Dan Snow's History Hit - Who Was Jesus, The Man?

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Followed by billions and worshipped across the planet, Jesus is the most famous person who ever lived. Jesus Christ is revered as a prophet and the Messiah by Christians but who was Jesus, the man, who was born in Judea in the 1st Century AD and preached around Galilee during the Roman Empire?What we know of Jesus largely comes from the four gospels of the New Testament which are regarded as the most authoritative accounts of Jesus' life. As a poor labourer who only really appeared on the scene for a very short time, it's no surprise there's no archeological evidence of Jesus. Only kings and emperors leave a trace. This means historians have to find other ways to corroborate the details in the gospels.In this Christmas episode Joan Taylor, Professor in Early Christianity at Kings College London, compares parallel details across all the gospels, looks at contemporary textiles, Roman historical accounts and evidence of Jesus' contemporaries to piece together a biography of the man who changed the world. Produced by Mariana Des Forges, mixed by Joseph Knight.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're approaching Christmas, the time at which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. With absolutely no evidence of him having been born on the 25th of December, was he born at all? Did Jesus exist? Is he a historic figure? Joan Taylor, a professor of Christian origins at King's College London, is coming on the podcast to tell me why. She's written a book called What Did Jesus Look Like? Spoiler, not a gigantic blue-eyed Scandinavian Viking that you occasionally might see on churches you stroll into.

And she is the ideal person to tell us what we think we know about Jesus and why this man, born in what is now Israel-Palestine, in an obscure village, the son of a peasant woman who worked as a carpenter and then wandered about for a few years spreading the news and was then brutally executed has become the most famous person on earth. A man worshipped by billions of our fellow citizens. It's a wild story folks and now's the time of year to be talking about it. So here's Joan Taylor. Merry Christmas to you all. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Joan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

I don't know any other way to ask this other than just to start by going, how much do we know about Jesus as a historic figure? I know that's your whole of your life work in one sentence. Where can we start? Should we start with it written? Is it archaeology? How can we get at Jesus? Our resources are mainly in the New Testament.

And it's how we interpret the New Testament, what we do, how we tease out the material in the New Testament, what we prioritize. We can look outside the New Testament as well. We can look at the archaeology, the cultural context. But our core stuff is in the New Testament. And why do we trust the New Testament? I guess the people that decided on putting the four gospels as we have them, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John in the New Testament had reasons to decide that they were the most reliable, most authoritative writings on Jesus. And we actually, as historians, we order them like this.

We consider the Gospel of Mark, the oldest one, then Matthew, then Luke, then John. We can compare them. We can see how the story develops. We can see what they edited, what they didn't like, what they liked. And we can work out what has the most chance of being authentic or the oldest memory. Can you give me a brief bio of Jesus? Okay, for someone who doesn't know who Jesus was, I mean, he is the most famous figure in the world, I think. That would go without saying.

People who don't know much about Christianity will still know that there is this figure, Jesus. He can be recognized. People know that there was this man in first century Judea who people claimed was really fantastic, was in some way a savior, a king, a great prophet, a great healer. And terrible things happened to him in that the Romans, who were in charge of the security of the country of Judea, arrested him as a troublemaker, or what we would consider a terrorist, and had him horribly executed in a way that was designed to discourage other people from rebelling against Rome. And this happened in the early decades of the first century. Our whole time is reckoned on the basis of the supposed birth date of Jesus in the year one.

So Jesus' life became something that then was reflected upon. The claim was made by those who were close to him that he had risen from the dead. There were experiences of him having risen from the dead. And that idea of him having a continuing spirit that lasts until the present day is something that is foundational for Christians. Do we think he's wandering around performing miracles from an early age, or does he live in relative obscurity and then hit his stride towards the end of his life? You know, later on in Christianity, there are what they call infancy gospels, where they try and fill in the details of Jesus' wondrous childhood. But in terms of the Gospels we have in the New Testament,

there's really nothing very much about him as a child. He really does arrive on the scene as an adult. And it's almost like they're saying, okay, don't think about how he was before. That's not really important. The important thing is what happens when he goes to the Jordan River. And he goes to the Jordan River because there is a prophet, John the Baptist, who is calling people to repentance and saying that a new age is going to dawn and you better watch out. Come and be repentant,

