Unit 16 · Reading the Gospels Closely

The Gospel of Matthew is one of four books in the New Testament that tell the life of Jesus. In Matthew 5:1–2 Jesus sees the crowds, goes up a mountain, sits down, and begins to teach. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 form one continuous speech. Readers have called it the Sermon on the Mount since at least the fourth century; the name is not in the text. Many scholars think Matthew collected sayings that Jesus gave on many occasions and arranged them here, because Luke scatters the same sayings across his book.

The setting matters. In the Hebrew Bible, Moses receives the law on a mountain, Mount Sinai (Exodus 19–20). Matthew, whose gospel quotes the Hebrew scriptures more than any other, puts Jesus on a mountain to teach about the law. Many Christian and academic readers see a deliberate echo: Jesus is presented as a teacher who interprets the law of Moses, not as one who throws it away. Matthew 5:17 has Jesus say he came to fulfill the law, not to destroy it.

The sermon opens with the Beatitudes, from the Latin word for blessed. Each sentence has the same shape: "Blessed are the [kind of person], for [what they will receive]." Matthew lists nine: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those persecuted for righteousness, and those insulted for Jesus’s sake. The rewards are the kingdom of heaven, comfort, the earth, being filled, mercy, seeing God, being called God’s children.

Notice the reversal. A first-century audience, like a modern one, would expect the fortunate to be the rich, the strong and the comfortable. The Beatitudes name the mourning and the meek instead. Christians have read them in many ways: as a description of the ideal disciple, as promises for the world to come, or as a portrait of Jesus himself. The Beatitudes also echo Psalm 37:11, where the meek inherit the land, which shows the sermon drawing on the Hebrew Bible from its first lines.

Matthew 5:21–48 contains six sayings with the same pattern. Each begins "You have heard that it was said," quotes a command or a common reading of one, and continues "but I say to you." Scholars call them the antitheses, from a Greek word for setting one thing against another. The six topics are murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation and love of enemies. The first quotation is the commandment against murder (Exodus 20:13). Jesus adds that anger at a brother and insulting words are also answerable to judgment.

The word antithesis can mislead. In most of the six, Jesus does not cancel the command; he extends it. Not killing becomes not hating. Not committing adultery becomes not looking with lust. "An eye for an eye" (Exodus 21:24), a law that limited revenge to equal measure, becomes turning the other cheek. Many scholars note that Jewish teachers of the period also read commands this way, asking what a law is for and building a fence of stricter practice around it. Read like that, the sermon sits inside Jewish debate, not outside it.

The sixth antithesis is the one readers quote most. Matthew 5:43–44 has Jesus say, "You have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy; but I say to you, love your enemies." The command to love the neighbor is Leviticus 19:18. The words "hate your enemy" appear nowhere in the Hebrew Bible; they may reflect a popular saying or the attitude of some groups of the time. Jewish readers have pointed this out, and careful Christian readers agree that Jesus is not quoting the Torah at that point.

The section ends at 5:48: be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Christians have argued for centuries about how to live these sayings. Some have taken them as rules for every believer; historic peace churches such as the Mennonites refuse military service because of them. Others have read them as ideals that show how far everyone falls short, or as rules for a future kingdom. The text itself gives no instructions on how literally to take it.

Matthew 6 turns from the law to religious practice: giving, praying and fasting. The text warns against doing each one to be seen. In the middle sits a short model prayer, Matthew 6:9–13, which Christians call the Lord's Prayer or, from its first words in Latin, the Pater Noster. It addresses God as father, asks that God’s name be honored and God’s kingdom come, and then asks for bread, forgiveness and rescue from testing. Matthew’s version has seven petitions, requests, in about sixty Greek words.

Luke 11:2–4 gives the same prayer in a different setting and a shorter form. In Luke a disciple asks Jesus to teach them to pray, as John the Baptist taught his followers. Luke’s prayer has five petitions and begins simply, "Father." Most scholars think the two versions descend from one prayer that Jesus taught in Aramaic, the everyday language of Galilee, and that each gospel recorded it as its own community prayed it. Neither version is a quotation of the other.

Manuscripts add another layer. The closing line that most Protestants say, "for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever," called the doxology, is missing from the oldest surviving manuscripts of Matthew. Scribes seem to have added it from church practice. The King James Version (1611) includes it because the manuscripts its translators used included it; most modern translations put it in a footnote. Catholics traditionally end the prayer before the doxology, which is why the versions said in different churches differ.

The prayer’s ideas are Jewish ideas. Calling God father, asking that God’s name be sanctified and that God’s kingdom come, all have parallels in Jewish prayers such as the Kaddish, which asks that God’s great name be made holy and that God’s kingdom be established. Scholars do not agree on which prayer came first, or whether both draw on common language. What is clear is that the Lord’s Prayer, said daily by Christians around the world, is built from the prayer language of first-century Judaism.

