"Jesus in History: An Approach to the Study of the Gospels" by Howard Clark Kee

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JESUS IN EXTRABIBLICAl SOURCES

Is it possible that Jesus never existed? A half-century ago doubts about the historical existence of Jesus were earnestly voiced by certain historians and theologians,! most notably by Arthur Drews (1865-1935)2 in Germany and by his disciple, William Benjamin Smith (1850-1934),3 in America. These men claimed that Jesus was a mythical figure invented by propagandists for the developing Christian faith, who built on the strand in the Jewish tradition (especially after the time of the Maccabees) that sought to bring the Gentiles as proselytes into the community of Israel. According to Smith, the effort to achieve universal salvation was the essence of nascent Christianity, but the Old Testament prophecies and conceptions were not sufficiently concrete to appeal as widely as was necessary to accomplish Gentile conversion:
There was one and only one device that could meet the demand of the situation and at the same time lay close at hand: and that
1 See the discussion in Maurice Goguel, Jesus de Nazareth: mythe au histoire? [Jesus of Nazareth: Myth or history?] (Paris: Payot, 1925). Die Christusmythe [The Christ myth], 2 vols. (Jena: Diederichs, 190911). a The Birth at the Gospel: A Study at the Origin and Purport at the Primitive Allegory at the Jews (New York: 1927; New York: reprinted, Philo sophical Library, 1957).

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was to follow the precedent of Isaiah, so native and familiar to the Hebrew mind, so appealing to the oriental fancy, and to present the Righteous Servant, the Torch-Bearer, the Light for the Gentiles, as a Man, a suffering son of the earth, "tempted in all points in our likeness without sin." 4

The two major flaws in Smith's thesis result from (1) his assumption that, since some materials included in the gospels were shaped by the claim that Jesus was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, all the gospels must be so regarded;7 and (2) his neglect of the evidence pointing to Jesus' historicity in the form of allusions to him in Jewish and pagan sources. s

The process of creating the gospels began with the story of the passion, to which were added the accounts of the ministry and later of the prehistory of Jesus. Smith reported,
The final product, the symbolic quasi-biography which the world knows as the Gospels, we have found was the literary precipitate of a long-continued pictorial teaching that stretched all round the Mediterranean. These writings becotpe self-luminous when and only when we abandon the baseless assumption of historical documents. . . . The story of Jesus is, therefore, an idealization of the destiny of the nation Israel in its universal inclusiveness.a

EVIDENCE IN NON-CHRISTIAN HISTORICAL WRITING Historians, including Christian historians, would surely welcome direct mention of Jesus in some Roman legal documents of his day. Lacking authentic reports, early Christian imagination produced the Acts of Pilate, an apocryphal narrative that built on the brief mention of that Roman procurator in the gospels in an attempt to depict his reaction to Jesus and to reproduce the content of his official report on the execution. But most of the references to Jesus in the Greek and Latin writings of the first and the early second centuries are no more than brief allusions to the movement that began in his name-so brief that we can repro.duce most of them in their entirety (except for the letters of Pliny) in this chapter.

Smith's contemporaries did not dismiss his work as nonsense, nor should we today. He had far too many accurate insights and far too firm a grasp of historical facts about Christian origins to be labeled a crank. His intuition that some of the gospel narra tives were created or at least modified in order to demonstrate the fulfillment of the Old Testament was propounded by David Friedrich Strauss in the nineteenth century in Das Leben Jesu [The life of Jesus], a book that has continued to cast its sober influence over gospel studies down to the present day. Smith's awareness of the Hebrew practice of depicting a group under the figure of an individual, a corporate personality, is an that, developed by others, has been of fundamental importance for Old Testament studies in recent decades. 6
Ibid., p. 651. "Ibid., pp. 141-42 (Smith's italics). The classic study of corporate personality is Corporate Personality in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Press, 1964); see also his Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 69-74. See also the discussions in Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture, 4 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1926, 1940; Vols. 1 and 2 reprinted, 1964; Vols. 3 and 4 reprinted with additions, 1959).

