The Rest Is History - 287: Jesus Christ: The Mystery

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

*The Rest Is History Live Tour April 2023*: Tom and Dominic are going on tour in April 2023 and performing in London, Edinburgh, and Salford! Buy your tickets here: https://robomagiclive.com/the-rest-is-history/ Jesus Christ: The Mystery In today's episode, Tom and Dominic discuss the most mysterious historical figure of all, Jesus Christ. They take a deep look at who he was, his teachings, and whether he actually existed.  To get the second episode in this mini-series right now, join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com). You'll also get ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Twitter:   @TheRestHistory   @holland_tom   @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, everyone into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was that while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn. So that is probably one of the most famous passages ever written. It's from the Gospel according to St. Luke, which was probably written at the end of the first century AD. And it, of course, describes the birth of Jesus Christ. Now, Tom, we have just finished our World Cup marathon. We are resuming normal service and we're resuming normal service just before Christmas with arguably the greatest, the most bewildering, the most mysterious historical subject of all, which is the life of Jesus. And this is something that was voted for, wasn't it, by listeners to the Rest Is History Club? Yes, about a year ago.

Yes. And you've been dreading it ever since well no i haven't been dreading it but i wanted to do it justice because as you say it is um i mean jesus is to put it mildly a very famous historical figure and it's an incredibly complex subject because it is a subject that touches on theology as well as history. And that makes it complicated because obviously the issue of who Jesus was, what he might have taught, what happened to him, even the question of whether he existed, which some have doubted, is a topic of huge sensitivity for believers, for people who believe that this person was the son of God, was simultaneously

human and divine, but also I think for people who are militantly opposed to believe in God and who therefore would very much like to believe that he, say, didn't exist at the most extreme wing. And so it provokes faith responses, both from believers and from non-believers. And the challenge, therefore, is to try and kind of steer your way between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two opposing positions. But of course, it's hopeless because I think it's impossible to be raised in a fundamentally Christian society as we have been and not have perspectives on this that in so many ways are alien to the world that Jesus was born

into. But that is the challenge, is to try and get some sense of what do the sources tell us, and what's the kind of broader context that might provide, give us some chance to kind of arrive a sense of what he might have been. People have been doing this for 300 years, Tom, haven't they? They've been trying to unpick the sources to make sense of Jesus as a historical figure. I mean, I guess almost everybody listening to this podcast, I'm assuming everybody will know the outline of the story. Born in a manger, wise men, all of this stuff, then a bit of a blank, and then entering Jerusalem. Well, baptized by a figure called John the Baptist.

Yeah. Tells parables, teaches, all that kind of stuff. Casting out demons. Yeah. Casting out demons, enters Jerusalem um overthrows the moneylenders in the temple um arrested by uh the soldiers of the high priest uh delivered over to pilot the prefect of judea he's crucified and then according to christians he rises from the dead so we are talking i mean we we really are talking, I guess, aren't we, about the single most,

if Jesus did exist, he is the single best known person who has ever existed. People use his name without thinking about it. They must use it every minute on this planet, you know, as an expression of exasperation, of outrage, or as a prayer, or as an invocation, or whatever. I think, I mean, I think his only rival would be Muhammad. And I would put Jesus ahead of Muhammad in the fame stakes, simply because Jesus is also a figure in the Quran. But I compare, I think the comparison is often made between Jesus and Muhammad. But I think actually the comparison that is much more germane is between Jesus and the Quran. Because both Christianity and Islam have at their heart the idea that the divine

entered the world. So for Muslims, the Quran is the word of God. And for Christians, Jesus is, he is God the son. And so for the historian, that means that there's a kind of molten core of the weird, of the supernatural, of the strange, of the inexplicable at the beginnings of both those stories that I think has been fundamental Quran is the word of God? That seems to be absolutely fundamental to Muslim identity right from the very beginning. centuries later. So in a sense, it's basically impossible, I think, for historians to get back to the mystery of how the Quran came into being and how people came to think that it was the word of God. You just, in a sense, you have to take it as read that that is what people believed. Likewise, with the Christian tradition, the idea that there was something fundamentally strange about the figure of Jesus. And of course, it's focused on the idea that he's raised from the dead, but I don't think that's adequate to explain the incredibly elevated status that he seems to have cast as part of the omnipotent eternal godhead. This sense that there is a weirdness at the core of the story is part of what makes the analysis

of this story so difficult. But I think it's also kind of brilliant because it is a way of taking us back into the ancient world where there was no real division between the natural and the supernatural. There is no concept of the secular. There is no concept that the divine can be separated out from the dimension of the mortal. skeptical historian has to in a sense find a place in their analysis for the strangeness and the weirdness that has for 2 000 years has underlain christian faith so what we're going to do tom we're doing two episodes aren't we the mystery and and then the history or the history and the mystery brilliant and i guess so i mean we're going to look at the, we're going to look at the context. We're going to look at the sources.

We're going to try and reconstruct, or you're going to try and reconstruct with me also present. You're going to try and reconstruct as best we can. Yeah. Some sense of the historical figure of Jesus. But just for those people who don't really know, more than 2,000 years ago, we were in the Eastern Mediterranean. We did a few podcasts, didn't we? We did a series about the life of Cleopatra. So we're a generation after that.

And we also did two on the Judean revolt. So it's between Cleopatra and the Judean revolt. So the first character we mentioned in this episode was Caesar Augustus. So the Roman Empire has, as it were, begun. judean revolt so the first character we mentioned in this episode was caesar augustus so the roman empire has as it were begun uh augustus has it's a it's his it's his pax romana isn't it it's his he has put an end to the civil wars it's a period of p a relative peace and stability and it's in this context that this man if he is a man um is born lives and dies at the turn of the what are we what are the turn of the first century a.d i i suppose but but dominic i mean that's that's that's

a that's an absolutely kind of ringing example of the difficulty of treating jesus just like any other historical figure is that of course he you know his his his birth defines our dating system yeah so it's kind of, you know, it's even though, as we'll see, he seems not to have been born in one AD or right. Or not one BC or whatever.

There is no, not. And I think a further, you know, so, so that is, is why Jesus is, has always seen,

been seen as a complicated figure for historians to grapple with is that he is also a theological figure. And so you mentioned how for the past 300 years, really, people have been trying to kind of strip away the cladding of theology, but it's often theologians who do this. So I guess the first guy who did this was a German scholar called Remarus, who in the 18th century, in the kind of the heyday of the Enlightenment, he cast Jesus as a pretty Orthodox Jew who kind of descended from, you know, the hill country and aspired to become the kind of the worldly deliverer of Israel. So it's this idea that he is a rebel of a kind that in due course will lead to the destruction of Jerusalem. Yeah.

Then in the 19th century, you have various explanations. You have, again, Germans are popping up all over the place in this tradition. And he's rejecting all this kind of supernatural stuff as a simple kind of mythical cladding. It's kind of mythical elaborations. You have a Frenchman called Ernest Raynaud, also in the 19th century, who he's supplying kind of psychological explanations for it so again that's been a very popular tradition and then at the beginning of the 20th century you have a guy called albert schweitzer very kind of eminent distinguished figure um not just as a theologian

and he cast jesus as an apocalyptic prophet and what all these traditions have is that they're trying to de-theologize jesus so they're basically saying he's not a supernatural figure. He's a man. And, you know, this is what he actually was. But I think for what it's worth, that actually you have to keep a sense of the weirdness because otherwise you're not getting back properly into the cast of mind of the world that he's born into.

And it's not just Palestine. It's not just Judea and Galilee where this is current. It's across the empire. And when you look at what is happening in the first century AD across the entire span of Rome's provinces, Jesus doesn't actually seem that strange a figure. So I just want to read you a passage from Tacitus, who is writing about the year of the four emperors, AD 69. And he's describing Vitellius, a man who loved his pies, one of the four emperors. And he's arrived in Lyon. And Tacitus describes there a certain Maricus, who is a Gaul from the tribe of the Boe, who boldly endeavored to thrust himself into greatness and to challenge the armies of Rome, pretending to be divine. This champion of Gaul and God, as he had entitled

himself, had already gathered a force of 8,000 men. And Tacitus describes how he's starting to whip up a revolt. But he gets arrested, he gets brought before Vitellius, and he gets thrown to wild beasts. And then Tacitus says, as they refused to devour him, the common people stupidly believed him invulnerable until he was executed in the presence of Vitellius. So we know nothing more about this guy, Maricus, but he's claiming to be a god. People believe that he can't be put to death, that he somehow triumphed over the apparatus of the Roman state. And this is just one of a kind of multitude of rebellions that are happening throughout this period. There's a German prophetess in a tower who likewise is thought by her followers to be divine. There's the Druids in Britain who get

slaughtered because again, they are seen as kind of people who can channel a divine power that is seen by the Romans as somehow threatening. And so Jesus is in this, you know, looked at in the broader sense, he is a figure who is put to death by the Romans as king of the Jews, as a rebel against Roman power, and who claims some kind of divine authority. So in that sense, he's not so unusual. Right. So, and that bloke you described in Tacitus, so we know that bloke existed, or we assume he did because we don't think Tacitus is lying. Why would we have any reason not to think that? Right, exactly.