be ready for this great transformation. So John the Baptist is actually described by the Jewish historian Josephus, who was writing in Rome at the end of the first century as a good man and calling people to be immersed, to be baptized in the Jordan. And he had a huge following in the Gospel of Mark. It says all of Jerusalem, all Judea went out to John the Baptist. You know, this is slight exaggeration, but it shows how incredibly important he was. And Jesus goes to John the Baptist and has some kind of extraordinary experience. And all the Gospels indicate that it's from that point that Jesus then feels empowered by the Holy Spirit. And he needs to go off and tell people about what's going to happen.

And how old is he approximately at this point? About 30, according to the Gospel of Luke. Yeah. And he does that for how many years? How old is he when he ends up in Jerusalem getting in trouble with the authorities? That's another big question. How many years was he actually doing his stuff in Galilee? Some people say,

okay, probably about three years. That's on the basis of a chronology established by the Gospel of John. But my personal feeling is on the basis of the Gospel of Mark, he really didn't have very long. He was in Galilee for not even a full year, I think. And then he went to Passover in Jerusalem and he was arrested and executed. I think it was a really short mission he had. He didn't have long before the authorities came down on him. Let's dig back into that question about those authorities. Is anyone else taking notes apart from his disciples, his followers, his fans? Can we see him in any contemporary inscriptions or descriptions or any administrative records at this time? notes apart from his disciples, his followers, his fans. Can we see him in any contemporary inscriptions or descriptions or any administrative records at this time?

No. We can see people like Pontius Pilate, who was the governor of Judea. There's actually been found a really lovely inscription in the 1960s in Caesarea. It's a self-aggrandizing inscription of Pontius Pilate as prefect of Judea. So we know that Pontius Pilate existed and he is there in the Gospels condemning Jesus to the cross. What tends to happen in history, as you'll know, is history is the story of great men. And so they are the ones who get recorded. And Jesus was a troublemaker.

He was on the margins of the empire. He was not a well-to-do guy. The only people who really get recorded in history by their contemporaries are great kings and generals. So we shouldn't be alarmed about the historicity of Jesus by the fact he doesn't appear anywhere else. No, because, I mean, he appears in quite a lot of different writings. And if you say that he didn't exist, you'd have to account for the impact that he had so soon after he died, like what happened in terms of the fire of Rome and the fact that there were Christians in Rome at that time. So there would be a kind of huge hole if you tried to explain all of the impact of Christians.

And they were prepared to die. And you don't get so fired up that you were prepared to die on the basis of some story. There really was a foundational person that really gave them all of this great enthusiasm. And in Paul, who is in many ways another sort of founder of Christianity, he never met Jesus, did he? But we know he's well-attested. He is, but not with inscriptions. He's well-attested in that he wrote his own letters. You could say they were made up by other people after his time, if you wanted to doubt Paul's existence. But, you know, Jesus didn't write anything down. It all had to rely on the memory of other people. But he thought

that the whole world was going to be transformed. He thought that the world as we knew it was going to pass away. So there wasn't any reason to record anything. What do we think Jesus and his family would have looked like? I was very aware from looking at ancient textiles, how different the textiles were from all of the film and art portrayals of Jesus. And thinking about what people wore really motivated me. I wanted to get clear the kind of clothing Jesus wore. And I also wanted to get absolutely clear to people that Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jewish man

and not blonde-haired, white-skinned, with blue eyes, which is frankly the kind of standard portrayal of Jesus that we've come to expect from Hollywood. The number of blonde Jesuses that we get, Jesus Christ, superstar, whatever, it sort of stamps the idea that Jesus was this kind of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. but Jesus had brown skin, dark eyes, black hair. That was his ethnicity. And I think that actually is very important for people globally. Once we imagine Jesus correctly and also in the right clothing from his time, which would have been brightly colored and he would have worn a short tunic, the standard Mediterranean gear, it sets us off on a road that detaches our sort of standard Western image of Jesus from the true historical

