WHEN WAS JESUS CRUCIFIED?

 I just finished listening to an excellent series of lectures from the Great Courses on the New Testament. The professor is Bart D. Ehrman, who thinks that the writers of the Gospels (whom we shall call the Evangelists) botched the story of Jesus because they got inaccurate information about what Jesus said and did, and then they changed the details of the flawed information that they got in order to conform the story to their particular theology. He even goes so far as to say that the Evangelists told stories that they knew to be untrue.

Ehrman begins his analysis by positing that none of the Evangelists had any personal knowledge of the details of Jesus’ life. He then says that the stories about Jesus were transmitted orally for some 35-65 years before they were written down by the Evangelists. Anyone who has played the parlor game “gossip” knows what happens to twice and thrice told tales.

He offers as an example Mark’s and John’s conflicting dates of the crucifixion. Mark firmly fixes the crucifixion on Passover. John just as firmly dates it to the Day of Preparation, the day before Passover. Ehrman says that John knew the date was Passover but knowingly changed the date to the day before. Why? Because that’s when the Passover lambs were slaughtered and Jesus is the Lamb of God. So according to Ehrman, John told a lie to convey what he believed to be a spiritual truth. I don’t think so. As I discuss why I don’t think so, I will accept Ehrman’s assertion that none of the Evangelists had personal knowledge of Jesus, but I can’t accept his second assertion that they had only oral sources because one of the Evangelists (Luke) tells us he used multiple written sources. 

Ehrman compares Bible scholarship to police investigation, in that they both involve searching for and evaluating clues. I don’t claim to be a Bible scholar, but I do claim to know something about criminal investigations. Ehrman speaks of three evaluative tools that Bible scholars use when attacking the Gospels. He calls them independent attestation, dissimilarity, and contextual credibility.

(1) Independent attestation—If a story is told by multiple independent sources, it is more likely to be true. E.g. John, Mark, Paul, Tacitus, and Josephus are independent sources. They all say Jesus was crucified. Their agreement makes it probable that Jesus was in fact crucified. The same sort of analysis is true of criminal investigations. The more witnesses we have to an event, the greater the likelihood of the event.

(2) Dissimilarity—If the Gospels say something about Jesus that is dissimilar to what later Christians believe, it is more likely to be true. E.g., in Mark’s story of the Syro-Phoenician Jesus referred to non-Jews as dogs. This doesn’t sound like what later Christians thought about Jesus’s attitude toward non-Jews. Jesus probably referred to non-Jews as dogs. In criminal cases we use a similar criterion: when a party comes forward with evidence that is contrary to the party’s position, it is considered more credible.

(3) Contextual credibility—When various persons in the Gospel stories act as we would expect Second Temple Jews to act, these actions have more credibility. If they act like people from a later stage in Christian history, then that action is suspect. Once again, a similar yardstick is employed in evaluating evidence in a court of law.

Here are some additional yardsticks we use in a court of law which might have some application to the question of Gospel interpretation:

(1) You should never call anyone a liar unless you have an ample evidentiary basis for doing so. Forman v. Wallshein, 671 So.2d 872, 875 (Fla. 3d DCA 1996).

(2) The mere fact that two witnesses disagree does not mean that either of them are lying. Boatwright v. State, 452 So.2d 666 (4th DCA Fla. 1984).

(3) When confronted by conflicts in the testimony of witnesses, you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that somebody is lying. McLeod v. State, 128 Fla. 35, 174 So. 466 (1937).

The conflict between Mark and John about the date of the Crucifixion is not an ample evidentiary basis for calling either Mark or John a liar.  One of them, of course, has to be wrong, unless different sects of Second Temple Jews celebrated Passover on different days—a resolution of the conflict which has been put forward by some students of the Gospels.

Interestingly, I once had a case in which the credibility of a key witness depended on the date of Easter. He said that his girlfriend couldn’t accompany him on a drug smuggling run because it was over the Easter weekend and she needed to be in church on Easter. Big problem. The weekend of the drug smuggle wasn’t Easter weekend. It looked as though our witness was discredited until further investigation showed that the girlfriend belonged to some minor denomination of the Eastern Orthodox Church which celebrated Easter on a different Sunday than Protestants did. Turned out nobody was lying.

Does this suggest anything about the conflict between John and Mark? Could it be that neither Evangelist was lying but that both were reporting the facts as they sincerely believed them? Maybe Ehrman has it backwards. Maybe John called Jesus the Lamb of God because he sincerely believed Jesus was crucified the day before Passover with the rest of the Passover lambs. Or maybe John only knew that he was crucified around Passover and decided it must have been the day before because Jesus was the Lamb of God. Or maybe he was just mistaken about the date—that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus was crucified.

