Jesus' Activity in the Gospels: "only some three weeks"?

There is an idea attributed to B. H. Streeter (1874-1937) that attempts to articulate how much time Jesus' narrated ministry, in the canonical gospels, actually takes up. He is reported to have said that the action described in the gospels, with the exception of the Temptation story, would actually only occupy about three weeks. The point he is apparently making is a good if rather obvious one -- that what is narrated about Jesus' life in the Synoptics and John, even if it is were all historical, amounts to the tiniest fraction of Jesus' life. 

But did Streeter actually say this, and if so, when and where? I have been searching for the origins of the idea, and the earliest reference I can find is the following:

"They [the gospels] are extremely brief - B. H. Streeter once cal­culated that, apart from the forty days and nights in the wilderness (of which we are told virtually nothing) everything reported to have been said and done by Jesus in all four gospels would have occupied only some three weeks, which leaves the overwhelmingly greater part of his life and deeds unrecorded."

This is from Dennis Nineham, "Epilogue", in John Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM, 1977), 186-204 (188-9). I can't find the idea that he attributes to Streeter in any of his written works, and Nineham himself does not reference it, so is Nineham reporting an oral tradition? As far as I can tell, Nineham himself did not learn directly from Streeter. Although Nineham did go to Oxford, he was too young to have met Streeter -- only 16 years old when Streeter died in a plane crash in 1937.

On twitter, Brandon Massey speculated that Nineham might have picked it up from his teacher, R. H. Lightfoot, who perhaps reported this as a Streeter comment, which I think sounds quite plausible. 

It is also possible that the "three weeks" comment is a mis-remembered or mis-applied distortion of something that Streeter actually said. What is making me wonder here is that Streeter does in fact talk about "three weeks" in a related context:

Now of the last journey to Jerusalem, and the events of Passion Week, Mark presents a clear, detailed, and coherent account; and this, dealing with the events of, at the outside, three weeks, occupies about one-third of the whole Gospel. The rest of the Gospel is clearly a collection of detached stories as indeed tradition affirms it to be; and the total number of incidents recorded is so small that the gaps in the story must be the more considerable part of it. (B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1924), 424).

And if Streeter thought that Mark's Passion Narrative occupied "three weeks", could he also have maintained that "everything reported to have been said and done by Jesus in all four gospels would have occupied only some three weeks"? So we are now at at least six weeks, and there is clearly a contradiction here, unless the oral tradition also forgets the "three weeks" of the Passion Narrative.

Chasing down oral traditions is notoriously difficult since they only survive, before and outside of oral / aural recordings, in the writings in which they are represented, but this case provides an interesting analogy to first century Jesus research. Nineham's comment in 1977 is at least forty years removed from when the historical Streeter may or may not have made these remarks, rather as Mark is at least forty years removed from what he reports about Jesus, whose actual lifetime contained a great deal more activity than is reported in (pseudo?)-Streeter's "three weeks". 

How would Jesus have proved his own existence?

I like to dabble in the discussions on Jesus' existence from time to time, all the more so since I had a stab at putting together my own thoughts in NT Pod 47: Did Jesus Exist? last year.  James McGrath continues to keep the issue alive in his blog and his latest post Mythicism Around the Blogosphere provides links to recent activity.  I particularly enjoyed Loren Rosson's post on The Existence of Jesus and Doug Chaplin's Inventing the Mythical Jesus. Of course a lot of the discussion comes on the back of the new book by Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, which I was lucky enough to read and comment on in manuscript.

If I were in facetious mood, I would say: If only people were as interested in things that really matter, like the existence of Q!   I must admit that the question of the existence of Jesus strikes me as an extraordinary one.  Are there any other ancient figures about whom we torture ourselves in this way?  In my podcast on the topic, I said that in some respects it is a good question because it can keep us honest.  It pushes us to wrestle with the primary sources and to reflect on the nature of ancient history.  These are good things.  But good academic study is often a matter of asking good academic questions and it is not clear that the question "Did Jesus exist?" always produces the best academic discussions.

