Book Review: Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence

Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus consists of essays written by members of the Institute of Biblical Research, discussed at meetings of the IBR Jesus Group from 1999 to 2008, and revised prior to publication.

In the first essay, entitled “The Historical Enterprise and Historical Jesus Research,” Webb offers a lucid discussion of history, historiography, and historical method, particularly as they relate to historical Jesus research. Webb suggests that students of biblical texts must distinguish between the description of an event by the biblical author and that author's interpretive explanation of divine causality for that event (p. 39). He then offers three basic approaches to this distinction. In an ontological naturalistic history, descriptions and explanations that involve divine causation are rejected because “cause and effect within the space-time universe is understood to operate within a closed continuum” (p. 40). In contrast, a critical theistic history is one “in which reality includes not only the physical, space-time universe but also a supra-mundane, supernatural world that can and does interact with humans in the physical, space-time universe” (p. 41). A middle way may be found in a methodological naturalistic history, in which “the historian is methodologically limited to causation within the physical, space-time universe, but this does not limit the historian's personal ontological world-view, just her/his historical method as a historian” (p. 42). Representatives of each of these approaches may be found among the contributors to this volume.

The remaining chapters consider twelve key events and activities in Jesus' life that are deemed to have a high probability of historicity and to be significant for understanding Jesus: Jesus' baptism by John (Webb); the relation of the proclamation of the kingdom of God and the exorcisms (Craig A. Evans); the historicity and purpose of Jesus' choosing of the twelve disciples (Scot McKnight); the authenticity and significance of Jesus' table fellowship with sinners (Craig L. Blomberg); the Synoptic Sabbath controversies as a means to understanding Jesus' attitude toward Mosaic law (Donald A. Hagner); Peter's declaration concerning Jesus' identity (Michael J. Wilkins); Jesus' entry into Jerusalem (Brent Kinman); the temple incident (Klyne R. Snodgrass); the Last Supper (I. Howard Marshall); the Jewish examination of Jesus (Bock); the Roman examination and crucifixion of Jesus (Webb); and Jesus' empty tomb and his appearances in Jerusalem (Grant R. Osborne).

Each of these essays seeks to achieve three goals: to establish the historicity of the event; to explore socio-cultural contextual information in order better to understand the event in its first-century ce context; and to consider the significance of the event for understanding Jesus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, each of these events is deemed to be historical, with the certainty of the events ranging from “historically plausible/probable” to “highly probable.” While each essay offers a critical assessment of the relevant biblical passages and a helpful, though not exhaustive survey of secondary literature, there are points at which the portrait of Jesus that emerges mirrors that presented in the Gospel accounts. This may be seen, for example, in Chapter 8, where Jesus' self-understanding is consistent with that found in the Gospel of Mark: Jesus understood himself to be the Messiah and accepted this title, but rejected a political messiahship, qualifying the title with the Son of Man statements (pp. 368–69).

Socio-cultural contextual information typically refers to that which can be found in the Jewish Scriptures and other Second Temple literature, especially the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. A number of essays do, however, consider evidence from the Greco-Roman world, rabbinic literature, and early Christian literature.

Perhaps the most problematic essay in this volume is the final one, in which Osborne seeks to establish that Jesus' resurrection can be historically affirmed. He discusses the canonical statements concerning the empty tomb and surveys the context of resurrection within the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and Hellenism. He acknowledges that there were no witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus (p. 818). Nevertheless, he asserts that historians may move “from effect to cause in determining what is history,” and suggests that historians may find the resurrection to be the cause that accounts for the effect, namely, the entirety of the Christian movement (p. 818). Thus, he concludes that the resurrection is an historical event. What Osborne has established in this chapter, however, is not that Jesus' resurrection is an historical event, but that members of the early Jesus movement believed that Jesus' resurrection was an historical event.

Ultimately, a cohesive portrait of Jesus emerges, consisting of a messianic self-awareness. Jesus' actions are an enactment of restoration eschatology (p. 475) and they betray his self-understanding as the Messiah (p. 368), “a central eschatological figure of promise” (p. 420) and “the eschatological figure in God's promised program” (p. 837). He will bring about the eschatological fulfillment of the Kingdom of God (p. 286) and his exorcisms are seen as “proof of the defeat and retreat of Satan's kingdom in the face of the advancing rule of God” (p. 176). His table fellowship with sinners not only functions as an eschatological symbol of Jesus' centrality in bringing holiness, but also foreshadows the eschatological banquet (pp. 243–44). Jesus' self-understanding of his death contains both eschatological and soteriological dimensions (p. 579) and he anticipated his own exaltation (p. 661).

In such a lengthy volume, one might wish for a subject index to complement the indices of ancient texts and modern authors. Nevertheless, this work offers a significant contribution to the ongoing quest for the historical Jesus by scholars with a faith commitment. Both scholars and graduate students will benefit from a study of this book.