Sources#

Biblical and Extrabiblical#

Though not the first documents of the New Testament to have been written (some of the Letters—also called Epistles—were written earlier), the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John fittingly stand first as our main sources for reconstructing the life of Jesus.

The few non-Christian notices concerning him—for example, by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, in the Babylonian Talmud, and by the Roman writers Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Lucian—are so brief as to be almost valueless for a reconstruction.

Agrapha#

Some sayings of Jesus are recorded outside the four Gospels. For example, Paul quotes a dominical saying otherwise unknown: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). These agrapha, as they are called, differ from Jesus’ sayings in the Gospels but are quoted by early Christian writers and sometimes placed in the margins of ancient manuscripts of the New Testament.

Agrapha is Greek for “unwritten.” These sayings were written down somewhere, of course (otherwise we would not know them), but not in the canonical Gospels.

Collections of Sayings#

Most notable among other records of Jesus’ sayings outside the four canonical Gospels are the Oxyrhynchus papyri and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. The latter, discovered about 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, is not really a gospel, for it does not contain a narrative thread. Nor did the Apostle Thomas write it. Both this so-called gospel and the Oxyrhynchus papyri offer sizable collections of Jesus’ sayings.

Concerning their relationship to the New Testament, three possibilities present themselves:

1. the noncanonical records draw from the canonical Gospels;

2. the noncanonical records represent an independent tradition of Jesus’ sayings;

3. both relationships hold true in a mixed way.

With the exception of scholars who deeply distrust the reliability of the canonical Gospels, it is generally agreed that the Oxyrhynchus papyri and Gospel of Thomas reflect a largely corrupted tradition concerning the words of Jesus.

Apocryphal Gospels#

Luke 1:1 mentions numerous accounts written about Jesus and antedating the third Gospel, but none of these except Mark and probably Matthew have survived. Postapostolic apocryphal gospels did survive, however; and they present a motley mixture of heretical beliefs and pious imagination, especially in filling out the details of Jesus’ childhood and the interval between his death and resurrection, about which the canonical Gospels are largely silent.

Higher Criticism#

Alongside textual criticism, also called lower criticism and introduced in chapter 4, stands higher criticism. Whereas textual or lower critics try to answer the question of original wording, especially where ancient texts of the same document disagree, higher critics try to answer a variety of other questions concerning authorship; date, place, and purpose of writing; intended audience; possible use of comparable materials; editorial practices; and so on. Consequently, higher criticism subdivides.

Source Criticism of the Gospels#

Synoptic Problem: Oral Tradition Hypothesis#

As students of Jesus’ life, we must go first to our primary sources, the canonical Gospels. Immediately the synoptic problem confronts us: Why are the first three (or Synoptic) Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—very much alike?

Synoptic comes from two Greek words meaning “seeing together.”

According to the early hypothesis of oral tradition, resemblances derive from rapid crystallization of the tradition about Jesus in a more or less fixed oral form, which later came to be written down. But most modern scholars doubt that transmission by word of mouth could have retained so many and such minute verbal resemblances as exist among the Synoptics, especially in narrative, which is not so likely to have been memorized verbatim as possibly the words of Jesus were memorized.

Griesbach Hypothesis#

Other scholars, led by W. R. Farmer, have revived the hypothesis of an eighteenth-century German scholar named J. J. Griesbach. According to him, Matthew wrote first. Then Luke used Matthew. Finally, Mark wrote an abbreviated combination of Matthew and Luke.

Most contemporary scholars think the order of narratives concerning Jesus’ deeds might be explained fairly adequately in this way but that Luke’s disrupting the order of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew and detailed changes of wording do not receive an adequate explanation under this theory.

Marcan Priority#

The Mark-Q documentary hypothesis has gained the greatest favor: Matthew and Luke based most of their narrative on Mark, drew most of Jesus’ sayings, or teachings, from a lost document designated Q, and added distinctive material of their own. Scholars marshal a number of arguments for the priority of Mark.

Luke 1:1-4 states the utilization of earlier documents. This statement at least opens the possibility that Mark provided one of the documents behind Luke. More specifically, Matthew incorporates nearly all of Mark, and Luke about one-half. Both Matthew and Luke often carry the exact or nearly exact words of Mark, even in minute details.

