More On The "historical Jesus" Industry

IT IS ONE OF THE more curious things about the business of recreating "an" historical Jesus that it is both held that gospels written a few decades after the death of Jesus are considered to be too late to be reliable but that reconstructions done almost two thousand years later are to be considered better.  As the earlier post said, I was reading about one reconstruction made in the 1970s, trying to paint a "Jesus" before Christianity started based on allegedly accurate reconstructions of Judaism in and around where he lived and the ambient pagan culture and other things, along the way discounting what the Gospels had to say on many points while, also, using the Gospels as the primary source materials - which along with the various Epistles are the source material available.  This one, apparently, doesn't go for the later fad of using very late "gospels" which are even more obviously overlaid if not created out of extraneous theology and pagan philosophy that would be rejected by orthodox Christianity in Eurasia and Africa. I have to say that it might be nice if the "historical Jesus" industry would get its industrial standards straightened out to the point where the dating of Gospels really does matter in their credibility or if they come clean, that it is to matter only when the dating can be used to attack the common conclusions made about the canonical Gospels.  I've read the apocryphal gospels and I don't find any of them, including the Thomas Gospel, to be especially believable as compared to the Synoptic Gospels and that attributed to John, taking into account that they don't strictly agree on some things. I'm sorry but I think Elane Pagels is not credible.

I have a hard time imagining that, especially, Luke didn't have access to eye-witnesses to the ministry of Jesus and that what he reported from his research, was something he didn't believe was accurate.  We can suspect that it's at least within the realm of possibility that "Luke" had access to eye-witness or at least somewhat fresh testimony from those who saw and heard Jesus though we cannot be certain of that.  We can be certain that the entire modern academic community can have no such claim made for it. I find it remarkable in this "historical Jesus" business that the claims that the Gospels written within the span of living memory of Jesus but somewhat after are not reliable while it is claimed that reconstructions made almost two thousand years later are.

I also have a hard time believing that what Jesus really taught and did was not radically different from the various mainstream Jewish sects of his time, what would have left written evidence, especially the ones which the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles present as being in opposition to what he taught.  I do believe that Luke and the other canonical Gospels present a Jesus who would have had to depart from conventional religious and political beliefs in significant ways or he would not have gotten that opposition which, eventually, resulted in his death. I think, if anything, the writers of the Gospels and, perhaps especially Paul would have toned down the radicalism of Jesus because they were mostly if not all observing him and his message out of conventional Jewish thinking and the Gospel they provide is plenty radical to be getting on with.  

That filtering is certainly going on today.  One of the things I now find hardest to believe in the many recent "historical Jesuses" is how conventional they are in today's terms, recreated out of scholarly (modern) claims made about the religions of the time which are, as well, seen through modern eyes.    Brueggemann notes that the "historical" Jesuses they come up with are often suspiciously like which ever person is constructing it. Modern scholars sell a Jesus that is tailored for modern acceptance or their book goes nowhere and makes no splash, which is ironic, considering the fate of the apocryphal gospels in history.

If the picture of the "pre-Christian" Jesus movement has been unreliable for most of the past 2000 years, why would anyone imagine the information about Judaism or the ambient Greco-Roman culture which survives was any more reliable so as to recreate a reconstruction of that and to create an "historical Jesus" based on a modern sifting and reconstruction of the evidence?  Why are the sayings of the Jewish sages and Rabbis of the time not as vulnerable to elisions and accretions and the past and so in need of historical-critical pruning and bending?  Every fault that can be laid to the texts of the New Testament is certainly as likely to be true of everything passed down to us from the period.

One thing is certain, for Christianity to get started in and among the Jewish and pagan converts starting during the ministry of Jesus but, perhaps even more so after his death when the professions about him by his followers and their converts was the only information about him, they living in the very milieu which is the stuff of the "historical Jsus" industrie's claims to base their reconstructions on would have had to find what was said about him credible in all of its incredibility . Whichever Gospel or Gospels they adopted, they must have believed them.  And it would have to be sufficiently different from what was there before to generate any movement at all.  Especially one that survives till today instead of it having sunk back into the ambient culture and disappeared.  