Matthew 7:12 gives a single sentence that readers have called the golden rule since about the seventeenth century: do to others whatever you would want them to do to you. The verse adds, "for this is the law and the prophets," which means that this one rule sums up the Hebrew scriptures. Luke 6:31 has the same saying in the Sermon on the Plain. The saying is phrased positively: do. Other versions of the rule, older and later, are phrased negatively: do not do to others what you would hate.

The negative form is well known in Jewish sources. The book of Tobit, in the Apocrypha, says not to do to anyone what you hate (Tobit 4:15). The Talmud tells of a non-Jew who asked the teacher Hillel, a generation before Jesus, to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel answered: what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a). Confucius in China gave a negative form centuries earlier. Some Christian writers once claimed the positive form was superior; most scholars today see the two forms as expressing the same principle.

The sermon ends with a short parable, a story that teaches by comparison. Matthew 7:24–27: whoever hears these words and does them is like a wise man who built his house on rock; rain fell, floods came, winds blew, and the house stood. Whoever hears and does not do them is like a foolish man who built on sand, and that house fell with a great crash. Luke 6:47–49 tells the same story with a builder who dug deep for a foundation. The point is the same: hearing is not enough.

Matthew 7:28–29 says the crowds were astonished, because Jesus taught with authority and not like their scribes. A scribe, a trained copyist and teacher of the law, would normally cite earlier teachers for support. The sermon has cited scripture and then said "but I say to you." That is the claim the crowds heard. Christians believe that authority was real and divine; Jewish tradition has generally read Jesus as one Jewish teacher among many; historians describe the claim and study how it was heard.

Luke 6:17 says Jesus came down with his disciples and stood on a level place, and there taught a great crowd. The speech that follows, Luke 6:20–49, is called the Sermon on the Plain. It is about thirty verses long against Matthew’s hundred and eleven. It contains beatitudes, the command to love enemies, the golden rule, the saying about judging, the tree known by its fruit, and the two builders. It leaves out the antitheses, the Lord’s Prayer and the teaching on giving, praying and fasting, which Luke places elsewhere or omits.

Why two sermons? Readers have answered in different ways. Some Christians, from the early church onward, have held that Jesus gave two similar sermons on two occasions. Most modern scholars think Matthew and Luke drew on a shared collection of sayings, which they call Q from the German word Quelle, source, and that each evangelist arranged it in his own way. On this view, Matthew built a long sermon that opens his account of Jesus’s teaching; Luke kept a shorter one and spread the rest through his travel narrative.

The differences are instructive rather than random. Matthew’s sermon is addressed to disciples in front of a crowd and is concerned with the law: fulfilling it, extending it, summing it up. Luke’s sermon is addressed to disciples and "a great multitude of people" from Judea, Jerusalem and the coast of Tyre and Sidon, which includes non-Jewish territory. Luke’s gospel as a whole is interested in the poor, in outsiders and in the reversal of fortune, and his sermon shows it.

Comparing the two versions is the basic tool of close reading in the gospels. Scholars lay the texts side by side in a synopsis, a book that prints parallel passages in columns. Doing so lets a reader see what each writer kept, added, reordered or dropped. That does not settle which version is older or closer to what Jesus said; it shows the shape of each gospel’s choices. Chapter 32 will use the same method on the Passion narratives.

Matthew 5:3 blesses "the poor in spirit." Luke 6:20 blesses "the poor." Matthew 5:6 blesses those who hunger and thirst "for righteousness." Luke 6:21 blesses those who "hunger now." Two words in Matthew and one in Luke change the meaning. Matthew’s blessings can be read as describing an inner attitude, humility and longing for justice. Luke’s describe a social condition: having no money and no food. Readers have argued for centuries about which is closer to the original saying.

Luke then does something Matthew’s sermon does not. After four blessings he gives four woes: woe to you who are rich, who are full, who laugh, and of whom everyone speaks well. A woe is a form from the Hebrew prophets, a cry of warning or grief, as in Amos 6:1 and Isaiah 5:8. Luke’s Jesus speaks like a prophet announcing a reversal. This fits Luke as a whole. In Luke 1 Mary sings that God has brought down the mighty and lifted the lowly, filled the hungry and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52–53).

Both readings have shaped Christian life. Liberation theologians in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, read Luke’s version as God’s preferential option for the poor, a claim that the text puts God on the side of the poor. Other Christians read Matthew’s "poor in spirit" as the primary meaning and understand the blessing as spiritual humility open to anyone. Neither reading erases the other verse; the two gospels keep both in the canon.

For a student of the text, the lesson is about method. A single English word, poor, can carry a whole social theology or a spiritual one depending on two words that follow it. Comparing the versions does not tell you which is right. It shows you what each writer chose to say, and it warns you against quoting one gospel as if it were all four.

