Defining Jesus: The Earthly, the Biblical, the Historical, and the Real Jesus, and How Not to Confuse Them

By Richard N. Soulen

Defining Jesus is about the semantic content of the name Jesus. To what does the name refer, especially when modifying adjectives are attached, such as "the historical Jesus," "the Jesus of history," "the earthly Jesus," "the biblical Jesus," "the real Jesus"? Problems arise when commercial writers and scholars, without the necessary caveat, equate their hypothetical portrait of "the historical Jesus" with "the real Jesus"--none other than the Jesus of the first century "as he actually was." To disabuse scholarship of this hubris, the author carefully delineates the diverse settings in which the name Jesus appears in the ongoing dialogue about Jesus of Nazareth. Its approach is apologetic: it defends the traditional language of Christian faith, arguing with Martin Kahler in the nineteenth century that the only Jesus Christians have ever known, or can know, is the Christ of faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Sep 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781498219365

Richard N. Soulen

Richard N. Soulen is Professor Emeritus of New Testament Studies at the Virginia Union University School of Theology in Richmond, Virginia.

Book preview

Preface

This brief essay regarding language about Jesus of Nazareth arose in response to a lecture given in the fall of 2013. The lecturer heralded major aspects of the newly released book by best-selling Iranian-American author Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Listening to the speaker’s enthusiasm as he reviewed the book, I was convinced that he had not fully appreciated the complexity of the hermeneutical issues involved in any depiction of a figure of the ancient past (especially Jesus, of whom unparalleled theological claims are made), had missed Aslan’s logical non-sequiturs, and had too willingly bought into Aslan’s representation of Jesus as a religious zealot intent on overthrowing Roman occupation of Palestine. At the same time, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News published Killing Jesus, another commercial book claiming in its subtitle to be a history of Jesus. It, too, received glowing approbation by those who were O’Reilly devotees. What can be done, I wondered, to counter the public’s willingness to believe almost anything about Jesus, positive or negative, when it is broadcast by the media as new and with equal audacity has the solid-sounding word history attached to it? The average person, certainly the average church-goer, is not willingly misled by media hoopla. People want to be well informed. But the contemporary situation is that, like every other intellectual discipline, the field of biblical studies has become ever more complex as the din of contradictory voices multiplies. Even scholars in the field of biblical studies, and not just commercial writers seeking to prop up sales of their works, unintentionally but repeatedly add to the semantic confusion surrounding the name of Jesus by ignoring the precautions of the past and overstating what scientific historiography is actually able to achieve.

The goal of the following pages is ambitious, and it is purposely brief for that reason. It seeks to bring semantic clarity to talk about Jesus by proposing foundational definitions for the terms employed. We do this in particular for those who want to be knowledgeable, but are not professionally trained in the study of Scripture. We must therefore eschew getting entangled in the numerous and subtle nuances scholars delight in when it comes to the person of Jesus. Even with the best of guides it is distressingly easy to get lost in the forest of opinion.¹ What we shall try to do is to offer a defense of the traditional language of Christian faith that seems to be under attack from so many directions.