Furthermore, Matthew and Luke usually carry Mark’s sequence of the events in Jesus’ life; they do not depart together from that sequence, as one would have expected them to do at least occasionally if they had not both been drawing on Mark. In other words, it appears that Mark is the anchor that keeps Matthew and Luke from drifting very far away (and never at the same time) from the order of events contained in Mark. Occasional, independent differences in sequence arise because topical considerations sometimes override chronology in the concerns of the evangelists (a technical term for the writers of the Gospels).

It often appears, moreover, that Matthew and Luke change the wording of Mark to clarify his meaning. Matthew and Luke also appear to omit material that might be misunderstood—for example, by omitting Mark’s story that Jesus’ family thought he had gone mad, perhaps because Matthew and Luke feared their audiences might infer he really had done so. They appear to delete material unnecessary for their own purposes. For example, Matthew 8:14 and Luke 4:38 omit the names of Andrew, James, and John in Mark 1:29 and retain only Peter’s name.

And Matthew and Luke appear to smooth out awkward grammar (a matter of style, not of accuracy). For example, Mark 2:7 (literally translated), “Who can forgive sins except one, God?” becomes, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” in Luke 5:21. (Mark has a rough and ready style—forceful but not elegant.) All these phenomena favor Matthew’s and Luke’s use of Mark.

Q Hypothesis#

Since similarities in narrative material appear to rise from common use of the document Mark by Matthew and Luke, similarities between Matthew and Luke in sayings material not contained in Mark have led to the positing of a second document, Q, thought to be an early collection of Jesus’ sayings with a minimum of narrative. Q might be thought to begin with the baptism and temptation of Jesus (his “call”), to continue with his preaching, but to lack any account of his suffering, death, and resurrection.

Q would be something like the Gospel of Thomas and the Oxyrhynchus collection of Jesus’ sayings or, better yet, like Old Testament prophetical books that contain the account of a prophet’s call, extensive records of his preaching, sometimes bits and pieces of narrative, but no account of the prophet’s death.

As to be expected especially for a hypothetical document, Q raises some questions. For instance:

• Why does the degree of agreement between Matthew and Luke in Jesus’ teachings vary widely?

• Did Matthew and Luke use or make different Greek translations of an originally Aramaic Q, use different editions of a Greek Q, or use the same Greek Q?

• Should we doubt the very existence of Q (Why did it not survive as such?) and adopt for Jesus’ teachings a theory of many short documents, or the theory of oral tradition (easier to believe for sayings than for narrative), or a combination of the two?

• Some believe that Luke used Matthew for many of Jesus’ teachings just as he used Mark for many of Jesus’ deeds (the Mark-Matthew hypothesis associated especially with M. Goulder); but if so, why did Luke often rearrange Matthew’s order of Jesus’ teachings?

• Or could it be that in the main, Luke used Mark and Q, but that he also used Matthew, only subsidiarily (a theory that would explain the so-called minor agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark)?

Elaborations of Mark-Q#

Proposing a four-document hypothesis, B. H. Streeter added to Mark and Q a source M for the sayings of Jesus distinctive to Matthew and a source L for most of the matter distinctive to Luke. He also advanced the Proto-Luke theory:

The first edition of Luke’s Gospel consisted only of Q + L, to which Luke later added a preface and the birth stories of John the Baptist and Jesus and interspersed Marcan material.

Marcan priority enjoys more favor than does Q, about which there is some uncertainty. Perhaps we should think of Q as a body of loose notes jotted down by Matthew. His Gospel often arranges and collects the sayings of Jesus topically instead of chronologically, as do also the other Gospels, though to a lesser degree. In contrast with Matthew, Luke may have used Mark as a supplement rather than as the backbone of his narrative; but this possibility falls far short of certainty.

It does not follow that where Matthew and Luke used Mark or another common source, such as Q, their testimony is inferior. Rather, they wanted to preserve the unity of the apostolic tradition about Jesus, because that tradition was anchored in history and deserved a united testimony in its favor. Where they change Mark or any other earlier source, they do so not in misleading ways but in ways that combat misinterpretation of the earlier accounts, add further details, omit others, and elaborate so as to bring out a variety of theological implications.

Form Criticism of the Gospels#

Task#

The earliest Christians had none of the four Gospels, much less all four. In the first decades of the twentieth century, therefore, German scholarship set for itself the ambitious task of inferring by literary analysis what the oral tradition about Jesus was like before it came to be written down in the Gospels.