Mark 4 opens with Jesus teaching from a boat to a crowd on the shore. A sower goes out to sow. Seed falls on the path and birds eat it; on rocky ground, where it sprouts and withers; among thorns, which choke it; and on good soil, where it yields thirty, sixty and a hundred times over. The story is the parable of the sower. Matthew 13 and Luke 8 tell it too. In all three the disciples ask what it means, and Jesus explains: the seed is the word, and the four soils are four kinds of hearer.

The Hebrew word behind the Greek word parable is mashal, which covers proverbs, riddles and short comparison stories. The prophet Nathan tells King David a mashal about a rich man who steals a poor man’s one lamb, and David condemns the rich man before realizing the story is about himself (2 Samuel 12:1–7). That is the pattern: a story from ordinary life that pulls the listener in and then turns. Rabbis of the following centuries told thousands of such stories, often beginning "a parable: to what is the matter like?"

Between the sower and its explanation stands a hard saying. In Mark 4:11–12 Jesus tells the disciples that they have been given the secret of the kingdom, but for those outside everything comes in parables, so that seeing they may not perceive and hearing they may not understand. The words echo Isaiah 6:9–10. Readers have long puzzled over this. Does it mean parables were meant to hide? Matthew 13:13 softens it to "because" they do not see. Many scholars think Mark is explaining, after the fact, why so many did not accept the message.

Most parables in the gospels come without an explanation. The sower is unusual in having one, and some scholars think the explanation, which reads like a sermon on the story, was added by the early church. Others hold that Jesus explained his own stories to his followers. Either way, the sower shows how the gospels treat parables: as stories about the kingdom of God that reward the hearer who keeps listening.

The story that opened this chapter is found only in Luke 10:25–37. Three men pass a wounded traveler. The first two are a priest and a Levite, both from the tribe that served in the Jerusalem temple. The third is a Samaritan. Samaritans lived in the hill country between Judea and Galilee, worshiped the God of Israel on Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem, and kept their own version of the Torah. Jews and Samaritans in the first century treated each other as heretics; John 4:9 says plainly that Jews did not share things with Samaritans.

A first-century Jewish listener would expect the third traveler to be an ordinary Israelite, a layperson, after two clergy. Making him a Samaritan is the parable’s shock. Readers have often guessed that the priest and Levite feared touching a corpse, which would make them ritually unclean; the text does not say so, and Jewish law required saving life over purity. The story does not explain their motives. It simply shows who stopped.

The ending is a reversal of the question. The lawyer asked who counts as a neighbor, a question about the limits of duty. Jesus asks which of the three was a neighbor, a question about behavior. The lawyer answers, "the one who showed mercy," without saying the word Samaritan. The story defines neighbor by what a person does, not by who they are. Christians have read it as the heart of Jesus’s ethics; Jewish readers note that Leviticus 19:34 already commands love of the stranger, and that the parable stands within that tradition.

The Good Samaritan has become a phrase in ordinary English for anyone who helps a stranger. Many U.S. states, including Illinois, have Good Samaritan laws that protect people who give emergency help from being sued. Martin Luther King Jr., in his last speech in Memphis on April 3, 1968, retold the parable and said the priest and Levite asked what would happen to them if they stopped, while the Samaritan asked what would happen to the wounded man if he did not.

Luke 15 holds three parables about lost things: a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son. Luke says Jesus told them because religious leaders complained that he ate with tax collectors and sinners. The third story, Luke 15:11–32, is the longest parable in the gospels. A younger son asks for his share of the inheritance, goes to a far country, wastes it, and ends up feeding pigs, animals that the Torah calls unclean (Leviticus 11:7). Starving, he decides to go home and ask to be a hired servant.

The father sees him from far off, runs to him, and orders a robe, a ring, sandals and a feast. The son’s prepared speech is cut short. Christians have traditionally called this the parable of the prodigal son, from a word meaning wasteful; many modern readers call it the parable of the forgiving father, because the father is the figure who acts. Christians read the father as an image of God’s welcome to the repentant, and the story is read in many churches during Lent.

The story does not end at the feast. The elder son, coming from the field, hears music, learns the reason, and refuses to go in. He has served for years and never been given even a young goat. The father comes out to him too and says: you are always with me, and all that I have is yours; but it was right to celebrate, because your brother was dead and is alive. The parable stops there. Whether the elder brother goes in is never told.

The open ending is the parable’s method. Luke’s audience of complaining leaders is placed in the elder brother’s shoes and left to decide. Jewish readers have noted that the father’s welcome fits the Hebrew Bible’s picture of a God who receives the one who returns, as in Hosea 14 and Jonah 3. Some scholars also read the story politically, as a picture of Israel and outsiders; others warn against reading the elder brother as a stand-in for Judaism, a reading that has fed hostility in the past. The text itself names no nations, only a family.

Matthew 20:1–16 tells of a landowner who hires workers for his vineyard at dawn, agreeing on a denarius, a Roman silver coin that was a common day’s wage. He hires more at nine, at noon, at three, and at five in the afternoon. At evening he pays the last group first, and gives them a full denarius. Those hired at dawn expect more and get the same. They grumble. The owner answers: I did you no wrong; you agreed to a denarius; may I not do what I choose with what is mine? Is your eye evil because I am good?

The story ends with a saying that also appears just before it (Matthew 19:30): so the last shall be first, and the first last. The parable illustrates the saying, but the illustration is uncomfortable. Every reader who has held a job feels the dawn workers’ complaint. Nothing in the story says the owner was unjust; everyone received what was promised. The sting is that equal pay for unequal work feels wrong even when no one is cheated. That discomfort is the point the parable presses.

Christians have read the vineyard in several ways. Early readers took the hours as stages of history or of a life, with the late workers as those who come to faith late. Others read it as Matthew’s word to Jewish followers of Jesus who had kept the law all their lives and now saw Gentiles, non-Jews, welcomed on equal terms. Many modern readers see a teaching about grace, favor that is given rather than earned. Jewish sources have a similar story: a rabbinic parable in the Jerusalem Talmud tells of a king who paid a short-time worker a full wage because he had done more in two hours than others did all day.

Parables like this one show how the form works. A familiar scene, a vineyard at harvest, is set up with care. Then one detail, the order and equality of payment, breaks the pattern. The listener’s reaction, whether outrage or relief, becomes part of the meaning. Scholars such as C. H. Dodd described a parable as a story that leaves the mind in enough doubt to tease it into active thought. That is a description of how these stories work, whatever a reader decides they mean.

Mark 1:15 gives the first words of Jesus in that gospel: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the good news. Matthew usually writes kingdom of heaven instead, using heaven as a respectful way to avoid saying God, a common Jewish practice. The two phrases mean the same thing. The Greek word basileia means a reign or rule more than a territory. Most of the parables begin by saying what the kingdom is like: a seed, yeast, a treasure, a pearl, a net, a feast.

The idea has roots in the Hebrew Bible, where God is called king (Psalm 47, Isaiah 52:7) and the prophets look for a day when God’s rule will be plain to all. Jewish prayers of the period, like the Kaddish, ask for that kingdom to come. Jesus does not define the term; he assumes his hearers know it and tells stories about it. That is one reason readers have disagreed about what he meant.

Three readings have dominated modern scholarship. Some, following Albert Schweitzer in 1906, read the kingdom as eschatological, a coming end of the present age that Jesus expected soon. Others, following C. H. Dodd in the 1930s, read it as already present in Jesus’s work: Luke 17:21 says the kingdom is within, or among, you. Most scholars today hold some form of both: the kingdom in the gospels is already at work and not yet complete. Christians across traditions pray for it to come and also speak of living in it now.

Jewish and Christian expectations differ here. Judaism has generally looked for God’s kingdom as a future age of peace, with the messiah as its human king, and has not seen it as having arrived. Christians believe the kingdom began with Jesus and will be completed at his return. Both draw on the same prophets. A student can describe this difference precisely without deciding it, and precision is what the sources require: which text, which phrase, which reader.

Hillel was a Jewish teacher active in Jerusalem around the end of the first century BCE. Tradition says he came from Babylonia, was poor as a student, and became head of a school whose rulings usually favored the more lenient reading of the law. His rival Shammai led a stricter school. The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, and the Talmud preserve sayings attributed to him. He died, by traditional dating, about 10 CE, when Jesus was a child.

The tractate Pirkei Avot, Sayings of the Fathers, records Hillel saying: if I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? (Avot 1:14). It also records him saying: be among the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving people and bringing them near to the Torah (Avot 1:12). Beside them, the Talmud’s story of the whole Torah on one foot, with its golden rule, is his most famous saying.

Set Hillel’s sayings beside the sermon and the likeness is plain: a golden rule, a call to be a peacemaker, love of people, the Torah summed up in a sentence. Jewish scholars such as Joseph Klausner in the 1920s and, later, Geza Vermes and Amy-Jill Levine have read Jesus as a Jewish teacher of the same world, whose sayings belong in that conversation. Many Christian scholars agree, and treat the parallels as evidence of a shared tradition rather than of borrowing in either direction.

The differences matter as much as the likeness. Hillel’s sayings are preserved as rulings and maxims in a legal tradition; the gospels present Jesus’s sayings inside a narrative that ends in his death and, Christians believe, his resurrection. Jewish tradition remembers Hillel as one of its founding teachers; Christian tradition remembers Jesus as far more than a teacher. Reading the two together is not a way to blend them. It is a way to see the first-century Jewish world both belonged to.