I am tempted to say that the problem with the question "Did Jesus exist?" is that it depends what we mean by "Jesus".  Where mythicism has popular appeal is in providing an antidote to fundamentalist Christianity and a particular version of a wonder-working superman. Most scholars don't believe in the fundamentalists' Jesus, practically by definition.  For those who do not know a lot about New Testament scholarship, mythicism can provide a refreshing one-stop shop for dealing with something they find problematic on other grounds.  I am not here talking about those who publish on mythicism as much as those who find their works appealing.

Even if we refine the question to "Did the historical Jesus exist?", we still don't have an easy time of it.  There are so many different reconstructions of the historical Jesus, each one only an approximation of what the historian can know on the basis of the extant sources.  There are lots of historical Jesuses that I do not believe in.  I don't believe in Crossan's historical Jesus because I don't believe in his sources.  I don't believe in Wright's historical Jesus because he believes all his sources.  I don't believe in Morton Smith's historical Jesus because he composed one of his sources.

And in this context, the word "exist" means what?  There's a kind of absurd reductionism in trying to load complex historical analysis of ancient source material into one natty little question.  I don't have any doubt whatsoever that the primary sources are, ultimately, witnessing to traditions some of which emerged in connection with Jesus of Nazareth but the really interesting work is not going to emerge from asking the question "Did Jesus exist?"

I wonder what Jesus would have made of the question?  How would he have established his own existence?  Herod the Tetrarch was rumoured to have worried that the figure they were calling Jesus might actually be John the Baptist risen from the dead.  John the Baptist is reported to have worried about who Jesus was too -- was he the coming one, or should they expect somebody else?  And according to the accounts of Jesus' arrest, they needed Judas to identify which one was Jesus, like Spartacus, or Brian.  

There is a delightful Roman joke that Mary Beard tells in her fantastic recent series Meet the Romans, here reported in The Guardian,

Beard tells me a Roman joke. "A guy meets another in the street and says: 'I thought you were dead.' The bloke says: 'Can't you see I'm alive?' The first replies: 'But the person who told me you were dead is more reliable than you.'" It slayed them in 4BC Rome. Beard takes the joke to have a serious point: "You realise that in Roman society, where there were no ID cards or passports, proving your existence required different criteria. The evidence of a reliable person was perhaps the strongest you had. It was very different from our society, but who's to say it was worse?"

I love this joke, and I like the lesson that Beard draws from it.  And it reminds us once again, as if we needed it, that doing ancient history is not like doing modern history.  The vast majority of ordinary punters made no impact on the archaeological record from antiquity.  Their impact, their "existence", if you like, can only be measured in so far as they influenced the memories of those who told their stories, and only in so far as those embellished, interpreted, creative memories ultimately found their way into the texts that managed to survive.

Admitting our Ignorance about the Historical Jesus

My latest In My View piece is up at Bible and Interpretation:

Admitting our Ignorance about the Historical Jesus

Regular readers of this blog may recognise that it repeats, deletes, adjusts and adds to some of the themes that I have been discussing here in the series on Missing Pieces. It is also my belated birthday tribute to Rudolf Bultmann whose 125th birthday was last week (see Bultmann posts and tributes).

Historical Jesus Missing Pieces IV: Placing the Baptsm

I have been reflecting here for a while about the problem of the Missing Pieces in the Historical Jesus puzzle. One of my concerns is that we might be putting the right pieces in the wrong places, or arranging them into the wrong pose. I wanted to concentrate on the phenomenon in those posts, and to dwell for a little on the dinosaur analogy, but now I would like to try to illustrate what I am talking about in the first of a couple of examples.

Let's take the example of Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist. This is generally regarded as one of the most secure pieces of data we have about the Historical Jesus, and many use it as a key piece in their reconstructions. I am inclined to think that they may be right and that this is a reasonably secure piece of data. Now, for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is indeed a good piece of data, the equivalent of finding a dinosaur fossil, and ask about how we integrate it into the picture as a whole.

Most reconstructions of the Historical Jesus place this event at the beginning of what they call his "public ministry". Here is one example among many:

"Jesus went out into the wilderness to be baptized by John. The fact that we know almost nothing of Jesus' life prior to his baptism by John suggests that John's baptismal ministry inaugurated Jesus' own public work."