figure. And we can start getting to that true historical figure. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about Jesus. More coming up. from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. tell me more about historical figures at the time do we know much about laborers artisans in that part of the world that time how they would have lived out what their diets were like a little bit you know in some ways the gospels are a great resource for understanding ordinary people's lives. If you don't just focus on Jesus, there's all sorts of incidental details about vineyard workers, day laborers, and so on. And the real sense that there was a large number of poor people that were quite desperate. And Jesus is really a prophet and a healer for those who were desperate in terrible, poor conditions in Galilee. And I've looked at the archaeology, and what is just remarkable when you look at the archaeology of Galilee in the first century is it's not this Sunday school image of rural, idyllic, green pastures and everyone looking well fed and sitting on a green field and listening to a rather Anglo-Saxon Jesus. It's a place where there were huge numbers of villagers. It was densely, densely populated, overpopulated in fact. And they can even trace in the hub of Magdala that

there was pollution and degradation of the seabed. So in that sort of environment, food is in crisis. There's a tremendous pressure on people. There's too many people in any given house. There's the spread of disease. And we know that there was malaria and typhoid and all kinds of nasty diseases knocking around in the first century. So it wasn't an easy world to be a labourer. You were given day wages and security of jobs, security of food, security of health was hard to come by. And presumably infant mortality, Jesus would have been part of a big family, would have lost siblings? Well, that's an interesting question.

We don't hear about him losing siblings or half siblings or however you want to imagine Jesus' family. him losing siblings or half siblings or however you want to imagine Jesus' family. He does have a group who are his brothers and sisters, but we don't know how big that family was, but they play a role in the later church so that there was this family of Jesus. If I reinvented myself as a healer and son of God slash prophet, my siblings would not support me in that mission. They'd just be like, Dan is intolerable. Anyway, the itinerancy is so interesting to me. And I think this about, geez, I think this about Rasputin, Russia. When you hear in these societies that we assume are less mobile,

because they have planes and cars, and how normal would it have been for someone to kind of travel round? Might he be looking for work as a carpenter? He's highly skilled. Or was it sort of just hitting the road as unusual as it sort of sounds? It's difficult to know. It's a good question. People did hit the road for pilgrimages. So they went down to Jerusalem or up to Jerusalem, as we should say, for major festivals if you're in the wider area of Judea. So for Passover in spring, that was the major festival. But there were other festivals as well that you might go to. People went on the road for trade, but the road was a

really dangerous place. There's lots of stories of robbers on the road, robbers living in caves. But that is also something that we learn from the Gospels and Josephus. It's a difficult place to be. But having said that, because we now know that there were so many villages in Galilee, Jesus wasn't on the road for very long before he arrived at the next village and the next village. It was so densely populated. And actually, in Jesus' way of thinking, when he sends out his apostles, his envoys who were supposed to go in his stead because he can't go everywhere and everyone wants him. He says, well, you know, go to the next village and see

if anyone is going to take you in. And if they don't take you in, then, you know, shake the dust off your sandals and leave. So the model he has is really arriving in a village as someone who needs hospitality or his apostles need hospitality. And it's really, who's going to take you in? And that's actually the clinching thing. If you've got people who are generous enough and compassionate enough to take a motley bunch of people that you don't know coming into your village, into your home and looking after them, hey, that is what Jesus is looking for. He's looking for that kind of compassion. And this could just be ridiculously condescending of me and a bit orientalist, but within the Roman Empire, people are moving around

at this giant unitary state. So it is easier than moving through a territorially divided area. But also, as you mentioned pilgrimage, there are loads of different religions, temples, belief systems, local idiosyncrasies. Would wandering be kind of a bit more normal than maybe they would if they turned up in your house today in Wellington? There has been some idea of seeing Jesus as a wandering cynic philosopher. And the cynics were people that really spurned the city. They wanted to live on the streets. They wanted to not dress well. They weren't interested in being fancy or having honor. They were really critiquing the city. So in lots of ways, Jesus is like that.

