Craig Keener on the Historical Jesus

KEVIN HARRIS: Craig Keener published a book called Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels in 2019. It’s 743 pages, so we are not going to be able to cover all of it in this podcast! But I’d like to look at an excerpt from the introduction. You know Craig Keener. Have you interacted with this work?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I have. I found Keener's massive five-volume commentary on the book of Acts to be very helpful as well as his two-volume commentary on the Gospel of John. Keener is renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of ancient sources, both Jewish and non-Jewish. He has an amazing knowledge of ancient history and literature, and he brings that to bear in all of his biblical commentaries.

KEVIN HARRIS: I was going to tackle this book, and I was looking at the introduction. I think what he says in the introduction could begin to answer some questions that listeners may have on ancient Roman history especially. And, by the way, Keener says what you say – that the Gospels are best categorized as ancient biography. Isn't that pretty much the consensus?

DR. CRAIG: I think so. As a result of the work of Richard Burridge, most New Testament scholars who study the Gospels have come to see them as a form of ancient biography. For example, similar to Plutarch's Lives of famous Greeks and Romans. Burridge was able to catalog a list of what he called family resemblances of ancient biographies. Then he looked at the Gospels and, lo and behold, the Gospels exhibit most all of these family resemblances so that they are akin to ancient biographies. The significance of that is that these ancient biographies are not like novels or romances but they have a definite historical interest in giving historically accurate information about the hero that is described in the biography.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's begin this excerpt. He says,

Christianity recognizes Jesus as its founder, and Islam deems him a major prophet. Together these religions encompass four billion adherents, more than half of the world's population. For this reason, if for no others, Jesus is a figure meriting significant attention among historians of antiquity, regardless of the historian's own religious horizons.

Yet it has not always been so. The primary interest of Roman historians in the early empire was Rome and incidents that directly impacted Rome, such as revolts in the provinces, wars on the borders, or the moral antics of emperors that often dominated political gossip. One crucified sage or rebel in a minor Asian province invited little attention until, a few decades later, his followers became public news in the Roman capital itself.

Some critics get on the Internet and ask why there's not more written about Jesus from Roman historians.

DR. CRAIG: And thereby they show their naïveté about ancient historical writing. Jesus seems so significant to us today because we see the way he's changed history, but during his lifetime, as one author put it, this was just a hillbilly preacher from Galilee who after three years of ministry got himself crucified. And for that reason was not a significant figure. It wasn't until the movement that followed after his death began to be socially significant that people began to take notice of it in writing.

KEVIN HARRIS: Keener continues,

On a popular level, some writers dismiss all evidence for Jesus as inconsequential and view him as a pure creation of his followers. Even apart from the dismissal of many lines of evidence, this skeptical approach, if followed consistently for other topics, would make much of history unknowable. As in the case of other new movements, whether from disciples of Socrates, Muhammad, Buddha, or Joseph Smith, the life of the founder was initially of little interest beyond the circle of his own followers. The Dead Sea Scrolls revere the founder of their community, the Teacher of Righteousness, yet he appears nowhere outside their own literature.

Likewise, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus claims to have been a Pharisee, yet he nowhere mentions the Pharisaic sage Hillel, whom most subsequent Pharisaic traditions name as one of their central figures. Meanwhile, the Judean king Agrippa I, whom Josephus depicts as prominent even in Rome, merits only the barest passing mention in a Roman historian covering the period. [That's from Tacitus]. Another major Roman historian devotes little space even to Herod the Great [Dio Cassius].

What can we conclude from this?

DR. CRAIG: I think what this displays is that these contemporary historians lacked the perspective that only comes with the passage of time. It is only from a temporal perspective that is removed later in history that one can look back and see the true historical significance of the past events that occurred. But when those events are roughly contemporaneous, you don't know which ones are the ones that will have great reverberations throughout history and which figures were the truly influential ones. So one might not make mention of them as much. It's really only with the passage of time that good history can be written because that gives you the proper perspective to assess the importance of the events and figures of the past.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing the excerpt,

By the same criterion of relevance, the earlier Greek historian Herodotus neglected not only Judea but Rome. And Josephus himself, despite his prominent role in the Judean war and as an interpreter of Judea for the gentile Greco-Roman world, merits no interest in later rabbis (who in fact show greater interest in Jesus).