The Jewish Historian Josephus

In his Antiquities of the Jews (written in Greek) the Jewish historian Josephus (A.D. 37-100?), who turned collaborationist at the time of the Roman invasion of Palestine in A.D. 67-70, refers to Jesus twice: once in a list of notorious Jewish nationalists and other troublemakers and again in connection with the execution of James, a leader of the Jerusalem church, who is identified as
7 On the effects of Old Testament prophecy on the gospel narrative, see Chapter 5. 8 For other assessments of some of these sources, see Maurice Goguel, Life of Jeslts, trans. Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 70-104; and Joseph Klausner, Jeslts of Nazareth, trans. Herbert Danby (New York: Macmillan, 1926), pp. 17-62.

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. Jesus in Extrabiblical Sources

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the brother of Jesus. The first of these passages has almost certainly been worked over by Christians, who tried to make Josephus bear Christian witness to Jesus:
About this time [that is, during the procuratorship of Pilate, A.D. 26--86, although Josephus here refers to the early phase of his rule] there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvellous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him. has still to this day not disappeared. 9 It is incredible that Josephus could have written this ac-

count of Jesus exactly as it stands, since he would have had to be a Ghristian believer to have affirmed unequivocally that Jesus was the Messiah. The recognition of Jesus as the Messiah is doubtless a Christian interpolation. However, in his translation of the Antiquities L. H. Feldman suggests that the rest of the account that has come down to us may not be essentially different from what Josephus wrote. In its present form the passage is ambiguous and lends itself to Christian interpretation. This ambiguity may have originated with Josephus, and if so, the Christians may have found it necessary to change only a halfdozen phrases in order to make the account serve their propaganda aims. The Christian reader of Josephus, for example, interprets "if indeed one ought to call him a man" as a suggestion of Jesus' divinity. But if the emphasis falls on the "surprising feats" mentioned in the next sentence, then the inappropriateness of calling Jesus merely a man may have meant, not that Jesus was divine, but that he was a magician under demonic control.
Josephus Antiquities of the Jews 18. 63, Loeb edition, Vol. 9, trans.
L. H. Feldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).

As we shall see, this was precisely the charge most commonly leveled against Jesus in the rabbinic sources. If we assume that in making explicit statements about Jesus as Messiah and about the resurrection Josephus is merely conveying what Jesus' followers claimed in his behalf, then there would be no reason to deny that he wrote them nearly as they stand. 10 It seems very unlikely that the passage in its entirety is a Christian interpolation; thus it can serve..as evidence outside Christian writing for the existence of Jesus. Even if we assume that the passage has come down to us almost as Josephus wrote it, however, it still provides us only limited information about Jesus. It presupposes that he lived and attests that he conducted a ministry that attracted considerable attention, even among those who thought him to be a wizard, that the Romans condemned him-presumably as a threat to the peace and therefore probably as an insurrectionistand that the belief in his resurrection developed soon after his death. The information from Josephus confirms the main points in the gospel account, but it in no way supplements it, since even in the gospels Jesus' opponents accuse him of performing his exorcisms by being in league with the prince of demons (Mark 3:22). It is also obvious that, although Josephus thought mention of Jesus worthwhile, he gave it no more place in his narrative than his accounts of other conRicts between the Jews and their Roman overlords, and far less space than his spicy story of the goings-on in the temple of Isis in Rome.H The second of Josephus' references to Jesus12 occurs in a section dealing with the struggles for power that characterized life in Judea in the years prior to the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66. Jesus' brother, James, had succeeded to the leadership of the (:hurch in Jerusalem and was apparently highly regarded by the majority of the Jewish community as well. No information what,. See the discussion of the authenticity of this passage in Vol. 9 of
L. H. Feldman's translation of Josephus' Antiquities, pp. 48--51 and notes

on pp. 48 and 49. Feldman reproduces and evaluates an attempt by Robert Eisler to restore the passage to its original form. 11 Ibid., 18. 65-80 . 12Ibid., 20. 200.

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soever about Jesus is provided by this passage in Josephus, but it does confirm the general picture presented in the gospels that Jesus was a well-known figure in first-century Judaism, who could be identified in a passing reference as the Jesus who was called the Messiah by his followers. There is no hint here of a Christian interpolation, which adds more weight to this as an important historical allusion and renders untenable the allegation that Jesus was a fictional figure invented by the Christians. Since mention of Jesus at this point in his narrative serves only to identify James and contributes nothing substantial to his account, Josephus certainly leaves his readers with the impression that Jesus is a historical person like any other of whom he writes.

