https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus: The title Logos, identifying Jesus as the divine word, first appears in the Gospel of John, written c. 90-100.
Raymond E. Brown concluded that the earliest Christians did not call Jesus, "God". New Testament scholars broadly agree that Jesus did not make any implicit claims to be God.
The gospels and Christian tradition depict Jesus as being executed at the insistence of Jewish leaders, who considered his claims to divinity to be blasphemous, see also
Responsibility for the death of Jesus. Historically, Jesus seems instead to have been executed as a potential source of unrest.
Jesus began preaching, teaching, and healing after he was
baptized by
John the Baptist, an apocalyptic ascetic preacher who called on Jews to repent.
Jesus was apparently a follower of John, a populist and activist prophet who looked forward to divine deliverance of the Jewish homeland from the Romans. John was a major religious figure, whose movement was probably larger than Jesus' own. Herod Antipas had John executed as a threat to his power. In a saying thought to have been originally recorded in
Q, the historical Jesus defended John shortly after John's death.
John's followers formed a movement that continued after his death alongside Jesus' own following. John's followers apparently believed that John might have risen from the dead, an expectation that may have influenced the expectations of Jesus' followers after his own execution. Some of Jesus' followers were former followers of John the Baptist. Fasting and baptism, elements of John's preaching, may have entered early Christian practice as John's followers joined the movement.
John Dominic Crossan portrays Jesus as rejecting John's apocalyptic eschatology in favor of a sapiential eschatology, in which cultural transformation results from humans' own actions, rather than from God's intervention.
Historians consider Jesus' baptism by John to be historical, an event that early Christians would not have included in their Gospels in the absence of a "firm report".
Like Jesus, John and his execution are mentioned by
Josephus
John the Baptist's prominence in both the Gospels and Josephus suggests that he may have been more popular than Jesus in his lifetime; also, Jesus' mission does not begin until after his baptism by John. Fredriksen suggests that it was only after Jesus' death that Jesus emerged as more influential than John. Accordingly, the Gospels project Jesus's posthumous importance back to his lifetime. One way Fredriksen believes this was accomplished was by minimizing John's importance by having John resist baptizing Jesus (Matthew), by referring to the baptism in passing (Luke), or by asserting Jesus's superiority (John).
Scholars posit that Jesus may have been a direct follower in John the Baptist's movement. Prominent Historical Jesus scholar
John Dominic Crossan suggests that John the Baptist may have been killed for political reasons, not necessarily the personal grudge given in Mark's gospel. Going into the desert and baptising in the Jordan suggests that John and his followers were purifying themselves for what they believed was God's imminent deliverance. This was reminiscent of such a crossing of the Jordan after the Exodus (see
Book of Joshua), leading into the promised land of their deliverance from oppression. Jesus' teachings would later diverge from John's apocalyptic vision (though it depends which scholarly view is adopted; according to Ehrman or Sanders apocalyptic vision was the core of Jesus' teaching) which warned of "the wrath to come," as "the axe is laid to the root of the trees" and those who do not bear "good fruit" are "cut down and thrown into the fire." (Luke 3:7-9) Though John's teachings remained visible in those of Jesus, Jesus would emphasize the Kingdom of God not as imminent, but as already present and manifest through the movement's communal commitment to a relationship of equality among all members, and living by the laws of divine justice. All four Gospels agree that Jesus was crucified at the requested of the Jewish Sanhedrin by
Pontius Pilate. Crucifixion was the penalty for criminals, robbers, traitors, and political insurrection, used as a symbol of Rome's absolute authority - those who stood against Rome were utterly annihilated.
According to Geza Vermes, Jesus' announcement of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God "was patently not fulfilled" and "created a serious embarrassment for the primitive church". According to E.P. Sanders, these eschatological sayings of Jesus are "passages that many Christian scholars would like to see vanish" as "the events they predict did not come to pass, which means that Jesus was wrong."
Robert W. Funk and colleagues, on the other hand, wrote that beginning in the 1970s, some scholars have come to reject the view of Jesus as
eschatological, pointing out that he rejected the
asceticism of John the Baptist and his eschatological message. In this view, the
Kingdom of God is not a future state, but rather a contemporary, mysterious presence. John Dominic Crossan describes Jesus' eschatology as based on establishing a new, holy way of life rather than on God's redeeming intervention in history.
Evidence for the Kingdom of God as already present derives from these verses.
- In Luke 17:20-21, Jesus says that one won't be able to observe God's Kingdom arriving, and that it "is right there in your presence."
- In Thomas 113, Jesus says that God's Kingdom "is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."
- In Luke 11:20, Jesus says that if he drives out demons by God's finger then "for you" the Kingdom of God has arrived.
- Furthermore, the major parables of Jesus do not reflect an apocalyptic view of history.
The Jesus Seminar concludes that apocalyptic statements attributed to Jesus could have originated from early Christians, as apocalyptic ideas were common, but the statements about God's Kingdom being mysteriously present cut against the common view and could have originated only with Jesus himself.
