JESUS DECONSTRUCTING

Introduction

JESUS CHRIST
AS THE EFFECT OF
CHRISTIANITY,
NOT THE CAUSE

he subject of this book is a rather abstract one. Though it deals with the very heart of the religion of a billion people, few of them even know there is an issue to discuss. For this book treats of the historical Jesus and whether we can know anything about him, whether even there is anyone to know about! Those billion Christians affirm the existence of Jesus Christ, the wonder-working man-god who died for sins and rose from the dead for them and their salvation. How do they claim to know these cherished facts? They were taught these things at their mothers' knees, or in catechism by clergymen. They would not think to question what they have thus learned, for it would seem to them the rankest disloyalty, as if one should think twice about one's patriotism. Many, however, would go beyond such pat certainty. "Bornagain" Christians, that is, evangelical pietists, filling the pews of most Protestant denominations and increasingly those of the Roman Catholic Church as well, do not rest content with believing inherited dogma. They see no advantage in taking one's religious convictions for granted this way. A faith analogous to one's ethnic background (to an extent that the two easily become synonymous) may become just as taken for granted. No, evangelical pietists insist, "God has no grandsons." One cannot inherit genuine faith but must personally opt for it. And this is what Billy Graham and his evangelistic brethren are trying to persuade people to do. Thus far, one can only applaud an apparent appeal for people to think for themselves.

But upon what ground is the certainty of such chosen faith, born-again faith, based? Apologists, defenders of the faith (with whose arguments I dealt at some length in a previous book, Beyond Born Again)' draw upon a great arsenal of arguments for the existence of God, the resurrection of Christ, and other major Christian tenets, but at bottom such polemics give the impression of being after-the-fact rationalizations of a position held ultimately on other, purely emotional and subjective, grounds. Faith, we are told, is "selfauthenticating." The born-again pietist tells us that for him it is not a question of debating a theoretical proposition, but rather of celebrating a "personal relationship with Christ." It would be possible to question its reality, but entirely perverse-like entertaining the theoretical possibility that one's loving spouse is really a CIA agent assigned to spy on one, as in the movie Total Recall. What are the chances?

I believe there is less here than meets the eye. Again, in Beyond Born Again, I explored the meaning and possible referents of the phrase "having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." Here let me just pause for a moment on the issue of self-authentication or self-evidence. John Calvin claimed that the believer in Christ enjoys such subjective reassurance; he called it "the witness of the Spirit," a term derived from 1 John 5:10 ("The one who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself"). As the old chorus puts it, "You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!" Since Christians can frequently be heard reminding one another to quiet their doubts by falling back on "the witness of the Spirit" within them, it is apparent that this witness cannot be quite as self-authenticating as it sounds! Whence arise doubts in the first place?

Dubious claims of the self-evidence of this or that point are hardly unique to religious rhetoric. Rene Descartes's whole epistemology depended upon the supposed reliability of what seemed "clear and distinct" to the rational mind. As Richard Rorty summed up the position, traditional philosophy has imagined the human mind as "the mirror of nature."' The external world and objective truth are just there, hanging in metaphysical space, as it were, and the mind is a passive receptor for this truth. The truth is supposedly self-evident. But if this is so, why do equally acute truth seekers not arrive at the same conclusions? The pre-Socratic philosophers theorized about the origin and composition of the world, but they could not agree in the absence of better data, so Socrates turned from natural philosophy, such as Thales and Anaximander had practiced, to the introspective study of human nature instead. And great was his confidence (to hear Plato tell it) that clear thinking could penetrate the secrets of human nature, morals, epistemology, and a great many other things. Yet Socrates' opinions, and Plato's after him, were hardly beyond doubt. The Skeptics were a philosophical school that anticipated modern Agnosticism in every way. They banished all reliance on what seems self-evident with one mighty blow. They merely pointed out the fact that all of us have at one time or another been absolutely certain of something-which later proved erroneous. You were wrong then; how can you be so sure you're not wrong now? Everyone knows the feeling of having a bubble popped, and thinking, "Oh yes! I never thought of that!" So much for self-evidence.

