Which Jesus: A Legend with a Multiple Personality Disorder?

By Rook Hawkins

Recently I wrote an article on the genre of the Gospels, and determined that the biographical genre of the Gospels is in serious doubt. The Gospels can not longer be considered a history of the life of Jesus. In this article I also brought up the position that modern scholars attempting to find the historical Jesus in the Gospel narratives are in fact fracturing the Gospels into specific sections and verses, while also using personal bias to determine which verse is ‘historical’ and which is not. Although I put forth the probable position that the Gospels are meant to be read as literary fiction, I purposefully left several questions unanswered; who wrote them and why were they written?

That is a question that many scholars have attempted to answer. I have partially already explained why these answers have come up lacking. But I feel I need to write more extensively on why these answers misrepresent the intent of the narratives themselves. Was Mark really recounting a historical series of events through a screen of his own theological values? As I have already explained in my earlier article, no, he probably was not. But if the Gospels are not biographies or histories, just who is Jesus?

There are two well known positions, and then there is my position which exists as the underdog. But I don’t want to focus on my position just yet. First, let me present to you the two other, more widely held, positions on Jesus. Jesus is looked at as (1) just as the Gospels describe. Generally used by apologists, this position is what I have come to refer to as the “Historical Christ hypothesis”. The other position, (2) while it is dramatically more scholarly, still has many flaws and is the often referred to as the “Historical Jesus” hypothesis.

The historical Christ hypothesis is exactly what the name implies. Jesus, according to the perpetuators of this perspective, walked on water, calmed storms, healed the sick, preformed a vast amount of additional miracles like multiplying the loaves and turning water into wine, only to blow all of these other miracles away by resurrecting from the dead. Advocates for this position generally are not critical scholars, and hold positions at theological institutions, far from the realm of what I would consider to be honest scholarly opinions. Why do I say that? Because those who support this conclusion believe a man (1) walked on water, (2) calmed storms, (3) healed the sick, (4) preformed a vast amount of additional miracles like (5) multiplying the loaves and (6) turning water into wine, only to blow all of these other miracles away by (7) resurrecting from the dead. But it isn’t just the belief in these miracles which makes me really distrust this position. It is because that, in order to accept that Jesus is exactly as the Gospels says he is, you have to cherry pick verses. You have to pretend that some of the Gospel narratives just do not exist. How is that?

Did Jesus come to abolish the Torah and the law (Mark 2:23-28, 7:15, Mark 2:18-20) or uphold the law (Matthew 5:17-21, 23:1-3, Luke 16:16-17)? How interesting is it that Mark, the earliest Gospel, has Jesus consistently changing the law, and in Matthew and Luke Jesus is said to have condemned such actions.[1] Or what about the resurrection which contains many discrepancies; who met those who came to the tomb of Jesus: A boy (Mark 16:5), an angel in white (Matt. 28:2-3), two men in “dazzling apparel” (Luke 24:4-5), nobody (John)? Was the slab of stone open when those who visited the tomb arrived (Luke 24:2, Mark 16:4, John 20:1), or was it opened by an angel after they arrived (Matt, 28:2)? Did the person(s) who greeted those visiting the tomb meet them inside the tomb, as in Mark and Luke, or did they come down from heaven with an earthquake like in Matthew? John seems unaware of this part of the narrative, or just didn’t care to include it. When it comes to the resurrection, you would think the disciples would want to get their facts straight on it, being as they were accused of stealing Jesus’ body (see Matthew 27:62-66, 28:11-15). But they do not seem to be reporting similar stories. And what is similar seems to be represented in a new way.

Of course, there are many examples that could be given to show how the Gospels are different. As John Dominic Crossan writes, “Have we not, for Jesus,…four biographies, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—individuals all directly or indirectly connected with him, and all writing within, say, seventy-five years of his death?...It is precisely that fourfold record that constitutes the core problem. If you read…them horizontally and comparatively, focusing on this or that unit and comparing it across two, three, or four versions, it is disagreement rather than agreement that strikes you most forcibly. And those divergences stem not from the random vagaries of memory and recall but from the coherent and consistent theologies of the individual texts. The gospels are, in other words, interpretations.”[2]

So, in order to accept Jesus as the Gospels portray them, one has to pick and choose which verses they want to agree with and which verses they want to disregard. So the historical Christ can not have existed, for the only way to suggest it is by a means which are highly dishonest. If one wants to defend the existence of the Christ, as portrayed in the Gospels, one needs to present at least three events that are not contested, whether in order or in presentation, by the other four Gospel accounts. They also need to explain why the four accounts conflict so much in detail. If per chance, the event they are trying to prove is attested accurately in all four accounts is a miraculous event, they should also be able to present a peer reviewed study verifying that this particular miraculous event does not defy the laws of physics somehow (which, I suppose, would cease to make it a miracle…).

While we wait for that (I imagine we’ll be waiting for a long time), let us now move onto the second hypothesis. More widely accepted in scholarship is the claim that, hidden beneath the individual theological perspectives of the anonymous authors, there can be known within the Gospels a historical person. This is a more recent perspective, dating back to about the beginning of the Enlightenment. It was these early thinkers, many of them European, who saw the discrepancies noted above, and sought to determine why. In a dramatic change from previous tactics, which generally involved more apologetic defenses of the authority that scripture held—that it should not be questioned—these critical scholars rejected the notion and tried to determine the factual setting of the Gospels within the history of the period. About this time, archaeology was becoming more prominent, and new manuscripts were being discovered. Egyptology was also playing a large part in the examination of the Bible in a critical fashion, especially in French and English circles, where both schools of scholars worked tirelessly with the intent of outdoing the other. German scholars, throughout much of history, have always managed to somehow take the lead in historical and biblical criticism.

In a very brief synopsis of three hundred years of scholarship, there have been three historical Jesus periods, called “quests”, in which scholars would compile books or theses and publish them on their best efforts to demythologize the Gospel accounts. It was Bultmann during the second of these quests who really made scholarship aware of the mythology of the accounts. Bultmann did so much to remove the mythology of the accounts, there was very little left for historians and critical scholars to look at. There is even a joke about the incident. It goes like this (From an article by R. Joseph Hoffmann):

The scene is Jerusalem in 1947. A team of Vatican archeologists discovers a burial site close to Golgotha, the “place of the skull,” where Jesus was supposedly crucified. Among fragments of ossuary and skeletal remains, they find a crudely engraved rectangular tablet, worn thin by the centuries but still bearing an easy-to-read inscription in Greek: “Here we have laid the body of our master, Jesus the Nazarene, the one we thought was the messiah.”

A junior member of the team races into the city, places a call to Rome, and manages to speak to the pope’s secretary. A moment later, the pope comes on the line: “Are you certain?” asks the pope. “Might it not be a hoax?”

“No hoax, your Holiness,” says the archeologist. “Soon the news will go all around the world—the Arab students digging with us will not be able to keep this quiet.”

The pope thinks for a moment, then, in a tone of resignation, tells his secretary to phone Professor Rudolph Bultmann in his office at the University of Marburg. “Are you sure, your Holiness? The Protestants have quite as much to lose from this discovery as we do.” But the secretary relents, and a moment later, Pius XII is speaking to Bultmann.

“So,” says the pope, “I’m afraid I must give you some bad news, professor. We have today discovered outside Jerusalem the site of what is almost certainly the burial place and the remains of our Lord and Savior, Jesus of Nazareth.”

The pause is long. Then Bultmann says, chuckling: “You mean he really existed?”

This joke sometimes is told with Paul Tillich in place of Bultmann, but the position is generally the same, and in the end so is the point: Historical criticism over the last three hundred years has destroyed the position that the Bible is a historical book. So what is the problem with this position?

