Part VI
In this part . . .
The Part of Tens is a must in every For Dummies book.
And as always, the chapters in this part are short but full of interesting info. Chapter 19 tracks the top ten controversies about Jesus over the past 2,000 years. Chapter 20 takes you on a virtual tour to the Holy Land so that you can see where Jesus walked and where Christian pilgrims have been walking ever since.
Chapter 19
In This Chapter
● Examining whether Jesus existed
● Figuring out Jesus’s religion and politics
● Contemplating where Jesus came from
● Working out whether Jesus married and what he looked like
Anyone famous is bound to attract a lot of attention. Stretch that attention out for 2,000 years, and you have that much more room for doctrines to develop and controversies to get cooked up.
In this chapter, I boil all that history down to the most persistent controversial questions about Jesus, the man from Nazareth.
Did Jesus Exist?
No one seriously doubted whether Jesus existed until the extreme skeptics of the Enlightenment era in the 17th and 18th centuries. Taking their cue from the budding recognition that the gospels were faith statements rather than documentaries, these folks began to argue that the gospels were outright fabrications.
However, this theory isn’t very plausible for a few reasons, including these:
● The degree of detail in the gospels and the surprising variation between them argues for rather than against Jesus’s existence. In other words, if you’re trying to perpetrate a fraud, you’d make sure to get your story straight first instead of shooting yourself in the foot with stories that contradict and confuse.
● In addition to the insider accounts, Jewish and Roman records are available that mention this man, and they all date to the first century after Jesus’s death.
● It’s tough to explain the rise of Christianity and the willingness of those first followers to die for a story they had cooked up.
At the end of the day, more evidence points to Jesus’s existence than away from it. See Chapter 5 for more about sources that solidify the case for the existence of Jesus.
Does Archaeology Back Up the Existence of Jesus?
As you may know, archaeology is often used to support historical theories. By studying items and reconstructing the contexts that they came from, experts can often prove, disprove, or reshape the leading theories. There have been, for instance, many artifacts and relics associated with Jesus over the centuries — such as relics from his body (foreskin, umbilical cord), items from his crucifixion (fragments of the true cross or the crown of thorns), “true images” of his face or body (see Chapters 5 and 17), and inscriptions naming his contemporaries (Pontius Pilate, the High Priest Caiaphas, or Jesus’s brother James).
Most of these relics first appear 300 to 1,300 years after Jesus’s death, raising the obvious question of where they were in the meantime. Only the Pilate inscription and the Caiaphas ossuary have been found to be early, legitimate artifacts.
Was Jesus Human?
As the belief in Jesus’s divinity grew, some people couldn’t imagine that he had ever really been human. In fact, it took Christians 450 years to sort that one out, and there are still differences in belief about it today (see Chapter 15 for more details). But almost all Christian churches say that Jesus was and is human and divine and that neither “nature” compromises the other.
Are the Gospels Reliable?
Christians answer the question of the gospels’ reliability differently, depending on how they view scripture. If they view the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of God, they may be more inclined to view its historical claims as reliable. If they view the Bible as an inspired text written by human authors, on the other hand, they may be more inclined to test the reliability of the gospels’ historical claims against archaeological and literary evidence from the time using the rules of judging history (see Chapter 3).
Was Jesus Jewish or Christian?
Jesus was Jewish. His teaching, his healing activity, and even his prophetic challenges to tradition place him squarely within the first-century Jewish world. There were no Christians during his lifetime. According to the Acts of the Apostles, the earliest followers of Jesus in Judea and in the Galilee called themselves “Nazoreans” or “The Way” (Acts 24:5, 14). These followers weren’t called “Christians” until they became more of a presence in the Greek-speaking cities, such as Antioch in Syria (Acts 11:26), well after Jesus’s death.
Was Jesus a Political Rebel?
Jesus probably wasn’t a political rebel, at least not at first. If he had been, Herod Antipas (son of King Herod the Great; see Chapter 7) would have taken him out a whole lot sooner. But remember that Jesus preached God’s coming kingdom — and he believed that it would come quickly. And he even contrasted God’s rule to the rulers of this world.
So, when Jesus arrived in Jerusalem for that last Passover, it’s highly likely that some people thought that God would soon act. That’s all the provocation that Pontius Pilate needed. Despite Jesus’s message of nonviolence, his authority and his teaching that the end was near drew crowds and made him politically dangerous.
Was Jesus a Magician?
The tradition that Jesus healed people is central to the gospel message (see Chapter 12). In the authors’ eyes, this tradition proved that divine power was at work in Jesus and that this divine power was all about restoring those who were broken in the world. However, throughout the New Testament, there’s a strong condemnation of miracles for miracles’ sake, of people who just want a big sign, and of magicians performing acts for money or notoriety instead of healing others as part of the restoration of the world. The New Testament calls these people magicians, and so in its own terms Jesus isn’t a magician (because instead of seeking fame or money he sought to bring about a different world). But Jesus certainly would be referred to as one by later detractors who were trying to paint him as a charlatan.
Who Was Jesus's Father ?
One of the earliest smears against Christians was that Jesus was a bastard. It pops up in the writings of the second-century Roman philosopher Celsus and in the Babylonian Talmud compiled by the Jews in seventh-century Iraq (see Chapters 4 and 16). These books are far too late to count as historical. Rather, they represent a kind of counterthrust to long-standing Christian claims of Jesus’s virginal conception (Matthew 1:18-25; Luke 1:26-38).
The matter can’t be settled by historians one way or the other because it can’t be demonstrated from evidence. The virginal conception of Jesus is a faith statement that tries to communicate in first-century terms the belief that God had a direct hand in Jesus’s existence and that Jesus is from God in a unique way. (See Chapter 15 for more on how the early Church tried to sort out this issue).
Was Jesus Married?
It appears that Jesus was neither a husband nor a father. There’s simply no evidence in any early Christian, Jewish, or Roman text that says he married or had children. It wouldn’t challenge the Christian creed if he had, though (despite what Nikos Kazantzakis thought in The Last Temptation of Christ and what Dan Brown wrote in The Da Vinci Code). After all, the Christian belief that God became human in Jesus is much more startling and fundamental than saying that, after becoming human, he married and had kids. (See Chapter 10 for the Mary Magdalene angle on this question.)
What Did Jesus Look Like?
I’m sure everybody has their own idea of what Jesus looked like when he walked the earth. But there are no early portraits or descriptions. That means that you have to argue from analogy, gathering evidence from contemporary skeletons, art, and literary descriptions about what other Palestinian Jews generally looked like. On the basis of analogy, experts believe that Jesus was probably short in stature, stocky, and dark skinned, and he likely had dark, curly black hair and a dark beard.
Western conventions of portraying Jesus as tall, slender, and muscular, with delicate facial features and fair skin and hair, say more about Western ideals than about what he really may have looked like. It’s the perennial issue in traditions about Jesus: The image we have of him is often our own.