The Passion is the Christian name for the suffering and death of Jesus, from the Latin word for suffering. Each gospel devotes about two chapters to the last day, far more space than to any other single day. Many scholars think the Passion narrative was the first part of the Jesus story to be told as a connected account, before the gospels were written, because the four agree so closely on its order. The rest of each gospel is arranged more freely.

The four gospels are not four independent reports. Most scholars date Mark first, around 70 CE, and think Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, adding material of their own. These three are called the Synoptic Gospels, from a Greek word meaning seen together, because they can be laid in parallel columns. John, usually dated around 90 to 100 CE, tells the story in a different order with long speeches and few parables, and many scholars think it was written without direct use of the other three.

None of the gospels names its author in the text. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from titles attached in the second century, and church tradition identifies them with two apostles and two companions of apostles. Many scholars treat the authors as unknown early Christians writing for particular communities. This course uses the traditional names as labels for the books, as scholars of all views do.

Reading in columns has a name: redaction criticism, the study of how each editor, or redactor, shaped shared material. When Matthew keeps a scene from Mark but adds a line, or Luke drops one, the change is evidence of that writer’s concerns. The method does not tell a reader what happened. It shows what each gospel wants its reader to see, which is a different and answerable question.

After the last supper, the Synoptic Gospels take Jesus and his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, an olive grove on the Mount of Olives across the valley from Jerusalem. Mark 14:32–42 describes him as deeply distressed. He asks three disciples to stay awake, goes a little farther, falls to the ground and prays that the hour might pass. The prayer begins with the Aramaic word Abba, father. He asks to be spared the cup, an image from the prophets for suffering, and then submits: not what I will, but what you will. The disciples fall asleep three times.

Matthew 26 follows Mark closely. Luke 22 shortens the scene to a single prayer, adds an angel who strengthens him, and describes sweat falling like drops of blood. Those two verses, Luke 22:43–44, are missing from several of the oldest manuscripts, and scholars are divided about whether Luke wrote them. Most modern translations print them with a note. It is one of several places in the Passion story where the manuscripts themselves are part of the question.

John tells it differently. John 18 has Jesus enter a garden across the Kidron valley, but there is no anguished prayer. Instead, when the soldiers come, Jesus steps forward and asks whom they seek, and when he says "I am he" they fall to the ground. Earlier, in John 12:27, Jesus says his soul is troubled but refuses to ask to be saved from the hour. John’s Jesus knows what will happen and goes to meet it. Readers have long noticed that John presents Jesus’s divine identity more openly than the Synoptics do.

Christians have read Gethsemane as showing that Jesus was fully human and fully willing. Historians reading by the criterion of embarrassment, the principle that a community is unlikely to invent a story that makes its hero look weak, tend to regard the distress in Mark as an early tradition. Both readings are responses to the same text; a careful student can state each without confusing them.

All four gospels describe a hearing before the high priest, Caiaphas. Then comes a hearing before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea from about 26 to 36 CE. Only Rome could carry out a crucifixion. The charge Pilate acts on is political: king of the Jews. Mark 14 describes a night session of the council, the Sanhedrin. Witnesses disagree, and the session ends in a charge of blasphemy. Luke places the council meeting in the morning and adds a hearing before Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee. John has no council trial at all, only questioning by the former high priest Annas.

The Pilate scenes grow longer from gospel to gospel. Mark’s Pilate asks a few questions and gives way to the crowd. Matthew adds Pilate’s wife’s dream. Matthew’s Pilate also washes his hands and says he is innocent of this man’s blood. John gives a long exchange. Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world. Pilate asks, "What is truth?" and leaves without waiting for an answer. Each gospel, in its own way, shows Pilate reluctant and the local leaders and crowd pressing for death.

Here the text has a history that must be told. Matthew 27:25 has the crowd say, "His blood be on us, and on our children." For centuries some Christians read that verse as a curse on all Jews for all time. They used the charge of deicide, killing God, to justify persecution. Historians answer on three points. Roman governors, not crowds, ordered crucifixions. The Jewish writers Philo and Josephus describe Pilate as harsh, not hesitant. And the gospels were written when Christians were separating from other Jews and living under Rome, which shaped how blame was assigned.

In 1965 the Catholic Church’s declaration Nostra Aetate addressed this. It stated that what happened in the Passion cannot be charged against all Jews then living or against Jews today. Many Protestant bodies have issued similar statements. Jewish scholars such as Amy-Jill Levine have worked with Christian scholars on reading these chapters. A student reading the trials should hold three things at once: what each text says, what historians think happened, and what the text has been used to do.