The issue is that there are still many underlining presuppositions that haunt this sort of scholarship. What are those presuppositions? Generally they fall into several different categories, and vary depending on which historical Jesus scholar you read. For example, I happen to feel that John Dominic Crossan is a very open and honest individual. I find his scholarship to be well researched, and his books consist of pages of endnotes. However, Dominic will often make a brilliant connection but miss causation when making his points. What do I mean? Consider his work with Marcus Borg in The Last Week (2006).

In this book, as erudite and compelling as it is, there are listed eight chapters, representing each day from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. For each day, Borg and Crossan give a selection from the Gospel of Mark and then proceed to examine the text and determine it historically. They make it very obvious at the beginning of this book, although they admit it is not a book about the reconstruction historically of the last week, that they do not make a distinction between historical reality and religious truth. According to both, they write in an endnote that, “there is no intrinsic connection between ‘infallibility’ and ‘inerrancy’ and reading the Bible literally- and factually. There is no reason why God could not speak infallibly in the language of poetry and parable, song and symbol, metaphor and myth.”[3] See what I mean about presuppositions? The same is true for practically every historical Jesus proponent. But don’t let my words fall on faithful ears. Let’s look to their positions on what is historically credible and determine then if the presuppositions exist or not.

First, in the book mentioned above, why do Crossan and Borg feel they can “tell and explain, against the background of Jewish high-priestly collaboration with the Roman imperial control, the last week of Jesus’s life on earth as given in the Gospel”?[4] Is that not somewhat of an attempt to historicize the events? If it is not, what is the purpose of the book? The impression Crossan and Borg give is that they are presenting a commentary, or rather, a retelling of “a story everyone thinks they know too well and most do not seem to know at all.” (p. xiii) So they are not giving us their interpretation of history, but rather a commentary focusing on the setting and historical background of the story - but is that not what a history is? In the slightest sense, whether they intend to or not, that is exactly what they are attempting to do here. But instead of analyzing the narrative, what they have done is turn history into a devotional.[5]

Throughout the book, Mark is portrayed as giving us an interpretation of historical events. Both Crossan and Borg start off with Palm Sunday, where Jesus has a triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Based on no internal, biblical evidence at all, Crossan[6] writes that Jesus’ entry was paralleled by another entry into Jerusalem at the same time, on the other side of the city, by Pontius Pilate and a Roman procession. He then makes an even more ridiculous claim; that Jesus had purposefully planned this entry as a political statement! He writes, “As Mark tells the story in 11:1-11, it is a prearranged ‘counterprocession.’ Jesus planned it in advance.” (p. 3) But that is not evident in Mark at all. This is a fiction created by Crossan. It implies that Jesus really was, in some way, a revolutionary figure—which is exactly what Crossan and Borg believe the historical Jesus was. But such a conclusion can not be reached from the Gospel of Mark, written in the year 70 CE.

Such claims are made throughout the book. Another example is found in their understanding and interpretation of the crucifixion, where Jesus is flanked by two insurrectionists, one to his left and the other to his right. Crossan and Borg interpret this to signify that Mark is attempting to show that Jesus was no ordinary criminal. They remark that “their presence in the story reminds us that crucifixion was used specifically for people who systematically refused to accept Roman imperial authority.” (p. 147) And also that “Jesus is executed as a rebel against Rome between two other rebels against Rome.” (ibid.) But this interpretation is just so intellectually bankrupt. It is bankrupt because it fails to take into account the whole narrative.