Paul J. Achtemeier, Joel B. Green, Marianne Meye Thompson (eds.), Introducing the New Testament: its literature and theology (2nd edition, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 211.

The placing of the baptism at the beginning of Jesus' ministry is, however, just a guess based on its positioning in the Synoptic Gospels. To assume that the baptism takes place at the beginning of Jesus' public life is simply to accept the narrative of Mark's Gospel at face value. The form-critics may have made a few mistakes, but the basis of their work, scepticism about the (accurate, chronological) biographical framework of the Gospels has not been successfully challenged.

There are, after all, obvious narrative and theological factors influencing Mark's placement of the baptism at the beginning of the Gospel. In his construction, John the Baptist is the Elijah figure who prepares the way for the Messiah to whom he is subordinated. In this construction, Mark is hardly going to position the baptism story half-way through his narrative, even if it actually occurred much later in Jesus' life, if, for that matter, Mark had any idea when it happened. The narrative structure is designed to subordinate John to Jesus, to make him the forerunner, who is arrested before Jesus begins public ministry in Galilee (Mark 1.14) , separating the two men both geographically and temporally.

In other words, the quotation above, which is fairly typical of Historical Jesus research, simply presupposes that the baptism is the first major event in Jesus' life that we know about. It is rarely argued that the baptism marked the beginning of Jesus' public ministry. The fact that we haven't heard anything about Jesus' life before Mark 1 does not make Mark 1 chronologically earlier any more than it makes Mark 8 chronologically the mid-point of Jesus actual, historical career.

Indeed a careful reading of the texts suggests that the Marcan construct is just that, a Marcan construct. There are indications that the two men were active at the same time. John 3.22-26 depicts Jesus baptizing alongside John, with the clear acknowledgement that the two men had parallel careers, at least for some time. Other traditions like Mark 2.18 (mentioning the disciples of John) may also witness to overlapping careers. My guess would be that John the Baptist did die before Jesus, as the Gospels suggest, and that it could have caused some reflection by Jesus on his own death, but that is a guess.

So let us imagine this kind of scenario. Jesus is engaged in some kind of public ministry in Galilee for a year or so before he has met John the Baptist. He hears about John and like several others he makes pilgrimage to the Jordan river to see him. Jesus has an epiphany; it's a confirmation that he has been doing the right thing by leaving family and home and preaching and healing. Perhaps things happened like this; perhaps they didn't. My point is not to argue for a different reconstruction but rather to draw attention to our ignorance about where to place the data and how to do our reconstruction.

Historical Jesus Missing Pieces Addendum: The Wrong Pose

In a recent post, Historical Jesus Missing Pieces III: Putting Pieces in the Wrong Place, I talked about the potential in Historical Jesus studies for taking the pieces we have and putting them in the wrong place.  The analogy I worked with was Gideon Mantell's initial reconstruction of the Iguanadon in which he put what turned out to be the animal's pointed thumb on its head, as a horn.   I began thinking about this problem after a recent visit to the natural history museum in Washington DC where the story was mentioned, briefly, in a dinosaur exhibit.  Then yesterday an interesting story appeared on the BBC News website:

Giant Dinosaurs "held heads high"

Victoria Gill

Diplodocus's impressive neck sweeps along the main hall of London's Natural History museum, welcoming its visitors.

Now, findings suggest that 150 million years ago the giant may have held its head higher for much of the time.

By studying the skeletons of living vertebrates, Mike Taylor, from the University of Portsmouth, and his team, reshaped the dinosaur's resting pose . . . .

It's a story I enjoyed because it might help us further to develop analogies for the reconstructive process in Historical Jesus research. Even if we have a pretty good collection of data, just how good are we at arranging those data in the right way? In my next post in this series, I will provide a couple of examples of the kind of thing that I am referring to.

