see Micah 5:2; quoted in Matthew 2:6).
But when we encounter a story about Jesus that does not support an early Christian agenda or that seems to run contrary to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about Jesus, as we saw, the story is more likely to be historically reliable since it is less likely to have been made up. We saw how the story that Jesus was crucified created enormous headaches for the Christian mission because no Jews would have expected a crucified messiah. This tradition clearly passes the criterion of dissimilarity. Given the additional fact that it is so thoroughly attested in so many of our independent sources, it appears highly probable that in fact Jesus was crucified. That is far more probable than an alternative claim, for example, that he was stoned to death or that he ascended without dying or even that he simply lived out his life and died as an old man in Nazareth, none of which is ever mentioned in our sources.
Or take the details of Jesus’s life. The idea that he had brothers does not serve any clear-cut Christian agenda. It is simply taken as a statement of fact by the early authors who mention it (Paul, Mark, John, Josephus). And so Jesus probably had brothers, and one of them happened to be named James. So too with the claim that he came from Nazareth. Since Nazareth was a tiny hamlet riddled with poverty, it is unlikely that anyone would invent the story that the messiah came from there. Given that the story of Jesus coming from Nazareth is widely attested in our sources, it is probable that Jesus came from Nazareth.
Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Page 29