Chapter 48. The Quest for the Historical Jesus: Sources, Methods and the Mythicist Challenge

No figure in the religious history of the West has been studied as intensely as Jesus of Nazareth, and no figure has given rise to so many incompatible portraits. The library holds the whole range of them. At one end are critical-historical reconstructions built on source criticism and oral-tradition theory. Next to them stand evangelical defences of the gospels’ reliability. Further out are mythicist arguments that no historical Jesus lay behind the story at all, a thesis that the Roman imperial court invented him, a sociobiological reading of Jesus as a man caught between Judaism and Rome, and Mehran Keshe’s reading of Jesus as a soul-teacher whose story was later reshaped by Rome. This chapter sets out the evidence each camp uses and how each weighs it. As James D. G. Dunn himself remarks, the external evidence “provide[s] very little hard information”, so the debate is decided mostly by method [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, §7.1].

The three quests as Dunn tells them

Dunn arranges the modern history of research under three headings in Part One of Jesus Remembered: “The Flight from Dogma” (ch. 4), “The Flight from History” (ch. 5) and “History, Hermeneutics and Faith” (ch. 6) [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, Contents]. The flight from dogma runs from Reimarus through D. F. Strauss to the nineteenth-century liberal “lives of Jesus”. In that phase Jesus became “a teacher of timeless morality … more the first Christian than the Christ — a flight from the Christ of dogma” [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 4]. Dunn insists on the weight of Strauss, citing Schweitzer’s verdict that those who think Strauss “can be easily dismissed simply demonstrate that they have never read him with care”. He also quotes Strauss’s definition of myth as “not the conscious and intentional invention of an individual but a production of the common consciousness of a people or a religious circle” [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 4, §4.2]. Dunn then describes the decades after 1914 as an “hiatus or diversion” dominated by Barth’s “dogmatic christological perspective” and Bultmann’s “equally dogmatic kerygmatic perspective”. Bultmann’s form criticism held that “many sayings … originated in the church”, which is why Dunn calls this phase the flight from history [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 4–5]. The “Third Quest” took Jesus’ Jewishness as its starting point. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies names E. P. Sanders as its emblem: Jesus and Judaism (1985), Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah (1990) and The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993), with “sociological questioning and a better understanding of Judaism … most evident in the historical Jesus research of our third period” [Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, #363277]. Dunn’s own starting point is the same: a picture of Jesus “should and must begin from the fact that he was a first-century Jew”, and “his execution on the charge of being a messianic pretender (‘king of the Jews’) is generally reckoned to be part of the bedrock data” [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 5]. Dunn also warns that the neo-Liberal questers are repeating the nineteenth century’s hope that a “historical Jesus, untrammelled by what late-twentieth-century sensibilities regard as unacceptable dogmas” waits to be found behind the Synoptics [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 4].

The non-Christian testimony

Dunn reviews the external sources briefly. Josephus’ Antiquities (written in the 90s) mentions Jesus twice. The first passage “has clearly been subject to Christian redaction, but there is a broad consensus that Josephus wrote something like the following”:

“At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who received the truth with pleasure … And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so” (Ant. 18.63–64). [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, §7.1]

Dunn notes that the phrases “a wise man” and “a doer of startling deeds” are characteristic of Josephus and “improbably Christian”. The second passage, on the stoning of James, “the brother of Jesus who is called Messiah” (Ant. 20.200), is one that “few have doubted … came from Josephus’ pen”. Tacitus (Annals 15.44), describing Nero’s scapegoats after the fire of 64, writes that “their name comes from Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate”. Dunn argues that the formulation “has no distinctive Christian features”. Suetonius’ “Chrestus” (Claudius 25.4) is a confused echo, and b. Sanhedrin 43a’s “Yeshu … hanged on the eve of Passover” as a magician is a possible rabbinic memory [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, §7.1]. Pliny the Younger’s letter to Trajan is the third classical witness. The library’s reference shelf treats it as a separate article [Wikipedia: Pliny the Younger on Christians], and Kieren Barry cites it as “one of the very few surviving independent contemporaneous sources”, in which the governor of Bithynia found only “a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths” [Barry, The Greek Qabalah, #64708, ch. 10].

Josh McDowell, writing as an apologist, uses the same passages in his Romanian-language El a umblat printre noi. He lists Thallus, Phlegon, Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Hadrian, Suetonius and Lucian of Samosata as secular witnesses. He quotes R. T. France’s point that “wise man” is not typically Christian but is Josephus’ term for Solomon and Daniel. He also answers G. A. Wells, who “wrote three books with a similar conclusion: The Jesus of the Early Christians (1971), Did Jesus Exist? (1975) and The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982)”, noting that Wells was rebutted by Ian Wilson [McDowell, El a umblat printre noi, #42107]. Dunn treats Wells as running “a long-running but lone campaign”, and says such references matter “if only because about once every generation someone reruns the thesis that Jesus never existed” [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, §7.1 n. 6].

Sources and the model of “Jesus remembered”

Dunn accepts the Liberal-era two-source hypothesis: Markan priority, with “some two hundred verses in Matthew and Luke” pointing to a shared sayings source, Q [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 4]. He is more cautious about Kloppenborg’s stratification of Q and Koester’s elevation of non-canonical gospels. He reports that some date the Gospel of Thomas to the first century and posit a “trajectory” from Q to Thomas, but that early dating of Thomas is “actually the lynchpin for most of the argument” [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 4 n. 165; §7]. His own thesis (ch. 8) is that the tradition began with “the various encounters between Jesus and those who by virtue of these encounters became disciples”. It was then carried as oral tradition that kept a stable core while varying in performance, so the gospels preserve Jesus as remembered rather than a reconstructable “Jesus behind” them [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, ch. 6]. Part Three applies this model. It treats the mission as “Beginning from the Baptism of John”. It argues for a Kingdom both “to come” (§12.4) and “has come” (§12.5), with a “solving the riddle” section (§12.6). It discusses Messiah, Son of God and Son of Man (chs. 15–16), and asks “Why Was Jesus Executed?” (§17.2). It ends with “The Empty Tomb Tradition” and “Appearance Traditions” (§§18.2–18.3), asking “how and why belief in Jesus’ resurrection began” [Dunn, Jesus Remembered, #62259, Contents].