Method#

Form critics try to determine the nature and content of the oral tradition by classifying individual units of the written gospel material according to their form and usage in the early church. The technical term for an individual unit is pericope. According to form criticism, pericopes fall into different categories:

1. apophthegms, paradigms, or pronouncement stories (stories climaxing in a saying of Jesus), used for sermon illustrations;

2. miracle stories, used as models for the activities of Christian healers and exorcists;

3. sayings and parables, used for catechetical instruction;

4. legends, used to magnify the greatness of Jesus (with perhaps a core of historical truth, but greatly exaggerated);

5. the passion story, used in celebrations of the Lord’s Supper and in evangelistic preaching.

In its more skeptical expression, this approach assumes that early Christians modified the information about Jesus greatly and invented stories and sayings to meet the needs that arose out of missionary preaching, catechetical instruction, sermonizing, formation of liturgies, doctrinal controversies, and questions of church discipline.

As a result, the Gospels tell us more about the Sitz im Leben (German for “situation in life”) of the early church than about that of Jesus.

To determine the truth about Jesus, form critics typically think they must strip away editorial accretions, such as geographical and chronological notations, miraculous features, and doctrinal elements supposedly dating from a period later than Jesus.

Development#

The Old Testament scholar J. Wellhausen fostered form criticism of the Gospels. M. Dibelius popularized it. K. L. Schmidt convinced many that the geographical and chronological framework in Mark came by Mark’s own invention. And R. Bultmann (best known of the form critics) concluded after detailed analysis that almost all the gospel tradition was fabricated or highly distorted. A characteristic line of reasoning is that since Christians believed in the deity of Jesus, they justified their belief by concocting stories in which he performed a miracle. We should, thought Bultmann, demythologize the Gospels (take away the myths) to make the Christian message palatable to modern people, who from their naturalistic standpoint can no longer accept the supernatural claims of the Gospels on Jesus’ behalf.

Evaluation#

Form criticism has placed salutary emphasis on literary analysis as a means toward reconstructing the oral gospel tradition and on the continuing relevance of Jesus’ words and deeds for the life of the early church. But utility was not the only factor. Form critics have not allowed enough room for the sheer biographical interest that early Christians must have had in Jesus. If those Christians really did appeal to his words and deeds to justify their beliefs and practices—as form critics themselves admit, indeed, emphasize—then the strongest motives existed for remembering him.

Nor have form critics allowed for the possibility that the gospel tradition was preserved because it was true as well as useful for Christian evangelism, teaching, and liturgy. The single generation between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels did not allow enough time for extensive fabrication of myths concerning him. Mythology does not normally develop in less than half a century. Yet the early Christians were proclaiming Jesus as a risen and exalted Savior-God almost immediately after his death. Moreover, during the first decades of church history the hope of Jesus’ soon return burned brightly, so that the early Christians would not have felt very much need to fabricate more information about him than was already available.

Form critics seem also to have forgotten that both Christian and anti-Christian eyewitnesses of Jesus’ career must have deterred wholesale fabrication and distortion of information. Throughout the New Testament numerous references indicate that early Christians valued highly the factor of eyewitness in establishing testimonial reliability. Not only would both friendly and unfriendly eyewitnesses have provided a restraining influence, but also their recollection of Jesus’ teaching and example would have been mined for solutions to ecclesiastical and doctrinal problems, for answers to inquiries from prospective converts, and for apology in the face of malicious charges. There is more than one reason, then, not to underestimate the factor of eyewitness.

Nor must we think that all ancient people gullibly accepted every tale of the supernatural they heard. Skepticism in the Greco-Roman world was widespread. Even among the disciples evidence had to overcome doubt, as in the case of Thomas, who at first disbelieved the report of Jesus’ resurrection. If the Gospels are not reliable, we draw a blank at the beginning of Christianity. But the dramatic upsurge of Christianity demands an explanation equal to the phenomenon.

Very early in the second century, probably in its first decade, the church father Papias passed on a tradition that Mark wrote down Peter’s reminiscences of Jesus. There are not sufficient reasons to doubt this tradition or the reliability of the Gospels in general. On the contrary, the texts of the four Gospels contain numerous indications of authenticity. Realistic details abound—references to places, names, and customs unnecessary to the overall story—just as one expects in accounts deriving from eyewitnesses. Descriptions of legal practices and social conditions in Palestine vis-à-vis the Hellenistic world exhibit an amazing accuracy.

