1 The Quest for Jesus This book is about one big question: Did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be God? The seeds of my interest in who Jesus really claimed to be were first planted back in the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate at Louisiana State University. I still remember vividly the day I walked into one of my introductory level classes, very excited to begin learning about the Bible. Although I had grown up Catholic and had even spent a fairly good deal of time reading the Scriptures, I had never before had the opportunity to study the Bible in an in- depth way. At the time, I was especially excited to begin studying the Gospels. For me, the Gospels were the most familiar part of the Bible, and my personal favorite. In particular, I was hoping that I would be able to learn more about Jesus. As a Christian, I had always believed that Jesus was the divine Son of God, fully God and fully man. I worshiped him and tried to the best of my ability (which was often quite lacking) to live according to his teachings. So when it came time in the class- room to turn to Jesus and the Gospels, I was all ears. Needless to say, I was somewhat taken aback when the professor began by saying: Pitr_9780770435486_4p_all_r1.e.indd 1 11/16/15 11:26 AM the case for jesus 2 “Forget everything you thought you knew about who wrote the Gos- pels.” What was that? At the time, I was vigorously trying to take notes, so I couldn’t quite digest what the professor had said. He continued: “Although your English Bibles say ‘The Gospel according to “Mat- thew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John,” ’ these titles were actually added much later. In fact, we don’t really know who wrote the Gospels. Nowa- days, modern scholars agree that the Gospels were originally anony- mous.” Got it. Titles added later. Gospels originally anonymous. Wait a minute! I thought. We don’t know who wrote the Gospels? What about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Weren’t they disciples of Jesus? (As we will see in chapter 2, I was wrong to think Mark and Luke were disciples.) At the time, these questions flashed through my mind in a matter of moments. Being a zealous undergraduate intent on getting straight A’s, I was more focused on writing down the professor’s words than on processing them. All the same, I do remember being struck by a thought. If what he was saying was true— which, of course, I never doubted, since I was an ignoramus and he was the professor—then how do we know what Jesus actually did and said? And, in fact, that is exactly what he proceeded to talk about: the so- called “quest for the historical Jesus,” in which modern scholars search for the truth about what Jesus really did and said, using contemporary tools of historical research. Despite my initial surprise at the idea that we don’t know who wrote the Gospels, the whole notion of the quest for Jesus still fas- cinated me. After all, Christianity is a historical religion which claims that the God who made the universe actually became a man— a real human being who lived in a particular time and in a particular place. As a result, the idea of searching for the historical truth about Jesus made sense to me. So, somewhat blindly, that’s what I set out to do. Pitr_9780770435486_4p_all_r1.e.indd 2 11/16/15 11:26 AM 3 The Quest for Jesus The Telephone Game On the one hand, as I began to devour a steady stream of books about Jesus, I felt as if my whole understanding of him and his world was being opened up in new and exciting ways. For one thing, I began taking courses in ancient Greek so that I could learn to read the New Testament in its original language. It was thrilling. As a result, I added a religious studies major to my program in English literature and de- cided to spend my life teaching and writing about the Bible. Eventu- ally, I was admitted to a master’s program at Vanderbilt University, which kicked off with a rigorous regimen of learning ancient Hebrew. I even had the privilege of studying under Amy- Jill Levine, a Jewish professor of the New Testament.1 Unlike some professors these days, who seem to make it their goal to tear down their students’ faith, Dr. Levine was always extremely respectful of and concerned for her stu- dents’ beliefs. Even more, she sought to enrich our faith by helping us to see Jesus and the New Testament through ancient Jewish eyes. This was a life- changing gift for me. In fact, as we will see later, it was pre- cisely her teaching us how to interpret the words and deeds of Jesus in their first- century Jewish context that would eventually help me to see clearly the Jewish roots of Jesus’s divinity. Without the insights I learned from her, I could never have written this book. On the other hand, in the meantime, something else began to hap- pen. I also began to encounter ideas about Jesus and the Gospels that were difficult to reconcile with what I had grown up believing. For ex- ample, in addition to the theory that the Gospels were originally anon- ymous, I learned that many modern scholars believe that the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus, that they were not authored by disciples of Jesus, and that they were written too late in the first century AD to be based on reliable eyewitness testimony. One of the textbooks I learned from— written by the now famous atheist New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman— even compares the way we got the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels to the children’s game of Telephone! These are the words I read all those years ago: Pitr_9780770435486_4p_all_r1.e.indd 3 11/16/15 11:26 AM the case for jesus 4 [N]early all of these storytellers had no independent knowledge of what really happened [to Jesus]. It takes little imagination to real- ize what happened to the stories. You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game “telephone.” A group of kids sits in a cir- cle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across), with thousands of participants.2 We’ll revisit the idea of the Telephone game later on in this book. As we will see, this so- called “analogy” is completely anachronistic and has no place in any serious historical study of Jesus and the Gospels.3 But I didn’t know that seventeen years ago. At the time, let’s just say that it didn’t exactly inspire confidence in me that the four Gospels were historically reliable. To make matters even more complicated, I also discovered that there were lots of other ancient gospels outside the New Testament that I had never heard about before. In fact, some scholars argued that these “lost gospels,” especially the Gospel of Thomas, should get equal treatment as historical sources in the quest for Jesus. After all, if the four Gospels weren’t based on eyewitness tes- timony, why should we trust them instead of the lost gospels? Finally, and most significant of all, I began to realize that many contemporary New Testament scholars do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth ever ac- tually claimed to be God. Of all the ideas that I encountered, this last one shook me to my core. Liar, Lunatic, Lord, or Legend? Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t as if I had never before come across the idea of someone not believing in the divinity of Jesus. To the contrary, when I was an undergraduate, I had read very closely C. S. Lewis’s famous book Mere Christianity, in which he explains some of Pitr_9780770435486_4p_all_r1.e.indd 4 11/16/15 11:26 AM 5 The Quest for Jesus the reasons he converted from atheism to Christianity. In that book, Lewis gives a classic argument against the common idea that Jesus was just a great moral teacher or a prophet. In Lewis’s own words: I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would ei- ther be a lunatic— on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg— or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or some- thing worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher.