Peter Kirby

I wrote this about six years ago. I would like to have it mercilessly subjected to searching criticism, withering even, run over with a fine comb and smashed to bits. Or, if you like, just comment.

A Start on the Historical Jesus

Brian. The babe they called 'Brian',
He grew,... grew, grew, and grew--
Grew up to be-- grew up to be
A boy called 'Brian'--
A boy called 'Brian'.
He had arms... and legs... and hands... and feet,
This boy... whose name was 'Brian',
And he grew,... grew, grew, and grew--

Unfortunately, this quote from the Life of Brian sums up all that we really know about the early years of Jesus. Any history lying behind the two contradictory infancy legends found in Matthew and Luke is all but unrecoverable. The people involved were all dead or 'unavailable for comment' by the time these stories were set to writing, and their principle source appears to have been 'searching the scriptures' for prophecies of the Messiah. Thus, in order to paint the backdrop for this Jew from Galilee, we shall have to be satisfied with general 'cross-cultural' considerations, with a little tradition sprinkled here and there.

Question: What's In A Name?

All of our sources - including Josephus and Paul, Q and Thomas, as well as the Four Gospels - agree that the name of this guy was "Jesus," or in Greek, *Iesou*. Given that this was an extremely common name in the first century Jewish world, this is quite credible. Josephus alone mentions some twenty or so men called "Joshua" or "Jesus" in his writings, four of which were high priests, and no less than ten belonging to the time of Jesus the Nazerene.

Both infancy narratives agree that his putative father was "Joseph" and his mother was "Mary," which is also attested by a few scattered references elsewhere in the Gospel tradition. For Joseph, see Luke 3:23, 4:22; John 1:45, 6:42; for Mary, see Mark 6:3, Acts 1:14, and a letter of Ignatius. In any case, his mother and father had names.

These parents gave their son the name *Yeshu* in Aramaic. This name was a shortened form of *Yehoshua*, which originally meant "Yahweh helps" or "May Yahweh help." By the time of the first century, many were interpreting this as "Yahweh saves" or "May Yahweh save." This understanding is attested in the work of the philosopher Philo (On the Change of Names 21.121): Jesus means "salvation of the Lord" (Gk. Iesou de soteria kyriou). This popular etymology is also hinted at in Matthew 1:21.

Although we refer to him in English as "James" out of tradition, in ancient Greek documents this brother of Jesus is always identified as Iakobos, or Jacob (Ant. 20.9.1, Gal 1:19), which was also a fairly common name, after the Hebrew patriarch. According to Mark 6:3, the other brothers of Jesus are named Joses (=Joseph), Judas (=Judah), and Simon (=Simeon); these are three of the twelve tribes or sons of Israel. A scholar can only guess that Mary and Joseph shared a common sentiment of their day: May God deliver us from our oppressors and restore Israel.

Question: Where Was Jesus Born?

In John 7:41-42, the Jews make the following objection to considering Jesus of Nazereth to be the Messiah:

"The Messiah isn't going to come from Galilee, is he? Doesn't the Scripture say that the Messiah will be descended from David and will come from Bethlehem, the town David came from?"

Some would say that this is "Johannine irony," and that the author and his audience knew that Jesus really came from Bethlehem. However, the evangelist insists from the very first chapter that Jesus does come from Nazereth (1:45), to which Nathaneal replied: "Can anything good come from Nazereth?" This tradition also shows up later (18:5-7), and the evangelist never clues in his reader on the "true" hometown of Jesus. The irony in John's story is probably not that Jesus actually came from Bethlehem, but rather that his birthplace according to the flesh is not important because Jesus is the pre-existent Word that comes from above (8:23).

Matthew 2 and Luke 2 are the only two chapters of the NT that clearly make the claim that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Elsewhere, in Matthew and Luke as well the rest of the NT, Jesus is simply Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Nazarene, or Jesus the Nazorean. And even in the infancy narratives, the writers have to go out of their way to get Jesus born in Bethlehem instead of Nazereth: Matthew says that Herod ordered the massacre of innocent children, so that they fled to Egypt and later returned to Nazereth. Luke says that Caesar Augustus ordered a census of the entire Empire, which required Joseph to register in his ancestral town. Despite the fact that Josephus delighted in recounting the vices of Herod, this story doesn't appear at all in his histories, although the story of Jesus coming out of Egypt does fit Matthew's presentation of him as the New Moses. Despite the fact that the very event was an exercise in record-keeping, we have no records of Luke's universal census, and the very idea of everyone returning to his ancestral home would be a bureaucratic nightmare. The first census of Palestine did indeed take place under Quirinius, when he became legate of Syria c. 6 CE, which angered many Jewish people; but King Herod had already died by that time. Most likely, these two authors had to invent stories to get around the well-known tradition that Jesus came from Nazereth, in order to present Jesus as the Messiah from the City of David.

