Now that I’m trying to avoid creating AI depictions of deity I feel like a Muslim.
The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” is a scholarly endeavor to try to suss out details about Jesus’ life from a naturalistic worldview without any religious priors. Given the extreme scarcity of hard data you have to think deep and hard about what evidence to accept if you’re going to be exclusively relying on standard historical methods, and even then your confidence intervals are going to be huge. It’s kind of interesting and they make some good points, but it all kind of feels like trying to reconstruct a working Saturn V in a backyard based on watching Apollo 13.
Still, it can be kind of fun and if nothing else it motivates a very close reading of the New Testament text even if it sometimes feels like Christ is specifically excluding the Jesus Seminar types when he refers to “they who have ears to hear.”
From a Latter-day Saint perspective, much of what they say clearly crosses some fairly bright red lines for all but the most heterodox among us. For example, the idea that Jesus thought that the End of Days was going to come in the next couple of years, or the idea that His crucifixion was a surprise to Him and that the die-for-their-sins angle was a post-hoc move to make sense of his death. (Although one silver lining of all that is that we can point out that if liberal Protestant scholars that believe that are Christians then by any objective standard so are we).
However, I can think of two cases where the “Historical Jesus” approach actually supports or sheds light on the Latter-day Saint perspective. One is more of an established if edgy take, and the last one is a little more eccentric, but for which there’s a stronger case to be made than some think.
The first is the idea that the Savior was married. Dan Brown thrillers aside, there’s actually a decent argument to be made that this was the case.
While a lot of Latter-day Saints are a little too quick to assume some evil redactor was pulling doctrine out of the scriptures they didn’t like, there actually is a case for something along those lines happening here. Princeton New Testament scholar James Charlesworth’s The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide (p. 83) states that “Many Christians would stress that Jesus could not have been married because he was divine. New Testament theologians would point out that perhaps Jesus’ marriage might have been suppressed by the claim that he was the bridegroom of the community he was forming with God’s help. The historian and sociologist might stress that since almost all Jews were married, and Jesus was a devout Jew, he was most likely married (see Phipps).”
Our favorite speculative theologian Orson Hyde’s case that the wedding at Cana was Christ’s wedding is actually a very mainstream hypothesis among historical Jesus types. The same Charlesworth chapter goes on for several paragraphs suggesting that it was plausible: Jesus’ mother had authority, his mother had to tell him that the wine levels were low instead of him seeing it for himself, the bridegroom is not identified, his brothers are not mentioned even though they are there. “Before its editing by the Evangelist, the story of the marriage at Cana may have preserved a tradition that Jesus was being married.”
There’s a long history of this speculation in the Latter-day Saint tradition given our theological priors that marriage is required for salvation going back to William Smith and, unlike much of the Christian world, there is no sacred celibacy, so there is some logic to this. (For a more thorough history of this debate in the Latter-day Saint community, see Christopher Blythe’s BYU Studies article).
As I noted, the second one is a little more off-kilter.
One of the common Christian beliefs that is challenged is the birth in Bethlehem, the census, and the slaughter of the innocents. I’m not going to rehash the arguments against their historicity, but some reasons have been proposed for why those stories might be less reliable than the ones surrounding Christ’s baptism, teachings, and crucifixion, the ministry and execution of John the Baptist, or the sincerity of the early apostles’ belief that he was resurrected.
Everybody gets one weird, strange belief about Caine wandering the earth or what have you, this one is mine. Or at least I think a non-Bethlehem birth of the Savior is more likely than 0%, maybe 20%, but regardless of the exact number it’s not insignificant.
There are two reasons why I think we could be more open to this given our priors as Latter-day Saints. One, nothing in our restoration scriptures mentions various aspects of the nativity story. Bethlehem isn’t mentioned, wise men aren’t mentioned, shepherds aren’t mentioned. The one aspect of the story that is mentioned is the star. In 1 Nephi 11 both Jerusalem and Nazareth are mentioned, but no Bethlehem. So if we’re open to parts of the New Testament not being accurate, we have no reason from restoration scriptures to think that this part is.
And then, of course, there is the famous fact that the BoM simply states that Jesus was born “at Jerusalem.” The standard apologetic response is to reconcile the two by treating Jerusalem as a sort of city-state, since Bethlehem is only about 5 miles away (albeit a half hour drive according to Google Maps, getting through security is probably a doozy). This makes sense, but what if we hold our ground and lean into the distinction? Given all of the above I’m also open to the idea that he was literally born in Jerusalem. There’s nothing in the restoration tradition that ties us down to shepherds and mangers.
While most of the historical Jesus types see Nazareth as his more plausible birthplace, there is a minority possibility entertained that he was born in Jerusalem. Again Charlesworth (p. 66) points out that Jesus’ extended family (Elizabeth and Zachariah) lived in the area, they frequented Jerusalem, Jesus received his bar mitzvah there, Jesus’ family is known to be living in Jerusalem after the crucifixion, and archaeologists have found evidence that descendants of David lived there. So not a slam-dunk case, and it could all be happenstance, but given that this is an area where a “Historical Jesus” take confirms this odd detail in the Book of Mormon that seems askance from the traditional narrative, and given that there is no other place in other scripture that confirms the nativity tradition, I’m a least open to the idea that the Book of Mormon statement was more literal.
To be clear, I’m not dying on any of these hills. I don’t feel particularly wedded to the Jesus-as-bachelor model, but I certainly have no desire to stick it to the traditional nativity story. I feel the spirit strongly when we read Luke 2 every Christmas Eve. The powerful story of the Savior of the world being born in a feeding trough, and of simple shepherds being given the honor of witnessing the birth of the Savior instead of wise scholars and potentates in nearby Jerusalem, is incredibly moving. (Of course, maybe the shepherds were there–just outside of Jerusalem, maybe watering their sheep in the brook of Kidron, who knows). The traditional narratives might very well be historically reliable, but in these cases I’m open to alternative takes.
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