What else can we learn about Jesus, the Jew from Galilee who lived two thousand years ago and became one of the most famous people in the world? The sources for his adult life, especially the Gospels, have already been commented on in detail; we do not have any texts about his youth.
However, says Pierluigi Piovanelli, chair of “Origins of Christianity” at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris) and author of “The Jesus of the Historians”. Between Truth and Legend (PUF, 408 pages, 24 euros) Jesus has not yet revealed all of his secrets to researchers.
Is there a consensus today about the historical existence of Jesus?
Pierluigi Piovanelli: All serious historians agree on the existence of a Jesus of Nazareth, named after the city in Galilee where he grew up. First of all, there is the breadth of evidence: on the one hand, the Gospels and the writings of the first Christians, but also a number of sources from different horizons, such as the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37–100), the Latin authors Tacitus ( 58-120) and Suetonius (70-140) or even the Syrian polytheist philosopher Mara bar Sérapion (50-?), who referred to Jesus – as a human being – in their writings without questioning his existence.
Then there is the fact that he was born in Galilee – a completely insignificant province – and died on the cross – a shameful death – elements that, in our opinion, were too consistent with the expected image of a “Messiah” to be invented would have been.
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We have no physical evidence, and Jesus is the focus of many legendary stories written years or even centuries after his death. But from the legends we still manage to implicitly recognize some elements about his true existence. Historians, especially those who deal with distant periods, operate with hypotheses: they look for the “most economical”, weigh up the advantages and disadvantages, retain the probable and reject the improbable. A whole web of evidence makes it more difficult to assume that Jesus did not exist than the other way around.
In your work you distinguish between three major “quests” in the history of research on the historical Jesus. What do they cover?
The German Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) is considered a pioneer of the first phase, even though he did not dare to publish his writings about Jesus during his lifetime – they were published posthumously in 1778. It is summarized in a few chapters in a work in defense of a rationalist faith, in which he attempts to show that Jesus was a Jewish messianic character, with a political project of restoring Israel and opposing the Romans. Disappointed by his death, his disciples continued his struggle and invented the resurrection.
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