Is the search for the Jesus of history important?

From my earliest memories of my childhood, I have been a Jesus person. I do not attempt to explain it. It is a simple fact with which I have lived. Jesus has been my friend. He has been my counselor. He has been my teacher. Jesus has been the one through whom I have received the grace and forgiveness of God. Jesus is my Lord and Savior. I have no recollection of a time when I desired or consciously tried to walk away from him. In my walk with Jesus, I have been a questioner, but never a doubter.

I am educationally privileged. I have had the additional advantage of being a minister, a job that required me to be a reader and a student. The churches that employed me paid me to read, study and think. The time that I have spent pondering the mysteries of life has been on churches’ clocks.

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out who this Jesus from Nazareth is and why and how he is still alive almost 2,000 years after he was brutally killed.

I have never been afraid of the search for the Jesus of my personal reality. Obviously, my search began with the collection of writings that we call the Bible. In my search, I learned that the Bible was not one book, but many. I learned it was written by many dozens of men who could be placed in history and in life situations and who had personal agendas in writing. I learned that in the Bible collections, authors had used every literary device known to human kind. I learned that many of the most significant writers of Bible materials were poets. I learned that the Bible contains a huge number of stories that were never intended to be read as history. I learned that much of the Bible material is in fact “mythology” and can never be read as history or judged by the standards of historical research. To call the Bible “the word of God” is a gross misstatement. The Bible is the collective work of flawed men with mixed motives and agendas.

Conclusions must always be tentative. That is the nature of all research. However in my quest for facts about Jesus, I have reached conclusions. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem and not to a virgin mother. The story of the birth of Jesus is a myth/legend that first existed as a folk story passed along by oral tradition. Our first written form of the story did not appear until three generations after his birth in the small village of Nazareth. The story of his flight with his parents to Egypt is legend, not history.

The reports of his resurrection are also a part of Christian mythology. (A myth is any story or report in which God or a god is the primary actor. Myth is a literary form or device.) The report of his resurrection is found in all four of the Church’s approved gospels. However, the most casual reader becomes aware that the four versions cannot be reconciled with each other. The differences are real and not simply a matter of perspective. The post resurrection activities of Jesus belong to the surreal.

Modern Bible scholars are asking hard questions that most Christians choose to ignore. I choose not to ignore the questions, but to appreciate the work that is being done. There are facts that confront us. Jesus’ first and primary language was Aramaic. Almost all of the rural poor who listened to him were illiterate. The most easily remembered Jesus materials were his stories (parables) and his aphorisms (short sayings). How the parables and aphorisms were transmitted from spoken Aramaic to written Greek, Latin and English is a long and complicated process and dedicated language scholars are our best commentators.

Parables and aphorisms are the key to understanding what Jesus believed and what his life was about. The stories about Jesus that are reported in the Jesus gospels were manufactured projections by the writers of the gospels, and each story must be carefully examined to determine its value.

The search for the Jesus of history forces all serious believers to face two key issues. The first is the virgin birth of Jesus. The second is his resurrection from the dead. I embrace the virgin birth as witness, not history. I am one of those Christians who believes that God was uniquely present in Jesus from Nazareth. Special births are a part of Bible lore. Two examples are the birth of Isaac and the birth of Moses. In the highest of Bible tradition, births and rebirths are essential to bringing forth change and the new day. In the best of Christian tradition people are reborn to a new life. When I celebrate Christmas, I celebrate the power of birth and rebirth in the establishment of the reign of God on earth.

In my celebration of Easter, I celebrate Easter as witness, not history. The witness is simple. God is able to restore life even when life is apparently destroyed by lies, violence and profane misuse of the love of God. The reign of God on earth can never be destroyed. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of men charged with crimes were crucified by the Romans. The followers of Jesus found in the prophet from Nazareth a life that could not be destroyed. I am one of those followers.

Even with the massive effort now being put into the search for the Jesus of history, we see only glimpses and shadows of the rabbi from Nazareth. I am certain that people in the future will know more than we now know. All to the good! The Christ of faith and the Jesus of history are tied together tightly. The two are companions, not enemies.

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister, who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.

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