He's critiquing society. He's standing apart from it. He doesn't really go into cities. The big cities of Galilee, like Sepphoris or Tiberias. There's nothing about him going there. There's nothing about him going to the Hellenistic cities like Hippos or Skithopolis or any of these great cities that were all around. He's really concentrating on villages where poor people were living. And so there is that element of being counter-culture, counter-city, making a statement against those who are wealthy. The city was where people were wealthy. This is where wealthy people lived. They might have their country villa, but they had their mansions in the city. This is where

there was some public charity and so on and so forth. The villages were not wealthy. Tell me more about the people around Jesus. Were they drawn from a similar place in society to him? Yes, in that we know that some of them were fishers. Andrew and Peter and John and James were fishers. Matthew apparently was a tax collector who would have been in some ways more wealthy, but in other ways, not so good because everybody hates tax collectors and they were collecting dues for Herod and no one liked Herod. There is a question about how well-off anyone might be thought of in terms of Jesus' milieu. And it's so hard because,

you know, what's the benchmark of well-off? What's the benchmark in terms of middling income in Galilee in the first century? They weren't destitute poor. They weren't the beggars on the street. And Jesus is very concerned about the beggars and the destitute poor. But the people he goes for are the people who have trades and crafts, sort of like himself. He's got a craft. He's the son of a carpenter. crafts sort of like himself. He's got a craft. He's the son of a carpenter. So they're not the bottom of society, but there's a great concern with the bottom of society. And Jesus also looks

up to those who are well-to-do, super wealthy, and really critiques them. And what about sources from other Jewish documents that are not canonical in the Christian faith? The Romans kept good records, didn't they? The Jewish state kept records. What can we learn about Jesus from those places? Right, yes, there are a few bits and pieces. So, Suetonius and Tacitus, famous Roman historians, do mention Christians. They mention disturbances in Rome as a result of Crestus, who seems to be Christ Jesus. So there might have been some kind of disputes, rioting in Rome about what was going on.

And Suetonius is living 100 years after Jesus, roughly. Yeah, but trying to do a good job of telling the story of the Caesars, the imperial household. And the story goes that the Emperor Nero in 64, the terrible fire of Rome happened and Christians were blamed. And the idea was that it wasn't so much that they started the fire, but that they were not worshipping the Roman gods correctly, made the Roman gods very annoyed. And so the Christians were to blame. And so you had to get rid of the Christians. And they were apparently rounded up and executed in horrible, horrible ways. So you're right, because that's 6480. So that's 25 years, that's years after Jesus lived.

So that's pretty rapid or interesting spread into the imperial capital from Judea. You're right. It was only about 30, just over 30 years after Jesus' death. But it does seem like it really took the world by storm. You know, one of the things that used to be said was, oh, it was just a little meaningless sect in Judea. You know, why did it become so astonishingly effective in the Roman Empire? But if you read the Acts of the Apostles, it actually does indicate that it hit the

ground with a huge oomph. And the apostle Paul was really considered a great troublemaker, but he spread the gospel all over the Roman Empire. And it really took on, it became something that people got incredibly excited about. And so Christians did create an impact in where they went quite quickly and including Rome. And that's why the Romans were bothered by them. If they were insignificant, they could just kind of ignore them. But the fact that they had some influence and they could actually influence the way people saw the Roman emperors was a problem. I'd love to come back to your point about writing down the Gospels, these central foundational texts.

When do you think they're first written down? Aha! The earliest story we have, which is in the writings of Papias of Hierapolis, indicates that there was something written down by Mark, who was the interpreter of Peter in Rome. And I think, fair enough, the Gospel of Mark does read like it's Peter's memories. Peter is in just about every scene, and it's very much Peter's memories. So that kind of makes sense to me that in the 60s, Peter died after the fire of Rome. He was

executed along with a whole lot of other Christians. And then Mark decided, hang on, I'd better write down the sort of things that Peter said. And Papias said he wrote them down, but not in order. But Papias also says there was another writing by the apostle Matthew who wrote down Jesus' sayings or logia, the oracles of Jesus. And that's where I think, okay, there's something in the tradition of the gospel of Matthew. And that's where I think, okay, there's something in the tradition of the Gospel of Matthew that has that at its foundation, but it can't actually be the Gospel of Matthew as we have it, because the Gospel of Matthew as we have it actually absorbs the Gospel of Mark. And that's not how Papias describes the original Matthew record of Jesus' sayings.

But they were written down by people that may have known Jesus or within living memory of Jesus' life. Yes, certainly the Gospel of Mark and the original sayings of Matthew. And they were guided by communities, you know, so they couldn't just make things up because whatever they wrote would have had to be acceptable to the communities that they wrote to. And also, you know, we have to remember that from what we know of the letters of Paul, the moment something was written down, someone was copying it and copying it and copying it and distributing to other communities. So there was a great industry of scribes copying things down and sending them

around. That, of course, does raise the question of whether or not scribes did a few little nifty alterations as they did the copying. Any evidence he was born at Christmas? No. The idea of Christmas is something that comes a little bit later on, and it's a bit tied in with the birth date of the sun. Now, let's rewind. In the fourth century, Christianity becomes the religion of the Roman Empire. Up until that point, Christianity was a bit despised and marginal. But in the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine really takes on board Christianity, wants to do the right thing by Christians. And what happens then in the fourth century is Christianity, which starts off as a Judean sect, gets remade. And certain things that Romans knew

about, like sun worship, get fed into Christianity and certain practices of the Roman imperial cult and other cults get fed into Christianity. And so it seems like then it becomes sort of sensible that the idea of the birth date of the sun gets linked up with the birth date of the Messiah. That's as I understand it. There will be critique of that, I know, from some listeners. Oh yes, Joan. Is Christmas originally a pagan festival? It's like an electrified overhead wire. You touch it at your peril. But yeah, the birth of the sun, S-O-N, and the S-U-N. It makes sense. So Joan, why is this rough-handed, labouring man who became an itinerant preacher for a couple of

years at the end of his reasonably short life, who left no imprint on contemporary official records, why is he the most famous person in the history of the human race? Well, you know, I think he was pretty amazing. He had a tremendous impact on people. He called people to a new way of being, a new kind of community, living together as brothers and sisters, sharing their possessions. He critiqued

those in power at a time they really needed to be critiqued. He was tremendously courageous. I think he did have this incredible charismatic power that had an enormous effect on people, so that people were healed or felt they were were healed and people told stories about how amazing he was and things that he did. So there was something really channeling through Jesus that was second to none. It was just a quite miraculous, mystical, mysterious, special, spiritual thing that was Jesus. And then to have the courage of his convictions to stand up to the might of Rome and say what he wanted to say and critique them and also proclaim God's care for humanity, that God wasn't just going to let the world suffer. It was something quite extraordinary.

And he went to his death in the smarter way, actually saying what he needed to say. And then the kind of power of who he was had such a tremendous effect on his followers that whether you believe he really did rise from the dead or, you know, his spiritual power lives on or it was all their hallucination. It was incredibly powerful. So much so that they were prepared to go to their own deaths in decades following, saying that they truly believed he was the son of God and Messiah, the anointed king prophet who would lead to a new world order.

So, you know, there was this personality that is just mysterious and wonderful. And this is obviously unbelievably simplistic, but then that remarkable force eventually convinced the official Roman Empire. And then from that moment on, Christianity, once it's an official religion, locking it into the Mediterranean world, to Europe and then elsewhere as an official faith. Absolutely. But there were also problems with that.

faith. Absolutely. But there are also problems with that. Given that Jesus started off as a very radical countercultural movement, to what extent has he been compromised by that success? I love going to St. Peter's in Rome or the mad, opulent, beautiful Christian spaces and just think, from what I know, I'm not sure Jesus would have been into this. Yes, well, compassionate about people trying. I'm showing the signs of my Scottish Presbyterian forebears here, so maybe I'm just a low church guy. Thank you very much for coming on this podcast. I've told everyone what's that book called again.

It sounds great. What Did Jesus Look Like? Lovely. Thank you very much, Professor Joan Taylor. Thank you very much, Professor Joan Taylor. Thank you.