So that raises the question, Jesus. So there will be some people listening to this podcast who will have started listening, thinking, and saying to themselves, well, this is a strange subject for a history podcast because I don't believe Jesus did exist. I think I don't, I'm not a Christian. I think it's all invented. You know, maybe it's invented by St. Paul later on,

you know, the great sort of proselytizer of Christianity. Maybe it's been cooked up by the Romans, you know, the Catholic Church, blah, blah, blah. But Jesus is all a bit of a fiction and a fairy tale. But Tom, I think it's fair to say that you don't think that, do you? I don't think any historian thinks that. I don't think any credible historian thinks that. And the reason for that is that unlike Maricus in Gaul, we have quite a detailed, well, not, I mean, by the standards of ancient history, we have a very, very detailed understanding of what is going on in Judea, in Galilee at this period in the first century AD. And by the standards of ancient history, we actually know an enormous amount about the world into which Jesus is born.

And I know you love a discussion of sources. I dread a discussion of sources, Tom. I can hear people switching off. But I think in this context, it's worth looking at. I think it's worth looking both at the references to Jesus per se, but also the much broader context that enables us to have a sense of the world into which he's born. So references to Jesus, we have this one reference to Maricus. We have quite a lot of references. I mean, considering that Jesus is a provincial who gets crucified, we have quite a few. So admittedly, some of them are quite problematic. Some of them aren't absolutely certain, but there's a kind of haze there. So the first, as far as we know, the earliest one is by Josephus, who we talked about in the context of the Judean revolt. And Josephus is the key figure for enabling us to have a sense of how accurate the Gospels are and to what extent Jesus is a historical figure.

So remind people who is Josephus. Josephus is a Judean who is brought up in Jerusalem, very well educated. He's from the priestly class that basically have responsibility from the Romans for administering Jerusalem. He joins the revolt against the Romans in the late 60s. He gets captured. He persuades Vespasian, the commander of the Romans against the Judeans, who goes on to become emperor, that he is going to become emperor. And so he ends up a Roman citizen and he writes an account of the Judean war. And then he writes a very, very long account history of the Judeans. And it's in this later account that he seems to mention, well, he mentions kind of various figures

who appear in the New Testament. So he mentions John the Baptist. So John the Baptist clearly seems to be a historical figure. He describes how John is put to death, all that kind of stuff, although he doesn't link him to Jesus. So there's no hint of the Christian tradition that John the Baptist baptises Jesus. So for people who don't know, John the Baptist is a forerunner of Jesus. I mean, this is unbelievably simplistic. He goes around baptising people. Yes, a little bit more than that. But yes, that's basically his thing. And then there's a very notorious passage which seems to mention Jesus himself. Josephus is describing all the events that happen in Pilate's period of office in Judea. And so he describes all the various things that Pilate does, how he introduces imperial

images into Jerusalem. So images of Caesar, which doesn't go down well, how he expropriates temple funds to build an aqueduct. And then he comes to Jesus and his followers. And the passage as we have it is as follows, about this time comes Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it is proper to call him a man. For he was a worker of incredible deeds, a teacher of those who accept the truth with pleasure. And he attracted many Judeans, as well as many who live like Greeks. This man was the Christ. And when in view of his denunciation by the leading men among Now, this is definitely ornamented. This man was the Christ, this man was the Messiah. Josephus wouldn't have written that.

We know for a fact that Josephus did not write that because Origen, who is a church father in the early third century AD, flatly says that Josephus did not think Jesus was the Messiah. So this has definitely, definitely been elaborated. And so there are some who say that it's completely fake. So when you say elaborated, do you mean it's been altered by Christians later on? I mean, it's definitely been written up by Christians, but the issue is, was there a kind of core at the beginning? And I think that probably the balance of consensus is that there was a, you know, there's a kernel that then got written up. So there's a biblical scholar called John P. Mayer, and he's offered his version.

At this time, there appeared Jesus, a wise man, for he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who received the truth with pleasure. He gained a following both among Jews and Greeks. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who loved him previously did not cease to do so and up until this very day the tribe of christians named after him has not died out so basically all the kind of theological christian stuff has been purged and you perhaps have a hard core i mean we don't know because we have no and i'm afraid that throughout this podcast there's going to be a lot of we don't know oh it's very frustrating but i would say that that the balance of probability is that Josephus

probably does mention him. And the reason for that is that he also mentions Jesus's brother, James, who gets put to death by an amusingly named high priest called Ananus. Ananus. Ananus. Right. And the reason why this is telling is that it's a very offhand reference so josephus describes james as the brother of jesus the so-called christ the so-called messiah right and it's a throwaway comment the focus isn't james the focus isn't jesus it's a description about how an an anus is a kind of tyrannical figure um so that suggests that actually jesus probably has been mentioned earlier by josephus in his in his narrative so we got that josephus also provides very detailed account of the functioning of judea and galilee in this period and we'll come to