Perhaps Crossan and Borg are unaware of the connection that Mark is intending to make with this story. Earlier in the narrative, the two brothers John and James ask Jesus if they may sit at his right and left. Jesus answers, “You do not know what you’re asking. Can you drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” John and James answer that they can. What is implicit here is that Jesus is asking them if they can sacrifice their lives as he will. He makes this clear when he says, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right and left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.” (Mark 10:37-40) Prepared for whom? The story surrounding this request by his disciples is about healing the meek. In preceding verses he tells his followers they must be like children, later he tells a rich young man he must give up all he has to follow Jesus, to become meek. Mark ends this parable of the rich man by saying, “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (Mark 10:31) The third (Mark likes to write things in thirds) instance after this is the healing of the blind man at Jericho. Mark shows us who is coming first during the crucifixion—this is the glory of Jesus, unbeknownst to James and John when they asked the question. The right and left of Jesus are not held by his disciples who all abandoned him, but rather they are inherited by the meek. They are the last of society, who are the first in the kingdom of God. Mark is also reinterpreting the scripture here, as the phrase “right and left” (dexiôn and aristerôn) refer to straying away from God’s straight path set forth by Moses.[7] Jesus was ‘counted among the lawless,’ and thus he saved them. Both the insurrectionists have strayed from Gods path, but still receive the salvation of mankind.

Another example is the treatment of the Bar’abbas story. They write, “As history remembered, the story of Barabbas is difficult.” (p. 144) It is only difficult when assuming this story has a foundation in history. They continue, “But if we set it in Mark’s historical context as he wrote around the year 70, it makes considerable sense. Both Barabbas and Jesus were revolutionaries.” Yes, the story makes abundantly more sense…or does it? The position that Crossan and Borg are pushing here is that since they “both defied imperial authority” (ibid.) the most probable interpretation is that Mark was getting through was that the way of violence was what the Jews of from the years 66-70 CE had chosen, instead of the way of Jesus which did not advocate violence. While this may be true, the means by which Crossan and Borg are interpreting the text again seems to come up intellectually and theologically short. To be accurate, Crossan’s position on the Bar’abbas trope is compelling. He and I both agree that the story is a fiction, created by Mark.[8] It is obvious that the portrayal of Pilate here is completely fabricated, much like Alexander the Great is portrayed in the fictional narrative of his visit to Jerusalem, as given by Josephus in Antiquities 11.317-345. There is also the fictitious custom where there was this “open amnesty, the release of any requested prisoner at the time of the Passover festival, is against any administrative wisdom.”[9] As any good historian would do, Crossan opens up the question, “if the Barabbas incident did not actually happen, why did Mark create such a story…what…was its purpose?” (p. 142)

But, unlike his exemplary look into the passion accounts, or his examination of the Triumphal Entrance, it seems Crossan put his historian clothes away for this part of the narrative. Crossan’s desire to make Jesus the passive revolutionary shines through during this part of his interpretation. He makes the right conclusion, that Mark is offering his audience a choice. The problem is the choice Crossan is claiming that is being offered to Mark’s readers is between the banditry of Bar’abbas and his ilk and that of a peaceful savior, which Crossan is placing during the Jewish War. The problem is Crossan does not take in the location of where Mark was composed; somewhere in the Diaspora, by an unknown Hellenized Jew. He also does not take into account the literary trope being used by Mark. What trope exactly? Ironically, it is the same trope Crossan accurately and astutely applies to the Passion narratives in Mark: the trope of the Scapegoat found in Leviticus 16.

Crossan makes a very good case for the trope of atonement, found in Leviticus 16, to be a pivotal part of Mark’s allegorical creation of the passion narratives. The problem that arises is his use of the Mishnah, which is itself a collection of redacted stories from the Torah which were passed down orally until the first – second centuries Common Era. He attempts to make the case for the comparison of the Mishnah scapegoat that is released into the wilderness as Jesus, but there are a few fatal flaws in this interpretation. (1) There is not just one goat, there are two. (2) Attempting to determine oral tradition from a written series of manuscripts that have been redacted and collected over a period of a hundred years is futile. First, it is unknowable whether the redacted article you are reading is representative of the oral tradition prior to the time it was written down. In other words, we only have evidence of that tradition when it was composed, at that moment in time. We do not have any evidence that this particular tradition existed any earlier. Nor do we have any particular knowledge as to what exactly was redacted and changed by the composer of the manuscript. At the time of the composition of Mark, there was no such thing as an Old Testament. (3) The canonization of the scriptures known today as the Hebrew Bible did not happen until c. 200 CE. And at this time, throughout the Diaspora, scripture was being freely interpreted and allegorized by Hellenized Jews, especially those in mystery cults. The Mishnah is an example of scripture reinterpretation, a product of this very tradition in Jewish composition, in much of the same manner as the Gospel narrative of Mark. In any case, assuming that Mark would have had an understanding of the Scapegoat trope that exists in the Mishnah that we have today is something that isn’t guaranteed. Crossan is presupposing its authority and Mark’s knowledge of these oral traditions in the Diaspora, leagues away from Jerusalem.