The Roman Historians: Pliny, Suetonius, and Tacitus

Among Roman writers, the oldest reference to Jesus that has survived is found in one of the letters that Pliny the Younger (A.D. 62-113) wrote to Emperor Trajan. Around A.D. 110, writing from the seat of his governorship in Bithynia, a Roman province on the Black Sea coast in Asia Minor, Pliny asked for guidance in dealing with Christians, whose numbers and influence seem to have been on the rise in the area at this time. So greatly had the impact of the Christian faith been felt throughout the Black Sea provinces that the temples of the officially sanctioned gods were nearly deserted. 1s Christ was worshipped "as a god" and both the Eucharist and the love feast, the joyous fellowship meal that preceded it, were being celebrated by adherents of the new faith. Pliny's evidence shows us, therefore, that Christianity had a strong foothold on the Black Sea coast about eighty years after the crucifixion, although his description of Christian practices adds nothing to our knowledge of the life of Jesus. The Roman historian Suetonius, a contemporary of Pliny, mentions in his Lives of the Twelve Caesars that under the reign of Claudius (A.D. 41-54), there was a disturbance among the Jews
13 Pliny Letters 10. 94. The full text in English, with ample commentary, is in A. N. Sherwin-White, Fifty Letters of Pliny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

that reached such a peak of intensity that they had to be expelled from the city. The instigator of this internal struggle was someone named Chrestos. Suetonius reports, "Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestos, he [Claudius] expelled them from Rome." 14 It is generally acknowledged that Chrestos, a common name, was used by Suetonius instead of Christos, which would not have been at all' familiar to most Latin-speaking people. Perhaps the cause of the disturbance among the Jewish community in Rome was the coming, not of Christos, but of Christian preachers with their message that Jesus was the Christ(os). Although it is possible that Suetonius had his date confused and that the disturbance actually occurred during the reign of Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), it is more likely that the expulsion of the Jews from Rome was the occasion for the migration from Rome to Corinth of Priscilla and Aquila, the Christian couple who aided Paul in founding and building up the Corinthian church (Acts 18:2-26; Rom. 16:3; I Cor. 16:19). As in the case of the evidence from Pliny, all that we learn from Suetonius is that there was a Christian community in Rome as early as A.D. 49-50. 15 In his Annals, Tacitus (A.D. 55?-1l7?), a third Roman writing early in the second century, describes in vivid detail the fire that destroyed much of Rome during the reign of Nero (A.D. 5468). In order to divert suspicion from himself as the one who had ordered the city set afire, Nero placed the blame on the Christians, of whom a "multitude" were convicted.
Neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order, i.e., of Nero. Therefore, to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits and punished with
H Suetonius Lives of the Twelve Caesars 25. 4, trans. Joseph Gavorse (New York: Modern Library, 1931; reprinted, 1959), p. 226. "Chrestos" would be the Greek form, "Chrestus" the Latinized form. W A discussion of the date of Claudius' decree concerning the Jewish disturbance is given in F. J. Foakes-Jackson and Kirsopp Lake, The Beginnings of Christianity, Vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 459~60. For a different interpretation of the evidence, see John Knox, Chapters in a Life of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1950), pp. 81-83.

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the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. First, then, the confessed members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for the hatred of the human race. And derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts' skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and when daylight failed were burned to serve as lamps by night. Nero had offered his gardens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his Circus, mixing with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on his car.16

Allowing for exaggeration, we can still infer that the Christian community was at least large enough in Rome to attract public notice and aggressive enough to invite the hatred of the masses. In identifying the Christians among the many religious sects he scorned, Tacitus mentions that "Christus" was executed during the reign of Tiberius, probably about 29, having been sentenced by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Tacitus' account is the most precise and extensive information that the pagan authors provide about Jesus. Although his details match exactly what is known from Christian accounts, Tacitus, like Pliny and Suetonius, provides us with nothing that supplements what we know of Jesus from the gospels. The writings of the Roman historians are, however, important evidence for Jesus' existence as a historical person: They show that non-Christian historical writers, and by inference their audiences, believed Jesus to have existed, and that they considered his death and his continuing inHuence after death to be significant enough to rate a few brief references.
16 Tacitus Annals 15. 44, Loeb edition, trans. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931).

J.

Jackson (Cambridge,

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