What Is the Historical Jesus?

The phrase "the historical Jesus" turns up in documentaries, sermons, bestsellers, and online arguments. People use it to mean very different things. Some mean the man himself. Some mean a version of Jesus stripped of the church's claims about him. Some assume it means a debunking.

Scholars use the phrase in a narrower, technical sense. Three scholars with little else in common show how widely that sense is shared: John P. Meier, a Catholic priest; Marcus Borg, a progressive Episcopalian; and Bart Ehrman, an agnostic. All three treated the historical Jesus as a reconstruction. It is the outline historians can defend with public evidence, and it gets revised as the evidence and the methods improve.

This article covers what the term means, where the idea came from, how historians do the work, and which portraits of Jesus have held up. Whether Jesus existed at all is a separate question, covered in Did Jesus Actually Exist?

What the Term Means

Much of the confusion around this subject comes from one name doing four jobs. Scholars separate them.

The real Jesus. The real Jesus is everything Jesus of Nazareth ever thought, said, did, and experienced. Meier stressed that almost all of it is gone.¹ The Gospels say nearly nothing about his life before he was "about thirty years old" (Luke 3:23). Even his public career survives only as a selection of episodes and sayings. The real Socrates and the real Alexander the Great are lost in the same way.

The historical Jesus. The historical Jesus is the part of that life historians can recover and defend. It includes only the words, deeds, and patterns that survive critical testing as probable. Meier insisted the historical Jesus is never identical to the real Jesus.² It is a hypothesis, and hypotheses change.

The Gospel Jesus. The Gospel Jesus is the character in the four Gospels. Their authors wrote roughly 40 to 70 years after his death. They believed he had risen from the dead, and they told his earlier life in that light. Scholars sometimes call this figure "the earthly Jesus," because the Gospels narrate his life before Easter. The Gospels are the main evidence for the historical Jesus, and they are also theological portraits.

The Christ of faith. The Christ of faith is the risen Lord of Christian worship and the creeds. The creeds call him "one in being with the Father." Studying that figure is the work of Christology, the branch of theology concerned with who Christ is. Historians cannot evaluate it, because no historical evidence could show that a person is God.

Borg pointed out that the earliest Christians blended these figures without any sense of contradiction. Their memories of Jesus and their convictions about the risen Christ went into the same stories.³ Historians try to separate the layers. The separation is a matter of method. It passes no judgment on whether the Christian convictions are true.

Meier illustrated the method with a thought experiment. Imagine a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic, all trained historians of first-century religion, locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library on a spartan diet. They cannot leave until they agree on a document about Jesus of Nazareth.⁴

They could agree that Jesus was a Jew from Galilee, that John baptized him, that he gathered disciples and had a reputation as a healer, and that Pilate had him crucified. They could not agree that he died for the sins of the world.

The same limit applies to every claim about Jesus. History can say what he probably taught and why Rome probably killed him. It cannot say whether he was the Son of God or whether God raised him from the dead. Meier's word for what historians do is prescind: they set their beliefs aside while working, without giving them up. A believing historian and an atheist historian can therefore work side by side on the historical Jesus and still part ways about the Christ of faith.

How the Search Began

The modern search began in the Enlightenment. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a German scholar who died in 1768, argued in secret that the disciples had invented the resurrection after a failed political mission. The writer Gotthold Lessing published fragments of his work anonymously in the 1770s, and the scandal launched a field. David Friedrich Strauss followed in 1835 with a Life of Jesus that treated much of the Gospel material as myth. In 1865 Strauss gave the field one of its lasting phrases with a book titled The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History.

Through the 19th century, liberal Protestant scholars wrote dozens of "Lives of Jesus." Ernest Renan in France and Adolf von Harnack in Germany are among the best known. Their Jesus tended to be a gentle teacher of universal morals. Thomas Jefferson worked in the same spirit in America. In 1820 he used a razor to cut the miracles and most of the supernatural out of the Gospels, leaving a small volume he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.⁵

In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published a survey of the whole enterprise, known in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus.⁶ He showed that each author's Jesus looked remarkably like the author. The liberal Jesus was a 19th-century European gentleman. Following the scholar Johannes Weiss, Schweitzer argued that the real figure was far stranger: a Jewish prophet who expected God to end the present age within his own generation. That portrait was alien to modern readers, and it ended the liberal Lives.

