From the very beginning, the Jesus Christ of Christian faith has been also the Jesus Christ of Christian hope: not only the one who preached and practised the kingdom of God, not only the one who was crucified, not only the one who was raised from death and exalted to participation in God’s sovereignty over all creation, but also the Christ who is to come. One of the earliest Christian prayers that have survived and certainly the earliest Christian prayer to Jesus Christ that has survived is the Aramaic prayer Maranatha, meaning ‘Our Lord, come’. It was so significant that it was evidently still used in its original Aramaic form in Paul’s Greek-speaking churches. Paul, writing in Greek, quotes it in Aramaic (1 Cor 16.22), and it survives, also in its Aramaic form in an otherwise Greek prayer, in the earliest eucharistic liturgy that has come down to us (Didache 10.6). Translated into Greek, it forms almost the last words in the Bible: ‘Amen, come, Lord Jesus!’, where it is a response to Jesus’ own promise, ‘Surely, I am coming soon’ (Rev 22.20). Even in the Gospel of John, despite its reputation for emphasising ‘realised’ at the expense of future eschatology (where ‘eschatology’, in the language of biblical scholars and modern theologians, refers to God’s final completion of his purpose in history), Jesus’ last words are: ‘until I come’ (John 21.23).

There are a number of reasons for giving an account of the history of the study of the historical Jesus. One is straightforwardly practical. By examining the history of the study of any subject, it is possible that desiderata in research will emerge more clearly. This is the aim of all those histories of research through which one customarily enters the body of a standard monograph. A related purpose emerges from the belief that by exposing the major faultlines in such study, one will be better able to grasp the nature and character of the problem under discussion. A third reason arises out of a desire to emphasise the historicity of the study of the subject itself. Motives for such a desire vary. Some have their roots in a certain 'pietas' towards the work of predecessors in the field. Scholarship is a collective enterprise, and academic predecessors are part of the collective.

Other motives are less obviously positive. An appreciation of the historicity of the study of a subject can be used to question the assumption that matters have somehow progressed. Such an approach takes one of two forms. One form involves the narrator of the history demonstrating the tendency for the same problems and, broadly speaking, the same solutions to recur. The implication here is polemical, encapsulating the appropriately biblical sentiment that ‘There is nothing new under the sun’, with perhaps an accompanying call for a new approach that will apparently lead the scholarly world out of the perceived impasse. The other form is found in histories of research in a postmodern or (perhaps more accurately) relativistic mode.

Why did Jesus have to die? This question is capable of multiple answers. For example, a Latin historian writing at the end of the reign of Tiberius likely would never have heard of Jesus or his execution; or if he had, he would probably have had no reason to mention it. Had he woven this crucifixion into his narrative, the most credible impetus would have been to illustrate the religio-political agitation that marked Roman-Jewish relations during this period, perhaps as an anecdote displaying how Rome dealt with those who threatened the pax romana. If reports of this incident were written up differently in the second century, or if already within the first century those who penned documents that would become our New Testament had relocated it from a footnote in the annals of history to its status as an epochmaking event, this is because Jesus' death had been set within different interpretative horizons.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the nature of the evidence available for discovering information about the 'historical Jesus' and how we might use that evidence. The phrase 'historical Jesus' is one that is potentially fraught with methodological problems (Meier 1991-94:1. 21-40). I am taking it here to mean (very crudely) Jesus during his earthly life in Palestine, without seeking to prejudge anything about the periods before or after that time. Any information we have about the historical Jesus will of course be limited by the nature of our sources. These give us Jesus as mediated through the eyes of others. Inevitably then one gets verbal portraits influenced by those who are relating them. To produce a 'real Jesus', untainted by the views of others and independent of the later pictures of him, is probably an impossible task. The 'historical Jesus' will in one sense only be 'the Jesus whom our sources enable us to reconstruct'. But that is one of the limitations within which all historical study must work.

The belief that Jesus is the Christ has been fundamental to Christian faith down the ages. So basic a belief is it that it has become incorporated into essential Christian vocabulary. Already within the New Testament what is initially a Jewish title and role, 'the Christ/Messiah', as commonly in the gospels, becomes a proper name, Jesus Christ, as commonly in the letters of Paul and in Christian usage subsequently; and the followers of Jesus have been known as 'Christians' since earliest times (Acts 11.26).

It is a belief that can also be seen to encapsulate what came to be the Christian conviction that the Bible should be composed of two testaments, the scriptures of Israel in conjunction with the apostolic writings of the early church. For Christians the Bible contains both an Old Testament, where the Jewish category of ‘Christ/Messiah’ is formulated and becomes an important category for expressing hope in God’s action especially through the house of David, and a New Testament where Jesus fulfils and transforms Israel’s existing categories. Thus, major issues of biblical interpretation as a whole centre on the affirmation that Jesus is the Christ.

