In his TV film "Jesus before Christ" A.N Wilson described how during his study of theology at university he discovered that many of the stories about Jesus that he had taken to be historical, were in fact myths.
The more he studied the New Testament the less credible it seemed that Jesus of Nazareth should have thought himself to be divine or to have founded a religion for non-Jews.
The Christ of faith who lives in the heart of believers has little or nothing to do with the Jesus of history.
Behind the Christian religion lies a real man, not a god, that is the interesting Jesus.
Regarding Jesus' birth, the religious historian Paula Fredrikson (Boston University) is very doubtful that Bethlehem is part of the story of the historical Jesus. It is not attested in the earlier tradition - Paul, neither Mark, who is one of Matthew's sources; and we can see from a comparison of Matthew and Luke that by the time that those two evangelists write their gospels that there is a theological motivation for it. They are filling in the claim that Jesus is the "Christ" (Greek for "Messiah") by locating him by birth in the messianically correct town. This is based on Micha who says that a leader will come out of David and be born in Bethlehem. In other words, these writers had their ideas about Jesus and then turned to ancient Jewish scriptures available to them in Greek, and used those ancient texts to give them biographical information about Jesus.
Jesus grew up in Galilee and it is likely that he was born in Nazareth (the census requiring Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem is unhistorical). Joseph was probably not a carpenter, but a prosperous man. The Aramaic word "nagar," which is translated in the Greek bible as "tektar" (craftsman) can also mean a learned man.
The dead sea scrolls, discovered in 1947, confirm that there was energetic expectation amongst first century Jews that the kingdom of god was about to come. It is impossible for us to imagine what it must have been like for first century Jews to expect the messiah to arrive at any time.
First century Jews had different ideas about what the messiah was to be. Biblically messiah means the anointed king or the high priest of the time. There is nothing unique about the word messiah, until you get to the time around the lifetime of Jesus when many of the political hopes - and also a more universal hope of redemption from evil - are focused on this particular kind of figure who will be god's agent. As for Jesus himself, he couldn't have declared at the beginning of his public life that he was the messiah. That is a simple historical fact. Had he done so, he would have been crucified right away. That happened with any messianic prophet. We know from Josephus that in Jesus' own childhood, in the Galilee, 2,000 Jews were crucified for beginning to act on the expectation of an imminent liberation. The Galilee was notorious to Roman administration for being a constantly excited province, always beginning with these movements triggered by the hope and expectation of the arrival of the kingdom of god.
This is what Jesus would have been growing up with in this small Galilean village with the memories of this terrible event and all around him a messianic expectation, or at the very least religious movements that the Romans might have interpreted as revolutionary.
Ancient Jews did not make a distinction between politics and religion. For them the kingdom of god would mean at the minimum an end to the kingdom of Rome.
In the gospels, one of the first acts of Jesus ministry was to teach at the synagogue at Caperneum. It was on this site that he performed exorcisms and healings. This suggests that the historical Jesus was one of a group of charismatic healers who flourished away from authority in areas like Galilee. They were pious men who wandered the region, teaching the Jewish faith and curing people believed to be suffering from demonic possession. Unlike the temple hierarchy in Jerusalem, they preached a popular Judaism and a popular piety which attracted a following wherever they went.
Geza Vermes, professor emeritus of Jewish studies, Oxford university:
The essential purpose of Jesus activity was a knowledge that he thought that the kingdom of god was at hand, and it was essential for each Jew to recognise this and draw the consequences which was really to realise that there was no future, that everything has to be centred round the present and you have to give your self wholeheartedly to receive this incoming kingdom. He sees no future for future transmission of his teaching because their was no future.A.N Wilson
The message of Jesus was to Jews only and it was urgent. The kingdom would come in his lifetime. There were many Jewish traditions of the kingdom, but to the people he addressed it would have probably meant something very different to his idea. To him it implied total surrender to god's law. For them in meant total freedom from Rome, and universal recognition of Judaism. The crowds to whom Jesus preached would not have been large, 30 to 40. A larger number would have attracted the attention of the authorities.He avoided towns and sought the people of the villages. It is totally impossible to claim that everything reportedly said by Jesus were said by him. There are some characteristic themes, that is all.
