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The
Historical Jesus
The Beginning of Luke's Gospel
Towards the end of Luke 3, the author tells us that Jesus was about 30
years old when he began his work. In thinking about this information, it's
useful to recall that Luke's author (like all the other Gospels, and
especially John's) isn't particularly interested in history. His main
purpose in writing is theological. He wants to make points about the meaning
of Jesus, not "what really happened" to him.
So, as the Roman Catholic biblical scholar J P Meier
remarks [1], this
statement is "... clearly a passing remark that plays no great part
in Luke's theological program."
Because this is an aside, it's worth wondering why Luke
should think Jesus' age worthwhile recording. John 8.57 suggests only that
Jesus was "not yet fifty years old" in the view of the author of
that Gospel.
Commentators think that Luke's author was almost
certainly what Hebrews of his time would have called a
"Gentile". That is, his culture would have been more allied to
Roman and Greek learning than many early Christians, who were probably
Jewish to the core.
Four hundred years before Jesus, a Greek scholar named Thucydides
wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.
His methods of investigating historical fact came closer to modern methods
than for many centuries afterwards. Concern with history as "what
really happened" was stronger in Greek and Roman minds than in most.
Luke's stories imitate the style of Greek historians.
His words reveal that he is a second- or third-generation Christian who is
attempting to improve upon existing tradition.
We shouldn't be misled by the Gospel author's claim to
have "carefully studied all these matters from their beginning".
Though he isn't quite as firmly wedded to a non-historical outlook on the
past as were his fellow Hebrew Christians, his almost overwhelming concern
is with "the full truth about everything which you have been
taught" in the sense of the truth about how God acts in the world. So
his information about Jesus' age may or may not be accurate. To judge that
requires that it matches his probable year of birth, for example.
What does Luke's theological priority mean for us 21st century readers of
his Gospel? In summary, the following distinctions apply to its first
three chapters:
Many in Luke's time conceived of the Jewish
scriptures (the Old Testament) as repositories of truth.
This conception operated in a way very strange to us. What we call
"rational thought" was for them subordinate to truth from
the past. We are aware of the strong possibility of perceptual error,
indeed of self-deception, in our own evaluations of the world around
us. So we seek to find "the truth"
through an analytical process and by making multiple checks on
"the facts". Even then, our conclusions tend to be held
provisionally. For Luke and others, rational thought focused
on analysing the truth as revealed by God in his past actions. The
"historian" or wise man was able to confirm from the past
that something now must be true. Reason was subordinate to
what was revealed by past authorities, who had after all recorded
God's actions. Thus the prophet Isaiah, for example,
had to be believed because God had spoken directly to him. It must,
therefore, have been Jesus to whom he was referring in Isaiah 53.7-9. When ancient authorities predicted that something
would happen, one looked to the present for confirmation that it
had happened. We might wonder if a prediction had been fulfilled. Luke would have
known that it had been fulfilled. It
was therefore possible to first to observe data in the here-and-now
and then examine the Old Testament with certainty, knowing that God
through a sage or prophet would have predicted anything of fundamental
importance. Thus, if Luke believed that Jesus was the Messiah, he
would search the Old Testament knowing that he would find those
predictions which fitted the facts about the life of Jesus as he knew
them. This enabled the Gospel authors to "invent"
facts. Of course, that's not how they perceived it. Rather, it's how
we perceive it from our analytical, scientific standpoint. In the
first century, if one knew that Jesus was the Messiah then stories
which had been applied to the Messiah and other great wonder-workers
could be applied to him. This back-to-front way of reasoning seems
incredible to us. But that's the closest we can today come to
understanding the thought processes of the Gospel authors. Great men sent by God from heaven to carry out his
work here on earth were always given great powers. One only had to
look back at the accounts of the Hebrew escape from Egypt, to Moses,
to Elijah and to David to know that this is how things work. The
Hebrews thought that their God was the only god with genuine power.
But in the Roman and Greek cultures the same principle applied. If the
gods didn't actually come to earth in disguise to do their work, then
they endowed humans with supernatural powers to enable them to do
great things. If Jesus was the Messiah, then it followed that he also
would have supernatural powers and would be able to do things ordinary
people can't. Luke's author and the other Gospel authors would have
thought it unbelievable if Jesus had not carried out what we
would today call miracles. But these acts were not important because
they broke natural laws - that wasn't in any way the point. They
mattered because they confirmed the God-sent nature of the person
performing them.
Once one is able to recall these points constantly, Luke's Gospel takes
on a different look altogether. It's not until the beginning of Chapter 3
that anything approaching history in a modern sense can be discerned.
Even then (as you can tell from the "bare bones" text
here of the first five chapters) the author of Luke is mainly concerned
with theological truths. "What really happened" has to be dug out through a
sometimes uncomfortable process of eliminating the theology. As J P Meier
remarks, "... Luke wishes to impress on his Graeco-Roman readers that
the seemingly paltry events of Jesus' public ministry belong to the sweep
and indeed the pivotal moment of history."
Meier adds: "Little or nothing can be said with certitude or high
probability about the birth, infancy and early years of the vast majority
of historical figures in the ancient Mediterranean world." This
applies, of course, to Jesus - and perhaps more so because the Gospels are
unsupported by any external sources. Nevertheless, some history of Jesus
is possible.
A current, and quite conservative, consensus on the main details of the
first two chapters of Luke's Gospel, goes something like this in summary:
The infancy narratives in both Matthew and Luke stand apart in every
way from the rest of the two gospels. Once the narratives have been
set down, they are not referred to in any way in what follows. The authors of Matthew and Luke contradict each other in important
details. The journeys and geographical details can't be harmonised.
This doesn't make for good history, especially since we have so few
sources external to the gospels. The author of Luke gets a number of things wrong about Jewish
religious practice. He's wrong about Mosaic Law requiring that Jesus
be presented at the Temple, for example. This doesn't enhance the
credibility of his account. The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem is almost certainly not what really
happened. Everywhere else he's known as coming from Nazareth,
including Mark and John's gospels. Placing the birth in Bethlehem seems to be the authors'
attempt to link up with Micah 5.2 and therefore with the illustrious
king David. Referring to the Hebrew scriptures tended to give
credibility to the early Christian communities. The genealogy in Luke disagrees with that in Matthew. The
genealogies have
another purpose entirely.
They are not intended to be historical records of birth and descent. The same applies to John the Baptist's genealogy. This is
shorter that that of Jesus, presumably because John doesn't have the
same status. Both John and Jesus are given miraculous conceptions. That of John
has extremely strong echoes of the conception of Isaac by Abraham and
Sarah. These are tales typical of great people in the places and times
in which the Gospels were written. Zechariah's doubt about the angel's
message is typical of ancient birth stories. Luke 2.1-7 gives the impression of an accurate dating of Jesus' birth
day. There is no evidence that the Emperor Augustus held a census. But
a registration for tax purposes was held in the year 6
when (as we know from elsewhere) Quirinius was Governor of Syria.
Luke's dating is almost certainly inaccurate, however, because he
later makes it clear that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the
Great. Herod died in the year 4. Our conclusion must be that Jesus is
more likely to have been born in the year 4, with the year 6 coming a
close second in probability. While it's highly probable that Jesus was circumcised
according to Hebrew custom on the eighth day, the rest of Luke 2.21-40
isn't probable. Not only does the author make large errors about
Jewish rituals. but it's clear that he's creating theology by
paralleling the dedication of the baby Samuel (1 Samuel 1.24-2.11)
with the baby Jesus.
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[1] A Marginal Jew, Volume 1, 1991
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