Jesus (c. 4 BCE–30 CE)

Historical Context and Debate

Analyzing Jesus as a leader in his own time and place is hampered by limited historical information. The four canonical New Testament Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are the principal sources of historical knowledge about Jesus. Even the oldest Gospel, Mark, was written at least thirty years after the death of Jesus, and the respective contexts of the Gospel authors shaped their narratives. A few other [Page 768]early sources, including the Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37–100 CE) make reference to Jesus, but they offer little additional information about his life and work. The second-century-CE Gospel of Thomas also provides a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus.

Given the dependence upon the Gospel accounts, knowledge of the historical figure of Jesus is undeniably linked to the theological beliefs about him by the early and later church. One Gospel writer notes his desire to record the events surrounding Jesus “so that you may know the truth” (Luke 1:4, New Revised Standard Version), and another explicitly states that he has “written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31 NRSV). This issue is frequently cast as the relationship between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.”

Despite the difficulty of culling away theological beliefs about who Jesus was or is, the confidence placed in scientific and historical methods of biblical scholarship has fueled concerted attempts, since the latter part of the nineteenth century, to discover the essential basics about the life and death of Jesus. The most classic of these works is the French theologian and philosopher Albert Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906, trans. 1910). Schweitzer's book and the myriad other writings on Jesus disagree vehemently on many points of historical and theological interpretation. Yet all of these works have the virtue of exploring the Gospel stories within the wider context of Jesus' social, political, religious, and economic milieus. Recently, members of the “Jesus Seminar,” a group of scholars pursuing the historical Jesus, have sought systematically to determine what parts of the Gospel texts can be attributed to Jesus himself, and with what degree of certainty. Critics have rejected this exercise as a misplaced attempt to evaluate the modern historical accuracy of ancient texts that did not communicate truth as scientific fact.

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