Trying to establish the authentic sayings of Jesus is complicated by the differences between the Aramaic and Hebrew languages and the Greek of the new testament. Phrases such as "son of man" and "son of God" made more sense to one culture than they do to another. In Aramaic, "son of man" was sometimes used in place of the word "I" when the speaker didn't wish to appear boastful. It did not imply that Jesus saw himself as a heavenly saviour. "Son of God" is similarly problematic. Prof. Sean Freyne, Trinity college Dublin, an expert on Jesus' Galilean background, believes Christianity has made much more of the son of God concept than would have been understood by Jesus and his fellow Jews.
Sean Freyne:
The "son of God" is a classic example of a term or phrase that has very different meanings as you move from a Jewish monotheistic culture, based on the Hebrew bible and Aramaic paraphrases, into a Greek culture and philosophical tradition. That is a good example of Christianising a particular designation of Jesus, even assuming he used the phrase. Jesus seems much more concerned about the "kingdom of God" than he was about Jesus.This is an absolutely key statement. In Christianity, Jesus is in the centre, even God is in the background. Whereas for Jesus, he himself was in the background, and everything was directed towards God. So this idea that Jesus was continuously striving and struggling to describe himself was a totally misreading of his mind.
Any Jew would use the term "son of God." The problem for many Christian readers of the new testament is that they come to these texts with the trinity firmly in place, and so they have a Jesus thinking of himself as being the second person of the trinity as if he is walking around with this divine self-consciousness. These theological associations of the Christian creed have to be disassociated from the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus could not have conceived of himself as divine. Even if he attempted to express this, it would have been so blasphemous and scandalous at the time that people would have screamed.
The picture that emerges of the historical Jesus is of a prophet. He believed the kingdom would come in his lifetime. What he wanted from his Jewish followers was a renewed commitment to God, not a church dedicated to his own teachings.
If Jesus hadn't come up to Jerusalem in the feast of the Passover in or around the year 30, it is very unlikely he would be remembered by historians. He'd probably be about as famous as the other Galilean holy men of his day. But the events which took place in Jerusalem were to make of Jesus something much more important than a teacher or performer of miracles. For the gentile world he was destined to become God, the saviour of all mankind.
The destination of all observant Jews was the temple. The Jews came to the temple for 3 main purposes. Their own purification, prayer and sacrifice. At Passover time the area near the temple would have been filled with about 20,000 priests and Levites working together. There had to be a lot at the same time at Passover as in a couple of hours in the afternoon they slaughtered about 30,000 lambs. That's some butcher's shop! They slit the animal's throat and then they would have hung it to flay and some the blood would have been scattered on the altar.
The lambs' slaughter indicated how Jerusalem swelled at festival time, from its usual population of about 25 to 30 thousand to 10 times that number, which put the Roman authorities under enormous pressure.
Prof E.P. Saunders, Duke university, North Carolina.
Pilate didn't have much to do with the actual running of his province Judea on a day to day basis. Pilate lived in one of Herod's luxurious palaces down on the Mediterranean coast in Caesarea. For festivals however, he along with extra troops came up to Jerusalem. That was because there was a history of riots and disturbances during festivals. You pack an extra 300,000 or so extra people into a relatively small city and you fill a large open area with these pilgrims and they are remembering things like "it's Passover week - this celebrates our liberation from bondage in Egypt!" That is, there is an aspect of national liberation to the religious festival of Passover - and then it wouldn't take much for there to be an outbreak, an uprising or disturbance.If there had been a big public outcry and people running up and down the street [during the triumphal entry] shouting "the king is here" then that person would not have lived too long. Instead, if there was a triumphal entry, it is probable that it was a small symbolic band of Jesus and his immediate followers and it did not catch the attention of the whole city.