Lydia McGrew pushes further toward reliability, rejecting the treatment of John as “the red-headed stepchild of Gospels scholarship”. She argues that her evidence “significantly shifts the burden of proof in favor of John” and hopes readers will wonder “why one would not take John to be fully historical”. She invokes Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3.1.1) for John’s composition at Ephesus [McGrew, The Eye of the Beholder, #70156, chs. I, III and n. 117].

The mythicist and Roman-invention theses

Acharya S states flatly: “The ‘gospel’ story of Jesus is not a factual portrayal of a historical ‘master’ who walked the earth 2,000 years ago. It is not a true story.” She quotes Albert Churchward, “The canonical gospels can be shown to be a collection of sayings from the Egyptian Mythos and Eschatology”, and Joseph Wheless, “The gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates”. She sets out lists of parallels: Horus called “the KRST, or Anointed One”; Krishna’s story “nearly identically” parallel to Jesus’; and the “sun of God” born of the Virgin at the winter solstice, “the Light of the World” [Acharya S, The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ, #38018]. Joseph Atwill argues instead that “the Gospels were not written by the followers of a Jewish Messiah but by the intellectual circle surrounding the three Flavian emperors”. He claims that Josephus, who “wrote War of the Jews while living in the Flavian court”, built typological parallels in which Jesus’ ministry is the “type” of Titus’ campaign through Judea. On this reading the Flavians “did not intend to have sophisticated people like themselves take their invention, Christianity, seriously” [Atwill, Caesar’s Messiah, #63252, Introduction, chs. 3, 11]. Baigent and Leigh add that “reputable scholars before Allegro had questioned, and doubted, the existence of an historical Jesus”. They also say Wilson and Allegro “challenged the team’s laboured attempts to distance the Qumran community from so-called ‘early Christianity'” [Baigent & Leigh, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, #71853, ch. 4].

Heisman: Jesus between Rome and Judaism

Mitchell Heisman accepts Crossan’s frame of Jesus and Paul “within Judaism within the Roman Empire”, “the absolutely necessary matrix”, and then asks “where does Jesus fit into this historical matrix?” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, part 129]. His answer rests on his hypothesis that Jesus was conceived when a Roman soldier raped Mary during Varus’ punitive campaign in Galilee, and that Joseph was a stepfather. He reasons from studies of stepparent abuse, and from Mark calling Jesus simply “Mary’s son” (Mark 6:3) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp. 397–399]. He writes: “If Jesus was half-Jewish and half-Roman, then his biological family was … a war zone”, and “Jesus was the boundary between Rome and Israel”. From this he derives “love your enemy” as the inversion of kin selection, and calls the “son of God” title an identification with “both the Jewish and the Roman strains of his identity simultaneously” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, pp. 405, 438]. He traces Christianity’s break from Judaism to the dispute “within Judaism that immediately preceded the life of Jesus” between Shammai, “‘right-of-center’ or conservative”, and Hillel, “‘left-of-center’ or liberal-like”. He sets “the very different ways of Bar Kokhba and Jesus” on either side of that divide [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, part 137].

Keshe: crucifixion, transmutation and Roman revision

Keshe treats the cross as ordinary Roman practice: “cross wasn’t something just for Jesus, it was a normal way of punishment by the Romans”. He claims Jesus “knew his destiny” and used the Soul of Physicality to “transmute” so as to evade Roman recognition and leave with his family, citing “Jewish historians who wrote about Jesus at time he” lived rather than later Christian accounts [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 488, #378200, sections 9–10]. In the KSW 428 Easter excerpt he states: “Christ as a man went on the cross, then on the cross he separated the D of P … into dimension of the Soul”, and “The body of Christ never went missing” [Keshe, Resurrection Part 1 (428 KSW), #378484]. In KSW 612 (2025) he calls the crucifixion a punishment for “his adulterous life”. He says the “three days, and the ascension” were “added to, by … the rulers of Rome, to bring it to Mithraism”, and that one must “read … the life of Mitra and Zoroaster” to understand the resurrection [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 612, #378324].

Comparison of methods

Key points

• Dunn divides modern research into a flight from dogma (Reimarus, Strauss, the liberal lives), a flight from history (Bultmann) and a Jewish-context Third Quest, of which the Oxford Handbook makes Sanders’ Jesus and Judaism (1985) the emblem.
• Dunn and the consensus he reports accept a Josephan core of Ant. 18.63–64 and the authenticity of Ant. 20.200; Tacitus’ Annals 15.44 is judged free of Christian features.
• Dunn’s “Jesus remembered” model replaces the search for a Jesus behind the gospels with the impact Jesus made on disciples, carried as oral tradition.
• McGrew and McDowell defend gospel reliability, including John, against Wells and other sceptics.
• Acharya S calls the gospel story “not a true story” but a solar and Egyptian mythos. Atwill attributes the gospels to the Flavian court.
• Heisman reads Jesus as half-Jewish and half-Roman, a boundary between two polarised worlds, and traces the break from Judaism back to Hillel versus Shammai.
• Keshe reads the crucifixion as a routine Roman punishment, the resurrection as soul-transmutation, and the three-day narrative as a Roman addition to align Christianity with Mithraism.