Creating Jesus: The Earliest Record of Yeshua of Nazareth

Prologue

Last week I went to a funeral at a local Catholic parish in Dublin. I haven’t attended any church regularly for a long time and funerals are about the only occasions when I am at Mass. I didn’t know the deceased well; he was a professional colleague and I felt no particular grief at his passing. The service was boring, the sermon tedious, the eulogy conventional, the music misguided. Even a final blessing by a retired bishop sounded off the cuff. But then the incense was lit, scenting the coffin and the people, and I was sent back to childhood.

Though I am descended from an Irish family and have lived in Ireland for three decades, I was born in Cincinnati, a city on the Ohio River settled heavily by Germans and Irish in the second half of the nineteenth century. My father was a plumber and a strictly observant Catholic, my mother was very pious, and my learning was in Catholic schools, right through university. I began at the Saint Francis de Sales school, taught by the Ursuline nuns, attached to a gorgeous pseudo-gothic church. The children started each school day in that church where, probably for unrelated reasons, the service was usually a Requiem Mass said for the intention of some departed soul. A strange way for a youngster to welcome the day, participating in the rite for the dead. In those years the priest wore purple or black vestments for the Requiem and the general tone of the service was fear and woe. A little later I joined the children’s choir, singing about doomsday, the forbidding rhythms of the Gregorian Dies Irae battered into my brain:

Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla

Teste David cum Sibylla.

Day of wrath, that day

The age dissolved to ashes

Testified by David with the Sibyl.

End-of-the-world prophesy delivered daily for six-year-olds.

Because it was delivered inside the padded glove of Latin, the blow was softened. I grew up in a Catholicism that was linguistically bifurcated, our children’s missals offering side-by-side English with the Latin spoken at the altar, which seemed all the more authentic because incomprehensible. As an altar boy like thousands of others I learned the Latin responses by heart and can still say some of them, along with my Paters, Aves, and Glorias. Or I could say them, since I do not—not deliberately, though sometimes they pop into my head unrequested and I run through them in a sentimental attachment to Latin.

My father moved us to Santa Barbara in southern California in the 1950s in time to catch the housing-construction boom—not to that wealthy suburb now the province of Hollywood royalty and disgruntled British royalty, but to a working-class district populated by immigrants and their descendants from Italy, Ireland, and Mexico. I finished elementary education at Our Lady of Guadalupe school, named for an appearance of the Virgin Mary in sixteenth-century Mexico that few in Cincinnati had heard of. As a result, Spanish was added to church Latin and church English, and in my uncritical mind became part of the sacredness, or otherness, of the liturgy. High school was staffed by more nuns with dissatisfied faces, who regularly encouraged me to become a priest; religion was taught by local Jesuits. Then I was off to the Jesuit University of San Francisco, where we were required to take a course every semester in Thomistic philosophy and one in Catholic theology.

In my uninterrupted sixteen years of Catholic instruction I cannot remember a single nun or priest encouraging me to read a gospel from start to finish. The idea would have seemed outlandish. In fact there was little encouragement to read the bible at all. That fits with the stereotyped view of the Roman church, which from the middle ages worried that reading the bible was a double-edged pursuit for ordinary mortals—not because it was evil or mistaken, but because it is so easy to misunderstand, which for the church meant it could be construed in an unorthodox fashion. In tune with its dogmatic and paternalistic establishment in the fourth century, the pre-Reformation church thought its duty was to guide the (illiterate, uninformed) faithful through the complications of belief. Established doctrine was more important than the founding documents. The Old Testament was good for poetic prayer from Isaiah or the Psalms, and the New Testament was useful for theological instruction from the gospel of John and the epistles, but generally biblical matters were best contained in brief passages inserted in Mass, where their editorial selection and liturgical placement already circumscribed their meaning. Missals and lectionaries were more reliable than bibles.