After the entry, the story then goes that he overturned the tables in the temple. That is not, in my (i.e. A.N. Wilson's) view an attack on materialism, but a statement to the Jewish world that the kingdom was about to come and the temple would be physically destroyed. Jesus seems increasingly isolated as the story progresses. Passover, as well as a serious religious festival, was also a holiday and it is easy to imagine the singing, drinking, noise and smell of the city as all around a sacred barbecue was being cooked for 300 thousand people. But Jesus believed the end was near.
The important question about the last supper is - did Jesus invent the Eucharist? Did he say the words, "this is my body, this is my blood." Did he, in effect, want to institute a catholic rite for a new religion? The Gospel John has Jesus speak in metaphors all the time. The elements body and blood are likely to be metaphors for his death. [His behaviour in the temple, drawing a crowd was the sort of behaviour guaranteed to bring a death sentence]. He could not have been thinking about starting a new religion if he thought the kingdom was at hand.
The story of the garden in Gethsemane really belongs to mythology. We know it to be invention because the friends that Jesus brings fall asleep. No one sees Jesus as he prays.
It is historically likely that it was (as the gospels say) the temple guards that arrested Jesus. This is because Ciaphas as a good middle man between the Romans and the Jewish populace, had to keep the Roman soldiers apart from the Jewish populace. At Passover he would do whatever he needed to achieve that. He thought that Jesus was dangerous and when he condemned Jesus he was carrying out the responsibilities he had assumed as middle man in this difficult political situation. He was keeping the peace. So that when he says in the fourth gospel that one man should die for the people, he was telling the truth. That was the way any good administrator in his position would have thought.
It seems Jesus bought a certain amount of hostility with him from Galilee based on his claims to speak on behalf of God. But what got him killed was the action against the temple, coupled by the fact that he could draw a following. There are known cases of individual eccentrics who might speak against the temple and not be executed. Jesus had followers, and doubtless he obtained more whilst in Jerusalem. This made him more dangerous than if he were a solitary eccentric. Then he physically did something in the temple which is the kind of thing that can spark a riot. That seems to be what sealed his fate.
From Ciaphas' house, Jesus probably would have been taken to Pilate in the Antonia fortress. It is thought Ciaphas had no authority to execute, but since he was a respected administrator Pilate may have simply acted on his advice and ordered Jesus' crucifixion.
The outstanding problem for an historian like Sean Freyne, is how to regard the resurrection stories. The only accounts of Jesus' resurrection occur in the NT and Christian faith rests entirely on the message of salvation, supposedly promised by Jesus. But resurrection was not a new idea in Jewish thought and in the gospels there are numerous risings from the dead. Lazarus, the daughter of Jiarus, and Matthew tells us that when Jesus was crucified, whole cemeteries rose up.
Prof. Sean Freyne Trinity college, Dublin:
"Clearly it was inconceivable for people to affirm the notion that one person was going to rise from the dead without thinking in very general terms that it is all going to happen, and Matthew wants to anticipate the event by having that occur around the crucifixion. In effect he made it up. It is absolutely not an historical story. Matthew is making a symbolic expression of victory, of resurrection into what is for Christians the darkest hour. The same is true of the resurrection story. It is a made up story. It is not a historical event. It is not an event within time and space. The early Christians claimed to have a religious experience of Jesus and named it in this particular way [the resurrection] because it was part of their religious heritage. We cannot locate the experience other than in the way it changed lives [as a religious experience]."To believers these resurrection appearances are far more important than the death of Jesus in history. That such an event as the resurrection took place in history seems almost inconceivably unlikely. Had he lived, Jesus would have been filled with despondency and rage at the idea of gentiles identifying him with the very person of the God of Israel. The real Jesus, the Jesus of history, has been crushed and all but obliterated by the Christians, who not content with making him into a God have made him into an occasion of wars, persecutions and inquisitions. In A.N. Wilson's experience, it is only when you raked away the theology and stopped bowing down to Jesus as if he was divine, that you begin to see him.