Later Christians would have glorified the twelve apostles (as did later Christian literature) rather than unflatteringly portraying them as often bumbling, thickheaded, unbelieving, and cowardly. Why would sayings of Jesus embarrassingly difficult to interpret have been invented? Their very difficulty implies authenticity. It is also doubtful that wholesale distortion and fabrication would have produced the large amount of Semitically parallelistic poetry evident in Jesus’ teaching as recorded by the evangelists. The same thing is true concerning other traits of its Semitic style, which shines through even though the Gospels were written in Greek, a non-Semitic language.

The absence of parables from the Letters of the New Testament shows that early Christians did not use parables as a pedagogical device and are therefore unlikely to have created them in the Gospels. Similarly, the absence in the Letters of the christological title “the Son of Man” (frequent in the Gospels) shows it to be distinctive and thus characteristic of Jesus. Conversely, the failure of the Gospels to say anything about many of the burning issues reflected in Acts and the Letters (such as whether or not Gentile converts should be circumcised) shows that the early Christians did not read their own later developments of doctrine wholesale into Jesus’ mouth.

Only a positive assessment of the gospel tradition adequately explains the beginnings of Christianity and the literary features of the Gospels and Letters.

Kerygma#

The prominent British scholar C. H. Dodd offered an alternative to skeptical form criticism by noting a common pattern in the sermons of the early chapters in Acts (especially 10:34-43) and in the Letters of Paul where Paul occasionally summarizes the gospel (for example, Romans 1:1-4; 10:9; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; 15:3-7):

• Jesus has inaugurated the fulfillment of messianic prophecy.

• He went about doing good and performing miracles.

• He was crucified according to God’s plan.

• He was raised and exalted to heaven.

• He will return in judgment.

• Therefore repent, believe, and be baptized.

This pattern Dodd called the kerygma (Greek for “proclamation” or “preaching”).

Gradually, the bare outline of this kerygmatic pattern came to be filled with stories, sayings, and parables from Jesus’ life. As eyewitnesses began to die off, the Gospels were written for a permanent record. Also, as the gospel spread geographically far from Palestine to places where eyewitnesses were not available for confirmation, the need arose for trustworthy written records to be used by Christians in their preaching about Jesus’ words and deeds. Thus the Gospel of Mark is an expanded kerygma in written form.

A common idea is that at first the Christians did not even think of writing about the life of Jesus, because they expected him to return in the immediate future. When decade after decade he failed to do so, it dawned on them that more formal and fixed accounts were needed to fill the ever-widening gap. This idea contains some truth. Nevertheless, the expectation of a nearly immediate return of Jesus is easily overestimated.

Redaction Criticism#

After World War II, scholars began to analyze the Gospels as unified compositions carefully redacted (edited) by their authors to project distinctive theological views. A well-known example of this approach is H. Conzelmann’s hypothesis that Luke reinterpreted Jesus’ ministry to be, not the final stage of history (as Conzelmann alleges early Christians believed), but the midpoint of history with the age of the church and the second coming to follow—hence Luke’s addition of the book of Acts to his Gospel.

Usually, the particular theological standpoint of the evangelist is attributed to an entire school of thought within the church. The contribution of redaction criticism consists in its identifying ways in which the evangelists tailored earlier materials about Jesus to the needs of their own times and circumstances. Thus his words and deeds do not appear as fossils of dead history, but as applications to contemporary life (as form critics say was already being done with individual units of tradition in the preceding oral stage).

Other Kinds of Higher Criticism#

Other kinds of higher criticism jostle for attention too, though none of them has attained the prominence of the foregoing.

• Composition criticism pays attention to editorial arrangements of and additions to tradition (and as such is scarcely distinguishable from redaction criticism).

• Narrative criticism tries to establish the story line of a Gospel.

• Tradition criticism traces the origin and development of theological themes present in the Gospels.

• Rhetorical criticism seeks evidence of persuasive art in the presentation of dominical tradition.

• Literary criticism studies the impact of style on the message of the Gospels.

• Genre criticism, looking for the significance of larger literary forms, asks, What is a Gospel? How does it differ from other comparable books? Why does it differ?

• Canon criticism stresses the effect on the meaning of a Gospel had by its association with other biblical books.

• Tendency criticism keeps an eye on the influence of theological conflicts in the early church.

• Social science criticism studies the influence of societal oppositions—wealth versus poverty, freedom versus slavery, honor versus shame, city versus countryside, and so forth—on Christian life and belief as represented by the Gospels.