The Reformation changed this for the sects that withdrew from Roman authority, and should have changed it for Catholicism more than it did. Luther’s and Calvin’s insistence on sola scriptura (by scripture alone) radically altered twelve hundred years of ecclesiastic emphasis on tradition and interpretative doctrine. After Luther the New Testament was to be the guide for understanding the nature of the Messiah and his offer of salvation. No priest, no pope, no church, no appeal to tradition should stand between the minds and souls of human beings and their intimate relation to God. Ironically, by enforcing what they thought a return to origins the reformers actually were going against how the earliest Christian communities viewed the gospels: as notes for preaching and discussion rather than absolute truths. That there were four of them, that they often contradicted each other in detail, and that none of the four was ever suppressed, those facts suggest that the basic declaration of faith, the core belief in the actuality of the Resurrection, mattered more to early Christians than the biography of its fountainhead. How and why this happened, and the part that the evangelist Mark played in it, are the main themes of the work that follows.

First, though, it is fair to ask why a lapsed Catholic agnostic should undertake to write such a book as this one. No doubt there are psychological reasons that revolve around my past; it would be as tedious for me to dig in that soil as it would be for you to sift through it. At death I think we go into nothingness, the emptiness of a universe that has no clue we ever existed. I know that the belief in an afterlife is a source of comfort for many people, whether Muslim or Christian or other, and I have no desire to deny anyone the sense of hope, belonging, and community that the practice of religion can give. This book is not for or against religion; it is designed as a work of historical and literary analysis that looks at the earliest gospel as a remarkable document in its own right. Of course we can’t separate the gospels from the faith that gave rise to them, but it is possible, and desirable, to investigate them without recourse to preexisting thesis or a predetermined outcome.

A second question is also legitimate. Since I’m not a biblical scholar by training, what expertise can I bring to a subject already overloaded with commentary and remarkable research? My professional schooling was in literature and history, and in many ways this book falls inside those subjects. In practice I became a historian of performance in an academic field usually called theatre and performance studies. I have researched and written about performance of many types: not just the presentation of plays in playhouses but also other types of performance, such as television game shows, public gambling, museum displays, and religious rituals. Later in the book I will bring that experience to aspects of Mark relating to the oral tradition, the performance of the gospel, and the celebration of the eucharist; for now I’ll simply note that my sense of the pervasiveness of performance in the past and present will help uncover aspects of New Testament analysis that might be new to some readers.

Thanks to the Jesuits I learned classical languages, but decades of neglect have left me, as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, with small Latin and less Greek. I have worked hard at Greek over the past few years and managed, with a good deal of help, to make the translation of Mark that appears as chapter 3. That effort brought me more deeply into the gospel, since the act of translating requires an understanding of a text that goes beyond ordinary reading and even thorough study. I have also dug deeply into New Testament scholarship and the history of early Christianity, subjects that intrigued me long before I thought of writing this book. A historian looks at how a moment in the past or present became itself, how the past and the understanding of the past determined the condition that later prevailed. Few things in history are inevitable; almost everything that happens has a context, a set of causes, actors, and an element of chance. Understanding it requires a measure of creative interpretation. How did one of the itinerant Jewish teachers in rural Galilee become the catalyst for a new way of understanding human purpose? How did first-century belief in his power become solidified around an idea of salvation and eternal life? No one has objective answers to those questions, but trying to answer them is what a historian of Christianity ought to do.

In the end what draws me to the gospel of Mark is a conviction that it is an extraordinary document. Whether considered as a work or literature, a text for performance, a historical treatise, or a religious manifesto, Mark was unparalleled in previous culture, and has had influence as great as any single text in world history.

1

The Gospel Truth: An Introduction

Both read the Bible day and night,

But thou read’st black where I read white.

—William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

From its start Christianity depended on translation. The Mediterranean world of the first century of the Common Era was a multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual mix of societies and nations, some of them displaced by war and exile, all of them conquered by a brutal and unforgiving occupier. The eastern regions of what became the Roman Empire had been thoroughly Hellenized by the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, and ever since Greek had been the lingua franca for a variety of peoples, many of whom spoke something else at home. Koine Greek, it was called—common Greek, a simplified form of classical Greek, useful for trade, for interrogation by the empire’s officials, and for written communication. That is the simple reason why the gospels were written in Greek, along with all of the rest of the New Testament.