This is not to imply that non-Christian reports about Jesus are altogether absent. Most scholars today recognize that the first-century Judean writer Josephus, who wrote about John the Baptist and Jesus’s brother James, also wrote about Jesus himself. Josephus treats Jesus as a sage and wonder-worker executed by the governor, probably with the complicity of some of Jerusalem's elite. Many scholars argue that an early Arabic version also confirms the key points about Jesus that scholars have reconstructed as original (before scribal tampering) in Josephus's account. Possibly as early as forty-five years after Jesus’s crucifixion, a Syrian philosopher named Mara bar Sarapion speaks of Jews executing their wise king, bringing judgment on Judea. (He probably heard this report from Syrian Christians.)

Josephus comes up a lot in apologetics discussions. You talk about him. What about the alleged interpolations?

DR. CRAIG: What Keener is referring to there are apparent insertions into the Josephus passage about Jesus of Nazareth that look as though they come from Christian copyists rather than from Josephus himself. Fortunately, these are very easy to spot. For example, Josephus says that there was a man, Jesus, and then adds a parenthetical comment “if we can truly call him a man.” And he later refers to him by saying he was the Messiah, which is unlikely to have been said by Josephus. So these Christian interpolations as they're called are fairly obvious and can then be deleted to reconstruct a very plausible reading of what the original Josephus passage said. And, as Keener indicates, it shows that Jesus was a teacher and wonder-worker who was executed under the prefect Pontius Pilate and that this execution did not put an end to his movement. He also talks about the brother of Jesus, James, by name, and talks about how he was also killed by the Jews during the AD 60s during a lapse in the civil government. He mentions (Keener does) a version discovered by the scholar Shlomo Pines of the Josephus passage in Arabic which does not include these Christian interpolations, and so there is some claim that perhaps Pine’s version is actually closer to the original than the one that comes down in the Greek Josephus. So Josephus being a contemporary of Jesus, a first century Jewish historian who wrote about what was going on in Palestine, is an important witness to the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next Keener writes,

By the early second century, one historian includes a report, from just two decades after the crucifixion, about Jewish debates in Rome, apparently concerning the Christ [Suetonius]. Another, reporting the slaughter of vast numbers of Jesus followers in Rome roughly thirty-four years after the crucifixion, mentions that Jesus himself was earlier crucified under Pontius Pilate [Tacitus]. Rome itself had finally taken notice, because subsequent events had made Jesus’s movement a matter of local significance. In fact, the movement had become more significant in Rome than was the governor who executed Jesus. Although Jewish sources and an inscription mentioned Pilate, this passage marks his only appearance in surviving Roman literature.

That last sentence also brings up the issue of what has actually survived from the ancient world. I mean, we don't have everything that was written.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, far from it! Isn't it remarkable that the Roman official who is responsible for sending Jesus to the cross would be primarily mentioned only in the Gospels? There's hardly any evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate outside the Gospels. What I find especially interesting about these examples that Keener shares here is that although these authors are writing at a later time when they had gained perspective on the past, nevertheless you notice they still had access to much earlier events fairly soon after the crucifixion of Jesus. So it shows that these things didn't just fall into the memory hole and were forgotten. These later authors now looking back with perspective are able to excavate the facts concerning what events really transpired.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we wrap up today, we haven't even gotten to the things that Craig Keener writes about. The New Testament documents themselves. He's mostly been talking about extra-biblical sources here. Any other thoughts on the historical method and the reliability of the Gospels?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I would just say that these are very exciting times for Christians today compared to, say, the situation a hundred years ago. Do you realize at the end of the 19th century there were scholars that were saying that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed – that this was all just myth and legend? And yet today that would not be defended by any responsible New Testament historian. Instead, the Gospels have reemerged as historically credible sources for the life and teachings of this first century person, Jesus of Nazareth. So when Christians read their New Testament they can do so with a real confidence, and they can use these historical tools that Keener shares to read his commentaries, read the work of other New Testament scholars, to show the historical credibility of the New Testament that we read today.

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