In AD 325 the Council of Nicaea affirmed the divinity of Jesus in the creed of Nicaea. This led to the emergence, over fifty years later, of the Nicene Creed, which defines the faith of the Christian church world-wide. At the heart of both stands the affirmation that Jesus Christ is 'God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being [homoousios] with the Father, through whom all things were made . . .' The intention of both is clear. They wish to affirm with unambiguous clarity that Jesus is to be identified as God incarnate - God has not merely come in a human being but as human. What is less obvious is that the issue at stake here concerns the very possibility of Christian God-talk. Without this decisive affirmation, it is questionable not only whether the Christian church would have continued to exist, but whether its existence would have been warranted. The whole raison d'être of the church is the recognition that Jesus is not simply a good person, or an inspired prophet, or a person with spiritual insight but, rather, the very presence of God identifying with humanity and revealing himself to humanity in a reconciling act of pure and unanticipatable grace.

There are many 'images' of Jesus, whether verbal or visual. Each canonical gospel presents one such image, but the process of image-making does not stop there. There are non-canonical, 'apocryphal' images, and there are images of Jesus in theology and literature, high art and popular religious culture. These images derive from many times and places, and will always reflect something of their own time and place, within which they will meet a perceived need. Does this constant manufacture of images testify to Jesus' extraordinary impact on western and global cultures? Or is Jesus little more than a blank screen onto which individuals and cultures may project their own aspirations and fantasies? Is Jesus (like Mary, perhaps) the origin and pretext for an entire myth-making industry? And if so, is the 'real' Jesus of any significance? There was, no doubt, a first-century Jew of that name who came from Nazareth and was crucified in Jerusalem, but the 'reality' of Jesus' impact on history is simply the reality of the images: or so it might be argued. Perhaps even the two centuries of scholarly endeavour to get behind the images to the 'real', historical Jesus have merely produced a further profusion of images, similar in kind to the ones they sought to displace?

As the gospels testify, Jesus was hardly drawn to Jerusalem. The turning-point verse in Luke's Gospel underscores the tension: 'he set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem' (9.51 NEB). Moreover, after his resurrection that same Gospel directs his disciples to proclaim 'repentance bringing the forgiveness of sins . . . to all nations beginning from Jerusalem' (24.47), as they are sent (in the companion narrative of the Acts of the Apostles) to 'bear witness for me in Jerusalem, and throughout Judaea and Samaria, and even in the farthest corners of the earth' (Acts 1.8). So the New Testament explicitly reverses the centripetal movement of all nations gathering to Jerusalem (in the messianic prophecies of Isaiah) to a centrifugal one, leaving Jerusalem to be a centre whose role would remain ambiguous throughout Christian history. In her masterful account, Karen Armstrong (1996) delineates these ambiguities through a history punctuated and shaped by diverse interactions with Jews and Muslims. Peter Walker (1990) provides an early set of reflections from Eusebius and Cyril (see also Walker 1994), while Robert Wilken (1992) offers textual evidence of the richly theological exchange between Jews and Christians in the context of this holy city. Frank Peters (1985) offers a rich compendium of texts from 'chroniclers, visitors, pilgrims and prophets from the days of Abraham to the beginning of modern times'.

There is little or no trace in the first Christian decades of a Christianity unmarked by devotion to Jesus as a living agent. Even allowing for the most sceptical reading of the Gospels and Acts, we can say that within about twenty-five years from the likeliest date of Jesus' crucifixion, he was being invoked by Christians as a source of divine favour and almost certainly addressed in public prayer at Christian assemblies. The concluding verses of Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth (16.22-23) illustrate both things, with the ambiguous Aramaic formula, maranatha, strongly suggesting a direct address to the glorified Jesus as Lord, and the reference to 'grace' stemming from Jesus identifying him as a bestower of the kind of favour that is normally to be looked for from God. Without entering into the very involved question of how far Jewish piety at the time accepted a cult of angelic powers, we can at least say with certainty that Jesus was, within a generation of his death, regarded as present to and in the believing community, the object of personal devotion, the recipient of personal address. He is coming again to act as judge; but in the meantime, he is not absent, and his future judgement can in some ways be anticipated or affected by the present decisions of the church and especially of its charismatic leaders, acting 'in' the Spirit of Jesus (e.g. 1 Cor 5.4-5). By the end of the first Christian century, this presence of Jesus and anticipation of his return and judgement have become both pervasive and pictorially vivid in Christian literature. Luke depicts the first martyr Stephen commending his spirit to Jesus (Acts 7.59) as Jesus had commended his to the Father (Luke 23.46); the writer of the Revelation depicts Jesus as bearing the title and the attributes of the God of Israel (Rev 1.11, cf. Isa 44.6; and compare the pictorial details with the divine manifestations e.g. in Dan 7 and Ezek 1), and issuing sentences upon the Christian communities of western Asia Minor.

The so-called Third Quest of the historical Jesus has been marked by a variety of portraits. Jesus has been depicted as a rabbi, a sage, a prophet, a philosopher (perhaps even a Cynic), a holy man and a Messiah. What lies behind these discrepancies is a lack of consensus about context and differing assessments of source materials. The present chapter will treat three important areas of Jesus' background: (1) context, (2) family and (3) formation. Of special interest will be the extent of the Jewishness or Hellenisation of Galilee in Jesus' day and the question of how well trained in Scripture Jesus was.