The central figure of Christianity was born a Jew in the northern sector of the ancient Israelite nation, which had been long divided into three or more parts ruled by invading forces and shifting alliances. Raised in Aramaic, a northwest Semitic language prevalent from eastern Anatolia and Syria to the Levant and Mesopotamia, he spoke the Galilean dialect, readily mocked in Jerusalem. By the standards of the southern region of Judea, Galilee was a backwater, important for fishing and farming but suspiciously corrupted by the many Hellenized non-Jews who lived around its large lake. Whether he could read or write Aramaic or Hebrew is an open question. The word used in the gospels to describe his occupation and economic class is tekton, which can mean any kind of artisan or craftsman, including carpenter, mason, or metal worker. Builder is probably the best translation.

¹

If he was a builder or the son of a builder it is unlikely he was educated in any formal way, though he might have become literate with the help of a synagogue teacher.

The third language of the region was Hebrew. In the same Semitic group as Aramaic, it was no longer spoken regularly in Galilee but known to Jews everywhere through quotations from the scriptures, hymns, and religious terms. It was used in Jerusalem and the Temple, though it was regular practice to comment on the biblical texts in Aramaic and to translate scriptural Hebrew into Aramaic as well. In the gospel of John, Pilate writes out a famous inscription, The King of the Jews, and has it fastened to the cross. John comments: Many Jews read this inscription because the place where Iesous was crucified was near the city and it had been written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (19.20). When the evangelist wrote Hebrew he actually meant Aramaic. Aramaic for locals, Latin for Romans, and Greek for everybody else.

The fourth language, then, was the Latin of Roman officials, used among themselves, for communication with Rome, and for inscriptions on monuments. Elite Romans learned Greek, which was considered more refined, backed by a large ancient literature that provided a model for Latin. In practice Greek would have been necessary for any administrator posted to the eastern Mediterranean. Contrary to Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ (2004), the trial before Pilate would have been conducted in Greek, not Latin. The ordinary Roman soldiers in Galilee were most likely not Roman at all but mercenary legionnaires hired from a variety of eastern ethnic groups, perhaps Aramaic speakers, but with at least some Greek as a shared tongue.

Four languages around a lake where Jews and gentiles, Phoenicians and Syrians, Pereans and Persians, Macedonians and Romans crossed and recrossed in trade, manufacture, politics, conflict, and religion. People were translating all the time, usually into Greek. Throughout the New Testament a Greek is used to identify a gentile, referring both to the language and the Hellenized situation, but educated Jews knew Greek as well, and had used it regularly for some centuries in speech and writing.

Names. Let’s start with a name. Known around the world as Jesus Christ, or in some fair variant, neither word was his actual name. The world, Christian and non-Christian, is so used to hearing that name in praise, submission, invocation, and hope, or in anger, curse, denigration, pain, and oath, that it is very difficult for anyone to approach it objectively. Jesus Christ! I can say, and mean many things, some of them completely opposite each other. To get beyond our anesthetized use, it might help to use his real name, which was Yeshua. Yeshua, or Yehosshua, with variant transliterations from Hebrew, was the name of a number of biblical characters, most prominently the successor to Moses in the book of Exodus. The standard English equivalent is Joshua, he who fit the battle of Jericho, in the words of the Black American Spiritual. Joshua’s Hebrew name was translated into the Greek version of the Hebrew scripture, the Septuagint, as Iesous (Ἰησοῦς—the final sigma is the Greek masculine singular), and the New Testament writers followed the precedent. It went into Latin as IESVS or Iesus, and then into English and many European tongues with an initial J. Because there are very few other biblical figures whose names in modern languages are rendered as Jesus, the word has achieved a special quality as an independent signifier, sacred, unique, pervasive, and in one sense, incorrect.

The second word, Christ, is not a name at all but a title. Christos in Greek (Χριστός) means anointed and translates Hebrew Mashiah, or Messiah. The term refers to the ancient Jewish practice of anointing the heads and bodies of priests and kings with oil, and suggests divine appointment or ratification. (The rite conducted for crowning Solomon is outlined in the first chapter of 1 Kings, and is the basis of the anointing that occurs at the coronation of the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.) In the first century CE Jewish belief was various about a Messiah, a man who might be sent by Yahweh as a great king to restore the ancient state of Israel by defeating its enemies, in order to establish the reign of God on earth. Some segments of Judaism believed that this end time would involve the resurrection of the bodies of the righteous dead, who would then live in God’s kingdom for a long time or perhaps forever. The enemy now was not one of the ancient foes of Israel recounted in the scriptures but the Roman imperium that controlled and taxed Yahweh’s own people. To overthrow that oppression, it was clear, would require a superhuman force with a superhuman general, a new Moses to lead his people not to the promised land, which they already inhabited, but out of the talons of the Roman eagle. Thinking about the end of Roman rule blended into thinking about the end of time itself. Eschatology—concern about the last things, the conflagration, doomsday—was as bright as the sun on the Judean desert.

