The historical birth of Jesus page 2
For the orthodox, such a question is irrelevant, if not impious. Jesus is the Son of God, come down to earth to redeem fallen humanity. The Gospels, for believers, are holy writ, not historical documents. For modernist theologians, the question is equally irrelevant: they acknowledge that virtually everything about Jesus' life is historically problematic, but are untroubled by that fact. Faith, not documentation, is what matters.
Photograph by Gertrude Herbrich
For one writer, however, the contradictions in the historical account of Jesus' life ultimately shattered his belief --- and cleared the way for him to assess that life dispassionately. Paradoxically, A.N. Wilson's clear-eyed "Jesus: A Life," published in 1992, makes Jesus a much more vivid and compelling figure -- at least for this nonbeliever -- than do the grandly mythical accounts of theologians.
Like Shakespeare, that other vast figure about whom we know remarkably little, Jesus is a gigantic blank page that few can resist trying to fill in -- even if the results more often resemble a Rorschach test than a biography. Because of the unreliability of the primary sources, the four canonical Gospels, such investigations can seem as fruitless as attempts to establish a "correct" interpretation of Joyce's "Ulysses." The Biblical scholar Morton Smith even compared the search for the actual Jesus to a search for a submicroscopic particle in physics.
Despite these difficulties, the last half-century has witnessed an explosion of Biblical research, beginning with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and such important works as the excluded Gospel of Thomas and culminating in the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars that meets annually in Northern California to determine the authenticity of Jesus' sayings in the Gospels. Like John Dominic Crossan's speculative, left-leaning "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography" and E.P. Sanders' meticulous "The Historical Figure of Jesus," to name just two of a vast field, Wilson's work clears away the folklore and distortions surrounding Jesus' life.
Thus, Wilson points out that the nativity scene is a fairy tale -- Jesus was not born in Bethlehem at all, much less in a stable; there was no flight into Egypt; Jesus may have been married; he probably wasn't a carpenter, and so on. Like Sanders and Crossan, Wilson points out that the Gospels' attempt to blame the Jews for Jesus' crucifixion, and let Pilate off the hook, is transparent propaganda designed to curry favor with imperial authority.
But Wilson's aims are larger than merely to demythologize. He tries to recreate the first-century world in which Jesus lived -- a world in which "miracles" were part of ordinary experience, a world in which Jesus' contemporaries believed that the Messiah would come down from the sky as a great warrior king and drive the Romans out of Palestine, a world in which great and mythic historical parallels were taken for granted. He places Jesus firmly in the Jewish tradition of Galilean hasidim -- holy men who traveled about, healing the sick, casting out demons and communing with God.
The Jesus that emerges from his tautly written, closely reasoned book is a figure who reveals himself in brief images of haunting authority. Wilson grapples with the possibility that Jesus never existed at all -- and dismisses it, citing what he calls "the tiny detail which seems too strange to have been invented."
Next page: A difficult and dangerous man
