Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant

Jesusby GeorgeEllington

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October 29, 2009: Michael Grant's Jesus: A Historian's Review of the Gospels is certainly worth reading, I think, despite a fundamental flaw in how the author encourages the book's reception. He certainly wishes, as the title suggests and as he repeatedly states in the work, that his book be seen as a valid history of Jesus. There have been thousands of biographies written about Jesus, he remarks, yet his book is intended to be distinct from the rest in that he approaches the life of Jesus from the standpoint of a historian and employing historical methods of research. And therein lies the flaw. A historian must proceed from original sources, and no original sources survive from the time of Jesus. Therefore, as the title again clearly states, a history of Jesus must be based on the Gospels. And yet as historical sources, how valid can the Gospels be? None of the Gospels can be accurately traced to an identifiable author. We know neither the writer nor the time nor the exact place of composition of any of the Gospels, although very intriguing research has been conducted to suggest what the sources might have been for the Gospels. But without them, we have second-hand accounts, if not more distant.

By which I am certainly not arguing that there was no Jesus. I fully believe in Jesus and his ministry, although not entirely as it has come down to us through the Gospels. But I would be more comfortable with the work of an author designating himself a historian, calling his work a history, if he indeed relied on original sources. Of which there are none. Grant himself notes this, and seems to have realized the challenge any historian faces with this subject, as he ends his book with just such questions of validity as I am posing here. Any study of Jesus employing sources that come anywhere near to his own lifetime is limited to the Gospels. Moreover, we cannot even depend on the oldest versions of the Gospels as truly accurate evidence of the life of Jesus in that Jesus, his companions, and the people around him must have spoken primarily Aramaic, Hebrew, or Latin, while our oldest forms of the Gospels are in Greek. So already we have been as distanced from Jesus from a linguistic standpoint as we have been from a temporal one. Consequently, from my perspective at least, this book would have been better described as a literary analysis of the figure of Jesus within the Gospels rather than a history.

And it is in that format that I think this book is worth reading. Grant does a very good job of considering the figure of Jesus within the text, examining how he is depicted, and how he seems to have preferred to be seen. Although Grant is once again too close to his subject, perhaps, in often declaring to the reader what Jesus thought, what Jesus felt, what Jesus expected to happen - most of which go far beyond the limited sources at his disposal, and far beyond what a historian could confidently declare. Nonetheless, his interest in Jesus' self-image is quite intriguing, I thought. He notes, for example, that Jesus seemed far less comfortable being characterized as the Son of God or as the Messiah, while he seems to have been more comfortable with being called the Son of Man.