Christian History Magazine Collection

What type of history do the four Evangelists tell, and what does it reveal about Jesus?

by Ben Witherington III from Christian History magazine no. 59

No modern biographer would ignore all of Jesus’ early life, as Mark does, or skip over his formative experiences as a young adult, as all Gospels but Luke do (Luke 2:41-52). Nor would a modern biographer of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, for example, spend half of his account on just the last week of his subject’s life, even if the person died tragically. And most modern historical works at least attempt to present themselves as reasonably objective.

But the authors of the four Gospels broke all these rules, especially the last. They were not disinterested observers of Jesus and his movement. No author who launches his work with the phrase “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God” is pretending to write as a neutral reporter.

If the Gospels are not like modern works of history, neither are they like folklore. The time gap between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Jesus traditions (between 30 and 60 years) is too short to consider the Gospels as mere legends or folklore, which always have long gestation periods.

If they are neither modern biographies nor legends, what type of history do these Gospels contain? What do they reveal about Jesus? I believe upon close reading that three of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and John) are ancient biographies, and one (Luke) presents itself as an ancient history.

Revealing Character

The Gospels were not written to give a chronology of Jesus’ ministry as much as to reveal who he was. Even markers that seem to be precise were only devices to move the narrative along. Mark, for example, frequently uses the term immediately in transitions, but he usually only means “after that.”

The authors did not have access to the extensive sources available today; besides, they were more interested in presenting what was typical and revealing of a person than in giving a blow-by-blow chronicle of each year of a person’s life. So ancient biographies were anecdotal by necessity.

Furthermore, most ancients did not believe a person’s character developed over time. Character was viewed as fixed at birth, determined by factors such as gender, generation, and geography; it was revealed gradually but consistently. Ancients also believed that how one died was especially revealing of one’s true character. This is one reason the Gospel writers spent so many words recounting Jesus’ last week.

One feature of the Gospels that troubles some modern readers is their lack of chronological precision, but this is typical of ancient biographies. Again, the focus is on the persons involved and what they did, not on the space-time coordinates of the event.

Jesus’ cleansing of the temple provides a fine illustration. While all four Gospels record only one cleansing, the fourth Gospel places this event near the outset, while the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) place it during Passion week. A modern reader may think Jesus cleansed the temple twice. But this interpretation overlooks two points: (1) ancient readers would have concluded there was only one cleansing since no Gospel includes two such events; (2) the ancient audience was aware that a biographer had freedom to arrange his material in whatever fashion he felt most revealing of his subject.

In this case, the fourth Evangelist wished to stress at the outset how Jesus replaced the institutions of Judaism with himself (e.g., he is God’s Torah or Word, he is the temple, he is the source of new life and purity). Many ancient biographies, such as Plutarch’s Parallel Lives or Tacitus’s Agricola, were likewise more interested in events that reveal character than in a strict chronological record.

In some ancient historical (versus biographical) works, especially in the Greek tradition, there was more attention to chronology. This helps explain the “synchronisms” in Luke 3:1-2 or Acts 18:2. A synchronism tries to locate an event in divine history in relation to secular events, like the reign of a certain governor. Thus Luke-Acts would have seemed to ancients to be less biographical and more historical in character.

What Can We Depend on?

What kind of historical information, then, do the Gospels give about Jesus?

First, the Gospel accounts (especially Matthew, Mark, and John), present a good deal about Jesus’ character and how he was evaluated by his contemporaries. These character sketches, however, are largely indirect, and let Jesus’ words and deeds speak for themselves.

Second, the Gospel writers presented what they deemed were the salient facts readers absolutely must know to understand Jesus’ mission, person, and work.

Third, these writers presented this information in a broadly chronological way (e.g., Jesus’ birth obviously came before his ministry, and his ministry before his death), but they were not concerned with chronological minutiae (except, perhaps, in parts of Luke).

Fourth, this literature was written by and for a special community—a tiny minority in the Roman Empire—so they could know more about their Savior.

