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Since the 19th century, a gap has come to be perceived to exist between "the Jesus of faith" and "the Jesus of history". The two have often been seen as incompatible, to the extent that increased awareness of history, and the historical circumstances of Jesus's life, can seem to be unhelpful to the image of "the Jesus of faith" that has been formulated and propagated by the institutional church, for whom this "Jesus of faith" is paramount. Various answers to this apparent dilemma have been proposed. In an article in The Irish Times on 2nd March 2010 the Revd.Andrew Furlong, a dissident Anglican, articulated the view that many of the apparently historical aspects of Jesus's life depicted in the New Testament should be interprested metaphorically rather than factually. And in The Inquirer of 6th March 2010 the retired Unitarian Minister David Doel supported an even more traditional and conservative position: that the value of the insights deriving from "the Christ of faith" should not be diminished or undermined by what we can know of "the Jesus of history". If I may say so without appearing over-critical of Furlong and Doel and those like them, I think this debate has been hampered by the way in which "the Jesus of faith" has been understood as established and fixed: in other words, the parameters and positions that that "faith" involves have not been adequately questioned. I should like therefore to propose what is in effect an inversion of the Furlong-Doel position. On the assumption that the Faith of the Church as it has evolved represents, very often, a distortion of what applied in the very earliest environment -the Apostles themselves around Jesus, and then the Apostles going out individually or in groups into an essentially hostile world -, I would say that it is vital to our quest to recover as precisely as possible the historical detail relating to the life and teaching of Jesus and those around him. For there can and should be no conflict between "the Jesus of history" and "the Jesus of faith". If there is conflict, it is "the Jesus of faith" which must yield -as being an artificial construct in great part, not the other way round, as has too often in the past been the case. And, against this background, we can move on to the question of "The Date of the Crucifixion". For me something very dramatic, and with potentially serious personal consequences, evolved during the course of 1982-83. I was then Lecturer in Latin and Greek at Maynooth, the principal Catholic seminary in Ireland (a position I occupied from 1976 to 2000), with the seventeen senior Roman Catholic Archbishops and Bishops as my employers. In 1982 I had already been working on and off for fifteen years on the historical origins of Christianity, and along the way had reached the firm conclusion -for reasons I shall come to that the Crucifixion must have taken place in the year 36. Pope John Paul II's announcement, therefore, in 1982, that 1983 was to be a Holy Year, as marking the 1,950th anniversary of the Crucifixion -suggesting a Crucifixion date of 33 , came as a 'bolt out of the blue' for me; for I believed this decision to be fundamentally mistaken. Prudence might have dictated that I stayed silent in these circumstances. But I learned (on inquiry from senior priests whom I trusted) that acceptance of the year 33 was not an 'article of faith' among Catholics, and that -although of course I was not a Catholic it was perfectly possible in theory to remain a Catholic in good standing and support a date other than 33. And so I decided to go public. Articles and letters by me and others about my position appeared in late 1982 and early 1983 in The Irish Times, the Irish Sunday Independent, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph/The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and New Scientist; and in March 1983 I was interviewed for half an hour by a reporter (John Bowman) for one of R.T.E. radio's main current affairs programmes. I was certainly conscious that that interview was being listened to with intense interest -and a certain degree of scepticism -by the priests and bishops at Maynooth. Fortunately, I seemed to pass whatever test was involved as far as they were concerned. What, in brief, are my main reasons for supporting 36, rather than 29 or 30, or 32 or 33 -all years which have received backing and approval at various stages in the past? In the present context it is enough to observe that the date is closely bound up with, and consequentially dependent on, the unexpected question "When was John the Baptist beheaded?" All the evidence on this latter point tends towards very late in 34, or perhaps very early in 35. And since Tiberius, under whose emperorship the Crucifixion took place, ceased to be Emperor early in 37 -certainly before the spring and the Passover that year -, there are only two possible years after the death of John the Baptist, 35 and 36. Another consideration is the New Testament emphasis on John the Baptist as "forerunner" to Jesus. According to this view, Jesus could not be active until John's mission as "forerunner" was over. I would go as far as to suggest that the apparent time discrepancy between Matthew, Mark and Luke -who envisage a ministry for Jesus lasting little over a year -and John's Gospel -which describes a ministry spread out over at least three years -results from precisely the need to regard The Baptist as no more than "forerunner". For, if John died in late 34/early 35 and the latest possible date for the Crucifixion was in spring 36, no more than fourteen to sixteen months lie in between; and the shortened time-frame of Matthew, Mark and Luke is a condensation imposed for that reason. But, within the wider actual and historical framework, John the Baptist was much more than merely "forerunner". For the later Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, John the Baptist was the major prophet, and they lived their lives, religiously, under the influence of his teaching and example. And, even in the New Testament, it is clear that John's activity (as Baptizer) was not limited to the period before the baptism of Jesus: a stray vestige of the original wider emphasis has escaped the censor's net at John 3.22-23. Let me translate these verses myself directly from the New Testament Greek: "After these things Jesus and his disciples came to Judaea, and Jesus spent time there with them [his disciples] and carried out baptisms. And John also was baptizing at Aenon near to Salem, since there was much water there".
This undoubtedly is a surviving fragment of 'original John', embedded in 'developed John', and tells us two remarkable things which the institutional church -with its figment of John as 'forerunner -would have preferred us not to know. Since Jesus has been baptized by John in chapter I, and John is still active here later, in chapter 3, John's career as 'Baptizer' did not conveniently lead up to, and then come to its culmination with, his baptism of Jesus. There was overlap and rivalry -between the two, extending over a much longer period than we might care to imagine from the bare remains of the canonical record. If John the Evangelist's suggestion of an at least three-year ministry of Jesus is correct -and I think it is -, the overlap between The Baptist and Jesus was in fact something of the order of two years at the minimum.
Dr.Martin Pulbrook 21st March 2010. |