In light of such considerations, Michael Grant concludes (_Jesus: A Historian's Review of the Gospels_, p. 9): "the familiar story that Jesus was born at Bethlehem - which was in Judaea and not in Galilee - is very doubtful. More probably his birthplace was Nazareth in Galilee, or possibly some other small town in the same region." The fact that Jesus came from Galilee is the object of some embarrassment, as the quotes from John above show. And this is not just because the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem. In John 7:52, some people object that no prophet can come from Galilee. As also reflected in the Talmud, the higher classes in Jerusalem and elsewhere looked upon those from the rural backwater of Galilee as uneducated, uncouth, and even barbaric. Among other things, this was reflected in their speech, which was considered to be slurred in a distinctive dialect (Matthew 26:73; in the Talmud, cf. b. Ber. 32a, b. Erub. 53a, b. Meg. 24b).

Because the town is not mentioned by Josephus or other early non-Christian writers, some believe that Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus. On the other hand, it is also possible that Nazereth was just a small village; archaeological findings suggest that it was occupied since the 7th c. BCE and may have had a "refounding" in the 2d c. BCE (Meier, _A Marginal Jew_, Vol. I, p. 300). If Jesus was not actually born in Nazareth, he may have been associated with the town by the Hebrew word *netzer*, a shoot or branch, a term related to the Davidic house in a passage of Isaiah regarded as prophetic of the Messiah to come (Is 11:1, cf. Jer 23:5). It has also been proposed that 'Nazareth' was used as a synechdoche for all Galilee, which is why Jesus was also known often as 'the Galilean'. However, both of these suggestions would be a little strange unless Nazareth actually existed; moreover, as the City of David, Bethlehem would be a much more likely choice based on OT prophecies of the Messiah. Hence, we may continue to speak about "Jesus of Nazareth."

But the exact town of Jesus' birth, just as the exact year, is trivial in the final analysis. We can be fairly certain that Jesus originated in Galilee, which is why most of his career or ministry takes place in that area. Notably, the Gospel stories do not mention the larger Hellenized cities such as the capital of Sepphoris as being part of his itinerary, although it was only a few miles from Nazareth.

Question: What Language Did Jesus Speak?

Since Jesus became an itinerant preacher throughout his home area and surroundings, the real question here is: What was the language spoken by ordinary Jews during their daily lives in first century Palestine? Jesus must have been fluent in this language, and just possibly others as well.

From the writings and inscriptions of the time, there are four languages attested: Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. We may quickly eliminate the first from consideration. Latin was used almost exclusively by Roman officials, who only recently introduced the tongue. The Romans would have written inscriptions on public buildings without regard for the abilitiy of most Jews to read them. Notably, almost all of the known Latin inscriptions were situated in and around Caesarea Maritima and Jerusalem - the seats of imperial power, not Galilean villages.

Whether Jesus knew any Hebrew will, I think, hinge on whether we think that Jesus was literate. Hebrew suffered a great decline in popular use after the Babylonian exile and the return of Jews to Palestine. Increasingly Aramaic, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East from the neo-Assyrian and Persian periods onward, made inroads among ordinary Jews resettled in Israel. Although the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran have many Hebrew writings, these works are theological and literary compositions of an esoteric group. The rise of the Aramaic targums (translations of Hebrew Scriptures), witnessed already in a Qumran community that was devoted to compositions in Hebrew, is a strong objection to seeing Hebrew as the language of the common people. It would seem that Hebrew was only preserved in first century Palestine among those Jews dedicated to the study of the Scriptures, much as Latin was mainly for the clergy in the Dark Ages.