But Descartes believed what was self-evident, what was clear and distinct to the mind, had to be true. So did his fellow Rationalists Leibniz and Spinoza. And they only repeated the sad spectacle of the pre-Socratics, since their supposedly infallible cogitations did not agree. David Hume began chipping away at the certainties of the Rationalists, pointing out that while we consider many things so self-evidently true that it would be insane to doubt them, they are in fact quite unprovable. Hume doubted we could prove there is an observing self, a feeling and sensing ego, a sequence of cause and effect, and so on. All these apparent realities which we think we experience are actually mere associations of ideas whose particular linkages we infer without proof. Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, among others, have taken up the weapons of unblinking analysis against such naive confidence in the supposedly self-evident. Derrida aims his guns at what he calls the "Presence Metaphysics" of traditional philosophical and theological thinking. We can always find the hidden tracks on the virgin snowfield if we look hard enough. We can always find the seams in the seamless garment if our lens is sharp enough. What seems basic, tacit truth, upon closer inspection, bears the telltale marks of composition. The sublimely simple is yet the product of a hidden process of relation. Derrida points to Freudian analysis to demonstrate that even "clear and distinct" knowledge of the self is anything but. The conscious self is but a carefully edited "authorized version" provided for our own "public consumption." Perception is twisted, at least refracted, in a thousand ways. Even the bare perception of "the present moment" is not a spontaneous reception of naked phenomena, but is rather a compounding of memory's echo and imagination's anticipation. The overlap of the two results in a scripted, preinter- preted "now" moment that only seems to have emerged from the time stream perfect and full-blown like Aphrodite rising from the waves.;

Just as presence may be deconstructed, so may the "experience" of Christ. Jesus Christ functions, for instance, in an unnoticed and equivocal way, as shorthand for a vast system of beliefs and institutions on whose behalf he is invoked. Put simply, this means that when an evangelist or an apologist invites you to have faith "in Christ," he is in fact smuggling in a great number of other issues. For example, Chalcedonian Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity, the Protestant idea of faith and grace, a particular nineteenthcentury theory of biblical inspiration and literalism, habits of church attendance, and so on, are all distinct and open questions, or should be. And yet no evangelist ever invites people to accept Christ by faith and then to start examining all these other associated issues for themselves. Not one! The Trinity, biblical inerrantism, for some even anti-Darwinism, are nonnegotiable. They say you cannot be genuinely "saved" if you do not toe the party line on these points. Thus for them, to "accept Christ" means to accept Trinitarianism, biblicism, inerrantism, creationism, and so on. All this, in turn, means that "Christ" has become a shorthand designation for this whole raft of doctrines and opinions, all of which one is to accept "by faith," on someone else's say-so. Christ has become an umbrella for an unquestioning acceptance of what some preacher or institution tells you to believe. Once the believer begins to "deconstruct" what "Jesus Christ" has come to denote in his particular religious community, he may discover that his primary religious allegiance has been utilized to manipulate him into transferring the same diehard loyalty to other secondary or tertiary issues, political and cultural.

But I have already anticipated that I intend to deconstruct "Jesus Christ" on a deeper level, one underlying believers' imaginary relationships with their Savior, himself largely an amalgam of Sunday School illustrations and Holman Hunt paintings, stretched rigid on the rack of christological dogma. What I do not propose to do is what an increasing ocean of books endeavor, namely reconstructing a historical Jesus from what scanty evidence remains to us. In what follows I hope to indicate why that is practically impossible and ill-advised.

