Chocky

Hello all, I've been looking into the idea that the crowds in Jerusalem in the gospel narratives are literary devices.

I've come across two interesting points in my research:

1) the size of the crowds hailing Jesus as king at the Triumphal Entry, spreading palm branches and garments in front of him, were apparently exaggerated by the authors. There is a good article about their use of language - Brent Kinman's "Jesus' Royal Entry Into Jerusalem", which can be found with a Google search (I don't have a high enough post count to include the link), but the gist is a) the crowds were actually his disciples, not the public, and b) there weren't very many of them:

- Luke's crowd is the "whole multitude of the disciples" (Luke 19:37), who "Luke" later numbered at 120 (Acts 1:15)
- when Mark says "many" people this is the same word used about the crowd trying to fit in a house in Capernaum - maybe no more than a couple of hundred? (Mark 2:2)
- John's "great crowd" is the same crowd who had just gone to Bethany to see Lazarus (John 12:9).

2) the crowds coming to celebrate Passover were massive. E.P. Sanders estimates 300,000 to 400,000 per year ('Judaism: Practice and Belief', 1992, p.125-8). With such a large crowd, the various entrances to the city would have had a steady stream of people coming and going - reconstructed maps of the old city show entrances on all sides.

To sum up, this means the crowds hailing Jesus as king were most likely made up of different people from the ones later calling publicly for his death.

This is important because the provocative, nationalistic Triumphal Entry - with its palm-leaf waving, associated with the Maccabean revolt - is a typical explanation in scholarly work for Jesus' crucifixion, and if it was as minor as Kinman is suggesting, it could easily have passed unnoticed by the Romans charged with keeping order during the Passover. Also, it would then be possible that the "crowds" in the gospels weren't acting in contradiction if they were made up of different groups of people, and thus wouldn't need to have been invented.

Any thoughts?

Toto

I think that the events in the gospels were more likely to be the product of literary invention, rather than simple exaggeration.

Your links:

Jesus’ Royal Entry into Jerusalem by BRENT KINMAN, HERITAGE CHURCH, CASTLE ROCK, COLORADO

Just skimming the first part of the article, this appears to be another apologetic attempt to make some sense out of the gospel story, by jiggering some events to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together. The Jesus Seminar does not think that this event was historical - it appears to be based on prophecy fulfillment. The author quotes Bultman and Sanders and notes the objection that if the entry had been so triumphal, the Romans would have taken immediate action rather than waiting for Jesus to disrupt the Temple and hang out until the Passover. His solution is to make the crowds smaller. My solution would be to view the whole passage as literary invention.

I'm not sure that this is even worth reading in depth.

aa5874

There is really no external historical source for the Triumphal Entry.

And it would appear that the Triumphal Entry scene was based on supposed predictions in Hebrew Scripture.

Matthew 21.4 Examine Zechariah 9.9
Matthew 21.5 Even the chant of the crowd can be found in the Psalms 118.26.

Matthew 21.9 The Jesus story does not appear to be based on history but ON assumed prophecies taken out of context.

In effect, Jesus FULFILLED ALL non-prophecies, including the non-prophecy of the Triumphal Entry.

Chocky

Thanks Toto and aa5874.

Whatever Kinman's motives, I wouldn't necessarily read the article as minimising the crowds for apologetic purposes. Christians have generally assumed there were huge crowds welcoming Jesus but if that's not what the Greek infers, then Christians may have been wrong all along.

I was aware of the Jesus Seminar's rejection of this and it strikes me as knee-jerk - it "fulfils" the passage in Zechariah, therefore it's unhistorical. This is a fair enough argument but this particular prophecy wasn't difficult to fulfil. If Jesus existed and was something like a revolutionary nationalist, as some scholars suggest, how hard would it have been to find a donkey to ride to "fulfil the prophecy" and lend weight to the Davidic cause? The Quaker James Nayler rode a donkey into Bristol to re-enact the Triumphal Entry in the 1650s and was branded with hot irons for blasphemy for his trouble... clever.