These problems severely hurt Crossan’s use of these traditions to supplement the passion narratives, although there probably is a very strong case to be made for Crossan’s use of the Epistle of Barnabas. Instead, Leviticus 16 needs to be reexamined as a foundation for the creation of the Bar’abbas story.

“Then he shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting. And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. And Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord and use it as a sin offering, but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel.” (Leviticus 16:7-10)

In the Bar’abbas story, the tent of meeting has been replaced with the Palace, and it is Pilate who presents the two goats—presumably before the Lord—and to those who need to make atonement for their sins; the Jewish people. The two goats have been replaced by two characters: Jesus, Son of Man, and Jesus, Son of the Father.[10] The Jews cast lots, and it is Bar’abbas who is released into the wilderness. It is Jesus Christ who will be given up as a sin offering for the atonement. But what type of atonement? The casting of lots was between the murderer Jesus Bar’abbas, and the peaceful savior Jesus Christ. It was only through Jesus, though, that salvation could be made. Crossan is partially correct is suggesting that the Jews had chosen violence. But in another regard, the Jews had also chosen salvation. Just as Judas was intended to turn Jesus over for the good of Israel, Jesus had to be sacrificed for the atonement of sin.

How could Crossan miss this? Why does this happen? The truth is simple and unavoidable. Crossan in this case, but historical Jesus questers in general, are retelling the story through their own personal lenses. This unfortunate end reflects the opinion of Bornkamm on the failures of the first quest.[11] He writes, “Why have all attempts [to find the historical Jesus] failed? Perhaps only because it became alarmingly and terrifyingly evident how inevitably each author brought the spirit of his own age into his presentation of the figure of Jesus.” Crossan will make Jesus into his own personal Tenzin Gyatso (his Holiness the Dalai Lama), where Crossan’s life growing up in Ireland under the British Empire has seemingly affected his perspective of Jesus as a revolutionary Jew under the rule of the Roman Empire. Crossan is aware of this himself, and he spends time questioning this perspective in his autobiography.[12]

Perhaps this is why there are so many different perspectives on the historical Jesus, and why it is near impossible to get any agreement between them. Consider the list of scholars who write on the historical Jesus; E. P. Sanders, Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Ben Witherington, Paula Fredriksen, Geza Vermes, Burton Mack, Hyam Maccoby, Morton Smith, Bruce Chilton, John Meier, N. T. Wright, S.G.F. Brandon, G.W. Buchanan, John M. Allegro and many others; there are practically just as many claims from the community as to who Jesus was as there are scholars writing on him. Jesus, according to the questers, was one of the following: An itinerate preacher,[13] a cynical sage,[14] the Essene’s righteous rabbi,[15] a Galilean holy man,[16] a revolutionary leader,[17] an apocalyptic preacher,[18] a proto-liberation theologian,[19] a trance-inducing mental healer,[20] an eschatological prophet,[21] an occultic magician,[22] a Pharisee,[23] a rabbi who seeks religious-reformation,[24] a Galilean charismatic,[25] a Hillelite,[26] an Essene,[27] a teacher of wisdom,[28] a miracle-working-exorcist prophet[29] and yes the list goes on. Somewhere in this mess, some really believe to find the historical Jesus. Paul Rhodes Eddy sums up the conflicting dramatis personae by saying that the new quest has been “anything but uniform.”[30]