A German theologian, Martin Kähler, had already argued in 1892 that faith rests on the Christ the Bible preaches, and that reconstructions by scholars cannot supply it.⁷ Rudolf Bultmann, the most influential New Testament scholar of the early 20th century, went further. He held that the Gospels tell us very little about Jesus's personality and inner life, and that Christian faith does not need them to. Scholars often call this period the "no quest," though research never fully stopped.

The search reopened in October 1953, when Bultmann's former student Ernst Käsemann gave a lecture to fellow Marburg alumni arguing that the Gospels do preserve reliable memories of Jesus.⁸ This "new quest" produced most of the formal criteria described below. From the 1980s, a wave of scholars including E.P. Sanders and Geza Vermes put Jesus's Jewishness and his first-century setting at the center. N.T. Wright named this wave the "third quest."⁹ The Jesus Seminar, founded by Robert Funk in 1985, ran alongside it and reached very different conclusions.

Many scholars now find the numbered "quests" too tidy. The labels survive mainly as shorthand. Every portrait the search produced has also proved provisional. Schweitzer's warning still applies: historians tend to find a Jesus who resembles themselves. The field's best defense is open debate, and close attention to the evidence that resists every portrait.

How Historians Work

The Sources

Historians treat the Gospels as the end product of a long process. Catholic scholars Joseph Fitzmyer and Raymond Brown described three stages:¹⁰

1. The ministry of Jesus, about 28–30 CE: what Jesus said and did.
2. The oral tradition, about 30–65 CE: what his followers remembered, preached, and adapted for new audiences.
3. The written Gospels, about 65–100 CE: what the evangelists selected, edited, and arranged for their own communities.

The job is to work backward from stage three to stage one.

Broad consensus: Mark was written first, around 70 CE. Matthew and Luke, written in the following decades, both copied and edited Mark. Majority view: Matthew and Luke also drew independently on a lost written collection of sayings called Q, from the German Quelle, "source." A significant minority, including Mark Goodacre, argue that Q never existed and that Luke used Matthew. Matthew and Luke each also have material found nowhere else, which scholars label M and L. John draws on a separate tradition.

Watching how Matthew and Luke change Mark shows what each author cared about. Scholars call this redaction criticism, from redactor, "editor." Where an editor's habits are known, older material underneath becomes easier to spot.

Historians also use sources outside the four Gospels. The letters of Paul are the earliest Christian writings and date from the 50s CE. The Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus mention Jesus briefly. Actively debated: whether the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings found in Egypt in 1945, preserves traditions independent of the canonical Gospels.

The Criteria

To judge whether a saying or event goes back to Jesus, the new quest developed tests called criteria of authenticity. Five are used most often.¹¹

Embarrassment. Early Christians had no reason to invent material that caused them trouble. John's baptism was for repentance of sins, yet the Gospels report that Jesus received it (Mark 1:9). In Mark, Jesus admits he does not know the day or hour of the end (Mark 13:32).

Multiple attestation. Material found in several independent sources is less likely to be one author's invention. Jesus's ban on divorce appears in Mark, in Q, and in Paul (Mark 10:11–12; Luke 16:18; 1 Cor 7:10–11). His meals with tax collectors and outcasts appear across nearly every stream of tradition.

Discontinuity. Material that fits neither the Judaism of Jesus's day nor the later church may show what was distinctive about him. His refusal to have his disciples fast while he was with them is one example (Mark 2:18–20). Morna Hooker, E.P. Sanders, and Dale Allison warned that this test, used mechanically, cuts Jesus off from his own Jewish world.¹²

Coherence. Once a core of material is established, other material that fits with it gains probability.

Rejection and execution. Any reconstruction has to explain why Rome crucified Jesus. A harmless teacher of private morals would not have been executed as "King of the Jews" (Mark 15:26). His protest in the Temple and his choice of twelve disciples, recalling the twelve tribes of Israel, help explain why the authorities saw a threat.

Doubts About the Criteria

Actively debated: how much these tests can prove. Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter argued that the discontinuity test distorts the evidence. They proposed a criterion of historical plausibility instead.¹³ A tradition is plausible if it fits first-century Judaism and also helps explain the movement that grew from Jesus afterward.