Concerning Greek, we must note the testimony of Josephus (Ant. 20.21.2): "I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks, and understand the Greek language, although I have so long accustomed myself to speak our own tongue [Aramaic], that I cannot pronounce Greek with sufficient exactness; for our nation does not encourage those that learn the languages of many nations..."

As J.P. Meier observes (_A Marginal Jew_, Vol. I, p. 261): "Admittedly, all this sheds at most a very indirect light on our main question, the language that Jesus knew and used best. But if even the gifted Jerusalemite intellectual Josephus was not totally at home in Greek after years of writing in it while living in Rome, and if in A.D. 70 he had found it necessary or at least advisable to address his fellow Jews in Jerusalem in Aramaic rather than Greek, the chances of a Galilean peasant knowing enough Greek to become a successful teacher and preacher who regularly delivered his discourses in Greek seem slim."

Inscriptions of the time evince that the commonly spoken Aramaic was mostly free of Greek influence on its vocabulary, unlike in later centuries (Meier, p. 265). Although they are all written in Greek, the only foreign words that the Gospels put on the lips of Jesus are in Aramaic, such as in Mark 5:41, 7:34, and 15:34. The Greek Gospel of John says that Jesus named Simon as *Kephas* (Jn 1:42), and Paul used the Aramaic address to God, *abba*, even when writing to Greek-speaking Gentiles in Gal 4:6 and Rom 8:16.

To sum up the conclusion of the matter (Meier, p. 268): "Jesus regularly and perhaps exclusively taught in Aramaic, his Greek being of a practical, business type, and perhaps rudimentary to boot."

Question: Was Jesus Literate?

To refute the idea that Jesus was illiterate, Ben Witherington simply says that, "the only concrete evidence we have suggests the contrary (cf. Lk 4 to Lk 24)" (_The Jesus Quest_, p. 88). The more sober scholar Meier notes the following (ibid., p. 270): "However, the sources and historicity of the narrative in this pericope are disputed. Some exegetes consider Luke's scene a tradition from his special 'L' source and hence an independent verification of what the other Gospel traditions tell us about Jesus' return to and preaching in Nazareth. However, it is also possible that Luke 4:16-30 simply represents Luke's imaginative and colorful reworking of Jesus' preaching and rejection at Nazareth as recounted in Mark 6:1-6a. A middle ground is also possible: the pericope shows Luke's acquaintance with Mark, but some important elements come from Luke's special source. Certainly the Lucan pericope is loaded with LUcan motifs; the highly symbolic scene functions as a programmatic preview of the course of Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection, resulting in the proclamation of the good news to the Gentiles. The clear presence of Luke's redactional hand makes one wary."

Other scholars, such as Safrai, have tried to argue that the majority of Jewish children in first century Palestine received education at schools, a program instituted by Simeon ben Shetah (c. 103-76 BC) and later Joshua ben Gamala (c. 63-65 CE). However, our accounts of this in the Talmud were written down about 200 years after Jesus' boyhood. The references from Philo and Josephus probably only refer to the public reading of the Torah in the synagogue. Any school system would have to be reinstituted after disruption during the two Jewish revolutions c. 70 and c. 130. Many scholars consider the educational program of Simeon to be a later legend (ibid., p. 273): "What elementary education did exist was carried out within the family, and most often it simply involved instruction in a given craft by the father." Meier writes (ibid., pp. 275-276): "Hence, despite inflated claims from some modern authors, we are not to imagine that every Jewish male in Palestine learned to read - and women were rarely given the opportunity. Literacy, while greatly desirable, was not an absolute necessity for the ordinary life of the ordinary Jew. Indeed, the very existence of Aramaic targums (translations) of the Hebrew Scriptures argues that a good number of ordinary Jews present in the synagogue could not understand Hebrew even when it was spoken, to say nothing of an ability to read or write it. Jewish peasants who never learned to read or write coult still assimilare and practice their religion through family traditions in the home, the reading of the Scriptures in the synagogue (with accompanying Aramaic translations), and the homily that preceded or followed the reading. These living traditions of the community would have been the matrix of Jesus' religious life and thought, as they were for most Palestinian Jews at the time. Taken by themselves, therefore, such influences as reverence for the Torah and respect for literacy do not prove that Jesus was counted among those Jews who could read and study the Scriptures; they simply show what might have been."