Clearly there is a problem with specific presuppositions and methods currently underlining the Jesus quests. One of the harshest criticisms concerning methods that have been presented against the historical Jesus quest is its failure to take into account the whole narrative. Instead the quest has done nothing but fraction the Gospel into what is historical and what isn’t. Of course, nobody can accurately determine what is or isn’t historical – it’s all interpretation and at best guesswork. So the Gospels are always cut down and fractionalized. Crossan is just as much a victim of this problem as he is a culprit, as it has been occurring since Bultmann’s school over half a century ago. Because so many scholars have severed the narratives, the context overall is hardly ever considered except by the evangelicals which, ironically, have it completely wrong.

The second criticism is the same criticism I have presented against the historical Christ hypothesis. To track down the historical Jesus in the Gospels is to pick and choose which selection of text you’re going to ignore. The Jesus of Mark is not internally sound because Mark is reinterpreting scripture to create his narrative. He is pulling text from all over scripture and he is also adding in his own theology—probably Pauline—while writing mimetically. In order to compromise on a specific personality of Jesus, one has to vigorously ignore large sections of narrative, and raise other selections of narrative to a higher level of importance. Crossan’s apocalyptic Jesus dissolves when Burton L. Mack’s cynical Jesus is exposed. In the same manner, both dissolve when it becomes clear that Mark is reinterpreting apocalyptic statements made by David and the cynic sayings are not limited to cynics at all. As Thomas L. Thompson puts it:

“The sayings most favored by Crossan and Mack have a two-thousand-year history before the all too hypothetical oral traditions of Q and the tendentiously dated Gospel of Thomas. They go back at least to the Egyptian Sixth Dynasty in the third millennium BCE. There were many sages in the ancient world who shared the voice of the Jesus we find in the Gospels and, while there may have been a cynic philosopher among them, the broad sweep of the tradition was hardly defined by that particular school. Whether the voice belongs to the figures of an Egyptian philosopher like Amenemopet, a king of Israel like Solomon or the great prophet Moses, the specific figure who speaks such sayings within this remarkable coherent tradition is determined by the function of a particular text. Ancient literature swarms with the figures of wisdom: sages, prophets, priests and kings, each with their collected sayings reiterating one another.”[31]

What hasn’t been considered thus far is the reason why so many interpretations exist for Jesus, and who he was. Certainly, each Gospel is reflective of the author’s theology. But the question that Crossan asked was never answered. Why did the author of Mark create such a story and for what purpose? I have explained some of the reasoning in my short article on Genre which I linked to at the beginning of this paper. The conclusion is just as simple as it is to find so many parallels between the Gospel narratives and the Old Testament. That conclusion is that it was Mark’s purposeful intent to leave the Gospel to interpretation. His narrative was intended to be read as fiction. Jesus, then, is exactly what Mark wanted him to be. There was never any historical foundation to this character – the foundation of Jesus is scripture. Jesus is Elijah, Moses, David, Joshua and Asa—and those characters weren’t historical either. I would even go so far as agree with Crossan that perhaps even the Second Sophistic cynics had a large influence on the sayings attributed to Jesus. Mark also mimetically wrote to include tropes from Homer, and he also includes Pauline theology in his narrative. But that does not make Jesus historical, and it can no longer be taken for granted that he is. Taking things for granted is what evangelicals do—not critical historians.

When it comes down to the evidence, all of these traits are part of Hellenistic Jewish fiction writing. In conclusion, some additional information should be given on the establishment of the genre of Jewish fiction in its socio-cultural context. Several note-worthy scholars have written exhaustive works, and should be considered seriously for review. These authors include Thomas L. Thompson,[32] Philip R. Davies,[33] and most importantly Erich Gruen.[34] Additionally important although not so much on the concept of Jewish fiction writing as much as she is unquestioningly vital to the continued discussion of literary criticism in biblical scholarship, this article would not be complete without mentioning the incredible work on the Gospel of Mark, Sowing the Gospel (1996) by Mary Ann Tolbert. This leaves one final perspective then: Jesus was either the product of this Jewish fiction writing, or it must be concluded that Jesus had a serious case of Multiple Personality Disorder.

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[1] It should be noted that Jesus also changes the scripture in Matthew, Luke and John as well, but often does so—even in Mark—using scripture.

[2] J.D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1995), p. x. A more definitive look at why the Gospels are so different is given in my article on the Gospels, linked above.

[3] J.D. Crossan and Marcus Borg, The Last Week (2006), p. 218

[4] ibid. p. xiii

[5] It is evident that this was the intent when Crossan and Borg write, “We have been, and are, passionate about the meaning of Jesus (and the Bible as a whole) for Christian life today.”

[6] I say Crossan, because Crossan has written several books on the conflict between Roman and Christian kingdoms – or as Crossan puts it, “the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar.” (p. 4-5)

[7] This phrase and its meaning can be found in Joshua 1:7 and 23:6.

[8] Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 140

[9] ibid.

[10] In some early manuscripts, Bar’abbas is known as Jesus Bar’abbas. Bar’abbas means Son of the Father.

[11] Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth (1960), p. 13. This apt perspective was first recognized by Schweitzer when he writes, “The mistake was to suppose that Jesus could come to mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves. That is not possible.” (p. 397) and “There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus who was too small, because we had forced Him into the conformity with our human standards and human psychology.” (p. 398) The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1911) In more recent times, Ben Witherington III exposes this error in his book The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (1997), where he aptly reiterates this position; “…attempts to say what we could really know about the historical Jesus actually told us more about their authors than about the person they sought to describe. The authors seem to have looked into the well of history searching for Jesus and seen their own reflection.” (p. 9)

[12] J.D. Crossan, A Long Way from Tipperary, p. xviii

[13] J.D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus (1992)

[14] J.D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus (1992); Burton Mack, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic and Legacy (2003), The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (1993), and A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (1988); F.G. Downing, Cynics and Christian Origins (1992); Paul Rhodes Eddy, Jesus as Diogenes? Reflections on the Cynic Jesus Thesis; Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 115, No. 3. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 449-469.

[15] John M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1992)

[16] Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (1973), The Religion of Jesus the Jew (1993); B. Thiering, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story (1992).

[17] S.G.F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (1967); G.W. Buchanan, Jesus: The King and His Kingdom (1984)

[18] Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code (2004); Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (1988)

[19] James M. Robinson, The Jesus of Q as Liberation Theologian, paper presented at the Jesus

Seminar, (October 25-27,1991).

[20] S. Davies, On the Inductive Discourse of Jesus: The Psychotherapeutic Foundation of Christianity, paper presented at the Jesus Seminar, (October 22-25, 1992) and Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (1995)

[21] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (1985); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2: Mentor, Message and Miracles (1994).

[22] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (1978)

[23] Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (2003); Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee (2003)

[24] Richard Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (1987); Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (2006); Bruce Chilton, A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible: Jesus' Use of the Interpreted Scripture of His Time (1984)

[25] Geza Vermes, Jesus in the World of Judaism (1984)

[26] Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (2003)

[27] Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (2003); John M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1992)

[28] Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (1995)

[29] Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament. Vol. 2: History and Literature of Early Christianity (1982)

[30] Paul Rhodes Eddy, Jesus as Diogenes? Reflections on the Cynic Jesus Thesis; Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 115, No. 3. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 449

[31] Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth (2005), p. 107

[32] The Messiah Myth (2005); The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (2000); The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (Rev. 2002)

[33] In Search of "Ancient Israel" (1995); Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (1998); First Person: Essays in Biblical Autobiography (2002)

[34] Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans (2004); Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (2002); Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History and Historiography (1997)