exactly what it is that he says later on if we're carrying on looking at all the various stuff that we get in the non-Christian sources, there is a letter written by a philosopher in Syria by the name of Marabar Serapion. He refers to a man whom he describes as the wise king of the Jews, who's compared to Socrates and Pythagoras as noble, wise people who were put to death unjustly. And this brought down disaster. And he refers that it's because the Judeans put Jesus to death, if it is Jesus, the wise king, that their temple has been destroyed and they've been dispersed. Does he call him Jesus? No, he doesn't. He doesn't. And the other thing is, we don't exactly know when he wrote this. So Fergus Miller, who's very, very, very distinguished, I mean, uber distinguished classicist, dates it to just after the sack of Jerusalem. So that's kind of

the 70s, something like that. But others say that it's probably later, that's probably around the time of Hadrian. And just to be clear, we think Jesus, insofar as he existed, would have died in the early 30s, mid-30s AD? Yeah. So that's been adduced as an early reference. Then we have Pliny the Younger. Your favourite, yeah. No, my favourite is Pliny the Elder, the Encyclopedias,

but this is his nephew. Okay. And he gets sent by Trajan to become governor of Bithynia and Pontus, which is basically the north of what's now Turkey, adjoining the Black Sea. And he writes to Trajan in the autumn of A.D. 112. And he says that he's come across Christians and he describes it as a superstition, as a kind of disease that's spreading out of control. So now we're almost 100 years on, though, Tom. We are about 80 years on from the death of Jesus at this point.

And he says that it's their custom to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing a hymn to Christ as though he were a God and to bind themselves by oath not to criminality, but never to commit fraud, theft, or adultery. Around the same time, so perhaps 121, 125, maybe even 130, so pretty much a century after the death of Jesus, we have Tacitus, who I've already mentioned, great historian. And he writes about the reign of Nero and how after the great fire, Nero blames people who are called Christians, a sect detested for their abominations. And Tacitus doesn't call the founder

of this sect Jesus, he calls him Christus. So he seems to assume that Christus, the Messiah, the anointed one, that's his name. So Christus, just to be clear, Christus is Greek. Is that right? Yeah. It means anointed one, the Messiah. Yeah. And he says that Christus died under Tiberius, under Pontius Pilate, that it's, again, echoing Pliny, that it's a terrible superstition, that it's hideous, that it's shameful. So that's a terrible superstition, that it's hideous, that it's shameful.

So that's a definite illusion. I mean, you can find attempts to argue that this isn't authentic, but pretty much everyone accepts it's authentic. I suppose the problem that some listeners will have thought of immediately is this is almost 100 years afterwards. So it's a bit like you are only source for the life of Davidid lloyd george or woodrow wilson or the kaiser is written now in 2022 and a lot of people would say that's very unreliable yes it is a problem and and the other problem and we also have suetonius who all the the biographer of the 12 caesars who mentions somebody called crestus who he says in the reign of claudius is whipping the jews in roma into into a state of chronic state of disorder. This Crestus seems to be alive at the time when Suetonius is referring to him.

So again, much debate as to whether this is a reference to Jesus. He also references him in the context of the great fire. So all those references, aside from Josephus, pretty much all those references seem to derive from the Christians themselves. So it's not like they are deriving from, I don't know, Pontius Pilate's provincial report or something like that. These are reporting what Christians themselves believe. So in that sense, if you want to believe that Jesus didn't exist, I would say they're not conclusive. But I was about to say, Tom, just the issue about the chronology, about the sources being later. Ilusive. But I was about to say, Tom, just the issue about the chronology, about the

sources being later. I mean, when I think about some of the podcasts we've done this year or in the last couple of years. So we did a series about the life of Alexander the Great and a series about the life of Cleopatra. This is an excellent opportunity of course for me to advertise my own children's books. Christmas is coming. Christmas is

coming and your children and other people's children will thank you for it. However, that aside, Alexander, let's say, all the sources are much later and are conforming to literary formulas and of copying one another and all of this sort of thing. But we don't doubt that Alexander the Great lived and died. We don't doubt a lot of the details of the story. So is Jesus different? I mean, I suppose the references are much more fleeting and are much more obscure, aren't they? He is an obscure figure. So the significance that is given to him is given to him by his followers.

Alexander is palpably an earth-shaking figure who is remembered centuries and centuries after he lived. That's why he's remembered. But I think you absolutely fix on the salient point about this whole issue, which is that this is a problem with everybody in ancient history. This is the constant, constant challenge is that often you have fragments of detail or you have biographies that are written long after that have shot through with all kinds of fantastical elements. Nero, let's say. Nero, yes, absolutely. Yes, Nero. Exactly. Exactly so. So the challenge is to look at the overt references that we have and then to try and place them in the context of

the more detailed sources. So in the case of Jesus, that would be the New Testament. But before you can do that, you want to look and see what is the world that this figure is born into? And how does that then merge? How does that correspond to the evidence that we're getting, say, in the Gospels? So what can we say about Judea? What can we say about Galilee? And how does that then correspond to what we get in the New Testament? And then what does that imply for the figure of Jesus, the likelihood that he said what he said, that he existed as the gospel writers claim. And that I think is not in any way an unusual challenge

for an ancient historian to face. It's absolute bread and butter. So I think we should take a break now and then come back and look at the context. What do we know about Galilee and Judea, the world of Jesus? The world of Jesus is coming after the break. Don't go away. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History, or as I like to think of it, my own private kingdom of heaven.

