Almost all scholars concur on some basic features of the gospel story. They agree that Jesus was a Galilean Jew from Nazareth, a popular sage and prophet whose disciples began a distinctive Jewish movement. Jesus was influenced by the (likely eschatological) baptizing prophet John, announced the approach of God’s kingdom on earth, and taught in parables and often riddles.
Most scholars also agree that Jesus’s contemporaries experienced him as a healer and exorcist, offering divine help to the vulnerable.[1] He viewed his healings and exorcisms as signs of the promised kingdom.[2] He embraced for the kingdom many people whose status was marginal and/or normally overlooked by their society, including those deemed marginal morally or (in the case of tax collectors) nationalistically. He appealed to the poor, the disenfranchised, the disabled and the ill, and encountered conflict with various elites.
This conflict climaxed in Jerusalem, probably at Passover when Jesus and other Galileans made pilgrimage. Virtually indisputably, he died by Roman crucifixion, decreed by the governor, Pontius Pilate. Within days, his disciples were claiming that God had raised him from the dead and they had seen him, a message that may have become quickly coordinated with Jesus’s teachings about the kingdom and with God’s favor for the weak and the oppressed.[3] Distinctively, Jesus’s movement claimed the restoration of the prophetic Spirit (in a fuller sense than even in the Dead Sea Scrolls), spread to major cities of the empire within a few decades, and in the Diaspora began converting gentiles, sometimes without requiring circumcision.
Besides the more direct sources, general information based on Jesus’s environment allows us to screen out the plausibility of some approaches. Indisputably, Jesus was Jewish, so we may dismiss reconstructions of Jesus that do not take this feature into account (from some thinkers’ Aryan Jesus in Nazi-era Germany to today’s populist mythicists in the United States). Recent decades’ “Third Quest” for Jesus (as exemplified, for instance, in the works of E. P. Sanders, one of my own professors; Geza Vermes; James Charlesworth; and Amy-Jill Levine) has thus rightly focused on Jesus in his Jewish setting. Indeed, these Gospels, though all written in Greek for probably Diaspora audiences, reflect many Judean/Galilean traditions in a way that later alleged gospel works (such as Gospel of Peter) do not.[4]
On the basic outline of events, then, a wide consensus exists among scholars.[5] (I will not survey here the evidence that supports such a consensus for such claims, since I have treated them that evidence elsewhere[6] and these basic facts about Jesus are not the focus of the discussion at hand.)
Beyond such an outline, however, even scholars disagree considerably on the details. That is partly because we differ in how we estimate the reliability of the primary sources that supply our fullest first-century information about Jesus—namely, the Gospels. Almost no scholars claim that the Gospels offer Jesus’s words verbatim; such a claim would contradict the differing wording among the Gospels themselves.[7] (Any reader who assumes that the wording must be verbatim may disabuse themselves by simply comparing enough parallel accounts; a reader who has never done this has no business pontificating about what “must” be the case.) Nor, as we shall see, did the audiences of ancient writers expect verbatim reporting. Nevertheless, most scholars accept the Gospels’ reports of more teachings of Jesus and events in his life than the few mentioned above.
This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.
[1] For this summary of consensus, see also e.g., Brown, Death, 143–44; Meier, Marginal Jew, 2:617–45, 678–772; Eve, Miracles, 16–17; Dunn, Remembered, 670; Twelftree, “Message,” 2518-19; discussion in Christobiography, ch. 12.
[2] Matt 11:5//Luke 7:22 with Isa 35:5–6; 61:1; Matt 12:28//Luke 11:20.
[3] Cf. e.g., 1 Cor 1:18–25; 2 Cor 13:4; 1 Thess 2:12.
[4] I enumerate a few examples in Keener, “Suggestions”; Keener, “Assumptions,” 49–52. The Gospel of Peter reflects some Johannine tradition (cf. Kirk, Memory, 233-43) and might derive from Jewish Christian circles (Marcus, “Gospel of Peter”), but few today follow Crossan in dating parts of the Gospel of Peter to the first century; see Porter, “Reconstructing,” 53.
[5] So also Ehrman, Before the Gospels, 144, although beyond that outline our approaches often diverge.
[6] Keener, Historical Jesus, 163–329, 339–44, passim.
[7] For a quick, conspicuous example, see John 13:10–11; in the Evangelists’ Bible, see e.g., Gen 18:12–13; 39:17–19; Exod 6:12, 30; 1 Sam 15:3, 18; or Ezra 1:1-4; 5:13-15; 6:3-5.
