In coming weeks, I would like to return to some updated historical-critical reflections about the historical Jesus, so greatly needed in our contemporary times of politically tainted and distorted christianity.

Jesus of Nazareth was an historical figure and attempts to deny his historicity have been consistently rejected by contemporary scholarly consensus. His existence was also documented by ancient Roman and Hebrew historians.

Jesus was a Galilean Hebrew. Most biblical scholars and ancient historians believe that his birth date was around 6 to 4 BCE. (“BCE” meaning Before the Common Era.)

Jesus was not born in the year 1 AD because of historical miscalculations by the 6th-century Eastern European monk Dionysius Exiguus, who created the AD – Anno Domini “year of the Lord” dating system. The gospels of Luke and Matthew associate Jesus’ birth with the reign of King Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE.

Jesus lived only in Galilee and Judea, two distinct regions in the Holy Land. Judea, centered around Jerusalem, was the religious and political heartland. Galilee, to the north, was a rural, prosperous, and culturally diverse area.

Like most people from Galilee back then, Jesus had brown eyes, dark brown to black hair and olive-brown skin. Jesus spoke Aramaic and may have also spoken Hebrew and Greek. The languages spoken in Galilee and Judea during the 1st century included the Semitic Aramaic and Hebrew languages as well as Greek, with Aramaic being the predominant language.

Biblical perspectives on the historical Jesus are based on the Pauline epistles, written between 48 and 62 CE, and the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John all written within seventy-five years of Jesus’ death. Those four gospels, however, do not represent all the early gospels available. This becomes clear in studying other gospels either discerned as sources inside the official four or else discovered as documents outside them. An example of a source hidden within the four canonical gospels is the reconstructed document known as Q, from the German word Quelle, meaning “source,” which is now imbedded within both Luke and Matthew.

Another ancient Jesus document, outside the four canonical gospels is the Gospel of Thomas, which was found at Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, in the winter of 1945 and is, in the view of many scholars, completely independent of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. It is also most strikingly different from them, especially in its format. It identifies itself as a gospel, but it is in fact a collection of the sayings of Jesus given without any descriptions of deeds or miracles, crucifixion or resurrection stories.

Most contemporary scholars agree that Jesus began his public ministry when he was about thirty years old, as indicated in Luke 3:23. The New Testament does not specifically give the ages of any of the men and women who were Jesus’ disciples. Some of them may have joined Jesus as early as age 15 and would have still been teenagers at the time of his death and resurrection. Education for young Hebrews, in Jesus’ time, concluded at the age of 15.

What did Jesus do before his public ministry? We do not know. We can can only guess. Some historians suggest that Jesus, like his father, was first an early “blue collar” worker in construction work outside Nazareth. Others suggest that, after his father’s death, Jesus took over the work to support his mother, brothers, and sisters. Still others theorize that Jesus was a monk and spent years in study and prayer, before entering his public ministerial life. Frankly, I have no pet theory. I am more interested in what Jesus said and did in his public ministry.

When we look at the history and biblical testimony about the post-Resurrection apostolic community of Christians in Jerusalem, clearly the leader was James, the “brother of the Lord.” Peter played a role in the Council of Jerusalem, around 50 CE. But James was in charge and James issued the definitive judgment that converts to Christianity did not have to be circumcised. Then, according to the epistle to the Galatians, Peter went to Antioch. There he tangled with Paul, who rebuked him for treating Gentile converts as inferior to Hebrew Christians.

Peter and his wife certainly belonged to the group of young men and women, most in their late teens or early twenties, who were Jesus’ close disciples. Peter became the first Bishop of Antioch from around 44 to 51 CE. But he was never a bishop of Rome, because the early Christian community in Rome was governed not by a bishop but a group of elders: what today we would call a steering committee.

There is a tradition that Peter and Paul went to Rome and were put to death at the hands of Nero, probably between 64 and 68 CE. There has been a lot of historical development about Peter and the Papacy, in fact, over the past fifty years. The Roman Catholic biblical scholars, Raymond Brown (1928 –1998) and John P. Meier (1942 – 2022), for instance, were emphatic in their book Antioch and Rome: New Testament Cradles of Christianity, (Paulist Press 1983) that Peter was never a bishop of Rome. They wrote: “There is no serious proof that he (Peter) was the bishop, or local ecclesiastical officer, of the Roman church: a claim not made till the third century.” (We do grow in our understanding.)

The Papacy did not begin in earnest until Constantine (272–337). The first great acclamation of “Peter as a pope,” however, came from Pope Leo I who was pope from 440 CE until his death in 461 CE.

After the deaths of James, Paul, Peter, as well as others who had known Jesus face-to-face, it became essential for the survival of the way of Jesus that his words and deeds be recollected and written down. This led to the birth of the four Gospels. The clear majority of contemporary biblical scholars believe that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, sometime around the year 70 CE. The Gospels contain bits of history, parables, metaphor, symbol, re-interpreted passages from the Greek (Septuagint) Hebrew Scriptures and imagined scenarios for key events in the life of Jesus.

Next week we will explore perspectives on Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, which is simple and succinct with a vivid account of Jesus’ ministry, emphasizing more what Jesus did than what he said.

Jack