Ankerberg Show

Narrator: Welcome to the John Ankerberg Show Classics edition. For decades, we've been privileged to host esteemed scholars discussing a wide range of topics, from apologetics and science to biblical prophecy and beyond. Join us as we revisit these timeless conversations and make them accessible to you wherever you are.

Dr. N. T. Wright: I think the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar have actually shown that the whole enterprise was actually flawed from the start because those conclusions represent one section of American scholarship. It's not even all American mainstream scholarship. Here in Britain and in Europe, most of the scholars who are working on the Gospels and so on frankly wouldn't give that stuff the time of day.

Even the ones who are researching on Q and on the sources of the Synoptic Gospels would look at the kind of Q scholarship in the Jesus Seminar and would say, "Well, that's one way of doing it, but there are others, and we're going to follow this one." My guess is that most British, French, Belgian, and German scholars today, if they have heard of the Jesus Seminar, would simply say, "Well, I'm afraid that's some funny people in America, and we're carrying on with our scholarship and we're not going to bother about that."

We do have one or two from Europe who have joined in the seminar, Gerd Lüdemann, for instance, but it's interesting that precisely Lüdemann is out on a limb from mainstream European scholarship and has recently actually denied the Christian faith altogether and so on. I think most German New Testament scholars would see him as an angry young man, or maybe he's not so young anymore, but away in left field somewhere rather than in the mainstream.

When people start to read the New Testament as historians, they often feel obliged to show how clever they're being as historians by taking a razor blade and saying, "Oh, now we can see that there's something going on here and there's something going on there." Often what happens is that people like to pull together two different stories and say, "Really, this was just one incident, but it's told in two different ways." Like the feeding of the 5,000 and the feeding of the 4,000, they say maybe there was only one thing and it's just come out differently. Well, you'd have thought that Mark might have noticed that. I mean, was he just being stupid to say it two different ways? The answer might be yes, but maybe we're just being too clever.

Then you get the same thing happening when you get one account, like the story of the resurrection, and then scholars saying, "Well, really, these are quite independent traditions. There's an appearance tradition, there's a women tradition, there's an empty tomb tradition, there's a Peter tradition, and these are all quite separate and we can see that they come from different parts in the early church and that the evangelists have cleverly pulled it together." So, it's really, as we say in England, "Heads I win, tails you lose." You toss the coin. We are so clever that if there are two incidents, we'll say there were one, and if there's one incident, we'll say it was half a dozen.

I don't think that proves anything more than, as with all ancient history, we really don't know enough to be able to nail this thing down one thing after another. After all, even in modern history, nobody still quite knows who killed JFK. I mean, there's a debate about it. There are lots of things that happen in our own day, massively documented, and we're still not sure what happened. With ancient history, all we've got is the New Testament for Jesus' life, Josephus who is about that long on the shelf, a few other sources here and there, and that's it. You can read all the New Testament sources in a few days and that's not really very much to go on.

But as anyone will tell you who is involved with the media or with the law, the fact that you've got three slightly different accounts of something doesn't mean that nothing happened. It merely means that the eyewitnesses were so excited that they, if they saw a road accident, forgot that it was a blue car and they thought it was a red car or vice versa. That doesn't mean there wasn't an accident. It merely means that the judge or the jury has to sift quite carefully to make sure we've really figured out what happens. So it is with the resurrection narratives. I don't think we'll ever be quite sure which women went which way and met Jesus where, but that some women went to the tomb and that at least one of them met the risen Jesus that morning, I have no doubt whatsoever.

Most ancient history is stuff that we know about from one source only. The entire history of the Peloponnesian War, one of the most studied wars in the ancient world, comes to us from Thucydides, who was a sacked general by the Athenians and who sat there grumpily watching the other generals getting it all wrong. We go with Thucydides because he was around at the time, he knew who the people were, and he knew what the major political issues were. Now, of course, he had an agenda. Of course, Thucydides may get it wrong. He couldn't be in two places at once and maybe his sources got it muddled, but we go with him because he's the best there is. We've got little bits of archaeology to help here, a few coins, inscriptions, etc., but mostly we go with him.

Likewise, where we're sitting here in London, Britain was invaded by Julius Caesar about half a century before the time of Jesus. Most of what we know about that we know from Caesar's own account. He was not an unbiased witness. He was trying to say, "I'm the greatest. I'm the general. I went and did this stuff. I came, I saw, I conquered." But we don't assume that nothing happened. We don't assume it was all made up. The Romans were here 2,000 and some years ago.