Tom, you are guiding us through the world of Jesus. Very exciting. So before the break, you were talking about the complexities of the sources and all that sort of stuff. And now you're going to tell us about, well, tell us about the world in which this character is born. So the salient thing about, let's call it Palestine in this period, is that its administration is incredibly complicated. And we can have some sense of what is going on, thanks to Josephus, who describes its evolution in some detail. But basically, you will remember from writing about Cleopatra, Cleopatra is essentially a Roman client queen. Yes. And this is pretty much how the Romans like to administer large swathes of the eastern half

of their empire. And of course, the famous Judean client king is Herod the Great. Who Cleopatra hated. They got him very badly, didn't they? He kind of sucked up to Augustus, despite having previously backed Antony. And, you know, he gets away with it. And his sons, when he dies, his kingdom gets divided up between his three sons. And a guy called Archelaus, he gets given Judea. And Judea is basically, Jerusalem is its capital, and it's the kind of the region around it. And then to the north of it, there's a region called Galilee. And this gets awarded to a son of Herod, Herod Antipas.

And he rules, he has a very, very long life. So he rules from basically 4 BC up to AD 39. And this is in contrast to Archelaus who proves to be spectacularly incompetent and gets deposed by the Romans. And this is when Judea comes under direct Roman rule. This is the background to the census that is ordered when Cyrenius is governor that you mentioned in the opening passage from Luke. So this is what's going on. That census is a marker of the imposition of direct Roman rule. And just to be clear, so going back to that first reading,

so Nazareth, where Joseph and Mary are from, that's in Galilee. Yes. But Joseph has to go back to Bethlehem, or the story says he goes back to Bethlehem, which is in Judea, near Jerusalem. So this is the key problem, I think, is that we attempted to describe Judeans as Jews. And so because we have a sense today of what a Jew is, it's somebody who is defined by what we would call a religion, as well as by ethnicity. You have this idea that the Jews are somehow unusual in the context of the Roman world. I mean, they are seen as unusual,

but everybody is seen by the Romans as unusual. All provincials are seen as kind of weird and mad in some way. It's much, much better to think of Jews as Judeans. Just as Greeks are people who live in Greece, but they are also people who kind of buy into Greek civilization. So somebody who lives in Alexandria in Egypt might be a Greek. So likewise, a Judean can simultaneously be someone who lives in the province of Judea. And that is invariably, again and again, that is how they are referred to in the Gospels. So when in the Gospels you read Jews, you should think actually Judeans. And what do they mean by Judeans? Do they mean anyone who is a Judean or do they mean specifically people who are in the Roman province

of Judea? So that's a kind of key thing to bear in mind. And the corollary of that is that Jesus is a Judean in the sense that he's descended from Judeans, that he goes to synagogues, that he worships a Judean God. But in another sense, he's not a Judean because he's not a Roman subject. He's a subject of a client king. He's a Galilean. A Galilean. Yeah. So when people call him Jesus of Nazareth, that's a Galilean. That's not a Judean. And it's an incredibly obscure place. And it's a place so obscure that it would be very hard to know why anyone would make that up. I mean, there's no conceivable benefit for anyone in saying that he comes from Nazareth.

And so he's not subject, for instance, to Roman taxes. There are not Roman legionaries tramping around all over the place. What there are, are kind of cities that are more Greek than they're Judean. And these have been planted by Herod Antipas. These are the centers of his power, urban centers. But Jesus in the Gospels very notably does not go to these places. So Nazareth is a couple of hours walk from a place called Sepphoris, one of the great Greek cities of the region. But apart from one variant reading in a 10th century manuscript, I think of John,

there is no mention of Sepphoris in the Gospels. So it's a really, really telling absence. So Nazareth is a kind of rural hinterland, is it? It's kind of a fly-bitten obscure kind of place? It's Yorkshire. Oh, God. It's not Yorkshire. But you've got to think of Jesus as a northerner. Right. So, you know, all the apostles, Jesus and the apostles. Right. And Jerusalem is, you know, it's the southern metropolis.

And it is administratively distinct. So that's the key thing. Okay. And according, you know, John has Jesus going to Jerusalem and Judea every so often. But in the other three gospels, so Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus only goes to Judea when he goes to Jerusalem at the very end, which culminates in his death and in his arrest. So he spends all the rest of his time in Galilee. So the rest of the time he's in Galilee. So he's not surrounded by Romans.

