"Refeeling" the Past

Human behavioral ecology, sociology of knowledge, and the history of perception are fundamental to my attempt to reconstruct the past in which Jesus lived. Following these methods necessarily results in “historical empathy,” which implies more than just “re-visualizing” the past but “re-feeling” it as well.

It is not true that human emotions have remained everywhere and at all times the same. Did Jesus exhibit “anger” when he cleansed the Temple of the moneychangers? If so, what kind of anger? I suggest that his was an anger fueled by his love of God (Yahweh) and consequent detestation of Temple worship as an actual insult to God, which is an anger that we can only dimly imagine since we cannot now actually feel it. Not the way that Jesus did.

The same is true of Jesus’ experience of God’s presence and, for that matter, the disciples’ experience of Jesus. But, by placing ourselves in Jesus’ world as best we can, it is possible to catch distant glimpses and dim echoes of the feelings, longings, hopes, expectations, and desires of that vanished world.

“Historical empathy” does not mean agreeing with what people in the past thought, felt, or believed. It means attempting to understand their world as much as possible from their point of view.

In short, I will attempt to familiarize the reader with an ancient and alien thought world. Historical empathy is the aim of all good historians. For example, Robert Darnton writes in the introduction to his Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968) regarding his effort to recreate the outlook of literate 18th century Frenchmen on the eve of the Revolution is "to see the world as they saw it.” Although such a “presumptuous undertaking must fail. . .it is worth attempting.”

Fortunately, scholars have developed tools that will assist us in our quest. These include new techniques in analyzing the history of the five senses, discerning the history of emotions, meme analysis, and human behavioral ecology techniques. Although never previously applied to the thought world of 1st century Palestine, these analytic tools will prove invaluable.

A Modest Proposal

In making my arguments, I will challenge much of the reasoning and some of the conclusions of contemporary Jesus scholars. I argue that, as a secular historian, I bring a fresh perspective to understanding Jesus and can therefore suggest alternative approaches to the limited (although sometimes brilliant) but often ahistorical, anachronistic, and circular thinking that has come to dominate historical Jesus scholarship. As conservative Christian Jesus scholar Craig E. Evans shrewdly observes: “[The set of criteria used to determine NT authenticity] was greatly at odds with my studies in history (in which I had majored). Eventually I learned that many scholars engaged in the study of the historical Jesus have studied Bible and theology, but not history. These Jesus scholars are not historians at all. [Italics Evans] This lack of training is apparent in the odd presuppositions, methods and conclusions that are reached.”

I also intend to avoid as much as possible the turgid terminology employed by New Testament (NT) scholars who go on and on about kerygma, parousias, etc. to the mystification of all but the most highly motivated reader. My account will be couched in language that is simple and straightforward, even when the concepts to which I refer are decidedly not.

The Jesus I portray was indeed a “divine man.” But he was not only that. As Chesterton remarked, “There must surely have been something not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs can be carved out of him.”

Although it might seem that I describe Jesus in a way similar to that of several modern commentators, this is not the case for, in general, I define “mystic,” “wisdom teacher,” “prophet,” and “religious revolutionary” in ways that differ from modern Jesus scholarship. To take a few examples, Jesus has been characterized (caricatured?) in the following ways: Marcus J. Borg – a Jewish mystic and religious revolutionary, John D. Crossan - a Jewish peasant Cynic, N.T. Wright – essentially the Jesus of the Gospels, and James M. Robinson – a charismatic visionary whose true teachings are contained in the so-called “Q Sayings Gospel.”

The problem with many of these characterizations of Jesus is that they are influenced by the scholars’ theological agendas. Take Borg and Crossan, who quite openly say in their book written for a lay audience The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Final Days in Jerusalem (2006):

"[Although] the jobs for which we were paid were in the academy, our passion for Jesus has always been more than academic. We have been, and are, passionate about the meaning of Jesus (and the Bible as a whole) for Christian life today. [Italics mine] Our involvement with the sacred texts of our tradition has always been about, “What does then have to do with now?” And because we live in the United States, we are especially concerned with the question, “What does then have to do with this now, our now?” [Italics theirs]

As a historian, I find this scandalous. It is in our job description as historians to allow the past to speak for itself, insofar as that is possible, not to somehow force it into “relevance” for the religious or political benefit of those of us in the present. In the words of Jonathan Z. Smith, “The historian’s task is to complicate not to clarify. He strives to celebrate the diversity of manners, the variety of species, the opacity of things.” (Map Is Not Territory, p. 290.)

Note that many Jesus scholars also have political agendas. It is no accident that modern revisionist concepts of Jesus are conveniently congruent with a middle-class American university-centered limousine liberalism, or even, for those scholars fortunate enough to have written best-selling books, Rolls-Royce radicalism. A recent, flagrant, and slightly comic example of political posturing by a prominent Jesus scholar may be found in Crossan’s God and Empire (2007), which is subtitled Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now in which Crossan calls upon Christians to unite in opposition to the “imperialism” of the “new” Roman Empire, which, of course, is the United States

In compiling my “portrait” I try to avoid creating a version of Jesus’ life and teachings with which I happen to agree. I do not, in short, try to create Jesus in my own image, either theological or political. My religious sympathies are at once universal and non-existent and I belong to a political party of one that seeks no new members. Jesus (to say the least) was an ardent theist. I am not. I believe in violence when it seems justified. Jesus thought violence could never be justified. Jesus was profoundly egalitarian. In comparison, I am far less so. I am often appalled by how little most Christians know about Jesus and the early history of Christianity. I doubt this would have seriously upset Jesus There appear to be countless Christians who appear to know absolutely nothing substantive about their religious heritage. For example, I have encountered a number of devout Christians who think that “Christ” is Jesus’ surname, as if there had been a “Christ” family, with mom and dad Mary and Joseph Christ and a whole batch of brother and sister Christs. This strikes as more chilling than laughable.


Mainstream Jesus scholars, whatever their other virtues, are generally members of a closed community whose work is strikingly self-reinforcing, what Gary Wills calls the “new fundamentalism.”

I propose an interpretatively expansionist portrait, but one based on a minimalist view of acceptable evidence. In short, I view most of the New Testament as mythical rather than historical but in extracting what seems to me to be genuine historical gold, I reinterpret Jesus and his teachings in novel ways. Whenever I depart from the questionable collective wisdom of contemporary scholarship, I will explain my reasons for doing so.