The Gospels also appear to have been written, in at least the case of the last three Gospels, for audiences that had inadequate knowledge of Jesus’ Jewish world, including the meaning of Aramaic words (Mark 15:34; John 19:13) and Jewish customs (Mark 7:3).

In the case of the fourth Gospel, the audience was not expected to have personally known the characters in the story (see John 11:2, 12:4,6). The Gospels, then, were by and large written for non-Jewish converts to Christianity.

Given all this, what can the discipline of history, using the Gospels as the main source, tell us about Jesus?

A Birth that Needed Explaining

Jesus was born somewhere between 4 and 6 B.C. It might seem strange to suggest that Jesus was born “before Christ,” but this is due to an early miscalculation when in A.D. 525 Pope John I ordered a new calendar that would be reckoned from Christ’s birth. Regardless of the numbers, the Gospel accounts are clear that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, who died before this new calendar had begun counting the new era. In fact, Matthew 2:1-12 (where Jesus’ family flees to Egypt until Herod dies) suggests Jesus was born some time before Herod’s death.

The remarkable story of the virginal conception is found in two different accounts: Matthew 1:18-25 and Luke 1:26-38. What is most remarkable about these stories is that they try to account for something extraordinary that, so far as we can tell, Jews were not expecting—a Messiah coming into the world by means of a virginal conception.

Isaiah 7:14 in the Hebrew simply says, “Behold, the nubile young woman is with child and will bear a son,” though the later Greek version says, “The virgin will be with child, and will give birth to a son.” Still, it was not necessary to conclude that a miraculous conception was involved, only that a woman who had, up to that point, been a virgin, would now conceive. In other words, it was the anomaly of what happened at Jesus’ origins, not the Old Testament text, that led early Christians to search the Scriptures for an explanation.

At a minimum, the historical conclusion is that Jesus’ origins were unusual. It seems unlikely that early Christians would invent a story about a virginal conception knowing it would inevitably lead to charges that Jesus was illegitimate (a charge in fact we find in the third-century debate between Celsus the Jew and Origen, and one perhaps hinted at in Mark 6:3 and John 8:41). It was enough that their Savior had a scandalous death; early Christian writers were not looking to add more implausibility to the account.

The Facts of Youth

Though the Gospel writers, with the exception of the story in Luke 2:41-52 (Jesus talking with teachers in the temple), said nothing of Jesus’ youth, four things we know with a high degree of certainty.

First, Jesus grew up in a devout Jewish home. This is suggested by the birth narratives: Joseph is described as “a righteous man;” the family went to Jerusalem for the rites of purification after the birth; they attended Jewish festivals (Luke 2:41-52, John 7:2-5). By the time Jesus began his ministry, he knew the Hebrew Scriptures: he frequently quoted them in his discussions and debates and was even asked to read them in his hometown synagogue.

Second, Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a backwater town in Galilee. No historical scholar doubts this. It was not the kind of thing Jesus’ admiring biographers would make up, for no one was looking for a Messiah who came from Nazareth; indeed no one was looking for one who came from Galilee in general (John 1:46).

Third, in addition to knowing Hebrew, Jesus spoke Aramaic (a Semitic cousin of Hebrew) as his native tongue. It is also likely he knew at least some Greek (enough to deal with a centurion and a toll collector). Our earliest Gospel (Mark) stresses that Jesus prayed in Aramaic (15:34) and even used the Aramaic form of the word father (Abba, Mark 14:36) to address God. Jesus regularly identified himself to others using the Aramaic phrase bar enasha (“Son of Man”), an allusion to the figure spoken of in Daniel 7, one of the Aramaic chapters of the book.

Fourth, Jesus grew up in an artisan’s home. The traditions emphasize that Jesus was the son of an artisan, a carpenter, and may have been an artisan himself. Jesus was therefore not a peasant in the normal sense of that term (a poor person who makes his living by farming). He had a trade, which would have been considered an honorable thing in a Jewish or lower income Greco-Roman context (though the social elite of the Greco-Roman world looked down on anybody who worked with their hands).