• Anthropological criticism seeks to initiate modern readers into the culturally different ways of thinking and acting that the Gospels reflect.

• Postcolonial criticism analyzes the Gospels from the standpoint of people governed and oppressed by foreign powers.

• Feminist criticism exposes in the Gospels elements for and against women’s liberation.

• Reader response criticism examines the efforts of readers to make their own sense of the Gospels and pays special attention to reading between lines where the evangelists have left matters unexpressed or vague.

• Structural criticism examines modes of thought underlying the Gospels and common to human expression.

• Deconstruction tries to show that in and of itself the text of a Gospel contains no meaning

The Study of Jesus’ Life#

Most contemporary scholars agree that a full-scale biography of Jesus is impossible, because the Gospels are very selective in the amount and kind of information they present about him. But during the nineteenth century, before this restriction was felt so keenly, several outstanding biographies of Jesus appeared.

Edersheim, a converted Jew, produced his widely used and conservative Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah from a background of acquaintance with rabbinic literature.

At the start of the twentieth century a typically liberal view—outstandingly represented by the German scholar A. von Harnack—saw in Jesus a good example of sacrificial service to fellow human beings and a teacher of lofty ethical ideals, but not a divine-human redeemer.

In 1906 Albert Schweitzer shook the theological world with his Quest of the Historical Jesus. It was a critical survey of some modern studies of Jesus’ life. Schweitzer argued that liberal treatments rested more on preconceived notions than on data in the Gospels. According to him, Jesus himself thought that God’s kingdom was about to arrive on earth and that God would install him as the Messiah. In fact, Jesus told the twelve disciples that God would send him as the Son of Man (a superhuman messiah) to establish the kingdom before they completed a preaching mission throughout Galilee (Matthew 10:23). When this expectation failed, Jesus became increasingly convinced that he would have to die for God to bring the kingdom. Meanwhile, Jesus revealed the secret of his messiahship to Peter, James, and John at the transfiguration. Peter then betrayed this secret to the rest of the Twelve on the occasion of his great confession (Matthew 16:13-20; Mark 8:27-30; Luke 9:18-20). (To achieve this reconstruction Schweitzer had to switch the order of Peter’s confession and Jesus’ transfiguration as given in the Synoptics.) Judas then betrayed the secret to the Jewish authorities, who set in motion the events that culminated in Jesus’ death. Jesus himself courageously but foolishly thought that God would raise him from the dead and immediately reveal him to the world on the clouds of heaven to establish the kingdom on earth. Such an event did not happen, of course; so for Schweitzer, Jesus became a tragic and mysterious figure, hard for moderns to understand but worthy of imitation in his selfless dedication.

Schweitzer’s great contribution lay, rather, in his forcing a reconsideration of the eschatological teaching of Jesus and the messianic implications of his ministry, both of which were being passed over lightly by most liberal scholars and even now are being negated again by some such scholars, often with the result that the historical Jesus is portrayed as less a Jewish religious leader and as more a peasant philosopher similar to the Cynics. On the other hand, the Jewishness of Jesus has recently come in for widespread recognition.

Mediating scholars accept a larger proportion as authentic but reject the rest. Others have forsaken the quest of the historical Jesus in favor of literary, political, economic, feminist, sociological, and psychological analyses. Conservative scholars find good historical and theological reasons for full acceptance of the gospel records. Such acceptance does not imply that the evangelists always quoted Jesus verbatim and never elaborated the tradition of his words and deeds. On the contrary, differences among the Gospels imply editorial arrangement, paraphrasing, and interpretation, all of which can be perfectly legitimate ways to convey someone else’s meaning and significance. Nor do conservative scholars insist on a complete and always chronological account of Jesus’ activities.

Summary#

Extrabiblical sources confirm the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth but offer few details of his life, for which the canonical Gospels provide the main source. The first three of them are called “synoptic” because they often parallel each other.

Of the hypotheses suggested to explain their similarities, the most popular is that Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark a great deal of narrative concerning the deeds of Jesus, and many of his sayings from a hypothesized collection called Q.

Individual units of the Gospels are classified according to their form in an attempt to discover the oral tradition that was circulating about Jesus before it was written down. Adoptions and revisions of earlier material are studied to discover the overall emphases of each evangelist.

The telling and editing of information about Jesus raises questions about its historical reliability. These questions have received widely different answers, including an extremely skeptical one; but good reasons support the essential trustworthiness, both historical and theological, of the canonical Gospels.