Historical Jesus Missing Pieces III: Putting Pieces in the Wrong Place

In a couple of recent posts, I have been reflecting on the question, The Historical Jesus: What if the key pieces are missing? with a follow-up post, The Historical Jesus: More on those missing pieces. I would now like to turn to a related problem that is again insufficiently considered by those engaging in the quest. What if we are putting the pieces we have in the wrong place?  The fact of absent data has a direct impact on our reconstructions of the historical Jesus.  It may be that we are taking pieces and placing them wrongly, and that our partial record does not allow us to see where we are doing this.  Let me explain what I mean with an analogy.

Gideon Mantell was a nineteenth century British paleontologist who discovered the fossilized bones of a huge dinosaur he named an "Iguanodon".  Mantell's wife apparently discovered the bone pictured on the left (Source: Paper Dinosaurs 1824-1969) and Mantell, in his reconstruction, imagined this bone to be the dinosaur's horn and promptly placed it on the animal's nose (sketched here; illustrated here).   However, further discoveries, later in the century, made it clear that Mantell's guess was wrong.  The bone was not a horn but was instead its pointed thumb!

What if we are taking pieces of data and misapplying them? How will we be able to know? In the case of the Iguanodon, further discoveries corrected earlier reconstructions.  Absent more discoveries ofst Historical Jesus data, how can we know where we are putting (good) data into the wrong place(s)?  Another way of looking at the problem is to think of Historical Jesus research as a game of join the dots (apparently called "connect the dots" in the America) in which only a few of the dots have been given to us.  What kind of distorted picture might we be painting with only some of the dots available?

I should clarify that I am not trying to say that we cannot know anything about the life and personality of Jesus.  I am with scholars like E. P. Sanders in thinking that there is a reasonable amount that we can know about the historical Jesus.  My point is that saying some things with reasonable confidence is not the same thing as being able to provide something approaching a complete picture. It is the unavoidable fact of studying ancient figures that our information will be partial and, worse, that the parts that we have will not always be the ones that would be most telling.

The Historical Jesus: More on those missing pieces

In my post The Historical Jesus: What if key pieces are missing?, I suggested that we need to proceed with a greater degree of caution than is usual in the quest. It is in the nature of ancient history that the data we have is partial as well as prejudiced. We should be wary of proceeding as if we could retrieve everything we need to retrieve if only we hone our methods carefully enough.

I am grateful for some interesting comments on that post as well as a helpful post by Loren Rosson on The Busybody, Thoroughgoing Eschatology and Thoroughgoing Humility, including an apposite quotation from John Meier,

And yet the vast majority of these deeds and words, the "reasonably complete" record of the "real" Jesus, is irrevocably lost to us today. This is no new insight of modern agnostic scholars. Traditionally Christianity has spoken of "the hidden years" of Jesus' life -- which amounted to all but three or four of them! (A Marginal Jew, Vol I, p. 22).

In spite of the salutary reminder, though, Meier sometimes talks as if we can make conclusions with confidence about the "total" pattern of Jesus' activity as, for example, in this excerpt:

I would suggest that, if we are to continue to use the problematic category of "unique" in describing the historical Jesus, perhaps it is best to use it not so much of individual sayings or deeds of Jesus as of the total Gestalt, the total configuration or pattern of this Jew who proclaimed the present yet future kingdom, who was also an itinerant prophet and miracle worker in the guise of Elijah, who was also a teacher and interpreter of the Mosaic Law, who was also a charismatic leader who called disciples to follow him at great price, who was also a religious personage whose perceived messianic claims wound up getting him crucified by the Roman prefect, in the end, a crucified religious figure who was soon proclaimed by his followers as risen from the dead and Lord of all. It is this total and astounding configuration of traits and claims that makes for the uniqueness of Jesus as a historical figure within 1st-century Judaism. (The Present State of the "Third Quest" for the Historical Jesus, 476-7).

In context, Meier is making a broader point about Jesus' uniqueness and how to configure that uniqueness, but in the course of making that point, he works with a presumption that it is possible to generate a "total" configuration or pattern for Jesus. He is assuming that all the really important elements about Jesus were retained somewhere in the tradition and that these enable us to make claims with a degree of confidence about some kind of complete picture.  