It had been diversely prophesized that the Messiah would be a descendent of David, a son of God or one like the son of man. These ambiguous terms are theologically nebulous, but the Messiah’s power would derive from God’s nomination, not from himself. He would not be God, or an aspect of God, but a man lifted up by God. The letters of Paul, written in the decade of the 50s, make clear that early followers of Yeshua, both Jews and gentiles—Christians, we’d call them, though Paul never uses the term—held that Yeshua was the Messiah, a liberator or savior with a purpose that went beyond Jewish traditional expectations to a promise of eternal life for believers in his efficacy. By the time of the earliest gospel, written around 70 CE, the belief was secure enough for its writer to start with: The beginning of the good message of Iesous the Anointed. Iesous Christos, Jesus Christ: those words mean Yeshua the Messiah.

In a probably hopeless attempt to break through centuries of overuse, in this book I call him Yeshua, except when translating directly from Greek, when I maintain the Greek form.

Calling him by his birth name, however, comes with its own translation trouble. It accents his identity as a Jew, an itinerant teacher of righteousness and a prophet of the end time, but by refusing the Greek translation it runs counter to history. It was in Greek and in the Hellenized Roman world, from Damascus and Antioch to Ephesus and Corinth, that the local Yeshua cult in Palestine spread abroad and gradually separated from Judaism. The farther the cult went westward, the less likely its gentile adherents were to understand Christos as anything other than an alternative or second name of Iesous. The traditional Jewish expectation of a Messiah began to become irrelevant. Judaism was already a Hellenized religion, but the Hellenization of the new sect increased in the decades of the 40s and 50s and turned a Galilean preacher into a general savior. In the gentile world the Yeshua cult became the Christos cult, and the expressly Jewish Messiah became the universal Christ.

The Jerusalem remnant, whose leaders were the Yeshua followers Simon Peter (Shimon Kifa) and John (Yochanan), together with James (Ya’akov) the brother of Yeshua, was for some years after the Crucifixion a kind of mother house to the Christos cult of the west, as we can see in Paul’s visits to Jerusalem to pay his respects, pay his dues, and seek approval for his self-ordained mission. But after the leveling of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the original apostles, dispersed or executed, lost their claim of centrality and the focus shifted westward to Antioch and ultimately to Rome. Socially this meant that a small Jewish subset in Palestine, where Yeshua was understood to be a spiritual reformer of the established Judean order, moved to a collection of diaspora Jews and gentiles who, sometime in the second century, saw him as a radical break with Hebraic practice. The Galilean cult became a new religion of the uncircumcised, yet one that worshipped the deity of the circumcised, who was no longer called by the Hebrew proper name Yahweh but the general Greek word Theos. Because the new sect arose inside the Roman Empire, and because its language was the Greek of the Roman Empire, its increase was quicker and easier.

I am going to use the name Yeshua anyway. If nothing else, it should help to remind us that though all the Christian documents from the first century are in Greek, the words ascribed to Yeshua in the gospels were already translations of his Aramaic speech. That is also a help when reflecting on how later factions of Christianity fell to arguing over the meaning of his sayings, or when a textual scholar today must make a difficult choice among the variant readings in the Greek manuscripts that have come down to us. This is my body: the phrase has caused a great deal of dissension over the meaning of is in Yeshua’s words over the bread at the Last Supper. Was he saying I am in this bread actually, or metaphorically, or spiritually, or memorially? And always will be when you repeat the action? Or was he saying only that right now, at this moment, like bread I am consumed? The earliest recorded formulation is in Paul (1 Corinthians 11.24: touto mou estin to soma; word for word, this of me is the body). But in a Semitic language such as Aramaic, as John Barton points out, there would be no verb in the sentence at all, no equivalent of estin, just this my body or my body this.