I believe that every "Life of Jesus" book is that scholar's own Gospel of Jesus, his or her own Christology. Albert Schweitzer made it clear enough that the first quest of the historical Jesus (in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) was a piece of theology from start to finish, even though its practitioners were sincerely convinced of the purely historical character of their efforts. Liberal Protestant scholars wanted to deprive Orthodoxy of its Christ, which served as the warrant (much like the medieval forgery the Donation of Constantine, which pretended to guarantee church ownership of the Papal States in perpetuity) for all they did and said. If Jesus could, via the expedient of historical research, be made to mirror Enlightenment Modernist preferences, then Jesus would have switched sides. He would have been the flag, and liberals would have captured it from traditionalists and won the game. Liberals could then use Jesus as their secret weapon, their trump card, their ventriloquist's dummy, just like traditionalists always had. Thus it should have been no surprise, Schweitzer pointed out, that the "historical Jesus" emerged from every one of these historical plastic surgeries looking like the surgeon who operated on him.' Indeed the whole enterprise of stripping away the theo-mythological encrustations built up around Jesus is a theological shell game from the word go. It is a case of the "dangerous supplement" described by Jacques Derrida.' It is like the "noble savage" of the Enlightenment philosophes and, later, Claude Levi-Strauss. They held up the Tarzan-like innocence of the noble savage, uncorrupted by the evils of human society, as a rebuke to their own culture. But of course the noble savage, the historical Jesus, Marx's primordial Golden Age of primitive communism, Reagan's America, and the feminist primitive matriarchy are all alike: They are not genuine discoveries of the past, as they claim to be (something possible only with the aid of H. G. Wells's time machine), but rather clever polemical constructions. Pretending to be unvarnished nature, or brute fact, they are really sophisticated creations of culture like the culture creations they are employed to debunk. They seem to lend an ancient pedigree to the views of those who create them. What at first seems to be a critique of (corrupt) culture from the standpoint of nature turns out instead to be a creation of counterculture from within the very culture being critiqued. The traditional creedal Christologies of Nicea and Chalcedon are theoretical concepts of Jesus Christ based on an interpretive selection of New Testament texts. Certain texts are chosen as central, given a particular interpretation, and used as criteria for excluding others from serious consideration, or to explain away other texts inconvenient for one's christological theory. How different a procedure is that followed by historical Jesus researchers? They, too, are making a selection of core texts, based on consistency, distinctiveness, multiple-attestation, and so on. From this database emerges a consistent, distinctive picture of Jesus, who is again invoked to debunk and judge the dogmas and policies of traditional Christianity. It was only once the Vatican moved to quash liberation theology that liberal Catholic John Dominic Crossan dropped his fascinating Post-Structuralist readings of the gospels6 and took up the historical Jesus enterprise, fashioning a Jesus who would furnish a new pedigree for liberation theology by seeming to have presciently espoused it nineteen centuries ago.

So today's critical scholars engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus are themselves, at least implicitly, theologians advocating new religiously relevant Christologies, just like Arius, Athanasius, Eutyches, Nestorius, and the rest did in the old days. But to go back to where I began, they are no less similar to the naive pietists with their "personal relationship" to Jesus. Pietists like to speak of "accepting Jesus Christ as one's personal savior." The scholarly efforts to discover the authentic Jesus (as valuable and illuminating as many of them are) eerily recall this pietistic slogan. For has not every one of them manufactured a "personal savior," that is, one custom fitted to each scholar's own predilections and priorities? I do not mean to charge anyone with simple ventriloquism, but it is remarkable how few scholars come out the way Albert Schweitzer did: with a Jesus that embarrassed him.

Let me mitigate my judgment yet again. As a brief survey will suggest, many of the current historical Jesus options are quite plausible and make good sense of a number of gospel texts. None violates historical method. All are the product of serious and deep scholarship. But what these learned labors have yielded may be called an embarrassment of riches. There are just too many that make too much sense, and that fact, it seems to me, vitiates the compelling force of any one of them.

Nothing makes sense of all those gospel sayings about abandoning family and possessions, like the model of Jesus as a Cynic-like sage. Burton L. Mack, John Dominic Crossan, Gerald Downing, and others strongly defend this view. Or Jesus may have been a liberal Pharisee, somewhat along the lines of his predecessor Hillel, as Harvey Falk' argues, since virtually every one of the halachic judgments made by Jesus is paralleled in contemporary Pharisaic and later rabbinic thought. (Despite a somewhat uncritical treatment of the evidence both from the gospels and the rabbis, I think Falk's basic contention has much to be said for it.) On somewhat the same theme, Geza Vermes, an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls and New Testament-era Judaism, makes Jesus a freewheeling and only loosely orthodox charismatic hasid typical in many ways of other popular Galilean holy men and miracle workers, such as Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben-Dosa. Like them, Jesus was said by pious legend to have called God Abba (Father), to have been blessed by an audible voice from heaven, to have bargained with demons who steered clear of him, and to have roused the ire of the religious establishment.' Again, Jesus might have been a magician (or exorcist/faith healer, if you prefer), as Morton Smith held.' The gospel depictions of Jesus healing the blind, deaf, and mute with spittle and mud fit right in with contemporary magical healing methods (as fulsomely attested in numerous surviving Hellenistic magic handbooks from the period10), as do his exorcistic techniques, once you correct for christological exaggeration. As in Jesus' baptism story, magicians embarked on their career after the visionary descent of a familiar spirit in the form of a bird, filled with the assurance that they had become sons of God.