Nevertheless, obviously, Rome is a crucial part of the equation. And again, from Josephus, we can get a sense of how this is operating. So the prefect, it's a prefect up until, think AD 44, then it becomes a procurator. So Pilate is the prefect. He is based in Caesarea, a city that is named after Augustus. And so that is a kind of civic embodiment of Roman power. He comes up to Jerusalem at the Passover when huge numbers of Judeans gather in Jerusalem for the Passover. And that's always a cause of anxiety for the Roman authorities. So he's coming up with his troops. He works in close alliance with the priestly party in Jerusalem, who are basically kind of very posh collaborators with Roman rule. And his military forces, again, are not legions.

He does not have a legion. He has auxiliaries. And who are these auxiliaries? Well, they are locals, but they don't seem to be Judean. So Julius Caesar had officially granted Judeans an exemption from conscription because of the whole problem that they would have to kind of pay worship to legionary standards and so on. So the question is, where are these people being recruited from? And the evidence from Josephus is that they are basically what in the gospels are called Samaritans. So people who are Jew-ish. They have similarities to Judean belief, but they're very hostile to the Judeans. And that's the whole point of the parable of the good Samaritan. And so these are the soldiers in due course who will whip Jesus and crucify him. They're more likely to be Samaritan than they are Roman. And so that's a

kind of dimension of the story that often gets overlooked. So the Romans are there. And as I mentioned, you also have the high priests. And again, we know from Josephus that the high priest serves as the head of a council of priests, that it's his responsibility to call them. That's the Sanhedels. And it's their instinct is to work very, very closely with the Roman governor as a way of basically keeping order, because this alliance from the point of view of the priests enables the temple to function and Jerusalem to flourish as this great center of Judean pilgrimage. The Romans keep the accoutrements of the high priest, which are only given to him at very, very holy moments of the year. So when you say accoutrements, this is robes?

Robes, the tiara, all that kind of stuff. Only the high priest has authority to summon the council. And what Josephus does not tell us, and there is basically no consensus among modern scholars, is whether the high priest had the authority to put people to death. So the likelihood is that he kind of had de facto right to put them to death, but he didn't have the kind of legal authority under Roman law to put them to death. But that tallies, doesn't it, with the story of Jesus? We're jumping ahead, but the high priest basically goes to Pontius Pilate

and Pilate does all his hand washing and says, fine, you know. Based on the evidence of Josephus, that seems to be the state of play. Right. So I think what you might say with reference to the gospels is that in the gospels, the macro detail is basically pretty correct. Yeah. So the micro details might be all over the place, but the macro context seems to be pretty accurate. And what's interesting about them is that Josephus writes as an admirer of the priestly class. He is one of them. He respects them.

He admires them, which is one of the reasons why Josephus is so happy to collaborate with the Romans. He doesn't see it as being treacherous. He sees it as being sensible. That word collaborate, Tom, it's very loaded. I mean, they would say, listen, the Romans are the bigwigs. It's mad to think about fighting them or something. I mean, why would we want to do that? We want to trade. We want to have stability.

We want to have law and order. Yeah. And I think on top of them, they would say that it's the will of God. God has given the empire of the world to the Romans. So, you know, let's go with it. And that is absolutely Josephus' perspective. What's interesting is the point of view of the Gospels is different. The Gospels do not like the priestly authorities.

Well, I'm hoping we're going to get on to what the Gospels are in a little bit, because you've referred to them a lot, but we haven't really dug into who wrote them, where they come from. Before we come to them, there is one further source of evidence that is extraneous to the Gospels in the New Testament, and that's archaeology. And there's been a lot of excavations done in in galilee over recent decades and what they have shown is that the

period when jesus is living seems to be an age of escalating cultural tensions within galilee and this has been measured really fascinatingly through pottery, Dominic. I know you love a pot. I love a pot, Tom. I love a pot. This is exactly what I expect from ancient history. So what happens over the course of the first century BC is that in Galilee, you see the arrival of Roman-style cooking vessels, which are kind of shiny and red, very fashionable in Italy, and therefore become fashionable out in the Roman provinces. And what happens around the time Jesus is born

is that people who identify with basically Greek, who see themselves as belonging to the Greek world, they are buying up this Roman pottery. But in households that would identify as Judean, they start to consciously reject this. And so it's a bit of an extrapolation, but you might read from that the fact that this is a kind of an attempt to identify themselves very, very self-consciously as not a part of the Greek world. And this is the world that Jesus is born into. This is the world of the villages that lie outside cities like Sepphoris. So Nazareth and Capernaum and all these places that are familiar to anyone who's read the gospels. These are places where there seems to be a cultural repudiation of everything that

Greek civilization represents. So a little bit of a culture war, Tom. A little bit of a culture war. Metropolitan and non-metropolitan, urban and rural. Are you with the Romans and the Greeks, or are you one of us? That kind of way of thinking. Yeah. So what you have in Galilee, and what you definitely get in the gospels is the sense of an alienation from the Greek world, but also a certain alienation from the world of Judea and the temple, the

priests. Because they've collaborated, presumably, is it? Or are they part of some city, big city world that people are rejecting? Well, again, to go back to the modern parallel, it's long later profond and it's suspicion of London, that kind of thing. There is a sense of alienation from the world of the capital, from the world of the temple priests, from the world of... I wouldn't have a Roman pot in the house.

