Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

the
Antiquities
was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring movement.
    It is that movement, not its founder, that receives the attention of second-century
     historians like Tacitus (d. 118) and Pliny the Younger (d. 113), both of whom mention
     Jesus of Nazareth but reveal little about him, save for his arrest and execution—an
     important historical note, as we shall see, but one that sheds little light on the
     details of Jesus’s life. We are therefore left with whatever information can be gleaned
     from the New Testament.
    The first written testimony we have about Jesus of Nazareth comes from the epistles
     of Paul, an early follower of Jesus who died sometime around 66 C.E . (Paul’s first epistle, 1 Thessalonians, can be dated between 48 and 50 C.E ., some two decades after Jesus’s death.)The trouble with Paul, however, is that he displays an extraordinary lack of interest
     in the historical Jesus. Only three scenes from Jesus’s life are ever mentioned in
     his epistles: the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–26), the crucifixion (1 Corinthians
     2:2), and, most crucially for Paul, the resurrection, without which, he claims, “our
     preaching is empty and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Paul may be an
     excellent source for those interested in the early formation of Christianity, but
     he is a poor guide for uncovering the historical Jesus.
    That leaves us with the gospels, which present their own set of problems. To begin
     with, with the possible exception of the gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have
     were written by the person after whom they are named. That actually is true of most
     of the books in the New Testament. Such so-called
pseudepigraphical
works, or works attributed to but not written by a specific author, were extremely
     common in the ancient world and should by no means be thought of as forgeries. Naming
     a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person’s beliefs or representing
     his or her school of thought. Regardless, the gospels are not, nor were they ever
     meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness
     accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds recorded by people who knew him. They are testimonies
     of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events
     they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the
     man.
    The most widely accepted theory on the formation of the gospels, the “Two-Source Theory,”
     holds that Mark’s account was written first sometime after 70 C.E ., about four decades after Jesus’s death. Mark had at his disposal a collection of
     oral and perhaps a handful of written traditions that had been passed around by Jesus’s
     earliest followers for years. By adding a chronological narrative to this jumble of
     traditions, Mark created a wholly new literary genre called
gospel
, Greek for “good news.” Yet Mark’s gospel is a short and somewhat unsatisfying one
     for many Christians. There is noinfancy narrative; Jesus simply arrives one day on the banks of the Jordan River to
     be baptized by John the Baptist. There are no resurrection appearances. Jesus is crucified.
     His body is placed in a tomb. A few days later, the tomb is empty. Even the earliest
     Christians were left wanting by Mark’s brusque account of Jesus’s life and ministry,
     and so it was left to Mark’s successors, Matthew and Luke, to improve upon the original
     text.
    Two decades after Mark, between 90 and 100 C.E ., the authors of Matthew and Luke, working independently of each other and with Mark’s
     manuscript as a template, updated the gospel story by adding their own unique traditions,
     including two different and conflicting infancy narratives as well as a series of
     elaborate resurrection stories to satisfy their Christian readers. Matthew and Luke
     also relied on what must have been an early and fairly well distributed collection
     of Jesus’s sayings that scholars have termed
Q
(German for
Quelle
, or “source”). Although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we
     can infer its contents by compiling those verses that Matthew and Luke share in common
     but that do not appear in Mark.
    Together, these three gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—became known as the
Synoptics
(Greek for “viewed together”) because they more or less present a common narrative
     and chronology