²

The arguments over meaning might remain, but they should not be about the word is.

I must make it clear, however, that by preferring his Hebrew/Aramaic name I do not hope to recapture the historical Yeshua or retrieve his original words or what he might have meant by them. As I explain below in a section on evidence, there is no path to the actual man behind the faith that followed in his wake. We have the texts of the New Testament, that’s all. Calling him Yeshua is my way of defamiliarizing our use of the word Jesus while at the same time reminding us that he was a Jew.

A second category of translation familiarity sticks to the word gospel. It too has acquired derived meanings: a gospel sect, the gospel truth, the gospel tradition, gospel-sharp, gospel music, a gospel singer, the prosperity gospel, a gospel shop (a scornful eighteenth-century name for a Methodist chapel), and a delightful term for a puritan zealot, a hot gospeler. Gospel is very much an English word. It comes from Old English god-spel, meaning good word or good news, as translated from Latin evangelium, good news or, more precisely, good message. Gospel lost that meaning many centuries ago. It is unfortunate that it is still used, but it would be hard to replace: the Good Message would seem very awkward now as a descriptive noun for the four canonical gospels, though nothing prevents a translation from using it. Most European languages use some variant of evangelium, though those variants too have lost the original meaning, except in modern Greek. In English we have evangelist and evangelize and evangelical, but when we speak of the books themselves we call them gospels.

The word in Greek is euaggelion (εὐαγγέλιον; the double gamma γγ, or gg in Roman letters, is pronounced ng, explaining the Latin form of the word). Euaggelion and its variants appear often in the New Testament, particularly in Paul, who tends to refer less to specific proclamations of Yeshua and more to the entirety of his message, or to Yeshua as bearer of the good message. In classical Greek the word usually referred to a happy report, such as victory in a battle, or to the reward given to the messenger of the report. It appears in the Septuagint chiefly as a verb, meaning to proclaim the good news of rescue by God. As far as we know, however, Mark was the first to use the word to describe a book. The beginning of the good message of Iesous the Anointed—that is his Incipit or opening, the first line of a scroll that normally stood for a title. By beginning did he mean that this is the Incipit, or did he mean that this is the start of the good message? Or that Iesous the Anointed is the good message itself? Mark avoids the biographical background that so occupies Matthew and Luke, who go into detail about the genealogy and birth of Yeshua. Instead Mark jumps to what he considered important, the start of Yeshua’s ministry, suggesting that the good news consists not of the arrival of the Messiah on earth but of his mature activity on earth. Not the man but his words and deeds. In line with much scholarship, I think the phrase son of God that appears in some manuscripts at the end of the first verse is likely a later addition, what biblical scholars call secondary. Mark is careful to show that Yahweh names Yeshua as his son at the moment of his baptism in the River Jordan. In Mark he did not exist from birth as the son of God as the gospel of Matthew has it, or from his miraculous conception as Luke has it, or as the word (logos) of God from all time as John has it. In Mark he was nominated or appointed by God at the moment his agency was authorized.

³

The other evangelists do not use euaggelion to describe their books. In fact Matthew uses the noun only four times and Luke doesn’t use it at all, though he does apply the verb form ten times, with the meaning of evangelize: to proclaim the good message.

⁴

Perhaps Mark did not intend the word to mean a book, but it is a sign of his influence that euaggelion became the universal term in early Christianity to describe all the gospels, including the various noncanonical gospels written in the second century.

Though not of the same degree of importance, another New Testament translated word is also a complication for its readers: church. The Greek word ekklesia means an assembly or gathering of people; its root meaning is to call out. It is rare in the gospels but is pervasive in Paul, Acts, and Revelation to describe the gatherings of early followers of Christos outside Palestine. To render the word as church, however, as almost all translations do, gives a misleading impression. After the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the empire in the late fourth century, the significance of ekklesia was very different from what it had been in the first century. The model of the gatherings of the earliest diasporic Christians was the diasporic Jewish assembly called the synagogue, a place for reading the Hebrew scriptures, discussion, and prayer, independent of the Temple in Jerusalem. In neither the Jewish nor the Christian case did the gathering have anything like the implied authority that church achieved later and has today, whether referring to an