So you are a Galilean. And so this is the world that Jesus is born into, according to the gospels. And it seems to me that the evidence from Josephus, the evidence from the archaeology, actually seems to elucidate the portrait that we have in the Gospels. We now come to the New Testament. Yes. Come on, finally. And this is, I mean, this is basically why I've been so nervous about doing this episode, is that brilliant scholars study this stuff all their life.

And, you know, there is, as we said at the start of the episode, there is a huge kind of backlog of scholarly inquiry into this. Yeah. You know, for decades and decades and decades. That has never stopped us before, Tom. It has not. And basically, so there's the scholar Dale Allison. The frailty of human memory should distress all who quest for the so-called historical Jesus. So that's that is basically the issue. The Gospels are written.

We don't know when the Gospels are written exactly. The earliest is almost universally thought to be Mark. So it's Mark, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But Mark is number one. Mark is universally thought to be mark says mark matthew mark luke and john but mark is number one mark is generally thought to be number one um generally dated to around 60 so that's about 30 years after the death of jesus yeah matthew and luke are conventionally dated to after the sack of jerusalem so that would be uh looking into the into the 70s, perhaps. There are some who date, because there are quite interesting correspondences between Luke and Josephus.

So there are various kind of rebels against Roman rule that Josephus mentions that also appear in Luke's account. And so it has been argued that perhaps Luke is drawing on Josephus' work, in which case Luke would be right at the end of the first century AD. The alternative thesis would be that Luke is definitely a figure who's interested in the broader historical context. So you saw that in the reading that you had where he refers to Augustus,

he refers to the governor of Syria, all that kind of stuff. I like that in Luke. It's my favourite gospel because it has a lot of historical detail. It does have a lot of historical detail. So it may be that he's just interested in, like Josephus, he's picking up all these various figures. And John is a much more theological account. So the three other gospels are called synoptic. They have this kind of same gaze, the same perspective. John is seen as quite different, generally dated to end of the first century, beginning of the second century. Although there are scholars who actually think that it's very early and think that it was written by an

eyewitness called John. Okay. But they're in the minority, right? I mean- Well, there's a guy called Robert Baucom who's written a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. It came out, I think, about 15 years ago that has been, I mean, it's been very, it's had quite an influence. And in that he argues that Mark's gospel really was written by a bloke called Mark. And that essentially it's the record of Peter's, he's transcribing Peter's account. So Peter, the, you know, the rock, Jesus's chief apostle. And he also says that John's gospel is also an eyewitness account. And it is at one end of a range of perspectives. The other would say that everything is so garbled that we can't really know anything about it. with arriving at a hard and fast conclusion about the dates of the Gospels, where they came from,

how they came to be written, is that there is this range of accepted scholarly opinion. They were written by eyewitnesses, or at least Mark and John were written by eyewitnesses, or they were written at the end of the first century AD. And basically, we can know nothing at all about what Jesus said because of the effect of Chinese whispers. And that is basically, I think, where we are. You have to be agnostic about it to a degree, I think, and say that ultimately we can't know. And there are a couple of things though on that, Tom, if I can just interject.

One is that you mentioned Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the synoptic gospels. There are elements that match each other from those stories. So there are stories that recur, which might lead you to say, well, unless they are just copying each other, you've got three sources telling you something. Generally in history, you would say, okay, well, that probably happened. The second thing is, am I not right in thinking that people who work on this say, where there are details that are kind of embarrassing for Christians or a bit weird or a bit obscure or you wouldn't make it up, they probably are true.

Because if you wouldn't make it up and you put it in, then it's probably true. So again, this is absolutely par for the course for anyone who works in the field of ancient history. So you've talked about Alexander. So you have exactly the same spectrum of opinion around Alexander. You have people who write biographies of Alexander, notable historians who live in the Cotswolds among them. Yeah, or Robin Lane Fox. Or Robin Lane Fox or Peter Green, I mean, who are very, very reputable classicists. And they will write biographies of Alexander drawing on the texts and saying, Alexander did this,

he said that, whatever. And there are others who are so skeptical that they doubt that Alexander was ever taught by Aristotle or that we can say anything. We don't really know anything about Alexander at all, apart from the fact that he conquered the Persian empire. Ultimately, it comes down to weighing and sifting the evidence, placing it in the broader context and kind of arriving at your own conclusion. The complication with Jesus, of course, is that the people who study the Gospels are either Christian or very militantly anti-Christian. And so by and large, if you're Christian, you're going to essentially say, yeah, we can rely on this. And if you're militantly anti-Christian, you're going to say, no, it's all nonsense. I mean, I'm being unfair because there are absolutely examples of