I think it's pretty obvious that there are things about the way how to be a Christian is presented in Scripture that would have been a serious handicap to its widespread adoption.  The claim of resurrection during the present age instead of the end of the age doesn't seem to be something that Jews would have expected to happen. The claim that a carpenter's son, especially one of rather dubious fatherhood, one who lived and taught what Jesus taught was the Messiah doesn't seem to have been expected by anyone.  Certainly the claim of him being born to a virgin who claimed to have not had sex with a man was as capable of generating snark back then as it is today, probably more so.  The role that Women had in the witness of the Resurrection, they being the first witnesses who told men about it is nothing that would have been widely accepted as credible, Women not being considered credible witnesses.  I admit that I find the arguments for the authenticity of at least the belief in what the Gospels report by those who wrote them and the extent to which they were held to be true by his closest followers from the serious disadvantages for converting skeptics contained in them add to the credibility of at least what was said being believed to be true.  If it had been a consciously constructed con job you wouldn't expect those features to be there or to play such central roles in the claims, you would expect it to be constructed for easy sale and snark proofed.  

And on top of those disadvantages there are the central messages of Jesus, including the ones that so few of his would-be followers find it possible to do,

- selling everything you have, giving the money to those who are too poor to repay it,

- the whole host of personal privations and dangers advocated in it.  

- Central to the teachings of Jesus is the elevation of the destitute over the powerful, the marginal and nothings of their time over the elites, the opposition to the religious as well as economic and political elites and their power.  

- And to top all of that off there is the example of the Jesus as a powerless figure, held to be the Son of God,  being tortured and humiliatingly executed by the Roman government,

- and his earliest and closest followers presented as being headed for similar ends.  

Those aren't exactly made for easy sales.  Which is exactly why the "prosperity gospel" heresy as well as the Halloween horror house version of it is such an easier sell so much better than the real Gospel.  

That even among the heresies the real thing did succeed in establishing itself in some forms, in many places is something of a miracle. I think St. Francis arising as he did, where he did is a miracle.  More generally, I think the remarkable features of the monotheism that springs from the Jewish tradition flourishing and becoming so widespread across the world in ways that none of the far more powerful, far more widespread religious traditions of the time have is a remarkable phenomenon.  Perhaps especially Christianity which, in so many ways, contains its own greatest obstacles to success.  

There are some really good things about the recent scholarship into the origins of Christianity, especially those parts of it that call attention to the extreme egalitarian, leveling aspects of it - something which has certainly not typified the mainstream of Christianity after it gained political and legal acceptance and power.  But, as I said in my other post on this the other day, in doing that they also remove the most powerful reason for someone disinclined to egalitarian justice and economic leveling - and that is most of us - from making that effort, the divine authority of the one who gave those commandments to Christians.  

I have little emotional investment in things like The Virgin Birth but I don't think it's likely that there is a more effective or more likely source for bringing about the Kingdom of God than the belief that we are divinely commanded to do those parts of the Will of God which will comprise that Kingdom here, on Earth.  

And I don't think anything short of an expectation that us making that effort will have an effect on our eventual fate after death will make it happen, either.  I might like the idea that postmortem punishment is reformative and that, eventually, all will be convinced of the rightness of God's will but I think that punishment is still worth avoiding.  In that I find a God who both will not be mocked (as Brueggemann stresses) but who it is possible to love.  I don't think the Western Christian theory of eternal punishment is compatible with the idea that God is good and deserving of our love.  The God as described by Augustine and Calvin is one who you might fear but you could never really love, no matter how much you pretend you can.  

I think that accounts for why so many who are so wedded to the idea of eternal damnation are far more impressed with the power of evil than the power of good, I think they have an obsessive fascination with evil, the glamor of Satan which the Catholic rite of Baptism warns against.  Not that a lot of Catholics have exactly lived like that, including many clerics.  A number of those sitting in Bishops' chairs and higher might well be described as glamorously evil as well as most of the popular Protestant TV preachers.  I think the "trad-Catholic" fascination with pseudo-medieval bullshit is an example of how the devil can use the trappings of religion to corrupt the gullible, the fancier the better.  The trappings of academic respectability, with their own neo-medieval features and traditions historically based in ecclesiastical ranking and privilege and pomp, can serve the same ends, especially as filtered through the commercial publishing industry and NPR-PBS. And "liberals" are especially vulnerable to that.  I think they invent a Jesus who they hope will be compatible with modern, academic anti-Christianty.

I think there is plenty of work to be done in the conversion of conventional Christianity and, even more so "christianity" to the Gospel of Jesus.  Ironically, considering my criticism of Albert Nolan in that earlier post, I think it's exactly in the direction he announced his goal to be.  I don't think it's likely the "historical Jesus" industry is going to help that effort, I think it's far more likely to prevent it just as earlier establishment twisting and clipping of the Gospels did.  That's a radical stand, not a "conservative" one.