So far, the results have been unpromising, as neither the main biblical citation nor common Jewish practices support the idea that Jesus was literate. But Meier argues that the debates of Jesus over the Scripture in the synagogues and other details suggest that Jesus had the ability to read the sacred Hebrew texts. However, I myself am doubtful as to this "indirect argument," not least because the scriptural background "could have been conveyed by word-of-mouth catechesis and memorization." Since we do not have any clear reliable tradition in the Gospels, I do not believe that we can make a positive judgment here, especially in light of the fact that illiteracy was widespread in the ancient world.

Question: What was Jesus' socioeconomic status?

Although everyone is quick to identify Jesus as a carpenter, this universally accepted tradition rests on a single phrase in Mark 6:3, "Is this fellow not the carpenter [*tekton*]?" Nowhere else in the entire NT is the job of Jesus specified. Perhaps out of reverence for Jesus, the author of Matthew changes the question to (Mt 13:55), "Is this fellow not the son of the carpenter?" Luke, apparently also finding the jibe offensive, changes it to (Lk 4:22), "Is this fellow the son of Joseph?" One might apply the criterion of embarrassment here, because the evangelists drop the reference to Jesus as a woodworker, as well as the fact that the trade was not very prominent and has no theological significance. Despite the lack of multiple attestation, we may admit this universally known "fact" that Jesus was a woodworker, without any countertradition to challenge it.

J.D. Crossan writes (_Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography_, pp. 24-26):

===
Whether we read "carpenter" with Mark or "carpenter's son" with Matthew makes little difference in a world where sons usually followed their father's professions in any case. But what exactly was the social or economic class of a *tekton*, here translated as "carpenter"? The immediate problem is to avoid interpreting a term like *carpenter* in modern terms as a skilled, well-paid, and respected member of the middle class. But the only way to do that effectively is to discipline our imagination with both social history and cross-cultural anthropology.

Ramsay MacMullen has noted that one's social pedigree would easily be known in the Greco-Roman world and that a description such as "carpenter" indicated lower-class status. At the back of his book he gives a "Lexicon of Snobbery" filled with terms used by literate and therefore upper-class Greco-Roman authors to indicate their prejudice against illiterate and therefore lower-class individuals. Among those terms is *tekton*, or "carpenter," the same term used for Jesus in Mark 6:3 and for Joseph in Matthew 13:55. One should not, of course, presume that upper-class sneers dictated how the lower classes actually felt about themselves. But, in general, the great divide in the Greco-Roman world was between those who had to work with their hands and those who did not.

An earlier study by Gerhard Lenski helps put all of that in a wider cross-cultural frame of reference. He divides human societies, by technology and ecology, into hunting and gathering, simple horticultural, advanced horticultural, agrarian, and industrial societies. The Romen Empire was an agrarian society, characterized by the forging of iron plows, the harnessing of animal traction, and the use of the wheel and sail to move goods. It was also characterized by an abysmal gulf separating the upper from the lower classes. On one side of that great divide were the Ruler and the Governors, who together made up 1 percent of the population but owned at least half the land. Also on that same side were three other classes: the Priests, who could own as much as 15 percent of the land; the Retainers, ranging from military generals to expert bureaucrats; and the Merchants, who probably evolved upward from the lower classes but who could end up with consierable wealth and even some political pwer as well. On the other side were, above all, the Peasants - that vast majority of the population about two-thirds of whose annual crop went to support the upper class. If they were lucky they lived at subsistence lvel, barely able to support family, animals, and social obligations and still have enough for the next year's seed supply. If they were not lucky, drought, debt, disease, or death forced them off their own land and into share-cropping, tenant farming, or worse. Next came the Artisans, about 5 percent of the population, below the Peasants in social clas because they were usually recruited and replenished from its dispossessed members. Beneath them were the Degraded and Expendable classes - the former with origins, occupations, or conditions rendering them outcasts; the latter, maybe as much as 10% of the population, ranging from beggars and outlaws to hustlers, day laborers, and slaves. Those Expendables existed, as that terrible title suggests, becuase, despite mortality and disease, war and famine, agrarian societies usually contained far more of the lower classes than the upper classes found it profitable to employ. Expendables were, in other words, a systemic necessity.

If Jesus was a carpenter, therefore, he belonged to the Artisan class, that group pushed into the dangerous space between Peasants and Degradeds or Expendables. I emphasize that any decision on Jesus' socioeconomic class must be made not in terms of Christian theology but of cross-cultural anthropology, not in terms of those interested in exalting Jesus but in terms of those not even thinking of his existence. Furthermore, since between 95 and 97 percent of the Jewish state wsa illiterate at the time of Jesus, it must be presumed that Jesus also was illiterate, that he knew, like the vast majority of his contemporaries in an oral culture, the foundational narratives, basic stories, and general expectations of his tradition but not the exact texts, precise citations, or intricate arguments of its scribal elites. Scenes, in other words, such as Luke 2:41-45, where Jesus' youthful wisdom astonishes the learned teachers in the Temple at Jerusalem, or Luke 4:1-30, where his adult skill in finding and interpreting a certain Isaiah passage astonishes his fellow villagers in the synagogue at Nazareth, must be seen clearly for what they are: Lukan propaganda rephrasing Jesus' oral challenge and charisma in terms of scribal literacy and exegesis.
===

We may balance this picture with a quote from J.P. Meier (_A Marginal Jew_, pp. 281-282):

===
In one sense, therefore, Jesus certainly belonged to the poor who had to work hard for their living. And yet our imagination, rhetoric, and desire for instant social relevance can get carried away in depicting the grinding poverty Jesus supposedly endured: "Jesus, the poorest of the poor!" The rpoblem with us modern Americans speaking of the "poor Jesus" or the poor anybody in the ancient Mediterranean world is that poverty is always a relative concept. As Ramsay MacMullen points out, in the Roman Empire of Tacitus' day the senatorial class would have been something like two-thousandth of one percent of the total population, while the next highest class, the 'knights' (*equites*), was less than one percent. In a petty, dependent princedom like Galilee, the truly "rich" were a very small group that would have included Herod Antipas, his powerful court officials (cf. Mark 6:21), the owners of large estates (at times absentee landlords), highly successful merchants, and a few overseers of the collection of taxes and tolls (cf. Zacchaeus in Luke 19:2, though the city involved is Jericho in Judea).

Many people fell into a vague middle group (*not* our American "middle class"), including business people and craftsmen in cities, towns, and villages, as well as freehold farmers with fair-sized plots of land. In speaking of this middle group, we must not be deluded into thinking that belonging to this group meant economic security known to middle-class Americans today. Small farmers in particular led a precarious existence, sometimes at subsistence level, subject as they were to the vagaries of weather, market prices, inflation, grasping rulers, wars, and heavy taxes (both civil and religious). Further down the ladder were day laborers, hired servants, traveling craftsmen, and dispossessed farmers forced into banditry - what Sean Freyne calls the "rural proletariat." At the bottom of the ladder stood the slaves, the worst lot falling to slaves engaged in agricultural labor on large estates - although this was not the most common pattern for Galilean agriculture.

On this rough scale, Jesus the woodworker in Nazareth would have ranked somewhere at the lower end of the vague middle, perhaps equivalent - if we may use a hazy analogy - to a blue-collar worker in lower-middle-class America. He was indeed in one sense poor, and a comfortable, middle-class urban American would find living conditions in ancient Nazereth apalling. But Jesus was probably no pooer or less respectable than almost anyone else in Nazareth, or for that matter in most of Galilee. His was not the grinding, degrading poverty of the day laborer or the rural slave.
===

In any case, we must acknowledge that the historical Jesus who grew up in a small Galilean village did not become very wealthy or influential through his meager trade there.

best wishes,
Peter Kirby

jonesg

I don't think money was what he was after.

He was dangerous in the eyes of some, so they feared his influence.
And that which they did out of fear only guarenteed what came to pass.

Clivedurdle

Isn't Aramaic an assumption? HJ was alleged to be from an area that spoke Aramaic therefore that was his language? No HJ, no Aramaic!

Peter Kirby

Mostly. There are also some Aramaic bits in the Gospels, and scholars have retrojected some parts into natural Aramaic.

Right. The essay doesn't settle the historicity of Jesus question.

best wishes,
Peter Kirby

Peter Kirby

I was hoping for more response.

I am in the process of converting the above into a Wikipedia article here.

Feel free to comment, make improvements, or add stuff. Thanks!

best wishes,
Peter Kirby

TedM

There's a lot of good stuff in it. I only have a few comments off the top of my head, for what they're worth..

If the name was made up from scripture, is there a better candidate? Immanuel, perhaps?



Is there not also a possible connection between this name and the Nazarene sect mentioned in Acts--as the name of the early Christian sect? Was it named after a founder from Nazareth, or was a hometown of Nazareth mistakenly attributed to the sect founder?

Papias wrote that Matthew wrote something in Aramaic. Paul ends some of his letters with Aramaic "Maranatha", which means something like "Lord, come"


Paul possible says Jesus was poor in 2 Cor 8:9, and Jesus in the synoptics seems very concerned about the poor (the widow gave her last penny, very hard for a rich man to go to heaven, sell all you have an follow me, etc), and the early Jewish Christians (the pillars) seem very concerned with helping the poor, (Acts and Galations), and Paul appeared to take that very seriously.

That's all I got,

ted

Toto

This seems a bit, well, dated. It assumes that there was a historical Jesus pretty much the way the gospels describe, and tries to tease as much information out about this person as possible from what we know of the general history of the era. Will your article make this clear?

You do not mention the idea (I think of Geza Vermes) that calling Jesus a "tekton" did not describe his trade, or his father's trade; but was a metaphor for a skilled Talmudic scholar, who would be called a "carpenter." There is no indication in the gospels that Jesus was a worker of any sort, or from a low socio-economic stratum. (Certainly a concern for "the poor" is more typical of rich people with the leisure to think about social issues, not of poor people who are usually more concerned with making money or surviving.)

And "the poor" might be the name of a sect, not an actual description.

Peter Kirby

Dated? How come? Is a mythical Jesus now the "latest and greatest" cutting edge?

The article does not assume that Jesus was "pretty much the way the gospels describe." The article made a few observations of name (Jesus), birthplace (Galilee), language (Aramaic), literacy (none), and socioeconomic status (artisan class). The name and the birthplace derive from tradition, as does the tekton bit. This hardly is enough to make a Jesus "pretty much the way the gospels describe."

That's not how the gospel writers understood it.

Certainly? Data?

I think this is aimed at Ted. Are you talking about the reference in Paul to Jesus making himself poor? (Cited from memory.)

best wishes,
Peter Kirby

Toto

It seems that the effort to reconstruct a historical Jesus out of gospel material or contemporary history has been pushed to its limits, and no one is satisfied with it. Hypothesizing that Jesus was a working class hero, or a revolutionary leader, doesn't provide a satisfying explanation of history or of current religious needs. Every attempt to reconstruct a historical Jesus has some unexplained and unexplainable elements.

The cutting edge is literary deconstruction of the texts, with no attempt to find (or deny) a historical background. At least that is Robert Price's approach, and it seems to be the approach of most of the academic papers from young PhD's that I've seen lately.

If it were not for the gospels, why would you assume that Jesus had any connection to Galilee, or that he was a carpenter?

That's the problem with relying on the gospels. The gospels were written long after the events, and were probably literary / symbolic / artistic / liturgical compositions that turned metaphors into story elements. Jesus the Nazarene became Jesus of Nazareth

Based on my contemporary observation. But you're free to disagree.

It's aimed at Ted.

Peter Kirby

To quote the venerable Doctor X, "It would prove a very cloister'd academic who, after finishing even the most obscure tome on the 'Proto-Markan Influences of the PseudoPauline Rescension of the Q2 Layer in Spleenman's Stoichastic Paradigm' published as a 'supplement' to the 'Scholars Press' from the Isle of Man who does not sit back and wonder 'what does it say about the real Jesus?'"

And I think he's right. People, scholars or not, continue to wonder about who Jesus was (or, for the skeptic, whether Jesus was). Was it not just last year or the year before that The Journal of the Historical Jesus began? I don't see any waning interest in HJ studies, academic or popular.

The options of not using the gospels at all, or assuming a Jesus "pretty much as the gospels describe," are not the only two available.

That last sentence was missing a period, and I was left wondering if you finished the thought. Even if so, I would welcome elaboration.

Are you saying that the evangelists didn't mean to portray the events described as having happened in the past?

best wishes,
Peter Kirby