Or the historical Jesus might have been a priestly zealot, fomenting (violent or nonviolent) revolution against the Roman occupation, assuring the poor that their vindication was near at hand, and-warning the temple fat cats, lapdogs of Pilate, that their days were numbered. How else can we explain that it was the Roman authorities who killed Jesus, by crucifixion? If the Jewish Sanhedrin simply needed Pilate's permission to execute Jesus, why didn't they get it and stone him as a blasphemer? Maybe the Romans had their own reasons for putting this King of the Jews to death. In one form or another, the case for a revolutionist Jesus has been ably argued, with many variations on the theme, by Robert Eisler, S. G. F. Brandon, Hugh J. Schonfield, Hyam Maccoby, A. J. Mattill Jr., Robert Eisenman, Juan Luis Segundo, and John Gager." And there is much to be said for it. A somewhat similar position is that of John Dominic Crossan, Richard Horsley, and Elisabeth Scht ssler Fiorenza, who regard Jesus as a kind of first-century E. F. Schumacher or Mohandas K. Gandhi, a radical community organizer with surprisingly prescient proto-feminist views."

Perhaps Jesus was an eschatological prophet, foretelling the imminent end of the age and urging repentance upon his people, like the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, seeking to spark a national movement of repentance in order to hasten the coming of the Kingdom of God. Ben F. Meyer sees it this way, as does (with some modifications) E. P. Sanders.13 Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer, and Rudolf Bultmann pictured Jesus on a similar crusade, but appealing to individuals to repent and save themselves from a crooked generation, rather than marshaling the people as a collectivity." Joachim Jeremias, Norman Perrin, Gunther Bornkamm, and others added to this picture an element of rejoicing that the kingdom, as Jesus thought, had already begun to be realized among himself and his followers."

And there are more. More "historical Jesuses." None, as unfamiliar as they may sound to the reader not acquainted with critical Jesus scholarship, is particularly far-fetched. All tend to center on particular constellations of gospel elements interpreted in certain ways, leaving other data to the side as spurious (of course, this is what all critical historians, writing about any subject, do). All appeal to solid historical analogies for the Jesuses they posit. None is impossibly anachronistic. What one Jesus reconstruction leaves aside, the next takes up and makes its cornerstone. Jesus simply wears too many hats in the gospels-exorcist, healer, king, prophet, sage, rabbi, demigod, and so on. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure. Today's historical Jesus theories agree in recognizing that fact, but they part company on the question of which might be the original core, and which the secondary accretions.

Speaking of historical analogies, history does yield other, similarly complex figures, but they, too, seem to be overlays. For instance, Apollonius of Tyana appears in Philostratus' third-century hagiography as a wandering neoPythagorean sage. But he is quick with a miracle, a healing, an exorcism. Was he, then, like the gospel Jesus, both a sage and a miracle-worker? Probably not, for it appears that Philostratus has sought to rehabilitate Apollonius, traditionally remembered as a wizard, into the more sophisticated image of a philosopher. Similarly, do we not have in the messianic revolutionist Theudas (43 c.E.) a dual figure? Josephus calls him "a magician," implying he combined the roles of wonder-worker and revolutionary king-like Jesus? But apparently not: Theudas did not have a career as a healer; his "magic" is simply a climactic wonder he promised as the sign of God's imminent deliverance. God would part the Jordan as he had for Joshua of old. Josephus, a Jewish collaborator with Rome, naturally sneered at this extravagant promise as mere magic, always a disparaging way to refer to the other fellow's supernaturalism. So even in other cases where we seem at first to encounter ancient Jesus-like complex figures, they, too, have undergone legendary or redactional modification, combination with other stereotypes originally alien to them.

