I was in an online, ummm, discussion, about whether or not
Jesus actually existed. Such discussions require a certain amount of googling.
In my travels I stumbled on an iTunes course titled, “The Historical Jesus”. It turned out to be pretty good. You
can hear the student’s voices asking questions. There was at least one Middle
Eastern woman and an older guy, possibly from Texas, plus a few more. I would
have loved to go out for a beer after that class.
The teacher has been around for a while. He talks of knowing
about the new archaeological and textual evidence back in the 1960’s. Much of
that went underground somewhere in the decades to follow. Some of it resurfaced
with “The Jesus Seminar”, but much of it is still ignored. I only listened to
the lectures, but here is the reading list, including the professors own work,
free online.
New American Bible: St. Joseph New Testament Study Edition [ISBN
0899423116]
Thomas Sheehan, The First Coming: How the Kingdom
of God Became Christianity
Paula Fredriksen From Jesus to Christ, 2nd
edition, Yale-Nota-Bene [9-780300 08457]
Bernard Scott, Re-imagine the World Polebridge
[0944344 86 0]
Robert J. Miller, The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate, Polebridge
[0944344 89 5]
Dominic Crossan Who Killed Jesus? HarperSanFrancisco
[0-06-06141803]
Stephen J. Patterson, Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus [0-8006-3674-0]
By the way, Thomas Sheehan, the professor, is Catholic born,
raised and still attending. He would often repeat that he doesn’t intend to
challenge anyone’s faith, or change anyone’s mind on that topic. He does note
that if you approach Jesus as he does, through his course, you may find
yourself challenged, but that is not his intention. He would occasionally let
his views on religion be known, they were more about people working together to
find community for themselves, within God’s creation, but not as a way to win
favor or avoid punishment. He would also argue that this was the message that
Jesus, who he calls Yeshua, his Aramaic name, actually taught.
If you have some different ideas about what Jesus/Yeshua
taught, you should take that up with Mr. Sheehan. He can explain where the
theology that you espouse originated. Much of it came well after the death of
Yeshua. He would argue that Yeshua did not see himself as the vessel of the
message, or as divine. But I don’t want to get into those details. They
interested me once, but no longer hold me for more than a few minutes.
What his course builds up to is the moments when the preaching
of Yeshua was scrambled and turned into something more like history. Today the
people who try to treat the Bible like history are called fundamentalists. At
the time, they were people who had a message of their own, a political message,
and were using the oral history of Yeshua to tell their story. They mixed the
parables with the liturgy and said that these things; the virgin birth, the
resurrection, actually did happen.
This does not trouble him. He understands that it was how it
was done back in the latter days of the Roman Empire. What troubles him is that
we have spent a few hundred years unraveling this, we have been lucky to
recover ancient papyrus at Nag Hamadi, we have people who dedicate their lives
to learning languages that are no longer spoken, and yet, we still have
preachers telling the stories as if they are St. Augustine.
I have a study Bible that clearly states that the last
chapter of the book of Mark was tacked on by later editors. They had to do it
to harmonize it with the other gospels. Mark leaves you with an empty tomb and
suggests you go back to your homes and live a holy life like Jesus. That is how
you will bring the Kingdom. It makes for terrible liturgy on Easter Sunday. By the
way, this is the New International Version, not some agnostic’s guidebook to
Christianity. These are facts only disputed by those who refuse to look at the
evidence.
For Sheehan, much of the evidence is “source” analysis; what
were the authors of the gospels looking at, what were they reading and hearing.
He also uses “literary” analysis; what type of writing were they doing and what
message did they intend to communicate. So he looks at the book of John that
has Thomas being an unbeliever. Now that we have recovered the gospel of
Thomas, one that didn’t make into the canon, we can see how different it is,
and guess that the author of John was giving a snub to the community of Thomas.
Sheehan relies on the “textual” analysis from the people who translate the
words, assemble the fragments and comment on the authenticity of the source
documents.
This analysis does not end with the writing of the original
documents. As he traces the formation of the early church, he shows how the
Easter story, as presented in John, is “read back into” Matthew and Luke, then
that reading is gathered together and read back into Mark. This proved
difficult and thus the adding of the extra chapter. All of that
is in turn read into the few comments about resurrection found in Paul’s
letters. When St. Jerome translates the Greek into Latin he takes subtler
meanings of words about waking up from sleep or being lifted up and uses the
Latin for “resurrection”. From then on, we have a fabricated historical account
of what happened in those three days after Yeshua died.
Sheehan steps out of his professor
role at this point, about the middle of the 9th class, and says,
this is, “…the stupidity, frankly, of it all.” And he notes, it has given “the village
atheist” all the ammunition they need to say it is stupid. He continues,
“And
the fact that it is performed by people with doctorates and people who have the
authority to preach from pulpits, doesn’t make it any less ignorant. If you
went to a doctor and she didn’t know about the latest treatments for cancer,
you’d probably find another doctor. And if she treated you with information
about cancer from 10 years ago, you would sue her for malpractice. But
preachers get a pass. Even though they are dealing with issues that concern the
existential commitment of people’s lives, ‘does my life have meaning, will I
end up in hell if I do this, that or the other’, even though they advise on
those based upon their alleged knowledge of scripture. They get away with it.”
And
the people in the pews let them.
If
you’re interested, the course is in iTunesU. It is from Stanford University,
2007, given by Thomas Sheehan. That should be enough to find it if you have iTunes.
Or try this link.