When we look at the historians of the Roman Empire, we have to realize that the Caesar cult, the cult of the Roman Emperor, was the fastest-growing religion in the first century AD. When Paul was going around Turkey, what we call Turkey, there were new temples being built to Caesar. So when people were telling the story of Caesar becoming the lord of the world, this was as much a religious thing as a political thing. It wasn't a kind of a neutral thing at all. Likewise, again, we must insist, for a first-century Jew, theology was not about ideas about God; it was about things that God does in the world. If it doesn't have a purchase on the actual world, it's not about the Jewish God, because the Jewish God is the creator and redeemer of the world, not somebody who wants to save souls off in some abstract sphere somewhere.

I think part of the difficulty here is that both scholars and simple Christians alike have tended to keep their history and their theology in separate boxes, and often they've fallen into the trap of saying, "Well, Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell you the history and John gives you the theology," or something. We now know that it's just not like that. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are full of theology, but that doesn't mean again that this stuff didn't happen. Paul is obviously a theologian, but he's referring to things that actually happened, the death and resurrection of Jesus particularly. So you see, it's our actually post-18th-century Western worldview which has pulled these things apart, and what we're seeing now in our generation, thank God, is attempts to bring them back together again. That's difficult. We don't know how to do that, but actually, if we listen to the texts instead of cutting them apart to fit our ideologies, the texts will actually help us to do this.

The fact of something being early or late doesn't in and of itself mean that it is reliable or unreliable historically. If some crazy minor official in Pontius Pilate's court were to have written his own reconstruction of Jesus' trial and death the day after the crucifixion, he might have got it all upside down and inside out. He might have misunderstood what Judaism was all about. He might have only got a garbled account of Jesus. It might be very early, but it might have been wrong. Likewise, the best historian of the early Roman emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, and so on, is Tacitus, who is writing a century later, but he's got access to very good material. So earliness or lateness does not in and of itself mean that it's reliable or unreliable.

Now, I happen to believe that we don't really know who wrote the Gospels and when and where. Lots of scholars say they know, but somebody might dig up a document in the sands of Egypt or Libya or somewhere tomorrow which might actually prove that all the Gospels were written before 60 AD, or that none of them were written until after 90 AD. I would be surprised if they were that early or that late. I think they're somewhere between 60 and 80, give or take. But that's only because I, like most scholars, don't really know. You see, the crucial thing is the fall of Jerusalem, which many scholars say is predicted in Matthew, Mark, and Luke so clearly that it must in fact have been written up after the event. But as C.H. Dodd, who was my teacher's teacher, wrote two generations ago, in fact, those predictions do not look like the accounts of the fall of Jerusalem that we have in Josephus, who was there and watched it. They look much more like a collage of Old Testament quotations: bits of Daniel, bits of Jeremiah, bits of Amos, whatever, that have been put together by Jesus or somebody in the very early church as biblical ways of talking about the destruction of Jerusalem which was yet to happen. It actually looks as though they haven't been written up in the light of the way it actually panned out when Titus finally took the city in AD 70.

I think the information we have from the early second century is likely to be quite close up and quite accurate. Now, of course, those early fathers in the second century, they had their own agendas. They were fighting other battles. They wanted to be able to say that these Gospels are authentic and so on. So we have to discount a bit of that bias. But as I've said on one or two occasions, just because we have to be suspicious, that doesn't mean we should be paranoid. There are some scholars who as soon as they see a church father saying something, they conclude that the opposite must be the case. Now, nobody goes around ordinary life dealing on that basis. What Papias says, what Irenaeus says, what the other early fathers say, when we put it together, it has a certain amount of the ring of truth: that maybe Mark's Gospel does go back to Peter ultimately, or to something like Peter's preaching remembered by a young assistant or maybe even relative. Maybe Matthew's Gospel was originally composed in Aramaic. We can't absolutely prove that. That might have been an educated guess on the part of the early church, but it is perfectly reasonable. History consists of putting together reasonable things, and if they make something that looks probable for other reasons, we say, "Well, this is the best we're doing at the moment." John Roberts, the great historian in Oxford who's written a history of the world and has now got a multi-volume illustrated history of the world, when he comes to Jesus and the Gospels, he says, "There's no reason to be particularly skeptical about these. Great swaths of world history are constructed on far less evidence than this." He's not a practicing Christian as far as I know, but he's not bothered about the fact that this evidence comes from believing Christians. He says, "Well, this is the best we've got. It makes more or less sense. Let's go with it."

We in the modern world think we know about secrecy because we go into a room and we shut a door, and unless somebody has bugged the room, whatever we say isn't going any further. The ancient world wasn't like that. The only people who could afford secrecy in the ancient world were the very rich and the very royal. The way they did it was by having deaf-mute slaves who couldn't tell what they'd seen. More or less everybody else knew that whatever they were doing was in the public domain, give or take, because life was very public. In particular, if there was something going on in a crowded city which was of political, religious, or whatever significance, everybody would gossip about it to everybody else. Actually, it happens like that in communities, in colleges, in schools to this day. If something dramatic happens, even if people say, "We really shouldn't tell people about this," it leaks out. Governments leak out, and so on.