CONTEXT

Galilee of the early first century ad was profoundly Jewish, though a thin veneer of Graeco-Roman culture was present.Agriculturally rich and strategically situated, Galilee was a region over which the Roman Empire maintained firm political control, alternately through client rulers (viz. the Herodian dynasty) or through the direct administration of Roman governors. Galilee measures some 69 km from north to south, and some 49 km from east to west. Although most of this territory ranges in elevation from 600 m to 1200 m above sea level, Lake Gennesaret (or popularly Sea of Galilee), some 21 km in length (north to south) and 5–11 km wide, is situated about 215 m below sea level. In the time of Jesus the lake supported (and still supports) a thriving fishing industry (cf. Strabo, Geog. 16.2; Pliny, Nat. Hist. 5.15; Josephus, J.W. 3.506–508; Mark 1.16–20 parr.; Luke 5.1–10; John 21.1–11).

The perennial question of Jesus' significance for humanity has occasioned much discussion and assumed new dimensions in recent years. It is accentuated by the UN Declaration on Human Rights that no human being may be persecuted or discriminated against on the basis of religion. There is a growing tendency to see Jesus as one among the many prophets of world religions: Moses, Mohammed and Buddha, to name but a few. At the same time, Jesus has always been recognised and is increasingly being accepted by peoples of every tribe, language and nation as God's unique agent of human salvation, 'the Savior of the World' (John 4.42). Others again contest this Christian claim, holding that the teaching of their prophets is equally a good road to God. Thus, as prophesied by Simeon, Jesus continues to be a sign that is contradicted, as out of many hearts thoughts are revealed (Luke 2.34-35). What is it that makes him so attractive to people of every race and nation, across cultural, sex and religious boundaries, and yet such a bone of contention?

Friends and enemies have a unique power to define who we are. They locate us socially, within the world of what other people do. That localising capacity of friendship and enmity is not merely a matter of their exposing the extrinsic coordinates of who we are in terms of birth, status or education. Our relationships to friends and enemies express who we are and seek to become, as we engage or reject the kinds of behaviour, thought and feeling others represent to us.

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS CIRCLE

Jesus’ relationship to John the Baptist presents the strongest case in point. Certainly the most influential figure in his life, John gave Jesus the focus on purity that, in one form or another, became an emblematic feature of his activity. Jesus did not simply meet his teacher in adulthood (as a superficial reading of the gospels would suggest), but apprenticed himself to him as a youth.

Josephus’ famous report about John in Antiquities 18.116–19 is a flashback, related to explain the opinion among ‘some Jews’ that the defeat of Antipas’ army at the hands of Aretas, the king of Nabataea, represented divine retribution for his treatment of John. What Josephus does not say, but the gospels do attest (Mark 6.18–29; Matt 14.3–12; Luke 3.19–20), is that John had criticised Antipas for marrying Herodias, who had been married to his brother Philip. Josephus’ account dovetails with the gospels, in that he gives the details of Antipas’ abortive divorce from Aretas’ daughter in order to marry Herodias (18.109–2). Josephus also explains that this was merely the initial source of the enmity with Aretas, which was later exacerbated by a border dispute that preceded the outbreak of hostilities (18.113).

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS’ JEWISHNESS

The theme of the present chapter is more pervasive than appears at first sight. Although Jesus’ Judaism seems only one among his many aspects treated in this volume, it relates to almost all of those other aspects.

Not only can the plain facts of his life be supposed to make historical sense only when seen within first-century Jewish society. More importantly, we can hope to understand how his disciples came to see him as Son of God and Messiah only if, like them, we try to interpret his life and work in the framework of Jewish history and of Jewish views of history. Jews of the period ‘read’ the events of history alongside Scripture, and the significance of particular happenings would be expressed and measured by their correspondence with the sacred verses. This was also the spiritual and historical context of Jesus and his disciples, and it is in this context that they must be understood.

Put the other way around, if we would isolate Jesus from Judaism to start with and see his relationship to it as something accidental, the relation between the historical and the theological perception of his person would of necessity become very problematic. Precisely this is what has happened during the past two centuries, as other chapters show in detail. Historical criticism sought a ‘historical Jesus’ strictly separate from the ‘kerygmatic Christ’, the subject of Christian faith. The corollary was that the subject of faith had nothing to do with human history. It seems to become clearer and clearer today that this asphyxiating dilemma is reduced to a historical problem of manageable dimensions if we start at the other end and consistently consider Jesus and his earliest believers within their Jewish context.

This chapter follows up the overview of the previous chapter by focusing on the message and miracles of Jesus. These themes may seem to be an awkward pairing: whereas the teaching of Jesus is generally considered to be readily accessible and of continuing relevance, the miracles raise problems for the modern mind. For Jesus himself, however, message and miracles were interrelated, as they were for his opponents.

When the imprisoned John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus about his role and his intention, Jesus told them to tell John what they had heard and what they had seen, and then elaborated by couching his reply with phrases taken from Isaiah. This key passage (to which we shall return) links together the message and miracles of Jesus: