Join host John Williamson in this enlightening episode of the Deconstructionist Podcast as he sits down with Tucker Esferda, Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Tucker shares insights from his new book, "Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins," offering a thought-provoking discussion on the historical Jesus, eschatology, and the origins of Christian beliefs.
Discover how centuries-old interpretations and habits of reading shape our understanding of biblical texts and how modern scholarship is shedding new light on ancient beliefs. The episode also promises a trip down memory lane with a planned re-release of classic, Christmas-themed episodes that capture the essence of the season. Tune in for part one of this captivating conversation as John and Tucker challenge commonly held assumptions and invite listeners to reconsider what they believe about Jesus' second coming and its implications in both ancient and contemporary contexts.
Guest/Bio:
This week I welcome Dr. Tucker S. Ferda! We talk about his brand new book, "Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins" and what the New Testament has to say about Jesus return.
Tucker is associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His research interests include the Gospels, the history of New Testament research, Second Temple Judaism, eschatology, and hermeneutics.
Guest (Selected) Works: Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis; Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins
Special Theme Music:
Forrest Clay
X: @clay_k
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YouTube: www.youtube.com/claykmusic
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Songs used on this episode were from the Recover EP
You can find Clay’s music on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere good music can be found!
This episode of The Deconstructionists Podcast was edited, mixed, and produced by John Williamson
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00:00:00 --> 00:00:11 Music.
00:00:11 --> 00:00:15 Welcome to the Deconstructionist Podcast. I'm your host, John Williamson,
00:00:15 --> 00:00:20 and we're back with a new guest who is covering his new book that is pretty
00:00:20 --> 00:00:23 timely, I think, for Christmas, so hopefully you guys enjoy this one.
00:00:23 --> 00:00:27 Also intend for some of the newer listeners to re-release some older episodes
00:00:27 --> 00:00:33 from the archive that are some good, I would say, seasonal Christmas treats for you.
00:00:33 --> 00:00:37 So we're going to bring back some older episodes, including one by our dear
00:00:37 --> 00:00:38 friend, Dr. Alexander Shia.
00:00:39 --> 00:00:42 If you haven't heard it, it's just, It's one of my favorites,
00:00:42 --> 00:00:46 and so hopefully you guys enjoy it, but that'll be out in the next week or so
00:00:46 --> 00:00:47 as we get closer to the holiday.
00:00:47 --> 00:00:50 But in terms of new content that's coming out right now today,
00:00:51 --> 00:00:54 right here, I welcome guest Tucker Esferda on.
00:00:54 --> 00:00:58 He is the Associate Professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
00:00:59 --> 00:01:02 His research interests include the Gospels, the Historical Jesus,
00:01:02 --> 00:01:06 the History of New Testament Research, Second Temple Judaism.
00:01:06 --> 00:01:08 Eschatology, and Hermeneutics.
00:01:08 --> 00:01:11 His other publications include the book jesus
00:01:11 --> 00:01:14 the gospels and the galilean crisis his new
00:01:14 --> 00:01:17 book is excellent highly recommend jesus and
00:01:17 --> 00:01:20 his promise second coming jewish eschatology and
00:01:20 --> 00:01:24 christian origins we have a fantastic conversation really
00:01:24 --> 00:01:27 really good so hopefully you enjoy it uh this will be part one this week part
00:01:27 --> 00:01:32 two next week and then like i said planning on re-releasing some some christmas
00:01:32 --> 00:01:37 themed episodes from from deep in the archives believe it or not we are approaching
00:01:37 --> 00:01:41 10 years of having been doing this podcast, which is crazy to think about.
00:01:41 --> 00:01:46 So just want to say a deep appreciation for me, for those of you who are still
00:01:46 --> 00:01:50 listening and those of you who are new to the show and sticking with us.
00:01:50 --> 00:01:54 And hopefully you enjoyed the new content that we released this year.
00:01:54 --> 00:01:57 Still intend on continuing to release more into the future.
00:01:57 --> 00:02:02 And hopefully you enjoyed that equally as much. So right now we're in the process
00:02:02 --> 00:02:07 of moving platforms. And so there's a little glitch last week with the timely
00:02:07 --> 00:02:09 release, we'll say, of that particular episode.
00:02:09 --> 00:02:13 So hopefully we've got that ironed out, but hopefully we'll have some new benefits
00:02:13 --> 00:02:17 and features to this new platform, including one of the things is it really
00:02:17 --> 00:02:20 cleans up rough audio very, very well, I will say.
00:02:21 --> 00:02:25 And so sometimes when you have recording issues where somebody's recording with
00:02:25 --> 00:02:30 not the most ideal technology, this new AI technology is phenomenal.
00:02:30 --> 00:02:34 It's unbelievable. So anyway, Anyway, that's more for me than for you.
00:02:34 --> 00:02:38 I don't even know I told you guys that. But anyway, enjoy this first part.
00:02:38 --> 00:02:40 Like I said, part two will be coming next week.
00:02:41 --> 00:02:44 But without further ado, here's Tucker freaking.
00:02:45 --> 00:02:53 Music.
00:02:53 --> 00:02:57 All right. Welcome to the Deconstructionist Podcast. I'm very excited to have
00:02:57 --> 00:03:00 my guest on, Tucker Ferda, today. Thank you so much for spending some time with me.
00:03:01 --> 00:03:05 Thank you, John. It's great to chat with you. Absolutely. So you've got a really
00:03:05 --> 00:03:08 cool book out, and we were just chatting briefly before we started recording.
00:03:08 --> 00:03:13 It's called Jesus and His Promised Second Coming, Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins.