The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time. Attempts, such as Crossan's, to combine several of these portraits only demonstrate how arbitrary the procedure is. Most even of critical scholars studying Jesus are at least liberal Christians, and one suspects they cannot bring themselves to stop at agnosticism about the historical Jesus. "He might have been this, he might have been that. We don't know for sure." No, one suspects that even the radicals of the Jesus Seminar still need a single Jesus to function as a religious totem: "One Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Eph. 4:5). Thus they will choose one possible Jesus and promote him as the ideal for the church to follow. Or they will, like Crossan, preserve as many of the newly reconstructed Jesus slices as they can by gluing them into a new pie. But this will not work. And once one accepts that sad conclusion, the implications are striking indeed.

Later on, I will discuss the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. They all had in common some form of Docetism, a superspiritual, nakedly mythic view whereby Jesus Christ was a pure spirit, merely sporting the illusion of a fleshly body. This he needed in order to communicate with flesh-bound humans, but actual incarnation was out of the question, since many early Christians viewed the body as far too sinful for Jesus to have had one. So he only seemed ((SoKE o) to. In this, he was like the Olympian gods who might appear in any of a thousand forms. Zeus appeared as a bull, a shower of gold coins, a swan, an old man, and so on. Athena might appear as a crone or a warrior maid. This meant that the gods were beyond gross bodies of flesh. Even so, in the Acts of John, Jesus appears in different guises to the brothers James and John in the very same moment. One sees him as a beardless youth, while the other beholds a graybeard sage. Then they rub their eyes and see two more different images! To John, Jesus appears differently at different moments. Scholars call this motif "the polymorphousness of the savior." Again, it is the hallmark of Docetism: to have many forms is to have no true form at all.

Now, obviously no modern scholar believes Jesus was a bodiless ghost. And yet the theological mytheme of docetic polymorphousness is surprisingly relevant to the contemporary discussion of the historical Jesus. Call it a parable. Because in the same way that a Jesus who could take so many forms so readily had no real form to begin with, we may say that a "historical Jesus" capable of being portrayed with nearly equal plausibility as a magician, a revolutionary, a Cynic sage, an apocalyptic prophet, and so on, has no true and certain form at all! The various scholarly reconstructions of Jesus cancel each other out. Each sounds good until you hear the next one. The inevitable conclusion is that even if there was a historical Jesus who actually walked the earth two thousand years ago, there is no historical Jesus any more! The original is irrecoverable, unless someone invents a time machine and goes back to meet Jesus as in Michael Moorcock's novel Behold the Man.'s

Generations of Rationalists and freethinkers have held that Jesus Christ corresponds to no historical character: There never was a Jesus of Nazareth. We might call this categorical denial "Jesus atheism." What I am describing is something different, a "Jesus agnosticism." There may have been a Jesus on earth in the past, but the state of the evidence is so ambiguous that we can never be sure what this figure was like or, indeed, whether there was such a person. Among contemporary scholars, Burton L. Mack seems to me to come closest to this assessment in that he seems to conclude that we cannot penetrate behind the various Jesus figures shaped by the disparate Christian sects and cults to meet their own religious needs. In broad outline, Deconstructing Jesus will endeavor to follow the bold lead Mack has provided, while pushing his insights, and those of other historical Jesus scholars, further in Mack's direction. Specifically, in chapter 1, I will deal with the pioneering work of F. C. Baur, Walter Bauer, Helmut Koester, and James M. Robinson. In chapter 2, I subject Burton Mack's map of the early "Jesus movements" to positive but critical scrutiny and follow up in chapter 3 with a discussion of his taxonomy of the "Christ cults." Chapter 4 takes Jacob Neusner's important critical work on the attribution of sayings in the Mishnah and applies it to the historical Jesus question, while chapter 5 pursues the question of oral traditions underlying the gospels into a reconsideration of the much-debated Q Document, bringing to bear some neglected comparative source material. Chapter 6 takes up the revolutionary "scapegoating" theories of Rene Girard, applying them to Christian origins in a way Girard himself, surprisingly, shrinks from doing. Next, in chapter 7, I turn to the relevance of the ancient novels for understanding the crucifixion accounts of the gospels, and in so doing I attempt to clarify the recent suggestions of John Dominic Crossan, who, again, seems to tread only so far down a dangerous path he himself has marked out. The last chapter confronts head-on a question that will have popped up again and again in the chapters leading up to it, that of whether Jesus was a real historical figure or rather perhaps a myth historicized. There I will be taking up insights from Jerome H. Neyrey about the christological evolution implied in the Gospel of John. In the process, I think we will see how everything old is new again. We will find that some of the most radical conclusions of the skeptics of past generations, long ignored by mainstream scholarship, receive new and surprising support from today's scholarship. I contend that radical New Testament scholarship, while disdaining to share the journey with Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, and others, has at last come amazingly close to meeting them, like a mysterious stranger on the road to Emmaus, at the same destination.

