The Jesus Puzzle: Challenging Intellectual Uncertainty about Jesus

Introduction

This book concerns taking the earthly life of Jesus seriously.

First, as a modest attempt to challenge the assumed atheism of our times in its dismissal of the importance of Jesus.

Christianity is widely assumed to be based on a fairy story which can be discarded. It treats the Gospels as unreliable documents from a pre-scientific, superstitious world, for which we have no use today. They were written only as propaganda.

This scepticism concerning the gospels is presumed to rely on reason when it is in fact irrational. For the question of how Christianity emerged at all if the gospels are discounted as historically suspect is largely ignored, or given a number of purely conjectural explanations without any strong historical evidence for them at all.

The so-called Quest for the historical Jesus still fascinates scholars and claims to be historical enquiry, but it has in practice been mired in ideology, whether religious or anti-religious; it has often discounted basic historical principles. Jesus of Nazareth was a real human being living at a precise time and amenable to investigation by anyone because he was part of the public world of nature and history. He was not just a figure in which Christians have invested a huge amount of manufactured faith.

Second, as an attempt to encourage Christians to take the gospels more seriously as historical material for the life of Jesus.

It is sad, and also incoherent, to believe in Jesus as fully human as well as fully divine, and not to try to get as close a historically responsible understanding of him as a human being as possible. The gospels tend to be regarded by some Christians as just devotional material to be read in church in extracts without concern for their historical context.

Questions about what Jesus really taught and did should not be ignored. If they are, there is a danger that the Bible becomes almost idolized as a supreme authority which cannot be challenged or conceived mistaken in any way. Phrases such as The Bible says… are still common, treating the Bible as the Word of God as though there can be no other. This tendency goes back quite early in the Church’s history and was promoted even more by the Reformation which pitted the Bible against appeal to papal authority.

This attitude has created a great and unnecessary divide between faith and rational enquiry. It has further promoted a use of the Bible for proof-texts to bolster support for current controversies. So it has been, and still is, responsible for much un-Christian in-fighting and has served to distract attention from Jesus as a human being. The modern controversies over the role of women, gender etc., still see people quoting particular passages from Scripture in an exceedingly un-historical manner.

The question concerning what we can reliably know about Jesus as a human being has, however, been bedevilled by much misunderstanding. It is the purpose of this book to try to shed light on this quest.

Chapter 1

Does It Matt er That We Know About Jesus Today?

A strange amnesia

A strange amnesia appears to have overtaken the West. It has almost completely lost touch with the world view which has made it so distinctive and contributed so much to the values it both consciously and unconsciously holds. It has become common practice simply to ignore 2000 years of Christianity as though the Enlightenment appeared from nowhere or simply from insights gleaned from the Graeco-Roman world. Any mention of religion and specifically of Christianity contributing anything of value to Western civilisation is mostly masked out of the picture.

In reading for my recent book Making Education Fit for Democracy (2021), I was struck by the almost complete omission of any reference to the Christian institutions from which the schools and universities of the West emerged. It almost seemed as though education sprang up as something new following the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution in its wake, which required people to be educated up to at least basic levels.

A typical example at an everyday level of over-looking Christianity is how the Christmas Books Catalogue for 2019, drawn up by the Booksellers Association, had hardly any books on religion. It was presumed that Christmas is a secular festival. What about the millions of people who happily choose to sing carols at Christmas? Well, the words seemingly don’t matter at all; faith in Jesus may as well be no more than faith in Santa Claus; we grow out of both. We can enjoy singing carols in a sentimental/nostalgic way and appreciate the camaraderie of the Christmas season, but the stories are just incidental. Christmas was, after all, a pagan festival of mid-winter before Christianity came along.

It is significant that a highly-reviewed publication such as The Week, which advertises itself as giving All you need to know about everything that matt ers, has no section on religion at all. It carries a wide range of topics from politics to sport, consumer information to the arts, business to media, but readers are presumed to have no interest in Christianity or any other religion.

This does not appear to be the case when, for example, Dan Brown’s 2003 mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code, could become The Greatest Story Ever Sold, mocking the title of the 1965 American film The Greatest Story Ever Told. As is well established, the content of the novel is a hoax, yet its vague presumption of truth effectively took huge numbers of people in. This suggests that, though mostly unacknowledged, Christianity is still very much present in the popular psyche.