I am grateful for the opportunity these pages afford to express my deep gratitude to the Fellowship Class of Williamsburg (Virginia) United Methodist Church for their interest in this work, and to the Christopher Wren Association of the College of William and Mary for the invitation in 2014 and 2015 to delve into the topic at hand in a more formal setting. Thanks go especially to Seonyoung Kim, District Superintendent of the York River District of the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church, and Andy Glascott, Youth Ministry Team Leader of the Williamsburg UMC, for graciously consenting to share their experiences of the real Jesus (chapter 6). Max Blalock, United Methodist campus minister at the College of William and Mary, is in many ways the inspirational source behind the work and deserves my sincere thanks for it. It must also be said that without Luke Timothy Johnson’s work, The Real Jesus (HarperOne, 1996), this book would never have come to mind. I want to express my gratitude to Jonathan, Grace, and Jack Soulen for their ever willing and patient help with computer frustrations (!) and to R. Kendall Soulen for saving me from many blunders and for his passionate (albeit unsuccessful) effort to save me from those that remain. I wish to thank Marilyn Mauser and Bert Sikkelee for reading the manuscript at various junctures and for giving encouragement. Dr. Robin Parry, Editor of Cascade Books and Pickwick Publications, has now set for me the standard of the good editor; his responsiveness to this work from the beginning was most welcome, and his guidance, insight, and suggestions have been crucial to its successful completion. I give him my heartfelt thanks. This book is dedicated with fond affection to my colleagues and students stretching over many years at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University, Richmond, Virginia. Their personal integrity, indomitable humor, and friendship during a difficult period in the nation’s history enhanced my life and that of my family in ways beyond measure. I am deeply grateful. If there is passion regarding the name of Jesus in these pages, it is because of what I learned about Christian faith in their midst. Finally, I am grateful to Peggy, my wife of fifty-eight years so far. I live in amazement of her unquenchable spirit.

1. The monumental work addressing every possible nuance of opinion is John P. Meier’s four-volume work, The Marginal Jew, comprised of almost 3,000 pages.

Introduction

This book is about the semantic content of the name Jesus as it is used (and misused) in professional biblical studies, the church, and the popular press. To what does the name Jesus actually refer? At first blush the answer would appear to be obvious: the name Jesus means different things at different times to different people; its referent, or meaning, changes according to the context in which it is used. Such an answer is comforting in its generality, but it is not very helpful. The problem facing any perusal of the unending list of books purporting to be about "the historical Jesus" is the discovery that no two portraits are alike.² Confusion is compounded when told that the real Jesus has nothing to do with the Jesus of the New Testament,³ or that the real Jesus can be known only through hard historical work like that done by highly trained scholars using the latest scientific methodologies,⁴ or that the biblical Jesus is pure myth, a fabrication, and has nothing to do with the Jesus of history (the earthly Jesus),⁵ or that Jesus of Nazareth never existed;⁶ or, reversing the claim, that the Jesus just portrayed by the author should replace the Jesus of Christian tradition as a more credible object of devotion and example⁷—and so on. Given this terminological and conceptual muddle (one that has been around for a very long time) how is the inquiring reader, particularly the Christian believer, to make sense of it all?

The proposal we wish to make concerns how the varied terms noted above (the earthly-, biblical-, historical-, and real Jesus) might justifiably be defined for the sake of clarity. We are not trying to settle the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in every instance of historical or theological judgment regarding Jesus of Nazareth. We are not presenting a review of all the literature relevant to the subject; the issues are too numerous and the differences between scholars too nuanced for us to accomplish such a feat and still retain the brevity we seek. Nor are we addressing the name of Jesus in all its contexts, such as its place in Trinitarian doctrine. That too has been dealt with very well elsewhere.⁸ The limited goal we have chosen is to proffer specific definitions for the name as it is employed in four distinct semantic domains commonly found in the literature of the academy and the church. Each is characterized by a familiar modifying adjective that by its misuse or inherent ambiguity contributes to the semantic problem faced by the ordinary reader. Currently, there is simply no agreement as to what is meant by the earthly Jesus or the biblical Jesus or the historical Jesus or the real Jesus; nor is there any agreement on how one term should be related to the other. In the following pages we attempt not only to say what each term should mean in the context of Christian faith, we state how each term is related to the human being who walked the hills of Palestine and was known as Jesus, a Galilean (Matt 26:69).

For it is surely the case that effective communication requires avoiding conceptual confusion, and to that end defining words clearly is not only useful, it is necessary. When words are inherently ambiguous (like the words historical and real), or misused out of intent or ignorance (as by those harboring some pique against the church or Christianity in general), or when conventional meanings are obscured by using jargon, stun-words, or clichés to gain some notoriety or commercial advantage (e.g., Killing Jesus⁹), then effort toward clarity of terminology should be welcomed as salutary.