In my blog on Memories of Murder Weapons I talked about how memory works and how witnesses retell events they’ve seen. I won’t rehash everything I said there, but the bottom line is that we only truly remember the major points of an event and when recalling the event, we “remember” the details by filling in plausible inferences about what happened. For instance, I remember seeing John shoot Mary. When I describe John shooting Mary I say that John pulled the trigger on his firearm. I didn’t see John pull the trigger, but guns won’t fire unless you pull the trigger, therefore I “remember” John pulling the trigger. It’s a subconscious process, and I truly believe that I saw John pull the trigger. Psychologists call this process “confabulation.”

When I wrote The Last Murder, a book about a case I prosecuted, I was remembering events that had happened over three decades in the past. Checking my recollections against newspaper accounts, police reports, and the memories of others involved in the case, I found that I was frequently wrong about the nuances of a transaction but never wrong about the major events of the transaction. When I wrote The Almanac Trial, I wrote it using letters and statements of many of the participants in the trial, but these letters and statements were written three decades or more after the trial. There again, the witnesses were in conflict on the details of the trial, but not the main facts of the trial.

When the Evangelists wrote, they would have had at their disposal both written accounts of the life of Jesus and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. In other words, they’d have been in pretty much the same situation I was in when I wrote The Last Murder and The Almanac Trial. That means that they had accounts which agreed as to the major details but were in conflict as to the minor details. They would therefore have had to make judgments about which minor details were more accurate. E.g. In the story of the healing of the paralytic, his friends tore open the roof of a house that Jesus was in and lowered the paralytic through the hole to get him to Jesus. Mark said they dug a hole in the roof and Luke said they tore up the shingles to the roof. Does it really matter which they did? They made the hole. By the way, Mark was more likely right. First Century Judean houses didn’t have shingled roofs. Be that as it may, I’m not prepared to expel Luke from the New Testament because he was mistaken about the construction of Judean roofs in the time of Jesus.

I’ve worked with the testimony of thousands of witnesses, and I’ve seen all kinds of conflict in testimony. Like Ehrman, I see conflicts in the testimony of the Evangelists. I outlined some of them in The Case against Christ. But in my estimation the conflicts (1) are minor, (2) give no valid reason to doubt the honesty of the Evangelists, and (3) give no valid reason to think that their account of the life of Jesus is untrue.

TOWARD AN AUTHENTIC TEXT OF THE BIBLE

What version of the Bible is most authentic? What version has been used by the largest number Christians for the longest period of time? Have I just stated the same question in different words or have I asked two distinct questions? Since I am a lawyer by profession, I suffer from the lawyerly proclivity for never giving a straight answer to a straight question. If authentic means “closest to the words penned by the original authors,” then we have two separate questions. It is quite clear that most Christians for the longest period of time have used versions of the Bible which almost certainly differ from the original wording of the original writers.

Bart Ehrman has written two books in which he energetically points out those differences. The first is a scholarly work entitled The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, and the second is a popular work titled Misquoting Jesus. The thesis of both Ehrman's books seems to be that copyists changed the wording of key passages of scripture to conform the words of the Bible to their own belief system. Refuting that contention is not the aim of this essay, so I will just say I believe the contention is easily refuted and move on. (See Craig Blomberg’s excellent works, Can We Still Believe the Bible? and The Historical Reliability of the Gospels).

Anyhow, by 1611, when the venerable King James Version (KJV) of the Bible was rendered into English, the Bible text they used for the translation did not contain some of the original words of the original writers and contained some words which were not written by the original writers (See, e.g. John 8:1-11). But although it may not have been “authentic,” the KJV New Testament has a good claim to be based on the text which has been used by the largest number of Christians for the longest time.  Up until the 1500’s most Christians used a Latin translation of the New Testament done by St. Jerome in the Fourth Century. Known as the Vulgate, it was the basis of the Catholic Douay-Rheims (DRV) translation which was completed in the early 1500’s. The first versions of the DRV never really caught on.

About the time of the invention of the printing press in the mid 1500’s, it was recognized that there was a need for a standard Greek translation of the New Testament. After all, the New Testament was originally written in Greek. The Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus collected as many manuscripts of the New Testament as he could lay his hands on and compiled them into a Greek text. None of his New Testament manuscripts were complete, so to fill in the gaps he retranslated the missing passages back into Greek from the Vulgate.  Erasmus’s text, with some revisions, became known as the Textus Receptus, the “received text.”

When the KJV was translated into English (1611), they used the Textus Receptus as the basis for the New Testament.  About 100 years later, Bishop Richard Challoner revised the DRV using the Textus Receptus, and it was after this that the DRV became popular. So the Textus Receptus formed the basis of the New Testament for Protestants beginning in 1611 and for Catholics beginning in 1749. The Textus Receptus thus reigned supreme in Western Christianity for a period of approximately 400 years (1519-1900). Then came the Historical-Critical movement in Biblical studies.