Crucifixion was a Roman method of executing slaves, rebels and non-citizens. It was designed to be slow and public. The Jewish historian Josephus describes mass crucifixions during the war of 66–70 CE. In 1968 a heel bone pierced by an iron nail was found in a tomb near Jerusalem. It is the only physical remains of a crucified man found so far. The gospels say Jesus was flogged and made to carry the crossbeam. He was crucified at a place called Golgotha, skull, outside the city wall, with two others.

The shared frame is clear. A passerby named Simon of Cyrene carries the cross in the Synoptics. Soldiers divide the clothing, which the gospels connect with Psalm 22:18. A sign states the charge. Bystanders mock. In the Synoptics darkness falls from the sixth to the ninth hour. Jesus dies, and a Roman centurion speaks. Joseph of Arimathea buries the body before the Sabbath. Women who followed from Galilee watch, and Mary Magdalene is named in all four gospels.

The details differ. The sign reads "The King of the Jews" in Mark and "This is Jesus the King of the Jews" in Matthew. Luke has "This is the King of the Jews." John has "Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews," written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. Mark 15:25 says the crucifixion began at the third hour, about nine in the morning. John 19:14 has Pilate still passing sentence at about the sixth hour, noon. Readers since ancient times have tried to reconcile the hours. Many modern scholars think each writer chose the time for its meaning. John’s noon is when the Passover lambs were being killed.

Christians see the cross as the center of their faith: the death, they believe, by which God reconciles the world. Jewish tradition sees a Jewish man executed by Rome, one of thousands. Muslims, as the last section will show, generally believe he was not crucified at all. The historian says less and says it firmly. Crucifixion under Pilate is among the best-attested facts about Jesus. All four gospels report it, and so does the Roman writer Tacitus.

Christians have traditionally counted seven last words, sayings of Jesus from the cross. Many churches read all seven together on Good Friday. But no single gospel has all seven. Mark and Matthew record one: a cry in Aramaic, translated as "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" It is the first line of Psalm 22. That psalm begins in abandonment and ends in praise. Readers disagree whether the cry is despair or a quotation that points to the psalm’s hopeful ending.

Luke has three different sayings, and none is the cry of Psalm 22. Jesus prays, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That verse is missing from some early manuscripts. He tells one of the men crucified beside him, who has asked to be remembered, that today he will be with him in paradise. He dies saying, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit," from Psalm 31:5. Luke’s Jesus dies as he lived in that gospel: forgiving, welcoming an outcast, and trusting.

John has three others. Jesus gives his mother into the care of the beloved disciple; he says, "I thirst," which John links to scripture; and his final word is "It is finished," a single Greek word meaning completed or accomplished. John’s Jesus is in command to the end, as he was in the garden. The seven sayings, then, are three portraits laid over one another. Reading them separately, each in its own gospel, shows the portraits more sharply than reading them merged.

The same holds for the moment of death. In Mark the temple curtain tears and a centurion says, "Truly this man was the Son of God." Matthew adds an earthquake and tombs opening. Luke’s centurion says, "Certainly this was a righteous man." John has a spear thrust and blood and water. A student who notices which detail belongs to which gospel is reading the way scholars read, and also the way careful believers have read since the early church.

Each gospel says that early on the first day of the week, Sunday, women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the body gone. Mark names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. Matthew names two Marys. Luke names three women and others. John names Mary Magdalene alone, though she says "we" do not know where they have laid him. The number of women, the number of messengers at the tomb, one young man, one angel, two men, two angels, and what the women were told all vary.

Mark’s account has a famous puzzle. The oldest and best manuscripts, including Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus from the fourth century, end Mark at 16:8: the women flee from the tomb, trembling, and say nothing to anyone, because they are afraid. A longer ending, Mark 16:9–20, with appearances of the risen Jesus, is found in later manuscripts and in the King James Version. Nearly all scholars think it was added in the second century, and most modern Bibles mark it off. Whether Mark meant to end at 16:8, or his original ending was lost, is still debated.

Christians believe that the tomb was empty because Jesus rose from the dead, and Easter, the Sunday festival of the resurrection, is the oldest and central Christian holiday. Historians can say that belief in the resurrection arose very early; the apostle Paul, writing around 54 CE in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, quotes a list of appearances that he says he received, which most scholars date within a few years of the crucifixion. What a historian cannot do with historical tools is decide whether a resurrection occurred. That is a question of faith, and this course describes rather than decides it.

One detail draws comment from every kind of reader. In a culture where women’s testimony carried little legal weight, all four gospels make women the first witnesses of the empty tomb. Christian apologists have argued the church would not have invented such witnesses. Some historians agree that the tradition is early; others note that the gospels also record women following Jesus throughout, so their presence at the tomb fits the story. Both note the same fact; they weigh it differently.

Matthew reports an appearance to the women near the tomb. Then comes one in Galilee, on a mountain, where Jesus sends the disciples to all nations. Luke keeps everything in and around Jerusalem on the same day. Two disciples walking to the village of Emmaus meet a stranger who explains the scriptures. They recognize him when he breaks bread. Then Jesus appears to the gathered disciples and eats fish. John has appearances in Jerusalem, including one to Thomas, who had doubted. John’s final chapter is set by the Sea of Galilee.