Then, Christians could later have read a messianic meaning into it (as John claimed the disciples "did not understand these things at first").

Toto

The discussion of the size of the crowd starts at page 250:

The Greek does not seem to require the result that you want.

aa5874

But, in the 1st century, every "Tom", "Dick" and "Harry" rode donkeys to Jerusalem. And in the story, Jesus seemed to have borrowed the donkeys.

What King did not even own a donkey?

A King in a story about Jesus.

Doug Shaver

If there was no historical Jesus, then the triumphal entry obviously never happened.

If there was a historical Jesus, we still have no good reason to believe that an incident like it actually happened. If you want to argue, "But nobody can prove that it didn't happen," I'll give you that, but it won't get you anyplace you want to go.

Juststeve

I think Doug is exactly right. If Jesus existed, which I think he did, I still find the Triumphal Entry to be improbable.

Steve

aa5874

Well, you may be in a far worse position than a Christian. Christians generally believe that the Jesus stories are fundamentally true or probable hence believe Jesus existed.

You on the other hand think that the Jesus stories, as presented, are fundamentally improbable yet have FAITH or the BELIEF that Jesus existed without any external corroborative source.

Your belief about Jesus as a man is baseless or without supporting external sources.

Virtually all the events and words of Jesus in the NT are based on out-of-context or mis-interpreted prophecies.

The Triumphal entry is another clear piece of evidence that shows that the Jesus character was fundamentally fabricated from Hebrew Scripture or the Septuagint.

DNAReplicator

Despite being what qualifies as a historicist around these parts, I have to agree with most of the sentiments above. The contents of the passion narrative that first appear in Mark seem to be based on prophecy fulfilment, and most of the narrative (other than references to Jesus having been crucified) are not a common themes within earlier traditions (Q, Thomas, Paul). In addition, the passion reads as if it is a fiction – after all, how could the writer have known what Jesus said or did in front of Pilot?

So my personal best guess about the development of Christology is that the crucifixion was initially viewed as an act of martyrdom which served as an exemplar to the members of the Jewish cult of which Jesus had been a member. The resulting reverence for Jesus fostered myth making about him, which resulted in the attribution of cult ideology to the Jesus character (Q/Thomas).

My conjecture is that Paul’s resurrected Jesus was initially no more than a vision or hallucination about the Q/Thomas Jesus. Then after or towards the end of the eye-witness period Paul’s visionary resurrection evolved into a myth about a flesh and blood resurrection. This was then bundled up in Mark with whole slew of fictional material seeking to develop the reverential tales of “Jesus the Martyr” into the myth of “Jesus the Messiah”. For that reason, I would not trust any of the events described in the canonical gospels.

IMHO, if there was a HJ, then the most we can say is that he was a crucified member of a Jewish cult. Looking at the commonality between early sources the cult may have had some connection to John the Baptist, and other members of his cult may have included individuals with names like Thomas, John, Peter, Mary etc. I would not want to extend the assignation of ‘probable historicity’ to any other part of the Jesus myth.

As a historical Jesus, mine is pretty minimal and the case is far from certain. So splitting hairs and arguing about minor details in the passion narrative seems rather pointless.

You are correct to point to the singular lack of external evidence for the existence of Jesus or the disciples. However, there appears to be a development in the Jesus myth during the 1st CE from a plausible naturalistic account of the sayings of a ‘crucified cultic preacher’ to the magic wielding death defying, hocus-pocus ‘son of God’. If so, then positing that the ‘crucified preacher’ could have been based on a real person seems at least as parsimonious as the ‘invented from whole cloth’ theory.

I can understand those here that hold the position that the Jesus myth being created from whole cloth is more likely than it being based on some kernel of fact. What I can’t understand is the absolute certainty that YOU share with many Christians about your position. To me, the evidence is ambiguous, and to believe without reservation one way or the other requires a leap of faith. And you clearly have the faith of a fundamentalist – even to the point of preaching to the converted about your position at every opportunity!