Other scholars go further. In 2012 Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne edited a volume arguing that the criteria cannot cleanly separate "authentic" sayings from interpreted ones.¹⁴ Keith would drop them entirely. These scholars draw on research about how memory works. Every memory is already an interpretation, so historians should ask which picture of Jesus best explains the memories that survive. Dale Allison has made a related case: the broad patterns repeated across the tradition are more reliable than any single saying.¹⁵

What Historians Agree On

E.P. Sanders, John Meier, Bart Ehrman, Dale Allison, and Gerd Theissen each reached a similar outline.¹⁶

Broad consensus:

• Jesus was born a few years before the Common Era, late in the reign of Herod the Great, and grew up in Nazareth, a small Jewish village in Galilee.
• He lived as an observant Jew of his time.
• John the Baptist, a prophet who warned of God's coming judgment, baptized him in the Jordan River.
• He gathered disciples, including an inner group of twelve.
• He was known as a healer and exorcist. Historians can confirm the reputation. Whether God acted through him is a question of faith.
• He taught in parables and short sayings about the kingdom of God, and he shared meals with people others shunned.
• Around 30 CE, at Passover in Jerusalem, he caused a disturbance in the Temple courts.
• Temple authorities arrested him, and the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate had him crucified as a would-be "King of the Jews."

Majority view: Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. The word comes from the Greek for "revelation." Here it means he expected God to intervene soon, overthrow evil, restore Israel, and vindicate the poor. Sanders, Ehrman, Allison, and Paula Fredriksen have held versions of this view. Borg and John Dominic Crossan argued that Jesus's kingdom was a present reality more than a coming end. N.T. Wright reads Jesus's end-of-the-world language as imagery for events within history.

The central teachings in the earliest sources are love of enemies, forgiveness of debts, and the reversal of rich and poor. How literally Jesus meant them, and how far they depended on his expectation of the end, remain live questions.

Portraits That Didn't Hold Up

Two centuries of work have produced many portraits of Jesus. Most of the field has set the following aside.

The gentle moral teacher

The 19th-century liberal Jesus taught "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man." Schweitzer showed that this figure came from his authors' own values, and that the sources put prophecy about the end of the age at the center of Jesus's message. Few specialists today defend the liberal portrait. Even Borg and Crossan, who doubted the apocalyptic Jesus, rejected the 19th-century gentleman.

The Cynic sage

In the 1980s and 1990s, Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan compared Jesus to the Cynics, Greek philosophers who wandered without possessions and mocked social convention.¹⁷ Crossan's phrase was "a peasant Jewish Cynic." He argued that Jesus could have met Cynic ideas through nearby Greek-speaking cities such as Sepphoris. Some parallels are real, including instructions to travel without bag or sandals.

Minority view: most scholars reject the model. Sanders, Meier, Allison, and Ehrman have argued that it plays down Jesus's Jewish scripture, his debates over Jewish law, and his focus on Israel. No direct evidence places Cynic teachers in rural Galilee in the 20s CE. A wandering wit is also hard to square with a Roman execution for sedition. Crossan's defenders answer that his Jesus was a social radical, and that Rome had reason to crucify him.

The armed revolutionary

Reimarus first suggested that Jesus was a political rebel against Rome. S.G.F. Brandon revived the idea in Jesus and the Zealots (1967).¹⁸ The Zealots, who are often linked to the idea, emerged as an organized party only during the war of 66–70 CE.

Minority view: scholars almost universally reject an armed Jesus. Rome normally hunted down a rebel's followers, and none of his disciples were arrested with him. His command to love enemies is preserved in the sayings source Q (Luke 6:27; Matt 5:44). He was taken quietly at night, with no battle. Many scholars, Crossan and Borg among them, have seen Jesus as a political threat to Rome. Their Jesus challenged imperial power without weapons.

The harmonized Gospel Jesus

Harmonization blends all four Gospels into one seamless story and treats every detail as literal history. Historians reject it because the Gospels disagree in ways no blend can fix.

• In Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus clears the Temple in his final week. In John, he does it at the start of his ministry (John 2:13–17).
• In the first three Gospels, Jesus eats the Passover meal and dies the next day. In John, he dies the afternoon before Passover, as the lambs are slaughtered (John 19:14).
• His last words differ. In Mark he cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" In Luke he prays, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." In John he says, "It is finished" (Mark 15:34; Luke 23:46; John 19:30).

Each author shaped the story for his own readers. Blending them produces a Jesus found in no ancient text.

The Jesus who never existed

The claim that Jesus was invented has almost no support among historians, including secular ones. Did Jesus Actually Exist? covers the arguments and the evidence in detail.