scholars who, say, Bart Ehrman would be the classic example, someone who was a very devout Christian, went to study, you know, theological college, studied all the question of the historical Jesus and ended up losing his faith and is now on the kind of the much more sceptical wing. Equally, you have, so Dale Allison, who I mentioned, is a Christian, but is quite, you know, skeptical about quite a lot of the traditions for reasons that are deeply rooted in, you know, an understanding of how history functions. So I don't want to, you know, my position of relative ignorance kind of sound like I'm staring at it. I'm absolutely not. But I'm just saying that nobody thinks Alexander was a god. Nobody thinks Augustus was a god.

But people do think Jesus is god. And so, therefore, that does make it more complicated. But ultimately, it doesn't make it that much more complicated. Because what you have to do with all this stuff is to kind of weigh it up and say, well, what do you think? So I think in part two, that's what we should look at. We should say, well, you know, we've looked at the mystery can we get to the history so we've got josephus we've got tacitus we've got the archaeology we have the context of the roman world and the world of galilee and judea and we have these four gospels plus there are also other

things on there there are kind of apocryphal gospels and things. Well, I think, OK, so that's an interesting point. So you talked about how this tradition of looking at Jesus as a historical figure is basically enlightenment and post-enlightenment. But I think actually that's not entirely true because the early Christians themselves were aware that there were all kinds of gospels. And by the middle of the second century, they're starting to wake up to the fact that some of these gospels are less reliable than others. And the reason why we have the four gospels in what comes to be the New Testament, and why they come to be seen as canonical, is because there are so many other gospels that people who define themselves as orthodox, and the guy who does this is a man called Irenaeus,

is the guy who basically starts to construct the idea of the canon that will emerge as the New Testament. And his basis for deciding on which gospels are gospel, if you want to put it like that, is that they're the earliest and that they're the most reliable. So he is applying historical methodology to this question. And he's saying these four are the reliable ones. And that's why the other gospels are cast aside. It's not because of some conspiracy involving Mary Magdalene or the bloodline of Christ or anything like that. It's because they are weighed and quite correctly seem to be less accurate. They're later, they preserve all kinds of garbled traditions. And more importantly, they are not rooted in the fabric and the historical depth of first century AD Palestine. And what I would say is that the

best way for, I think, for understanding Jesus is that he is seen by his contemporaries as a very, very strange figure. His strangeness is not just because of the back projection of 2,000 years of seeing him as a god. He's clearly seen by his contemporaries, both Judean and Roman, as strange. And that's because, I think, he comes from this Galilean context in which there is hostility to the temple authorities. Galileans are regarded with a measure of contempt by the Judeans. So in John, you have this phrase, no prophet will ever arise in Galilee. So that's a kind of an expression of how Galileans are looked down upon by the temple authorities. Right. That's a Yorkshire parallel, Tom.

But you also have this hostility to the claims to power and authority of the Greeks and the Romans. And Jesus is very, very hard headed in his analysis of how Greek civilization works. So he refers to, you know, the Greek cities, when we go to a Greek city, you know, we think how beautiful it is, all these arches, these libraries, all this kind of stuff. Jesus is absolutely merciless in his analysis of this. He says that the great figures, hoi megaloi, in these cities and these projects of kind of civic benefactions are scams. They are ways for the great to flaunt their power

and their wealth. And that true greatness is not to be great. And so there's a kind of paradoxical undermining of the whole fabric of Greek and Roman assumptions there. And I think that it's the fact that he rejects both the Temple of Jerusalem and the gods and the kind of civic assumptions of Greece and Rome that make him so strange and that in the long run lead to his death. And that, I think, is where you situate, if you want to call it the historical Jesus, the historical Jesus. I led you down a massive new tangent then. You were just, I was thinking to myself, we're going to have a break now and you and I can go and have coffee.

Sorry. Sorry. So I started you off with the apocryphal gospels, which I shouldn't have done. However, so next time on The Rest is History, we will be trying to put together a life of Jesus based on these sources. Now, if you can't wait, you could, of course, join the Rest Is History Club, and you would be able to listen to that episode straight away. Now, I'm not going to say to you that that's what Jesus would have wanted, but it's what I want you to do.

And I think that's what you should be thinking of. Perhaps Jesus would have wanted maybe a loved one to get you an early Christmas present. He certainly would, Tom. Of that, there is no doubt. So on that bombshell, we say goodbye for the moment. If you're in the Restless History Club, we will see you, or you will hear us rather, in a couple of minutes. If not, you'll have to wait a few days. And goodbye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access,

ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

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