00:03:14 --> 00:03:17 And I think for a lot of people, this is going to be a really interesting book
00:03:17 --> 00:03:20 because as I kind of alluded to, there are a lot of things that a lot of us
00:03:20 --> 00:03:24 sort of grew up with and something that we've started to call over the years on the podcast,
00:03:25 --> 00:03:29 part of your inherited faith and things that we just kind of took for granted
00:03:29 --> 00:03:33 that were just fact or truth or whatever you want to call it and never really
00:03:33 --> 00:03:36 examined any deeper, more deeply than that.
00:03:36 --> 00:03:40 So before we get into it, though, talk a little bit about your background and
00:03:40 --> 00:03:44 then ultimately like what inspired you to write a book on this topic?
00:03:44 --> 00:03:48 Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, my background is definitely relevant for this
00:03:48 --> 00:03:54 in many ways. And I share probably a similar experience to a lot of your listeners, really.
00:03:54 --> 00:04:00 So I grew up in a Christian context that, you know, in many ways I'm very appreciative of.
00:04:00 --> 00:04:04 And it was a, scripture was really important. I was really, you know,
00:04:04 --> 00:04:06 curious about the Bible as a kid.
00:04:07 --> 00:04:11 But I was also really interested in history. And I initially went to college
00:04:11 --> 00:04:14 to be a high school history teacher.
00:04:14 --> 00:04:18 I went to Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and every,
00:04:18 --> 00:04:22 all the students have to take an intro to Bible class when you're there.
00:04:22 --> 00:04:26 And so, and I was in there and I think like within the first 20 minutes of the
00:04:26 --> 00:04:31 class, I realized like, I need to go change my major because this is like,
00:04:31 --> 00:04:33 this is exactly what I want to do.
00:04:33 --> 00:04:36 Cause it's a lot of, you know, I'm interested in the Bible, but it was also
00:04:36 --> 00:04:38 like a historical approach to the Bible.
00:04:39 --> 00:04:44 And so it conjoined these two things for me that I didn't know that in my orbit,
00:04:44 --> 00:04:47 that there were people that did this, that devoted their lives to studying like
00:04:47 --> 00:04:52 the origins of Christianity and the development of the Bible and the transmission of the Bible.
00:04:53 --> 00:04:57 So that was how I got into it. And I just, I always pursued it kind of more
00:04:57 --> 00:04:59 in that kind of academic track.
00:04:59 --> 00:05:02 I never really felt drawn to like pastoral ministry or anything.
00:05:03 --> 00:05:07 I'm really grateful to have landed at a seminary. So I teach New Testament courses
00:05:07 --> 00:05:12 here at Pittsburgh Seminary, but I am also like, I run our MTS program,
00:05:12 --> 00:05:13 which is more of our academic track.
00:05:14 --> 00:05:16 So that's much more kind of where I'm comfortable.
00:05:17 --> 00:05:20 And what I'm trying to do with this book really too, is to contribute to like
00:05:20 --> 00:05:24 the historical conversation about eschatology and Christian origins.
00:05:25 --> 00:05:30 It's not really a book of theology. I don't really even know fully the theological
00:05:30 --> 00:05:33 implications or what I even make of all of the things.
00:05:33 --> 00:05:37 But I was really interested in trying to make an argument about early Christianity.
00:05:38 --> 00:05:42 And so, but in terms of the actual framing kind of thing that got me into this,
00:05:43 --> 00:05:46 I talk about this a little bit in the book, but when I was a doctoral student,
00:05:46 --> 00:05:51 I was a preceptor for a class, a massive class on the origins of Christianity.
00:05:51 --> 00:05:56 And in this class, we were talking about a common view in historical Jesus scholarship,
00:05:56 --> 00:06:00 which is that Jesus had predicted really the end of the world,
00:06:00 --> 00:06:01 like in his own lifetime.
00:06:01 --> 00:06:02 And it's a very common view you
00:06:02 --> 00:06:06 find all the way back in like Albert Schweitzer's work and some others.
00:06:06 --> 00:06:09 And a student asked a question, you're like, well, what about all the stuff
00:06:09 --> 00:06:14 about the second coming in the Gospels? Which is a very fair question, you know?
00:06:14 --> 00:06:20 And at the time, that question just kind of stuck with me because I really didn't
00:06:20 --> 00:06:23 know how I would have responded to that question. And the professor's response
00:06:23 --> 00:06:26 was like, well, kind of like a counting noses approach.
00:06:26 --> 00:06:30 Like, well, scholars say that all this stuff comes from the early church.
00:06:30 --> 00:06:33 And that's like fair. That actually is what scholars have said.
00:06:34 --> 00:06:37 But I wanted to know, like, what is the argument? Like, what is the actual historical
00:06:37 --> 00:06:43 argument that makes that so compelling? And why can I not name a single book
00:06:43 --> 00:06:48 on this issue, like, in the last 60 years? Like, why is it really so clear?
00:06:49 --> 00:06:53 You know, like, how did that happen? So that's kind of how I got into it.
00:06:53 --> 00:06:56 And I knew, you know, going in, I didn't go in with a thesis to prove,
00:06:56 --> 00:06:58 really. I wasn't going to try to defend anything.
00:06:58 --> 00:07:03 I just knew no one was writing about it. And anything that I found and wrote
00:07:03 --> 00:07:05 about would be a contribution, because no one's talked about it for so long.
00:07:06 --> 00:07:09 And it was only in research that I found that my conclusion was going to be
00:07:09 --> 00:07:14 a little against the grain, you know, but that wasn't the intention from the beginning.
00:07:14 --> 00:07:18 That's so interesting. And by the way, it's funny because I also went to college
00:07:18 --> 00:07:20 to become a high school history teacher.
00:07:20 --> 00:07:23 So we've got that in common. You can act there. That's great.
00:07:24 --> 00:07:26 Absolutely. And yeah, it's interesting.
00:07:26 --> 00:07:31 You know, you talk about that instance where you had that encounter in class
00:07:31 --> 00:07:35 and just kind of took it for granted that from your perspective,
00:07:35 --> 00:07:38 from the scholarship perspective,
00:07:38 --> 00:07:43 like it was kind of already a settled thing and not something that was up for debate necessarily.
00:07:43 --> 00:07:48 And on the flip side, I would say that most people coming from like a,
00:07:48 --> 00:07:54 you know, congregant participant side of things feel like it's settled,
00:07:54 --> 00:07:56 but probably from an opposite perspective.
00:07:56 --> 00:07:59 Like, well, of course, yeah, of course, the gospels have all sorts of things
00:07:59 --> 00:08:04 to say. And it's talking about, we have all sorts of probably beliefs about it.
00:08:04 --> 00:08:07 Like, I would say the most common one that I grew up believing is that,
00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 yeah, Jesus is going to come back in the future at some point.
00:08:11 --> 00:08:14 And he's going to make his return. He's going to judge the living and the dead and all these things.
00:08:14 --> 00:08:18 And so, and never questioned it. Never thought, had a second thought about it.
00:08:18 --> 00:08:22 That's just part of, you know, it's in the Nicene Creed. And like,
00:08:22 --> 00:08:23 that's just what we believe.
00:08:23 --> 00:08:28 So, it's kind of interesting that you guys were both coming at it from an opposite perspective.
00:08:29 --> 00:08:34 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And there's some reasons, I mean, there are things that,
00:08:34 --> 00:08:37 you know, part of the book is I'm trying to challenge some.
00:08:38 --> 00:08:43 Assumptions that had been made about the second coming or reasons that,
00:08:43 --> 00:08:47 you know, scholars have dismissed this or disconnected it from Jesus for some
00:08:47 --> 00:08:49 bad reasons that we need to deconstruct.
00:08:49 --> 00:08:53 Like, you know, maybe we'll get into some of these things, but like it doesn't
00:08:53 --> 00:08:56 square with like an enlightened Jesus or it's too much like the Jewish Messiah.
00:08:57 --> 00:09:00 Like we need to really challenge those kinds of ideas, you know.
00:09:00 --> 00:09:04 But I also wanted to construct something at the end to make an argument about
00:09:04 --> 00:09:08 what's a better reading of the evidence that makes more sense in the first century context.
00:09:09 --> 00:09:13 Yeah, I love that. And so you kind of get into the book and you start by talking
00:09:13 --> 00:09:17 about kind of laying out the foundation for how did we get there?
00:09:17 --> 00:09:19 How did we arrive at that particular conclusion?
00:09:19 --> 00:09:23 And then you kind of go through a history of what the scholars over time from
00:09:23 --> 00:09:30 like Origen and Augustine have said about the matter to historians and theologians after that,
00:09:30 --> 00:09:33 and then all the way up to present day where you kind of talk about like John
00:09:33 --> 00:09:36 Dominic Cross and nt wright and and folks like that marcus borg
00:09:36 --> 00:09:41 and so talk about like starting at the beginning you know sort of the logical
00:09:41 --> 00:09:46 place to start like talk about like and you talk about you make a distinction
00:09:46 --> 00:09:49 early on which i think is important we should probably start there uh where
00:09:49 --> 00:09:53 you talk about the study of early christianity or the studies in the life of
00:09:53 --> 00:09:55 jesus and why is it important,
00:09:55 --> 00:10:00 to make a distinction between the two when studying the question of a potential second coming.
00:10:02 --> 00:10:05 I'm trying to think of where I named that and what
00:10:05 --> 00:10:08 exactly I was doing with that distinction is this part of
00:10:08 --> 00:10:11 the reception history like the beginning yep yeah I
00:10:11 --> 00:10:17 mean so well I guess there is a there's a serious interpretive exegetical debate
00:10:17 --> 00:10:21 that I wanted to reserve and tell a little bit later in the book which is when
00:10:21 --> 00:10:25 we're actually looking at New Testament texts and thinking you know how how
00:10:25 --> 00:10:30 are we supposed to understand this language about the coming of the son of man on the clouds of heaven.
00:10:31 --> 00:10:34 You know, you mentioned N.T. Wright, for instance. I mean, he's in an interpretive
00:10:34 --> 00:10:36 camp that reads this language symbolically.
00:10:37 --> 00:10:41 In its original context, he thinks this is supposed—we are misreading it if
00:10:41 --> 00:10:43 we're thinking about it in a literal way.
00:10:43 --> 00:10:46 So, I kind of wanted to bracket the exegetical New Testament question.
00:10:47 --> 00:10:50 And so, when I'm talking about early Christianity, I'm thinking more like second
00:10:50 --> 00:10:54 century, some of these patristic sources, and kind of beginning there to look
00:10:54 --> 00:10:57 at how the second coming is received, which I think is pretty clear.
00:10:57 --> 00:11:01 And I don't think Wright would actually probably disagree with my reading of
00:11:01 --> 00:11:02 some of that kind of stuff.
00:11:03 --> 00:11:08 But I mean, the gist of the conclusion for that is that the belief is really everywhere.
00:11:09 --> 00:11:14 And the belief in the return of Jesus is really all over the place,
00:11:14 --> 00:11:19 and it's widely assumed, and it doesn't seem to be as divisive of a topic as
00:11:19 --> 00:11:23 some other things were in the Christian movement in those early centuries.
00:11:23 --> 00:11:28 There was certainly a lot of dispute about, you know, how literally to understand
00:11:28 --> 00:11:33 the manifestation of the kingdom of God and heaven and some of those kinds of things. But like.
00:11:34 --> 00:11:40 I mean, Origen's really interesting, actually, in his commentary on Matthew, because he says,
00:11:41 --> 00:11:45 even as he begins this very spiritualized, kind of allegorical reading of the
00:11:45 --> 00:11:47 apocalyptic discourse in Matthew,
00:11:47 --> 00:11:51 he prefaces all of it by saying, like, look, I'm not trying to challenge what
00:11:51 --> 00:11:55 he calls the simpler understanding in the church, which is this refers to the
00:11:55 --> 00:11:56 return of Jesus in the future.
00:11:56 --> 00:11:59 He's saying, like, let's just, I'm not talking about that, but I'm going to
00:11:59 --> 00:12:02 go deeper into other ways to understand this language.
00:12:02 --> 00:12:05 And I think that's kind of telling, The origin would kind of feel the need to
00:12:05 --> 00:12:09 preface that with like, hey, this is kind of the common way this is received,
00:12:09 --> 00:12:13 and I'm going deeper into it rather than like challenging it, you know.
00:12:14 --> 00:12:18 And so I was, you know, I'm not a church historian, but this was a pretty research-intensive
00:12:18 --> 00:12:23 chapter for me that took quite a while to work through many of these sources.
00:12:23 --> 00:12:28 And, you know, the upshot for me was I really didn't find any noticeable difference
00:12:28 --> 00:12:33 in the history of the tradition until you get after the Reformation, where you start to have,
00:12:33 --> 00:12:37 especially in the Enlightenment period, where you get historians who are really
00:12:37 --> 00:12:42 kind of challenging this idea of the second coming and also saying that it really
00:12:42 --> 00:12:46 is something Jesus himself didn't talk about. It's something that comes from his followers.
00:12:46 --> 00:12:50 See, that's very interesting. So, like, we definitely want to get into that.
00:12:50 --> 00:12:54 So before we do that, though, one of the things, one of the terms or phrases
00:12:54 --> 00:12:57 that you repeat periodically throughout the book,
00:12:57 --> 00:13:02 which I think is very important and definitely helps us understand the things
00:13:02 --> 00:13:06 that sort of inform our reading on it, especially coming at it from like hundreds
00:13:06 --> 00:13:08 and hundreds of years later.
00:13:08 --> 00:13:12 It's this phrase that you call habits of reading. Tell listeners what you mean
00:13:12 --> 00:13:15 by that. Yeah, yeah. So I think the.
00:13:16 --> 00:13:19 Like so i i encounter this all the time as a
00:13:19 --> 00:13:22 seminary professor you know we we're reading the
00:13:22 --> 00:13:25 bible you know and i think the because we
00:13:25 --> 00:13:28 have the text in front of us and we think we're reading it carefully we
00:13:28 --> 00:13:31 think that the ideas we have the interpretations we had just
00:13:31 --> 00:13:34 kind of emerge between us and the text and it's just like something that happens
00:13:34 --> 00:13:38 in our heads as we're engaging the text right and there's certainly an element
00:13:38 --> 00:13:42 of and i'm not denying like that there's creativity and originality that happens
00:13:42 --> 00:13:46 in biblical interpretation but like we need to also account for the fact that
00:13:46 --> 00:13:49 we are like trained to read the Bible in certain ways.
00:13:49 --> 00:13:55 We're trained to, consciously or not, to ask certain questions of the Bible
00:13:55 --> 00:13:57 and not ask certain questions.
00:13:57 --> 00:14:00 For me, this has been a big learning curve in my own life of just like,
00:14:00 --> 00:14:03 oh, I didn't even know I could ask those kinds of questions of the Bible.
00:14:03 --> 00:14:08 I was only in, you know, or asking kind of personal individualistic questions
00:14:08 --> 00:14:10 maybe about what this meant for me in my life.
00:14:10 --> 00:14:12 I'm like, well, there's way more questions I could ask.
00:14:12 --> 00:14:15 So, that would be actually a good example of a habit of reading.
00:14:15 --> 00:14:20 Which is a kind of, and I don't mean to dismiss this in any way or say it isn't
00:14:20 --> 00:14:23 really important in Christianity today, but like reading single verses,
00:14:24 --> 00:14:28 you know, and you're kind of looking for what is this speaking into my life right now, right?
00:14:28 --> 00:14:32 That is a habit of reading that is kind of self-reinforcing.
00:14:33 --> 00:14:35 If that's what you're looking for, that's kind of what you're going to find, right?
00:14:36 --> 00:14:40 And so part of what I'm trying to do in this book is to look at where some of
00:14:40 --> 00:14:46 these habits of reading came from that ultimately distinguished the second coming
00:14:46 --> 00:14:50 idea from Jesus and linked it to his disciples. And.
00:14:51 --> 00:14:55 I mean, I think one, this quote I have somewhere in here from Annie Dillard,
00:14:55 --> 00:14:57 who's one of my favorite writers.
00:14:57 --> 00:15:02 She has this great line, you know, where she says something about like,
00:15:02 --> 00:15:08 after Jesus came, it wasn't like a few seconds before his followers just went
00:15:08 --> 00:15:12 crazy and came up with all these wild ideas and were kind of blocking the hole
00:15:12 --> 00:15:14 that Jesus broke through, you know?
00:15:14 --> 00:15:17 And that, well, I find that really interesting.
00:15:17 --> 00:15:20 That there's a habit of reading that has
00:15:20 --> 00:15:23 produced that because dillard is not a as brilliant
00:15:23 --> 00:15:26 as she is she is not a new testament scholar who has spent
00:15:26 --> 00:15:29 years and years and years like that that's not the result
00:15:29 --> 00:15:33 of a long historical investigation it's it's
00:15:33 --> 00:15:35 the recycling of a common habit of reading which is
00:15:35 --> 00:15:39 distinguishing jesus from his early followers and
00:15:39 --> 00:15:42 kind of linking the bad stuff with christianity we don't
00:15:42 --> 00:15:45 like with the followers and the good stuff with jesus and and so i'm curious
00:15:45 --> 00:15:50 was curious in tracing that out like how like where that came from yeah and.
00:15:50 --> 00:15:53 You and you rightly point out in a multitude of ways throughout the book like
00:15:53 --> 00:15:58 where that comes into play in terms of how we interpret you know what we're
00:15:58 --> 00:16:01 reading and what you know how we understand these things,
00:16:01 --> 00:16:05 talk about a little bit so you kind of dive in starting at
00:16:05 --> 00:16:10 the very beginning of what are some some of the sort of already established
00:16:10 --> 00:16:15 ideas or interpretations of a potential second coming in you You call out two
00:16:15 --> 00:16:19 what you call seminal contributions by Glasson and Robinson and their impact
00:16:19 --> 00:16:23 on our current views on the subject. So talk a little bit about that.
00:16:24 --> 00:16:27 So this is in the first part of the book. There's four parts,
00:16:28 --> 00:16:31 and they all are doing very different things. They're kind of different angles of inquiry.
00:16:31 --> 00:16:35 So some of the reception history stuff we were talking about is part two,
00:16:35 --> 00:16:38 where I'm really trying to explain where these habits of reading come from.
00:16:38 --> 00:16:42 But I thought it was important methodologically and otherwise,
00:16:42 --> 00:16:46 even just in terms of charity as a scholar, like in part one,
00:16:46 --> 00:16:51 to engage Glasson and Robinson as a historian, like really getting in the weeds in their arguments.
00:16:51 --> 00:16:55 Because I think that they are in some ways influenced by some kind of theological
00:16:55 --> 00:16:58 habits of reading, but that's not my main kind of beef with them.
00:16:58 --> 00:17:01 I have more like historical and exegetical problems with their arguments.
00:17:02 --> 00:17:07 So, I mean, a really fundamental thing that I disagree with is just kind of
00:17:07 --> 00:17:11 their general approach to writing about the historical Jesus.
00:17:11 --> 00:17:19 So, they begin very early on in their work in like trying to reconstruct the historical Jesus.
00:17:20 --> 00:17:26 And within like a chapter or two, they pretty much have the Jesus they think is historical.
00:17:27 --> 00:17:32 And then they're reading that Jesus against Paul's letters, what they find in
00:17:32 --> 00:17:35 other places in the New Testament, what they find in other places in the gospels.
00:17:35 --> 00:17:39 And in my view, there's gonna be discontinuity.
00:17:39 --> 00:17:42 You're gonna see that in the sources, but I think that gets things backwards
00:17:42 --> 00:17:47 in terms of our approach of going immediately for like reconstructing Jesus
00:17:47 --> 00:17:50 and then reading him against these early sources that we have,
00:17:50 --> 00:17:55 because all we have to reconstruct Jesus are these very fragmentary sources,
00:17:55 --> 00:17:57 Paul included, Gospels included.
00:17:57 --> 00:18:02 And so the historical work needs to be starting with careful description of
00:18:02 --> 00:18:07 what are the claims of these sources, and then inferring who is the historical
00:18:07 --> 00:18:10 figure likely behind these things. So.
00:18:11 --> 00:18:15 In my view, you know, my part three of the book is really exegesis,
00:18:15 --> 00:18:19 and then part four is claims, like inferences about the past.
00:18:19 --> 00:18:23 In Glasson and Robinson's works, those two parts are kind of flipped.
00:18:23 --> 00:18:29 Like they do the historical part first, and then they get into like engaging the texts.
00:18:29 --> 00:18:33 And I want to do that in a different order, because I think they're somewhat
00:18:33 --> 00:18:36 selective in terms of what they're picking through in the Gospels,
00:18:36 --> 00:18:40 and they too easily say, Jesus did this, he didn't do that.
00:18:41 --> 00:18:46 I do some of that work as well, but like that disguises like as a historian,
00:18:46 --> 00:18:50 I still have to explain how these sources came to be, even if I think they're
00:18:50 --> 00:18:52 full of stuff that's not historical,
00:18:52 --> 00:18:56 like to make a compelling argument about Christian origins, I need to explain
00:18:56 --> 00:19:00 how these sources came to be and where they emerged from and how they got Jesus so wrong.
00:19:00 --> 00:19:04 Yeah. As we talk about on the, on the podcast a lot, like context is very important.
00:19:05 --> 00:19:09 So, and speaking of context, that kind of leads to my next question,
00:19:09 --> 00:19:12 which is a point you make in the book also that i've
00:19:12 --> 00:19:15 you know found myself saying a lot is is we too
00:19:15 --> 00:19:18 often i feel like to try to divorce jesus from
00:19:18 --> 00:19:23 judaism and and and the fact that we kind of often even forget i often make
00:19:23 --> 00:19:27 the joke that like we forget that jews wrote the bible you know the majority
00:19:27 --> 00:19:31 of it anyway and and like and and so we kind of feel as if the jewish perspective
00:19:31 --> 00:19:35 isn't quite as important to understand when we're trying to understand like
00:19:35 --> 00:19:38 what this would have meant to the people who had hurt it initially.
00:19:38 --> 00:19:43 And so you talk about that a little bit in the fact that there seems to be a
00:19:43 --> 00:19:47 little bit of, I don't know, sort of disconnect or sort of almost,
00:19:47 --> 00:19:50 I'm trying to think of the word that you use in the book, but like,
00:19:50 --> 00:19:54 you know, there seems to be some disconnect there in terms of separating,
00:19:54 --> 00:19:57 you know, early Christianity from Judaism as a whole.
00:19:58 --> 00:20:03 Absolutely. I mean, I think this is, I hope that people are convinced by my
00:20:03 --> 00:20:05 reconstruction of Jesus, But even if they're not,
00:20:05 --> 00:20:10 I really hope this is a big contribution of the book in terms of reception history
00:20:10 --> 00:20:17 and looking at how Christians have distanced Jesus from Judaism in ways that
00:20:17 --> 00:20:21 are really troublesome and Christians need to do a better job in our own context
00:20:21 --> 00:20:25 of how Christians are preaching and teaching and thinking about this.
00:20:26 --> 00:20:31 There's this, you know, there's this, and it's not unique to Christianity, but there is a.
00:20:32 --> 00:20:37 It seems like we have this need, if there's something we love that we want to
00:20:37 --> 00:20:42 hold up and celebrate, we so quickly want to do that by creating a negative
00:20:42 --> 00:20:44 foil to make it look better, right?
00:20:44 --> 00:20:49 And I think that is what has happened over and over again in the discussion
00:20:49 --> 00:20:53 of Jesus and his Jewish context is like, it's for some reason not enough to
00:20:53 --> 00:20:57 say, you know, Jesus had women who followed him, right?
00:20:57 --> 00:21:01 Or there were female apostles, like, it's not enough to say that.
00:21:01 --> 00:21:05 We have to say, like, and Jews didn't care about women, or there was,
00:21:05 --> 00:21:08 like, there was this patriarchal context, and then Christians came along,
00:21:08 --> 00:21:12 Jesus came along, and, like, but that's just, that's all part of this foiling
00:21:12 --> 00:21:14 thing, right, that is not fair.
00:21:15 --> 00:21:17 It's bad history. It needs to be challenged.
00:21:17 --> 00:21:23 And so, that is a, so part of my argument about where, at the beginning,
00:21:23 --> 00:21:28 Jesus becomes severed from the second coming hope is related to this separation
00:21:28 --> 00:21:32 between Jesus and Judaism that you see really taking place in enlightenment
00:21:32 --> 00:21:36 scholarship, where you have these figures who like, they don't like eschatology.
00:21:37 --> 00:21:38 They don't like miracles.
00:21:39 --> 00:21:42 There's a lot of things about traditional Christianity they don't like,
00:21:42 --> 00:21:45 which is fair to have that, you can have that view, you know,
00:21:45 --> 00:21:50 but they then basically reconstructed Jesus who thinks just like they do on those things.
00:21:51 --> 00:21:55 And they say all the kind of bad stuff they don't like, which includes the second
00:21:55 --> 00:21:58 coming hope comes from his Jewish context, right?
00:21:59 --> 00:22:02 And so they see the followers of Jesus, his first followers,
00:22:03 --> 00:22:08 as kind of falling back into their Jewish ways of thinking after Jesus left the scene, right?
00:22:10 --> 00:22:15 There hasn't been a good study in New Testament studies of the reception of
00:22:15 --> 00:22:19 that and the impact it had on early work on the historical Jesus.
00:22:19 --> 00:22:22 A lot of more recent scholars are much more sensitive about this.
00:22:22 --> 00:22:27 So this critique is really about 19th century biographical life of Jesus,
00:22:27 --> 00:22:31 but it's still an important contribution, I think, to just the reception history of the Bible.
00:22:32 --> 00:22:38 Yeah, absolutely. And so talk a little bit more about the more recent scholarship,
00:22:38 --> 00:22:42 as you put it. So you talk about your name, obviously, Schweitzer, E.P.
00:22:42 --> 00:22:47 Sanders, Paula Fredrickson, and Dale Allison, who, again, wrote the four-year book and was just on.
00:22:47 --> 00:22:52 All believers all believe in sort of this, as you say, supernatural,
00:22:52 --> 00:22:56 transcendent events expected to occur in the immediate future.
00:22:56 --> 00:22:59 And so you've got, I should say, I should have prefaced this by saying,
00:22:59 --> 00:23:04 you kind of group these folks into like three different camps, if that's fair to say.
00:23:04 --> 00:23:08 So that's kind of camp one camp two you've got ch dot and nt right who we've
00:23:08 --> 00:23:12 also had on before who kind of see the imagery as more metaphorical or symbolic
00:23:12 --> 00:23:16 and then you've got the third camp not to my own home but we also had people
00:23:16 --> 00:23:17 from the third camp on too so.
00:23:19 --> 00:23:23 John donovan cross was just on marcus borg i didn't get him before he passed
00:23:23 --> 00:23:27 away unfortunately but but marcus borg stephen patterson and the jesus seminar
00:23:27 --> 00:23:30 which we've talked about on on the show before and so you've got these three
00:23:30 --> 00:23:34 different camps so talk a little bit about the three different camps and sort of,
00:23:34 --> 00:23:37 you know, kind of your perspective on where they all kind of fall.
00:23:38 --> 00:23:41 Absolutely. Yeah. This, yeah. And I think this helps too, in terms of seeing
00:23:41 --> 00:23:45 how, like where I think I fit kind of in this and the contribution I hope, I hope that it is.
00:23:46 --> 00:23:51 So, so like Albert Schweitzer and Fredrickson and Sanders and Allison,
00:23:51 --> 00:23:55 I think I put them in the same stream, which I would define in this particular way.
00:23:56 --> 00:23:59 So they take a lot of the eschatological material in the gospels,
00:23:59 --> 00:24:02 the coming of the son of man, descriptions of the judgment, right?
00:24:03 --> 00:24:07 As like Jesus is really talking about, or the sources are really talking about
00:24:07 --> 00:24:09 like literal things that are to happen.
00:24:09 --> 00:24:13 So the coming of the son of man is talking about like coming of some kind of heavenly being, right?
00:24:14 --> 00:24:20 So that's like an interpretive issue, right? They're interpreting the sources in that way.
00:24:21 --> 00:24:25 But then there's also a historical move, which is they're arguing that a lot
00:24:25 --> 00:24:28 of that stuff goes back to Jesus. So Jesus talked like this, right?
00:24:29 --> 00:24:34 Where all three of these scholars, and I try to, especially the more recent
00:24:34 --> 00:24:39 ones, I try to show that there's some interesting disagreements among them on some key issues.
00:24:39 --> 00:24:42 But they all are in general agreement, though, that they think Jesus expected
00:24:42 --> 00:24:44 the kingdom to come very soon,
00:24:45 --> 00:24:50 imminently, but none of them think he predicted his own return after an interim
00:24:50 --> 00:24:52 period, or at least they've not really written about that and explained how
00:24:52 --> 00:24:56 that fits with the rest of their views on eschatology.
00:24:57 --> 00:25:03 So before I get to the other camps, I'm going to say I am also in this Schweitzer
00:25:03 --> 00:25:09 stream, but I'm trying to, I think, nuance and provide some clarity in this,
00:25:09 --> 00:25:10 which is I think, you know.
00:25:12 --> 00:25:18 The sources themselves are clearly tying their imminent eschatology to the return of Jesus.
00:25:18 --> 00:25:22 So we might conclude historically that it wasn't that way, but I think we need
00:25:22 --> 00:25:26 to do a better job of like reading carefully what the sources are actually claiming
00:25:26 --> 00:25:28 in their eschatological,
00:25:28 --> 00:25:33 you know, views, instead of saying Jesus is expecting the kingdom to come,
00:25:33 --> 00:25:38 you know, very soon and all the parousia stuff comes later. So that's kind of what I'm doing there.
00:25:39 --> 00:25:43 You can get more into that. The other two streams, the other extreme of this view,
00:25:44 --> 00:25:49 actually, the other side of this is a kind of non-eschatological Jesus that
00:25:49 --> 00:25:53 on an interpretive level really probably agrees a lot with Albert Schweitzer
00:25:53 --> 00:25:56 and Dale Allison in terms of how they read this stuff in a literal fashion.
00:25:57 --> 00:26:00 Historically, though, they just don't think any of it goes back to Jesus.
00:26:00 --> 00:26:02 A lot of this stuff goes back to the early church.
00:26:03 --> 00:26:07 So, it's an interesting case of similar interpretation, but very different historical
00:26:07 --> 00:26:10 reconstruction, so where you're placing that.
00:26:10 --> 00:26:14 And in the middle, I would say, is the N.T.
00:26:14 --> 00:26:19 Wright, George Caird camp, which is fundamentally a difference in interpretation.
00:26:20 --> 00:26:25 And so, these scholars are going to say, we're misreading the Son of Man stuff
00:26:25 --> 00:26:25 and taking it literally.
00:26:25 --> 00:26:30 This is all apocalyptic symbolism for things that are happening on the ground
00:26:30 --> 00:26:34 in the first century. So, you can see, even in the way I sketched that out,
00:26:35 --> 00:26:40 that it's necessary for me to demonstrate, like, the historical reconstruction side of that.
00:26:40 --> 00:26:44 That's part of this, but also on the interpretive level, to look at these sources
00:26:44 --> 00:26:51 and make the case that, you know, the Schweizerian reading of things is probably
00:26:51 --> 00:26:53 the better first century reading of those.
00:26:53 --> 00:26:58 Yeah, and I found it really interesting because you point out this sort of very
00:26:58 --> 00:27:02 interesting sort of disagreement between, I think it was like Schweitzer and N.T.
00:27:03 --> 00:27:08 Wright, where one, they're sort of debating sort of the terms,
00:27:09 --> 00:27:12 as it were, like where one is saying that, as you said, it's a real.
00:27:13 --> 00:27:19 You know, apocalyptic end times sort of thing where Jesus comes back and all
00:27:19 --> 00:27:23 time and space comes to an end versus sort of this symbolic,
00:27:23 --> 00:27:27 what we might call like a collective enlightenment or,
00:27:27 --> 00:27:33 you know, of the collective consciousness sort of transformation versus,
00:27:33 --> 00:27:35 you know, the world literally ending.
00:27:36 --> 00:27:40 Yeah. I mean, I think, right, if I'm reading him accurately,
00:27:40 --> 00:27:45 He says that Schweitzer talks about the end of the world,
00:27:45 --> 00:27:51 and I think I even used that phrase earlier in the podcast, which I wish I could take that back.
00:27:51 --> 00:27:57 But I think he kind of characterizes Schweitzer as predicting the end of the—sorry,
00:27:57 --> 00:28:00 Schweitzer's Jesus as predicting the end of the world.
00:28:00 --> 00:28:04 And Wright wants to say, look, we don't have that kind of view around in first
00:28:04 --> 00:28:08 century Judaism. This is like a modern thing. what really is going on is the
00:28:08 --> 00:28:10 expectation for transformation.
00:28:10 --> 00:28:12 That's Wright's key term is transformation.
00:28:13 --> 00:28:18 And I think that's a good point, I think, that Wright is making,
00:28:18 --> 00:28:20 but I think that it's not fair to Schweitzer,
00:28:21 --> 00:28:26 actually, to say that he is characterizing eschatology in such a way that it's
00:28:26 --> 00:28:28 about the end of the space-time universe.
00:28:28 --> 00:28:33 In fact, I think transformation is really a great summary of what Schweitzer
00:28:33 --> 00:28:35 thought Jesus meant by the kingdom of God.
00:28:36 --> 00:28:39 I think the real difference is like, how obvious is that transformation?
00:28:39 --> 00:28:43 For Schweitzer, it's, he means transformation literally, meaning like,
00:28:44 --> 00:28:46 you would wake up and you would know the world is different.
00:28:47 --> 00:28:51 Yeah. Right? It's not just a change of perspective. It's not just a transformation
00:28:51 --> 00:28:57 in the way you perceive things, but it's actual, like, a physical transformation of the world, you know?
00:28:57 --> 00:29:01 But I don't think Schweitzer's talking about the end of the world in that kind of way.
00:29:02 --> 00:29:07 So I'm trying to do a little different take on that transformation language.
00:29:07 --> 00:29:10 Yeah, it's a really interesting thing to think about.
00:29:11 --> 00:29:17 So, like, talk about, you know, we start to get into sort of like the actual sort of primary text.
00:29:17 --> 00:29:20 And I remember talking to an archaeologist and talking about,
00:29:21 --> 00:29:26 you know, the problems that occur when you're digging into history versus ancient history.
00:29:27 --> 00:29:31 And just like when you're talking about ancient history, you're talking about, you know.
00:29:31 --> 00:29:36 I think they were using like the sort of a visual comparison where like regular
00:29:36 --> 00:29:40 history might have countless volumes on the Civil War, whereas ancient history
00:29:40 --> 00:29:42 might have three books on a shelf, you know, kind of thing.
00:29:42 --> 00:29:46 And so when we're talking about like the actual primary sources that we have
00:29:46 --> 00:29:51 to work with that we reference, you know, to even gain an understanding of how
00:29:51 --> 00:29:54 people may have understood this concept, what are we really talking about here?
00:29:54 --> 00:29:56 Obviously, we're talking about the gospels.
00:29:56 --> 00:29:59 And even within the gospels, you know, scholars disagree in
00:29:59 --> 00:30:02 terms of how early one was written versus the
00:30:02 --> 00:30:04 next and whether one borrowed from another or whether there
00:30:04 --> 00:30:08 was this document cue that they all sort of referenced that were popular
00:30:08 --> 00:30:11 sayings of jesus so as a from a historical perspective
00:30:11 --> 00:30:14 what are we working with here yeah it's a
00:30:14 --> 00:30:19 great question so it is it is very fragmentary you know and and we have to be
00:30:19 --> 00:30:22 really creative with the little meager stuff that we have but i mean i think
00:30:22 --> 00:30:28 the the honest truth is that most of our sources that help us to do anything
00:30:28 --> 00:30:31 like concrete are our literary sources.
00:30:31 --> 00:30:38 So, we can make inferences about the social location of Jesus and some things
00:30:38 --> 00:30:40 based upon archaeology.
00:30:40 --> 00:30:43 There's some really significant things we can learn from what we can find in
00:30:43 --> 00:30:48 the ground about the kind of nature of Jewish observance and practice in Second
00:30:48 --> 00:30:52 Temple Palestine, but that is all, it kind of remains on a pretty general level, right?
00:30:52 --> 00:30:55 It doesn't help us actually differentiate the.
00:30:55 --> 00:30:59 Different proposals about Jesus as one's more historical based on those kind
00:30:59 --> 00:31:05 of levels, that's ultimately going to come down to how we understand these literary sources.
00:31:05 --> 00:31:10 And among those, I include the four Gospels, even though, and there's been a
00:31:10 --> 00:31:15 kind of push in recent years to include the Gospel of John more in this discussion.
00:31:15 --> 00:31:20 I do have a chapter where I talk about the Gospel of John, but I see I'm a little
00:31:20 --> 00:31:22 more old school in this in some way.
00:31:22 --> 00:31:27 So in some respects, I'm doing a little more with the synoptic Gospels,
00:31:27 --> 00:31:30 and I see John going in a little bit different direction, even if it affirms
00:31:30 --> 00:31:37 kind of the base thing that I find in terms of eschatology in the synoptics. We have those Gospels.
00:31:37 --> 00:31:42 I engage other non-canonical Gospels, and I talk about them in this book as well,
00:31:42 --> 00:31:47 but I didn't have time to—this is a whole other separate book to really go into
00:31:47 --> 00:31:53 this—but I just am leaning on other scholars mainly for conclusions I find compelling
00:31:53 --> 00:31:58 about the fact that most of these other Gospels are later than our canonical
00:31:58 --> 00:32:00 Gospels, and in many respects,
00:32:00 --> 00:32:03 they're dependent on these earlier Gospels.
00:32:03 --> 00:32:07 And so, I'm skeptical that we're going to find a whole lot in those other sources
00:32:07 --> 00:32:11 that's going to be valuable for reconstructing Jesus in his own context.
00:32:11 --> 00:32:14 But I still need to engage them, and I try to do that.
00:32:14 --> 00:32:19 And then there's also, you know, Paul's letters, which is where I actually start
00:32:19 --> 00:32:22 in kind of the analysis of the literary sources because there are earliest sources.
00:32:23 --> 00:32:27 And, you know, it's well known that in very perplexing that Paul doesn't talk
00:32:27 --> 00:32:30 a lot about the life of Jesus and a lot about his teachings.
00:32:30 --> 00:32:35 But there are some very interesting clues in certain places that can help us
00:32:35 --> 00:32:40 understand kind of what he claimed he thought about or what he claimed he knew
00:32:40 --> 00:32:45 about Jesus and how he used that tradition in different ways in his own argumentation
00:32:45 --> 00:32:48 that I think is relevant for this question before us.
00:32:50 --> 00:37:51 Music.
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