NOTES

1. Robert M. Price, Beyond Born Again: Toward Evangelical Maturity (Eugene: Hypatia Press, 1993), especially chapters 5-7.

2. Richard Rorty, "Mind as the Grasp of Universals," in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 38-44.

3. Jacques Derrida, "Qual Quelle: Valery's Sources," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 273-306; Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 196-231; Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Meaning after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 92-95, 99.

4. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: From Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 1968); cf., Alan Sherman: "And your spine! Oh, your spine looks divine! It's exactly like mine-now doesn't that seem strange?"

5. Jacques Derrida, "... That Dangerous Supplement," in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 141-64.

6. John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); John Dominic Crossan, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); John Dominic Crossan, Cliffs of Fall: Paradox and Polyvalence in the Parables of Jesus (New York: Seabury Press, 1980).

7. Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985).

8. Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian's View of the Gospels (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977).

9. Morton Smith,Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). See also John M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition. Studies in Biblical Theology, Second Series 28 (Naperville: Alec R. Allenson, 1974); Stevan L. Davies, Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity (New York: Continuum, 1995).

10. Hans Dieter Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, 2d ed., vol. 1: Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1992.

11. Robert Eisler, The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, trans. Alexander Haggerty Krappe. (New York: Dial Press, 1931); S. G. E. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (New York: Scribners, 1967); Hugh J. Schonfield, The Pentecost Revolution: The Story of theJesus Party in Israel, A.D. 36-66 (London: MacDonald, 1974); Hyam Maccoby, Revolution in Judea (New York: Taplinger, 1980); A. J. Mattill Jr., Luke and the Last Things: A Perspective for the Understanding of Lukan Thought (Dillsboro: Western North Carolina Press, 1979); Robert Eisenman, "Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran: A New Hypothesis of Christian Origins" in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the First Christians: Essays and Translations (Rockport: Element Books, 1996); Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (Baltimore: Viking Penguin, 1996); Juan Luis Segundo, The Historical Jesus of the Synoptics. Jesus of Nazareth Yesterday and Today, vol. 2, trans. John Drury. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1985); John G. Gager, Kingdom and Community: The Social World of Early Christianity (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975).

12. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1984); Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).

13. Ben P. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1980); E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985); E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure ofJesus (London: Penguin, 1993).

14. Johannes Weiss, Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, trans. Richard Hyde Hiers and D. Lattimore Holland (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971); Albert Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus' Messiahship and Passion, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Rudolf Bultmann,Jesus and the Word, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero (New York: Scribners, 1958).

15. Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, rev. ed., trans. S. H. Hooke (New York: Scribner's, 1972); Gunther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Irene and Fraser McLuskey (New York: Harper & Row, 1960); Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching ofJesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

16. Science-fiction writers have undertaken just such a quest for the historical Jesus, via time machine. See, e.g., William Hope Hodgson, "Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani," in Out of the Storm: Uncollected Fantasies by William Hope Hodgson, ed. Sam Moskowitz (New York: Centaur Books, 1980), pp. 77-108; Arthur J. Burks, "When the Graves Were Opened," in Black Medicine (Sauk City: Arkham House, 1966), pp. 90-110; Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man (New York: Avon Books, 1970).