Amongst intellectuals, however, there is litt le acknowledgement of the importance of Christianity. Articles like Raphael Lataster’s in the philosophy journal Think (2016) indeed argue that we can now rationally doubt even the historical existence of Jesus. Julian Baggini begins his chapter in Tom Holland’s book Revolutionary with the words No one really knows who Jesus was, what he said and did, or even whether he really existed (2020, p.152). Jesus quite possibly never actually lived at all. His presumed teaching, life and death, and quite clearly his supposed resurrection, are no more than the figments of imagination by pre-scientific, premodern folk who have nothing to say to us today.

How can we account for this amnesia?

There are huge numbers of factors to do with the extraordinary changes the world has seen in recent centuries. These have seemed to leave older beliefs and values behind in the past, encouraging people to focus only on the present and the future. I think, however, that there is more to it than that. It reflects considerable anger with Christianity though, interestingly enough, not actually with Jesus.

Jesus is one of the few personal names understood widely throughout the world without the need to add an adjective or surname – people such as Napoleon, Hitler, Gandhi or Mandela. By itself that may mean little. What is odd, however, is that Jesus refers to someone who lived nearly 2000 years ago in a minor province of the vast Roman Empire, who never had political or military power, was unsupported by wealth, growing up in a conservative-looking rural semi-literate community beside an obscure inland lake, who collected a band of followers from amongst working people such as fishermen. He apparently preached a gospel of love and had his moment of glory being acclaimed by crowds before dying a criminal’s death at the hands of the political and religious authorities of his day. Why should anyone ever have heard of him?

The likeliest reason which most people might give is because he founded a new religion called Christianity. In time this religion, though starting in an unpromising way, became powerful: an important contender on the world stage succeeding a decrepit Roman Empire and providing the substance and structure for a new civilization in the West which was able to spread its influence around the globe especially through its developing science and technology.

Rescuing Jesus from the trappings of Christianity

Perceptions of Christianity have given Jesus much bad publicity. We need to ask whether the religion synonymous with his name is what he envisaged? Is it the case that the formalism, institutionalism, hierarchy, patriarchalism and sometimes wealth of the Christian church through the ages have been at all plausibly what Jesus intended? Is it not rather that, born a Jew, he wished for the reform of his own religion in such a way that it could be made open and available for all, based on the radical simplicity of learning to love as God loves every human being? Jesus wished to point humanity in a new direction, away from a self-centred approach to living towards a life of selfless love.

If this is what historically Jesus had in mind, then those aspects of Church theory and practice over the centuries which deny such a straightforward focus on love constitute abuse of a grave kind. It is probably the case that the majority of those who are antagonistic to Christianity are such because of the failings of the Church to live up to the teaching which, despite distortions, has remained at the heart of its message. Their proper enemy is institutional Christianity not Jesus. They are likely to agree with Mahatma Gandhi’s comment: I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. Indeed, it is interesting that usually mention of Jesus commands some respect even by diehard atheists who do thus distinguish between Jesus and the religion that bears his name. Richard Dawkins once commented: Somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist (You-Tube, 27 Oct 2011).

Thomas Paine, whose inspired writing was partly responsible for the American War of Independence, wrote vividly for the rest of his life in support of reason and the Enlightenment. He hated the Christian church, yet in his Age of Reason he exempted from his attack Jesus himself:

Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before; by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any.

He clearly distinguished Jesus from Christianity: The church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.

If it is difficult to find anti-Jesus quotes. it is much more difficult to find any positive reference to him in major books about the intellectual history of the West. Peter Watson’s book A Terrible Beauty: A History of the People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind (2000) has a tiny reference to Jesus and largely fragmented and negative references to Christianity. Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: the Books and School of the Ages (1994) never mentions Jesus.

In this book I want to examine what view of Jesus can historically stand up to the rigours of genuine scholarship and enquiry. The argument I want to present does not rest on wishful thinking but on what rationally can be said to make sense regarding what we really can know historically about Jesus the man.

Why knowledge about Jesus as a human being matters

It is necessary to set Jesus apart and seek afresh the story of his earthly life from an historical perspective for at least three major reasons:

First, Jesus