Radical Faith - exploring faith in a changed world

The Historical Jesus
Archaeology

The Christian belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God has had many consequences for the Church - both good and bad.

On the plus side of the equation, it has preserved the texts of the gospels, Paul's letters and other material when they might have been lost or badly degraded. The conviction that God's truth lies in the text - to a greater or lesser degree buried, but nonetheless there - has caused that text to be analysed more deeply than any other in history.

On the minus side, however, the Bible as revelation has led to a myopia about certain aspects of Jesus. There has been such an extreme focus on words that contributions from other disciplines have often been downplayed or ignored.

One such discipline is archaeology.

It might be thought that things found by archaeologists are facta bruta - hard facts which can't easily be contested, if at all. The truth is that even tangible artifacts have to be interpreted as part of the broader cultural picture into which they fit. That is, the meaning of a physical artifact is part of an overall pattern. It cannot stand alone, nor does it mean much merely in relation to disembodied texts - the target of most 19th century excavations and other quests.

Excavations over the past forty years have produced a picture of the culture in which Jesus lived which can no longer easily be ignored by theologians. Many shy away from the implications of new discoveries, for to be properly used they require a difficult mind-shift away from the Bible as revelation to a rational assessment of Jesus as a man of his time.

Perhaps coincidentally, the rise of interest in the Jesus of history since the late 1950s has been matched by new excavations and surveys in Galilee which gathered pace from the early 1960s onwards. The new exploration has had two sides. On one hand there have been those interested in finding out more about the culture and land in which Jesus lived and moved. On the other hand, Israeli scholars have been exploring the setting for early Judaism. The two aspects have dovetailed nicely.

All this has provided considerable new energy to the so-called Third Quest for the historical Jesus.

The overall impression had been gained by the end of the 20th century that more than 200 years of intensive dissection of biblical texts was coming to an end. A broad conclusion was that the gap between the man Jesus and the teachings of the early Church could not be bridged. Many had concluded that the gospels and the material they contain could provide only a skeletal picture of Jesus.

The effect of this, writes Jonathan Reed, is analogous to

... particle physics, in which the various effects of an event are apparent, so that something about the cause, itself invisible, can nevertheless be said. [1]

In other words, we can get back only to a point well after Jesus died if we rely only on the texts. This means that we can only infer from those texts what the Jesus of the history was like.

But if we know something about the socio-economic background of the area, it becomes possible to infer certain things about Jesus which can't be got from the New Testament. And, incidentally, it allows the correction of some misguided conclusions reached by a text-only analysis.

Reed sums it up:

Historical Jesus research today must be bifocal. This includes both a critical and informed reading of the early Christian texts and their reading within a plausible reconstruction of their background ... historical Jesus research must focus on an interpretation of Jesus within his environment ...

What characterises the important conclusions we can derive about this background - and therefore about Jesus - from the archaeological evidence?

Galilee, where Jesus conducted most of his ministry, was a distinct region with its own material culture which contrasted to a significant degree with the cultures surrounding it. We know this culture in increasing detail as excavations go on.
The region was not isolated from the rest of Palestine, but neither was its economy well integrated with its neighbours. Galilee was an unimportant backwater in relation to the Roman Empire. This backs up what the gospels and other contemporary literature convey.
Jesus' base in Galilee was probably Capernaum. This was one of an arc of Jewish settlements stretching from Upper to Lower Galilee and on into the Golan, in turn surrounded by gentile settlements and cities. So when Jesus is portrayed as leaving Galilee he would have been crossing over into a somewhat different culture.
Having said this, Galilee was part of the overall Judean culture. In this respect, Jesus shared the definite Jewishness of that culture. Being Galilean and Judean was thus only to be a particular type of Hebrew.
The archaeological evidence tells us that Nazareth was a small village of no more than about 300-400 souls. It was within no more than two hours walk of Sepphoris, a substantial town of around 4 000 inhabitants. It was also within easy reach of Tiberias, the provincial capital having a population of about
8 000 people.
It is possible to conclude that Jesus would therefore have been exposed substantially to Greek culture. But the facta bruta derived from archeology are clear that both Sepphoris and Tiberias were much more Jewish than either Greek or Roman. The cultural influence of the latter was confined largely to public buildings, ceremonies and laws.
Compared with the rest of Palestine, there is little evidence for substantial trade and travel with regions outside Galilee. It is more likely therefore that Jesus should be described as "provincial" rather than as "peasant" as some would have it.

These are the kind of conclusions that can be drawn from the hard evidence. But the main point is to observe that archaeology as it moves ahead is gradually providing us with a more and more detailed landscape against which to envision the figure of Jesus. The clearer the landscape, the clearer the person.

There is, however, a paradigm change involved in the switch of perspective which archaeology invites.

It is that to understand Jesus we must regard him as fully subject to the same forces and varieties of circumstance which influence and often dictate the courses of all human lives. For if we don't think about him in these terms, the insights offered by archaeology and related disciplines are ultimately of only passing interest to people of faith.
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[1] Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus, Trinity Press, 2002

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