More than one evangelical Christian reviewer or reader of my book The Jesus Dynasty has objected to the exclusion of the so-called “miraculous” as a part of an investigation of the “historical” Jesus. As Christianity Today’s Darrell Bock put it: “James Tabor’s historical assumptions that reject God’s activity on Earth force him into odd arguments to explain the birth of Christianity.” Bock is referring particularly to my observation that historians assume that all humans have two biological parents and that dead bodies don’t rise to life. Ironically, to most historians the “odd arguments” are characteristic of those who take the assertions that Jesus had no human father or that he walked out of his tomb and ascended into heaven as literal scientific statements of fact. Whether I personally reject “God’s activity on Earth” is another matter entirely that I don’t address directly in my book.

My training at the University of Chicago was that of an historian, not a theologian or even a “Biblical Scholar” as such. My Ph.D. was not from the Divinity School but in the Division of Humanities. I worked broadly in the area study of “Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Culture” and more specifically within ancient Judaism and early Christianity. What I reflect in The Jesus Dynasty are the methods and approaches generally employed by most academically oriented scholars who work in these areas.

Doing the work of an historian is not “hard” science in the purest sense of the term, but none of us in the field would want it to be understood as “art” either, at least not in some wholly subjective sense. There is no doubt that historians often differ in their conclusions in important ways, and that “interpretation” of the data, how it is finally weighed and processed, is indeed a partially subjective process. I write about this in the “Conclusion” of my book. But when my students retreat into the subjective regarding some historical conclusion that I or others have reached, with the easy retort “but that is just your interpretation,” I encourage them to go beyond that kind of reductionism. History is not mere subjective interpretation. Ideally it is based on arguments and evidence and in the end a good historian wants to be persuasive. It is rare that historical conclusions close out any possible alternative interpretations, but the goal is to set forth, in the open court of reasoned argument and evidence, a compelling “case” for whatever one is dealing with. Even when we disagree we end up stating “why” we don’t find this or that argument convincing, or what we find weak in the assumptions of one with whom we differ.

As for sources, nothing is excluded and everything can be evaluated as long as it offers us some reasonable way to reconstruct the past. Historians love and welcome evidence. That is what we live on and we crave any new materials that can shed more light on what we know. But even our best sources, particularly the literary ones, are remarkably tendentious. Modern standards of argument and objectivity were unknown to ancient writers. Writing was more often than not a blatant attempt at propaganda and apologetics, and all the more so when it came to competing systems of religious understanding. Recognition of those factors is a vital part of every historian’s method. If we want to “use” Josephus we also have to give attention to what we know of him as a person, as a writer, what his tendencies are, what his competence was, and so forth. It is the same with the Gospels, with Eusebius, and with all the ancients texts that we have at our disposal. It is also the case that for many important questions related to Jesus and his movement we simply do not have good evidence and probably never will. As thankful as we are for what we have, whether textual or archaeological or myth or tradition, in the end we have to face our own limitations. So, just to take one simple example, if we want to speculate on the “lost years of Jesus” we can do so, but in doing so we acknowledge that we have so little to go on, especially if we confine ourselves to early material (say 1st century AD), that our attempts are educated guesses and creative reconstructions. I cannot prove that Jesus and his brothers worked in Sepphoris, but I think it is a likely possibility, given what we know. But the assertions that Jesus traveled as a child with his uncle Joseph of Arimathea to Britain, or that he studied in Egypt or in India, are based upon legendary materials far removed in time and place from his world. Or, what about the question of whether Jesus was married to, and had children with, Mary Magdalene, that is so much in the public mind these days based on the success of Dan Brown’s book and film? As Bart Ehrman and quite a few others have shown, there is little to no historical evidence supporting the idea in any early sources. The public has been geared to think of the suppression of evidence, usually with the Roman Catholic church being the culprit, but such grand “conspiratorial” theories have little basis in fact. What we do find characteristic of early Christianity, or more properly, “Christianites,” is a competing diversity of “parties and politics,” each propogating its own vision of the significance of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. All sorts of interpretations are offered of Jesus, but the question finally comes down to how convincing a given argument is to other historians who work in the field and know the materials.

As far as the subjects of the miraculous and the supernatural, historians of religions remain observers. We do not exclude religious experience in investigating the past. What people believe or claim to have experienced becomes part of the evidence. We can note that Mark reported that Jesus walked on water, and then we date and evaluate Mark as a source, just as we note the miracles that Philostratus claims for his contemporary hero Apollonius of Tyana, or that the story that Zeus fathered Hercules or that Romulus was taken bodily into heaven (see the materials at my University Web site on Heroes and Gods) Most scholars in the field would say that Jesus practiced “exorcism,” but what that implies about the reality of the demonic world goes beyond our historical methods. We know enough about human psychology and our modern controversies regarding psychic phenomenon to realize the complexities of drawing such conclusions. History and theology/faith do part ways in some of these areas. It is easy to hold that “God” can do anything, and thus argue for the acceptance of a male baby being born without male sperm, or a corpse rising after two or three days, but such claims are not the purview of historians and they run contrary to our human experience and a more rational scientific understanding of birth and death. Historians likewise deal with “beliefs” about the afterlife and the unseen world beyond, but without asserting the historical reality of these notions or realms. We can evaluate what people claimed, what they believed, what they reported, and that all becomes part of the data, but to then say, “A miracle happened” and claim it as historical fact, goes beyond our accessible methods. I don’t want to oversimplify things here and I realize that the question of “faith” and “history” and the assumptions modern historians make in terms of a so-called “materialistic” worldview can be challenged, even philosophically. But for the most part historians are willing to leave the “mystery” in, but in terms of advocating this or that view of the so-called “supernatural,” as an explanation, they properly, in my view, remain wary.

We will probably never know who Jesus’ father was, or what happened to the body of Jesus, but I prefer the “odd arguments” of the historian in investigating those matters, however inconclusive and speculative, to the dogmatic assertions of theology that are problematic from a scientific point of view.

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