Hi everyone, with all the posting about the Passion today I thought I'd share a few sites and references on the historical Jesus.
I'm a lifelong secular humanist, but some of my father's cousins are evangelical christians. I've often debated religion with my cousins, and so have spent time researching scholarship on Jesus' life.
Here are some interesting sites to check out:
The Straight Dope: Who Killed Jesus?
This article gives a brief but well researched overview of the subject, concluding finally:
In summary, Jesus was killed because the Roman empire mercilessly put down any possible source of rebellion or riot. The empire's agents included the Roman prefect Pilate who ordered the execution, and the Jewish high priest Caiaphus and his council who initiated the process. Assigning responsibility to an entire group of people, whether the Jews or the Romans, is stereotyping, oversimplifying, and false.
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity
This is an excerpt from an out-of-print (but still available) book by Hyam Maccoby. Maccoby argues quite convincingly that Christianity as we now know it was largely created not by Jesus, but by Paul. He details evidence that Jesus was a practicing Pharisee his entire life, that his dispute with the Pharisees was invented by Paul, and that Jesus was in fact handed over by the Saduccee High Priest to the Romans to be executed - not for religious but for political reasons.
Further, he asserts that Paul was not actually a Pharisee himself but presented himself as such in order to tie his Hellenistic conception of Christianity to ancient Judaism.
I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book to read at your leisure.
The Search For A No-Frills Jesus
An excellent article from The Atlantic, 1996, by Charlotte Allen. Allen interviews Burton L. Mack, the author of Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth and discusses modern biblical scholarship, the Jesus Seminar, and the search for "Q" - the hypothesized original source for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
Interview with James Carroll
James Carroll (no relation to myself) is the author of a long but worthwhile history of Catholicism and Anti-Semitism entitled Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History. In this interview Carroll, a former priest, discusses his book's contention that "the New Testament betrayed Jesus."
Christians are liberated when we learn history. The New Testament is a collection of writings all of which were written down by people who may never have laid eyes on Jesus, who were not personally witnesses to the events recounted in the New Testament. Paula Fredriksen, a BU professor of religion who's a Jewish scholar of the Christian foundational documents, wrote one of the books I cite most frequently, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. What she helps us understand is, if you don't have a firm hold on the Jewishness of Jesus, then you can't know Jesus.
Clearly many questions remain about who Jesus really was and the religious ideas he represented. It's worth boning up on some historical background before millions of moviegoers descend upon us spouting the Gospel According to Gibson.