R. Joseph Hoffmann - Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth

R. Joseph Hoffmann (DPhil, Oxford), author of Marcion on the Restitution of Christianity, translator of Celsus on the True Doctrine, and distinguished scholar in residence at Goddard College, teaches history at Geneseo College.

Dennis R. MacDonald (PhD, Harvard) is Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School, an expert in Christian origins, and the author of Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?

Justin Meggitt (PhD, Cambridge) is University Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion and the Origins of Christianity at Cambridge University, Fellow and Tutor at Wolfson College, and the author of The Madness of King,esus.

Richard C. Carrier (PhD, Columbia) is a classical historian and the author of Not the Impossible Faith. He contributes regularly to professional and popular journals on the subject of historiography and the philosophy of religion.

Robert M. Price (PhD, Drew), a member of Jesus Seminar, has published extensively in the field of New Testament Studies, including The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and 7esus Christ Superstar The Making of a Modern Gospel.

Bruce Chilton (PhD, Cambridge) is Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College and was Claus Professor of New Testament at Yale University. His many works include A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible and The Temple of ,7esus. He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Bible.

David Trobisch (DrPhil, Heidelberg), Throckmorton- Hayes Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Bangor Theological Seminary, is the author of several important studies of the origins of the New Testament including The First Edition of the New Testament.

Frank R. Zindler is a former professor of geology and neurobiology (SUNY) and is the managing editor of American Atheist Press. He is the author of over one hundred technical and popular articles relating to science and religion. He is the author of The ,7esus the 7ews Never Knew: Sepher Toldoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical,esus in newish Sources.

Robert Eisenman (PhD, Columbia) is an American archaeologist and biblical scholar. He has been Senior Visiting Member at Linacre College Oxford and the director of the Institute for the Study of Judeo- Christian Origins at CSU Long Beach. Among his many works on Christian origins is lames.: The Brother of 7esus.

Ronald A. Lindsay (PhD, Georgetown; JD, University of Virginia) is a philosopher, practicing attorney, and the author of Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogma. He is the president of the Center for Inquiry in Buffalo, New York.

Gerd Ludemann (Dr Theol, Goettingen) is the director of the Institute for Early Christian studies and a professor at the University of Goet- tingen. His most recent book is The First Three Years of Christianity.

J. Harold Ellens, a licensed psychologist, is a retired university professor of philosophy and psychology, a US Army colonel, Presbyterian pastor, and theologian. His books include Sex in the Bible and The Destructive Power of Religion.

rouching somewhere between esthetic sound byte and historical detail is Michelangelo's famous statement about sculpture. "The job of the sculptor," Vasari attributes to it Divino, "is to set free the forms that are within the stone." It's a lovely thought-poetic, in fact. If you accept the theory of Renaissance Platonism, as Michelangelo embodies it, you also have to believe that Moses and David were encased in stone, yearning to be released-as the soul yearns to be set free from the flesh in the theology of salvation.

You will, however, be left wondering why such a theory required human models with strong arms and firm thighs, and why the finished product bears no more resemblance to real or imagined historical figures than a drawing that any one of us could produce. We may lack Michelangelo's skill and his deft way with a rasp and chisel, but we can easily imagine more probable first millennium BCE heroes-in form, stature, skin tone, and body type-than the Italian beauties he released from their marble prisons. In fact, the more we know about the first millennium BCE, the more likely we are to be right. And alas, Michelangelo didn't know very much about history at all. And what's more, it made no difference to his art, his success, or to his reputation. That is why idealism and imagination are sometimes at odds with history, or put bluntly, why history acts as a control on our ability to imagine or idealize anything, often profoundly wrong things.

If we apply the same logic to the New Testament, we stumble over what I have once or twice called the Platonic Fallacy in Jesus research. Like it or not, the New Testament is still the primary artifact of the literature that permits is to understand the origins of Christianity. It's the stone, if not the only stone. If we possessed only Gnostic and apocryphal sources as documentary curiosities and no movement that preserved them, we would be hard pressed to say anything other than that at some time in the first and second century a short-lived and highly incoherent religious movement fluoresced and faded (many did) in the night sky of Hellenistic antiquity. The Jesus we would know from these sources would be an odd co-mixture of insufferable infant a la the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a hell-robber, like the liberator of the Gospel of Nicodemu.r, a mysterious cipher, like the unnamed hero of the Hymn of the Pearl; or an impenetrable guru, like the Jesus of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Despite the now-yellowed axiom we all learned as first-year divinity students (of a certain generation) and later in graduate school (the one where we are taught that "no picture of early Christianity is complete without availing ourselves of all the sources"), I will climb out on a limb to say that these sources are not so much integral to a coherent picture of early Christianity as they are pebbles in orbit around the gravitational center we call the canon. They are interesting-fascinating even-in showing us how uniformity of opinion and belief can wriggle out of a chaos of alternative visions, but they are not the stone that the most familiar form of Christianity was made from. That recognition is as important as it is increasingly irrelevant to modern New Testament discussion.