A few years ago, there was a very tragic thing that happened in Uganda which is a good illustration of this. The Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Janani Luwum, who was a great spiritual leader in the time of the rule of Idi Amin in Uganda, Luwum had spoken out powerfully though peacefully against the Amin regime and carried on fearlessly as archbishop to stand for the message of the Gospel over against what the government was doing. He was eventually picked up by the security forces, taken somewhere, and beaten. Then taken by a different group somewhere else, beaten again, and given a kind of a kangaroo court, rough justice. Then he was taken off by another group of people, he was shot, his body was dumped somewhere, and there was no one person who witnessed all that sequence. And yet, by the middle of the next day, the entire connected narrative was being told on the streets of Kampala. Interestingly, once that story was told, it never changed. Everybody got to know that this was how it was because it was such a dramatic thing that even the people who were frightened they might be told off for doing it couldn't help talk about it. Everybody buzzed about it.

Now, imagine Jerusalem full with pilgrims for Passover, and something's going on. They've arrested this man, Jesus. We thought he was bringing the kingdom of God. We had hoped he would liberate Israel. Remember how the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, when Jesus incognito says, "What are you worried about?" they say, "You must be the only person in Jerusalem who doesn't know what's been going on there. Are you deaf? Have you not heard?" Our idea that, "Oh dear, nobody was there at the trial so they wouldn't have known," is simply an anachronistic back-projection from our cozy, privatized Western world. It wouldn't work in Jerusalem today. If there was an incident like that, everybody would know. They call it the Arabic telephone in Jerusalem today. The people at the other side of the Western Wall will know that you're coming with your tourist party before you get there because everybody tells everybody else what's going on. That's how it was in Jesus' day. So it is no trouble to me to think that people knew the sequence of events: the high priests' house, taking him off to Pilate, maybe Jesus in a dark prison overnight waiting between the one and the other. People knew how it happened.

If a saying crops up in quite different strands of tradition, then yeah, that helps. That isn't the only reason for saying that something is authentic, but it's kind of nice. You have something in Matthew, something in John, something in Paul. My goodness, there's real convergence here of quite different sources. So I wouldn't discount that. But equally, those scholars who've made a big song and dance about this often have a very strict criterion for what they mean by Q, for instance. I'm not nearly so sanguine that we can reconstruct Q or the stages of Q. I really don't think we know that stuff. So there are problems at that level. But also it appears that sometimes, even when there is multiple attestation, scholars like that want to ditch the saying for quite other reasons.

Jesus talks about himself as the Son of God. If you confess me, my Father will confess you, or before my Father who is in heaven. Then there are sayings about Jesus not knowing what the time of the destruction of Jerusalem is going to happen, but only the Father knows that, not the Son. So Jesus does talk about himself as Son of God in ways which it doesn't look as though the early church would have made up, like the famous saying in Mark chapter 10 where the rich young ruler says, "Good master." He says, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." Now, the early church certainly didn't make that up. Like the saying where they accused Jesus of being demon-possessed, the early church certainly didn't make that up. We've got a lot of these things where we've got a convergence and we can say, "Well, this isn't the only way of doing the history of Jesus, but we are pretty sure that these things really do go back." And then if we've got Jesus referring to himself as Son of God in these texts, well, there's every reason to suppose that some of the others might have been authentic as well. Again, how far do you take skepticism, suspicion, etc.? These are questions which the texts won't answer for you.

I think there's a problem here about how we describe what it is that we're doing as historians. Because in fact, I think that I and Crossan and Funk and Borg and so on are all in fact doing the same kind of thing, which is to say, we are trying out a big picture. It's called a hypothesis. Here's a hypothesis. Here is my hypothesis in this big book that I wrote about Jesus. I am trying it out, seeing how it fits. What I'm not doing is taking this little scrap of evidence, that little scrap of evidence, this little piece that I've cut out, that little snippet from Q or whatever, in a neutral, detached fashion and then saying, "Oh, now let's see what happens when we put this jigsaw together." No, I'm saying, "Here is the big picture. Now as I stand back, it seems that the evidence makes sense."

Now, I think the Jesus Seminar is in fact doing exactly the same thing. I think Bob Funk had from the beginning a particular picture of Jesus in mind: a Jesus who didn't quote the Jewish scriptures, a Jesus who didn't think he was anyone special, he was just somebody telling other people about the kingdom in some vague way, and so on. Funk had that Jesus picture already in mind, and the criteria that he adopts for deciding which little pieces to cut out come from the big picture. It isn't that they're neutral criteria giving him then a set of neutral jigsaw puzzle pieces which he can then say, "Oh, look what this big picture we're getting." The big picture was there from the beginning. Now, let's be clear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having a big picture. I do it myself. I've argued in detail in my books for a historical method which is: here's a hypothesis, now how do we verify it? But I think then when the Jesus Seminar say, "We are just coming to each text and cleaning it up and then we're standing back and drawing a big picture," I think that's just naive. They're not doing that at all. So I think the real problem is that they are misdescribing the method that they're using and coming out with something which looks to Joe Public as though, "Wow, this is a neutral, objective historical method," and it ain't no such thing.

When Dominic Crossan reviewed this book of mine about Jesus, he accused me of actually ignoring or marginalizing some of those non-canonical sources. I went to my index at the back of my book and I discovered that I have referred to and discussed the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas two or three times as often as even he does, let alone Robert Funk in their indices. So I reckon I've looked at the stuff pretty carefully, and I have offered here a historical hypothesis of how the whole thing in fact fits together.

Often when we're doing history or theology, we talk about worldviews. Now, a worldview is not what you see; it's how you see it. When I put on a pair of spectacles, the worldview is framed by the spectacles, particularly when I forget that I'm wearing them. Now, the problem is that we in the Western world often think we are merely neutral observers, but in fact, we've got a very thick set of spectacles which tell us what color things are, what shape things are, what we're allowed to see and not to see. What history does for us is that it challenges. It makes us go cross-eyed and it makes us say, "My goodness, maybe I've got colored spectacles on." And then very nervously, what happens if I take these off for a minute? What happens if I step outside the confines of the little box that I've been living in without even realizing?

Now, I think in our world, people do this in two different ways. For me, history and writing this big book particularly has enabled me to try to stand outside those two ways. One is the way which says, "We live in the modern world, so we know because we have electric lights and modern medicine, we know that miracles don't happen, we know that the supernatural doesn't exist," and all that stuff. My history makes me say, "Hey, put that stuff on hold for a minute. Just supposing Jesus of Nazareth really did rise from the dead. Don't start by saying did he walk on water? Don't start by saying was he born of a virgin? If you start with those questions, you go round and round in circles and you never get anywhere. Start by saying, how do you explain the rise of early Christianity? And if it comes back and says it was Jesus' resurrection, then you're going to have to hold your mind open to the fact that the world, as Shakespeare said, 'More things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.'"

At the same time, there's a different group of people: those who have got their Christian faith nicely sewn up in a spiritual, perhaps a supernatural package which doesn't integrate with history, with politics, with all the rest of the reality of the world. My study of Jesus has made me say, and I want to say it to that group, you're going to have to hold your mind open as well because Jesus lived in a world and died in a world where history and politics, the supernatural and the realities of life, just belong together. Don't live in this split-level universe. It's much tougher to live in an integrated universe, but it's God's world and Jesus invites you to join him in it.

Whenever we try to analyze any human being, whether it's our best friend, our spouse, whether it's a great figure of history, Winston Churchill in this century, Queen Elizabeth I five hundred years ago, whatever, we find that the closer we get to them, the more complex they become. And then it's very easy for historians to produce caricatures: "Oh, he was just into this," "She was just doing that," whatever. And then the good historian will come back and say, "It's a bit more complex than that."

What we've seen with Jesus is something very like that. We've seen people say, "Wow, there was a Jewish revolutionary movement at the time. They were talking about the kingdom of God. Hey, Jesus was talking about the kingdom of God. Therefore he's a Jewish revolutionary." Well, he was and he wasn't. It's more complicated than that. Or people, when we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls: "Here is a community that believed that there would be a messiah who would say a prayer over the bread and the wine and that all sorts of scriptures were being fulfilled through his work." Well, that's what the Christians believed, therefore maybe they were Essenes. Well, no, they were like cousins to the Essenes spiritually or theologically, and so on.

So the historian is constantly faced with the task of saying, "Yes, and there's more. Yes, but we need to fill in the picture a bit more." So it's been my experience that in the last fifty years of scholarship, all the renaissance of understanding of Judaism has been bubbling up and giving us more and more and more data. I've been very fortunate to live at a time when there's been so much of that, that I've been able to ride the crest of some of that wave and draw on rabbinic sources and draw on Essene sources and draw on Josephus and so on, to produce what I hope is a more fully rounded and complex but essentially at the heart simple picture of Jesus. Because human beings are both essentially simple and gloriously complex, and I think the Jesus that I see is like that. Now, I should say, I don't think I've got Jesus totally right yet. I don't think I've done all the work that needs to be done, but I think and hope and pray that this book is well on the way.

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