Demystifying the Life, Death and Times of Jesus

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the five-night miniseries, “Jesus of Nazareth,” with a cavalcade of stars including Laurence Olivier and James Mason. The Jesus that emerged from that epic tale was the kind, infinitely compassionate teacher, prophet, messiah, who spread a message of love and redemption, urged his followers to move beyond the laws of traditional Judaism and so incurred the wrath of a jealous priestly establishment and was crucified by the order of Pontius Pilate, who preferred to err on the side of repression.

According to Paula Fredriksen, this portrayal says more about our culture than it does about the historical Jesus of Nazareth. A professor of scripture at Boston University, Fredriksen fairly drips disdain for those who impose a contemporary sensibility on history. In attempting to correct the images and dispel the myths that surround Jesus Christ, she hectors, lectures and cajoles the reader to “think,” to step back, to respect history and “facts,” and to recognize the world of difference between our time and mores and those of the Jews of Galilee and Judea 2,000 years ago. While she recognizes the temptation to believe that Jesus was like us, she firmly reminds us that while doing so may help “First World liberals” understand the problems of the modern world, “we gain little insight into ancient societies by projecting our political sensibilities onto . . . them.”

Fredriksen freely acknowledges how difficult it is to reconstruct the life of Christ. The primary source material, the gospels and the various epistles of Paul, are at least 30 to 100 years removed from Christ’s death. Relative to other sources on antiquity, that actually isn’t bad, but, as Fredriksen emphasizes, the writers knew the end of the story. They knew that Jesus was crucified, and they knew that the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 by Roman troops suppressing a revolt. Jesus, however, didn’t know what would come after; he lived his life forward, even though history is written with all the advantages and distortions of hindsight.

Given the sources, Fredriksen applies the tools of the logician and the investigator, though she does so with an imperious tone and a dense scholarship that is only occasionally leavened by clunky narrative sections designed to evoke the everyday world of Jesus. She tests hypotheses using ancillary sources about the time and period. And the central question is: Why was Jesus crucified? The answer, she believes, unlocks the rest of the puzzle.

In winding her way to revealing that answer, she describes the scene in Jewish Palestine; she talks about Jewish law and notions of purity. She asks how Jesus saw himself and how his disciples saw him, and she asks above all how Pontius Pilate viewed him. For if Jesus were simply a Jewish teacher who disputed the priestly establishment, Pilate would never have executed him in the manner prescribed for rebels. Thus Fredriksen infers that Christ was seen as a political threat by the Romans.

Yet, parsing the texts, she concludes that Christ did not see himself that way. He believed that the long-prophesied End Time was near, and he had no intention of challenging Roman rule. He never seems to have arrogated to himself the title “Messiah,” at least according to Fredriksen’s reading of the Gospels. She also concludes that Christ had been to Jerusalem many times before his final Passover and that he had never before been seen as a threat. He was executed, she asserts, because the crowds at the Temple that year acclaimed him the Messiah who would restore Jewish rule over Judea and reestablish the kingdom of David and Solomon. To quell that, Pilate quickly arrested Jesus and had him crucified.

Fredriksen thus depicts Jesus as a teacher within the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, whose message was akin to various other teachings then prevalent in Palestine, whose execution was provoked by the zealousness of the crowds and not by anything he said or did himself. It’s an intriguing theory. But it’s only that, a theory argued well and logically expounded by someone deeply steeped in the scholarship of the time. Its greatest flaw is the degree to which it demystifies faith. Like science, secular history writing is hostile to faith. It elevates facts over belief. That’s all very well, but sometimes, things happen for mysterious reasons in mysterious ways. There may be a simple story behind the life of Christ--banal and straightforward. But it may also be that something extraordinary happened, that the man and his movement broke from their context because of faith and its power. That is one hypothesis that Fredriksen seems unable to consider seriously, and it leaves a gaping hole in her otherwise rigorously argued book.