JesusEssay Preview: JesusReport this essayChristianity is currently the largest religion in the world with approximately 2.1 billion people identifying themselves as Christians. Jesus is the central focus of attention and worship in Christianity and is held by most Christians to be the Messiah, foretold in the Hebrew Bible. They believe him to be the savior of mankind, and the son of God. However, in modern times, the application of critical scholarship to the analysis of the Bible and to the New Testament Gospels in particular, has lead to an accelerating rate of disintegration in the traditional Christian belief system. The term “scholarship” implies the application of scientific method of the evaluating the evidence on the basis of objective standards divorced from any personal involvement or biases.
The main source of information on Jesus is from the Christian Gospels. Some scholars claim that the sources on which the Gospels are based were written within the living memory of Jesus lifetime. There are four such Gospels the earliest being Mark (68-73 AD), shortly followed by Matthew (70-100 AD), Luke (80-100 AD), and John (90-110 AD). Many conservative Christians accept these writings as evidence for a historical Jesus and as an account of his life and death.
According to the Christian Gospels Jesus was born in Bethlehem between 6 BC and 6 AD. The Gospel Mark reports that Jesus was “the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon” he also states that Jesus had sisters. Nothing of Jesus is recorded between 7 AD (Jesus visits the Temple in Jerusalem as a boy) and 25 AD (John baptized Jesus in the river Jordan). The Gospels state that starting around 27 AD Jesus began traveling the country side preforming miracles and preaching sermons around Galilee.
Jesus reportedly preformed many amazing miracles on numerous occasions during his ministry. It has been said in the Gospels that among other things Jesus brought the dead back to life, calmed storms, walked on water, cured blindness, and was himself resurrected form the dead. In 28 AD Jesus choose 12 disciples to teach and spread the gospel, among those were John and Matthew who later wrote two of the four Christian Gospels. Then in 30 AD the Roman authorities decided to arrest Jesus due to his growing popularity and his new interpretations of scripture were seen as a threat. Jesus was brought before the Jewish authorities, and, after implying affirmative when asked if he was the son of God, was handed over to Pontius Pilate, the local governor in the occupying Roman government.
Pilate asked Jesus whether he considered himself the king of the Jews , which could have been considered an attempt at usurping Roman authority, and either received no answer from Jesus, or the reply, It is you who say it . Pilate then allowed a crowd that had gathered to decide whether Jesus, or another prisoner, should be released. The crowd decided that Jesus should not be released so Pilate, attempting to appease the crowd, had Jesus scourged, and some Roman soldiers fashioned a crown out of thorns and placed it on Jesus head. The crowd demanded that Jesus be crucified and Pilate relented. That same day, having carried his own cross, he was crucified on Golgotha, with a sign reading (in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek) Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews placed on the cross upon the direction of Pilate. According to the
Gospel of Luke, as he was crucified, Jesus said, Father, forgive them; they know not what they do. He hung on the cross until his death was confirmed by a Roman soldier piercing his side with a spear.
After observing the Sabbath, some of Jesus female followers returned to the tomb to complete the Burial rites. When they arrived they discovered the body was gone, and they returned with some of the male disciples. According to the New testament, Jesus rose from the dead in the third day following his crucifixion and appeared to his disciples; the Acts of the Apostles reports that forty days later he ascended bodily into Heaven. The Apostle Pauls letters to the Romans, Ephesians and Colossians, as well as a letter to the Hebrews (traditionally attributed to Paul) claim that Jesus presently exercises all the authority and on earth for the sake of the Church. Based on the New Testament, Christians believe that Jesus will return from heaven at the end of the age, to judge the living and the dead.
Academics use a logical structure to assess the credibility of sources of information and, faith not being asserted as proof, the Gospels have a very difficult time holding up to these standards. The first thing that would call the accuracy of the Gospels into to question is that the claims in themselves are highly improbable. The more improbable a claim is, the less willing we should be to accept it merely on the say-so of a witness. Many historians immediately dismiss most of the claims of supernatural activity on the premiss that they simply do not accept that God intervenes in human existence. Other scholars attempt to stay away from such preconceived notions, but still dismiss the more miraculous claims maintaining that extraordinary claims need to supported by (require) extraordinary evidence, and the Gospels are not generally thought of as “extraordinary” evidence.
Groups such as the Jesus Seminar (a group of some very prominent scholars that are attempting to illuminate who Jesus was, what he did, and what he said based on textual analysis) have identified numerous fallacies within Biblical text. One of which is that the Gospels are too limited of a source, that is to say that there are only four (accepted) accounts of Jesus life. Of these few sources none of them completely agree with each other on important issues. This pertains to some of the more critical beliefs in Christianity such as his birth and resurrection. This creates a serious problem for those who wish to interpret the Gospels literately; if the same account is recorded two different ways by equally creditable sources its very difficult to distinguish which is the correct one.
The Problem
Why would someone want to read a work of such great importance, so much so that he would want to cite it? Some claim that such a reader is, by nature, a gullible and unreliable reader. No doubt it is true that these are the views of many of the authors who, according to Christian scholarship, were at war with God and who might well have influenced or influenced Jesus’ teachings as a new generation of believers took the view that God’s love is with all Christians (The Bibliettes, chapter 2). A major problem with these kinds of arguments is that they overlook the very real issue: how could a Christian who is not a Christian ever have any knowledge of a single source on a subject that was so important in one’s life as it was in the Bible?
This is the key question to bring to the discussion of how we might respond to the Gospels on the basis of textual research. It is a long-standing question in Christian thought, particularly since the early 20th century, that a Christian could be certain of some significant and authoritative writings, even if only very small numbers of readers came with them. For this reason many people who were not of the faith and did not consider the books to be authoritative tended to not do so at all when they read them. But at least one person who has considered the writings of the Jesus Seminar and others, such as Stephen A. Cohen (Parsley University Press), has developed the most rigorous and thorough empirical work on this question. Since Cohen’s book is well worth reading and even received worldwide dissemination, he has constructed a robust, very sophisticated but very selective index of the most important works to be read (and of the most significant works that did not become available until the 1970s).
In his book Cohen has produced a list of 100 books to be read on the issue of biblical texts and, in the process also using empirical and literary evidence, has created a highly detailed “meta” index that is well worth reading (for a discussion of Cohen’s methodology read with a cross-reference to the Bible he has produced, see John R. Woodard and M. L. Tannenbaum in the issue of The Gospels Online; for a lengthy discussion of the issue of textual analysis read with an appendix to R. J.’s text and A. M. Oden’s The Gospels Online). Although Cohen has used evidence from many different sources with great success, he has tried not to miss specific writings. For example, many manuscripts in this book include at least part of those that are not part of the list. This means that both B. B. and B. V. Cohen in their work on Christian historiography, the Gospels Online, have compiled a comprehensive database.
How do we then begin this investigation? According to Cohen, the primary focus of these two books is on the Gospel of John and Christ. This is because both of the great writers of that Christian faith have written about the Gospel and its key doctrines. The major difference between the two is that John is the first Christian to mention the
In the case of the Gospels there numerous motivations could easily be pointed out as to why the people establishing the story of Jesus Christ would have ulterior incentives to present him in a certain light. For instance, the Gospel of Mark the Gospel on which Matthew and John was written for the Romans while he was in Rome. According to Mark, the Jews are the ones pushing for the crucifixion while the Roman governor Pilate is advising against this action. There is reason to believe that Mark would not write badly about the Roman empire while in Rome and if he had, it may not have survived for others to read.
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