The oldest written account is not in the gospels. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is usually dated around 54 CE. It lists appearances to Peter, to the twelve, to more than five hundred at once, to James, to all the apostles, and last to Paul himself. Paul says he passed on what he had received. Most scholars think the list is a formula he learned when he joined the movement, within a few years of the crucifixion. Paul does not mention the empty tomb or the women. The gospels do not mention the five hundred.

Christians across traditions hold that these appearances were real encounters with a risen Jesus. The Nicene Creed, recited in Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant churches, says he rose on the third day. Within Christianity there are different views on whether the body was physically raised or transformed in some other way. The texts have been read to support both: Luke’s Jesus eats fish, and John’s passes through locked doors. Scholars who are not Christians describe the accounts as the earliest expressions of a belief that transformed a small Jewish movement.

The differences among the accounts have been studied for centuries. Harmonizers, from the second century on, have combined them into one sequence. Others, since the eighteenth century, have argued that the differences show the stories developing. A student needs neither verdict to do the basic work. Name each account, its date, its setting, its witnesses, and what it emphasizes. That is the work this whole unit has been practicing.

Josephus was a Jewish general who surrendered to Rome in the war of 66–70 CE. He then wrote histories in Greek for Roman readers. His Jewish Antiquities, finished about 93 CE, mentions Jesus twice. The shorter passage, in Book 20, describes the execution in 62 CE of James, "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ." Most scholars accept it as genuine. The longer passage, in Book 18, calls Jesus a wise man and says Pilate condemned him to the cross. It also includes statements of Christian belief that a Jewish writer would not have made. Most scholars think a Christian copyist expanded an original, shorter notice.

Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian, wrote in his Annals around 116 CE about the fire of Rome in 64 CE. He says the emperor Nero blamed a group the people called Christians. Their name, he explains, came from Christus, who was executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Tacitus despised the movement and calls it a pernicious superstition. That makes his notice valuable to historians: he had no reason to invent its founder.

Other mentions are thinner. Pliny the Younger, governor in Asia Minor around 112 CE, describes Christians singing to Christ as to a god. Suetonius mentions disturbances in Rome over one Chrestus. Rabbinic texts from later centuries contain a few passages that some scholars connect with Jesus, but they are late, hostile and disputed, and this course does not rely on them. The Qur’an, from the seventh century, speaks of Jesus at length but as a religious text, not a historical record of the first century.

What do the outside sources give? Not much detail, but a firm frame: a man called Christ, a brother named James, followers called Christians, and an execution ordered by Pilate under Tiberius, who reigned from 14 to 37 CE. Almost no historian of the ancient world doubts that Jesus existed. The debates are about what he taught, what he intended, and how the gospels relate to him. For those, the gospels themselves, read critically, remain the main evidence.

The quest for the historical Jesus is the name for two centuries of scholarly effort to describe Jesus using the tools of history. It began in Germany in the late 1700s, was surveyed by Albert Schweitzer in 1906, and continues today in a phase often called the third quest, which pays special attention to Jesus’s Jewish setting. Its practitioners include Christians, Jews and people of no religion, and they argue with each other constantly.

The tools are called criteria. Multiple attestation: a saying or event reported in independent sources, such as Mark, Q, John and Paul, is more likely early. Embarrassment: a tradition awkward for the early church, like Jesus being baptized by John, whose baptism was for repentance, is unlikely to be invented. Dissimilarity: a saying unlike both Judaism of the time and the later church may go back to Jesus, though critics note it makes Jesus a stranger to his own world. Coherence with a first-century Galilean setting. None of the criteria is a proof; each is a reason to lean one way.

Applied with care, the criteria yield a short list that most historians accept. Jesus was a Jew from Galilee, from Nazareth. He was baptized by John the Baptist. He gathered followers, including a group of twelve, taught in parables and sayings, spoke of the kingdom of God, was known as a healer, and caused a disturbance in the temple. He was crucified by order of Pontius Pilate around 30 CE, and his followers soon afterward proclaimed that he had been raised. E. P. Sanders, whose 1985 book Jesus and Judaism helped shape the third quest, listed facts much like these.

Beyond the list, portraits diverge: an end-time prophet, a wisdom teacher, a healer, a social reformer, a messiah in his own eyes or not. The divergence is not a failure of the method; it reflects the limits of the evidence and the questions each historian brings. A student of this unit can recognize the moves. When a writer says "Jesus must have," ask which criterion is at work and which text is being weighed.