Everyone recognizes that the word ball is essentially meaningless until it is placed in some context (like football, Grand Ball, snow ball, and so forth), so the name Jesus requires an essential modifier if its intended meaning is to be readily understood. The early church recognized that the true identity of the Galilean from Nazareth named Jesus could not be captured by any one telling, any more than one explanation could account for his being called the Christ. For that reason the church canonized four divergent accounts of his life, knowing that each version could only be an approximation of the gospel it sought to convey. In our day scholars refer to the Johannine Jesus simply to underscore the difference between the Jesus of John’s Gospel from, say, the portrayal of Jesus found in Matthew or Luke. The mere act of placing the name in a definitive context limits and focuses its meaning. Only in this way is the name disambiguated and clarified, even as its semantic facets are multiplied.

The central issue, the one from which all others acquire their urgency, is this: When someone picks up a book on the historical Jesus, he quite understandably assumes that he is going to read about Jesus as he actually was two thousand years ago, that the word historical placed before the name Jesus refers to the man stripped of myth, superstition, ideological bias, and so on. That, however, is not the case—whether that fact be fortuitous or regrettable (see chapter 1). Only if one is trained in biblical studies, or in historiography generally, will the reader know that every account of the historical Jesus—whenever and by whomever it is written—is at best a hypothetical reconstruction and cannot be equated without further ado with the first-century human being known as Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, the plausibility of that reconstruction is no greater than the plausible accuracy and adequacy of the writer’s source materials and his/her aptitude and skill in doing fundamental historical research in those sources, including knowledge of the languages involved. But even with sterling credentials and an inimitably ingenious mind the writer’s product will always and only be a plausible reconstruction of this Jesus—and (by definition!) other plausible depictions of equal credibility will still be abroad for consideration. Every scholar worth his/her salt knows this. But, sadly, not everyone who writes about Jesus is such a scholar and not every scholar acknowledges its truth or its implications, even those who with the best of intentions and devotion put their hand to drawing a portrait of Jesus.

This is not to say that every plausible depiction of Jesus merits the further approbation of being designated highly probable or even probable. Not all plausible portraits are equal. A plausible portrait can be highly improbable. That is the judgment we make regarding Aslan’s book mentioned above (see chapter 4). From our point of view, the raw data that set the earthly Jesus firmly in history (chapter 2) are not only plausible, they are highly probable. Together they form what we believe must be the rough outline and starting point of any subsequent and more complete description of the historical Jesus (chapter 4). For we want to stress that the data establishing Jesus of Nazareth as a figure in human history of themselves do not yet provide a portrait of the man. They are data without interpretation—insofar as that is possible.

The biblical Jesus (chapter 3) is the early church’s effort to set down (actually, to proclaim) the identity of the earthly Jesus as the unparalleled instance of God’s self-revelation. The Gospels are good news precisely because they proclaim (and insofar as they are heard as) this coming together of the Divine and the human in him. The texts of the New Testament contributing to that identification, taken together as a whole, constitute the biblical Jesus. Most simply put, the biblical Jesus is the Jesus of the text(s). As an artifact of literature, therefore, the biblical Jesus’ is objective and unalterable—or at least as unalterable" as textual criticism, in its determination of the original wording of the (Greek) text, allows.

But let us state again: from the church’s point of view, the biblical Jesus is the first century’s attempt to spell out the identity of the earthly Jesus of Nazareth—not a figment of their imagination.

Reviews for Defining Jesus

[tedcoleman-490590 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book sets forth a clear scheme for distinguishing the complex topic of books, writings and films on Jesus Christ : (1) Jesus as he actually was, (2) the earthly Jesus, (3) the Biblical Jesus, i.e., Jesus as portrayed in scriptural and Biblical writings, (4) the historical Jesus as reconstructed by various theologians and modern historians, (5) historical Jesus criteria for normative portraits, and (6) the real Jesus and the Christ of faith, as described for example by Luke Timothy Johnson his Real Jesus and by John R. Stott in his Incomparable Christ series of lectures and videos.