Historical-Critical Bible scholars saw that the Textus Receptus didn’t agree with many early manuscripts of the New Testament, and that the early manuscripts didn’t agree with each other. It didn’t really matter that the vast majority of these discrepancies were trivial and that non-trivial discrepancies didn’t affect Christian doctrine, they wanted an “authentic” New Testament. They decided to apply their scholarly knowledge to the problem of figuring out which among the many conflicting passages was the most authentic. The result was the Westcott-Hort text, published in 1881.

The most singular thing about the Westcott-Hort text is that, being pieced together from multiple manuscripts, it is a version of the New Testament that no early Christian ever used. Nevertheless, it supplanted the Textus Receptus and became the forerunner of modern texts such as the Nestle-Aland and the UBS. Most modern translations of the New Testament are based on these modern critical texts. So now we’ve got an “authentic” New Testament text that no early Christian ever even saw.  Whether these modern English translations have successfully captured the “authentic” text of the New Testament is open to debate. I’ve read several different versions from several different denominations, and what I’ve noticed is that the translations of various disputed passages always seem to endorse the theology of the denomination sponsoring the translation.

So what modern English translation most faithfully captures the original text of the New Testament? Who knows? I think it’s much easier to answer the second question. The Textus Receptus wins that contest hands down. It’s been used by Western Christianity for centuries, and it is based on the most common ancient family of Greek texts—the Byzantine text. At least that’s the family which has had the most copies survive to modern times. Casting about looking for a modern translation of the Textus Receptus we find—the New King James Version (NKJ).

Now let us look at the Old Testament and see what we can make of it. Almost all modern Protestant versions of the Old Testament are based on the Masoretic text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible. We can be sure that no early Christians used the Masoretic text because it didn’t exist during the early days of Christianity. The Masoretic text began to take shape around 1000 and took its final form by the late 1300’s. Of course, modern scholars have gone behind the Masoretic text to try to find the original words written by the original authors, and their findings have been incorporated into the modern translations. The Roman Catholic Old Testament is based on an ancient Greek translation of scripture known as the Septuagint, which was originally intended for use by Jews living outside Israel who could not read Hebrew. Sharp-eyed readers of modern translations will notice that when Jesus quotes scripture, it sometimes differs from the text of that scripture found in the Old Testament. This is because Jesus was quoting the Septuagint, not the Hebrew Bible.

Early Christians used the Septuagint, and the Septuagint forms the basis for the Catholic Old Testament. That’s why the Catholic Old Testament has more books in it than the Protestant version. (The books known to Protestants as the Apocrypha). When Protestantism broke off from Catholicism, they wanted the Old Testament to be authentic, which they read to mean more like the Jewish Bible. So they adopted the Masoretic text as their Old Testament, purging the books which weren’t in the Masoretic text.  By trying to become more authentic, they actually produced a less authentic Old Testament. Which leads us to this conclusion—among the archaic English translations of the Bible, the Catholic DRV is truer to early Christianity than the Protestant KJV. Why? The DRV’s Old Testament is based on the Septuagint. So where do we find the most authentic modern English Old Testament? I’d have to say it probably comes from one of the modern Catholic translations. But you have to be careful—some modern English Catholic Old Testaments are based on the Masoretic text.

We can sum up what we’ve learned so far with three points: (1) The Septuagint is the Old Testament text recognized as authoritative by the greatest number of Christians for the longest period of time. (2) The Textus Receptus is the New Testament text recognized as authoritative by the greatest number of Christians for the longest period of time. (3) The most “authentic” modern English Bible translation is going to be based on the Septuagint and the Textus Receptus.

Where do we find such an edition of the Bible? I don’t think we can find a Roman Catholic or a Protestant Bible which will meet our criteria. We can, however, find one. While Western Christianity was replacing the Septuagint with the Masoretic text and abandoning the Textus Receptus for modern critical texts, one branch of Christianity clung to a Bible based on both the Septuagint and the Textus Receptus—the Eastern Orthodox Church. In 2008 the St. Athanasius Academyof Orthodox Theology published the Orthodox Study Bible (OSB). For the New Testament they used the New King James Version, and for the Old Testament, they took the NKJ and reworded it wherever it disagreed with the Septuagint. Protestants would be uncomfortable with the OSB’s Old Testament—some of the books have different names (e.g. I Samuel is I Kingdoms), the order is different, there are too many books, and the chapters and verses sometimes differ.

I myself am partial to the KJV, having read it from an early age, so that’s what I usually read. For modern translations I like the Protestant New American Standard and the Catholic New American Bible. Until I examined a copy of the OSB I always discounted the NKJ as not “scholarly,” but the OSB changed my mind about it.