The desire to draw a complete picture is in fact necessary to the claims about Jesus' uniqueness.  If key pieces of data are missing, we are not able to speak confidently about his "uniqueness", especially when it comes to theological claims.   Dennis Nineham sounded a warning about this over thirty years ago in his "Epilogue" at the end of The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM, 1977), 186-204, a piece that effectively undermined many of the claims made in the earlier part of that famous collection of essays.   Where the essayists often spoke about Jesus' unique relationship with God, and so on, Nineham questioned whether such claims can be made with any kind of confidence in responsible historical research.

One of the scholars mentioned by Nineham is Joachim Jeremias, who is also famous for his claim that Jesus' address to God as "Abba", in private prayer, was utterly unique.  The claim is of course a problematic one  because of the paucity of evidence of Jews' private prayer in antiquity.  Perhaps Jesus' address was unique but we could never know.  It is the nature of ancient history that our source material, especially on matters like this, is seriously limited.  There is an extent to which contemporary Jesus researchers have pulled back from bold claims like those made by Jeremias, but that same assumption, that all the really important data is present somewhere, and is sufficiently robust for us to be able to make large claims, still underlies a lot of our thinking about the historical Jesus.

The Historical Jesus: What if key pieces are missing?

When preparing to teach the Historical Jesus last year, I asked the question Why is the Historical Jesus Quest so difficult? The first difficulty, I suggested, is that so much evidence is missing.  Having just come to the end of another enjoyable Historical Jesus course here at Duke, I find that this is something that continues to haunt me, in spite of the fact that it seems not to trouble others engaging in the quest so much. So I would like to develop my concerns here by asking: What if key pieces are missing?

There is an assumption at work in a lot of historical Jesus research that all the relevant and necessary materials for a reasonably complete picture of Jesus are available. They are available somewhere and we can get at them somehow. We just have to work hard to get to them. We spend many painful hours sifting and honing criteria because we feel that the literary deposit is somewhere bound to contain all the material of real importance. We speak of what we can say about the historical Jesus "with confidence" because we are sure that the really key data has to be present. Only matters peripheral to the task of reconstructing the key elements in his life has disappeared.

The assumption develops out of an unrealistic perspective on the task. We proceed as if we are doing the work of restoration, clearing the dirt, the damage, the rust in order to unveil the real Jesus. But the quest is not about restoration.  It is about ancient history and when understood as ancient history, discussion about the historical Jesus should constantly involve the reminder that massive amounts of key data must be missing.

It may be that we seldom reflect on this fact because the ideological stakes in so major a figure inevitably interact with historical research on him. Those ideological interests are, of course, many and varied, but the same kind of optimistic assumptions about the data set are shared by those from different ends of the spectrum, from those whose faith commitment compels them to regard the scriptural deposit as definitive, to those who look to a range of materials and methods in a bid to reconstruct a Jesus who is uncongenial to later Christian orthodoxy.

Let me illustrate the kind of thing I am talking about. According to almost everyone, one of the most certain things that we can know about the historical Jesus is that he was a disciple of John the Baptist. This is bedrock stuff and anyone familiar with Jesus research will know all about why.  As it happens, I am inclined to agree with this;  I suspect that Jesus did indeed have an association with John the Baptist and that it was important, in some way, in his development.  But how important was John the Baptist, as an influence on Jesus, in comparison to other people?  We know about the link between the two men because John the Baptist was himself famous -- Josephus devotes more time to him than he does to Jesus.  So the tradition remembers and underlines the association between the two men.  But our influences are seldom solely other famous people.  Perhaps the major influence on Jesus was his grandfather, whose fascination with Daniel 7 informed Jesus' apocalyptic mindset.  Or perhaps it was Rabbi Matia in Capernaum who used to enjoy telling parables drawn from local agriculture.  Or perhaps it was that crazy wandering Galilean exorcist Lebbaeus who used to talk about casting out demons by the Spirit of God.  The fact is that we just don't know.  We can't know.  Our knowledge about the historical Jesus is always and inevitably partial.  If we take the quest of the historical Jesus seriously as an aspect of ancient history, we have to admit that many of the key pieces must be missing, don't we?