Jesus was born, lived and died a Jew, and every one of his first followers was Jewish. Judaism as a religion, however, has never accepted the claims Christians make about him. In Jewish understanding, the messiah is a human descendant of David. He will gather the exiles, restore peace and see the world acknowledge God. None of that happened in the first century. Jewish tradition also holds that God is one and not a human being. So the Christian belief that Jesus is divine is, for Judaism, not possible. Jewish readers say this plainly, and Christian readers who study with them expect to hear it.

For most of the last two thousand years Jews said little about Jesus in writing. One reason is that Christian rulers punished what they took as insult. The Babylonian Talmud contains a few passages that some manuscripts and readers connect to Jesus. They are late, disputed and were censored in many editions. Medieval Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, in the twelfth century, rejected Christian claims about Jesus. Maimonides also wrote that Christianity had spread knowledge of the Torah among the nations.

The modern change came with scholarship. Joseph Klausner, a professor in Jerusalem, published a Hebrew life of Jesus in 1922 that treated him as a Jewish moral teacher. Geza Vermes, a scholar at Oxford, titled his 1973 book Jesus the Jew. He set Jesus among the Galilean holy men of his day. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish New Testament professor in the United States, co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament (2011). In it Jewish scholars write notes on every book. The phrase Second Temple Judaism names the period from the rebuilding of the temple in 516 BCE to its destruction in 70 CE. It has become the standard frame for placing Jesus.

Dialogue has followed scholarship. Since Nostra Aetate in 1965 and parallel Protestant statements, Jewish and Christian scholars have often taught the gospels together. Chicago has seen some of this work. The 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in the city brought Jewish and Christian speakers to one platform. The city’s seminaries and Jewish institutions have hosted joint study since. Jews studying Jesus as a Jewish teacher, and Christians studying him within Judaism, are two different projects. They share a great deal of ground.

The Qur'an is the scripture Muslims believe God revealed to the prophet Muhammad in the seventh century. It names Jesus, in Arabic Isa, about twenty-five times, more often than it names Muhammad. Surah 19, named Maryam for Mary, tells of the angel’s announcement and the virgin birth. The infant Jesus speaks from the cradle to defend his mother. Surah 3 and Surah 5 describe him healing the blind and the leper and raising the dead. He also shapes a bird from clay that becomes alive. Each time it is "by God’s permission" (Qur’an 5:110). Mary is the only woman the Qur’an names, and she is honored above the women of the worlds (3:42).

The Qur’an also draws sharp lines. Qur’an 4:171 says Jesus was a messenger of God and God’s word cast to Mary. It tells the People of the Book not to say "three," for God is one, and it is not for God to have a son. Islam’s central teaching is tawhid, the oneness of God. It rules out the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the belief that Jesus is divine. Muslims hold that Jesus, like Moses and Muhammad, brought the same message of submission to the one God. They hold that his followers later altered it.

On the crucifixion the Qur’an is brief and much discussed. Qur’an 4:157 says that those who claimed to have killed the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, did not kill him and did not crucify him. It was made to appear so to them. The next verse says God raised him to himself (4:158). The majority Muslim reading holds that Jesus was not crucified. Some say another person was made to resemble him; others say the event only appeared to happen. A minority of Muslim scholars read the verse as denying that his enemies truly defeated him. Many Muslims also expect Jesus to return before the Day of Judgment.

Setting the three traditions side by side gives three readings of one figure. Jews see a teacher of the Second Temple period and no messiah. Christians see the messiah, the Son of God, crucified and risen. Muslims see a great prophet, born of a virgin, not divine, not crucified, raised to God. Each tradition reads its own scripture, and each claims to describe him rightly. A public-school class describes all three accurately. It leaves the judgment where it belongs, with the reader.

Three students read Mark 16:8 together. One is a Christian who believes the tomb was empty because Jesus rose; for her the verse is a doorway to Easter. One is Jewish and reads it as a text from another tradition, interesting and important, but not her scripture. One has no religion and reads it as a first-century Greek narrative that stops strangely. All three can answer the same questions: which manuscripts end here, what the women were told, how Matthew changed the scene. Their answers to those questions will match. Their answers to "is it true?" will not, and the class is not where that question gets settled.

This is the distinction between devotional reading and academic study. Devotional reading asks what the text means for me and my community, and it takes place in churches, synagogues, mosques and homes. Academic study asks what the text says, how it was made, how it has been read, and what can be known about its world. The two are not enemies. Many scholars are believers; many believers read critically. But they are different activities with different rules, and a public school does only the second.

The law in the United States draws exactly this line. In Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), the Supreme Court ruled that required Bible reading as a devotional exercise in public schools violated the First Amendment. The same opinion said that study of the Bible for its literary and historic qualities, presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, is consistent with the Constitution. This course exists because of that second sentence. It teaches about the Bible; it does not teach the Bible as true or as false.

The skill this unit has practiced is the skill the Court described. Lay the accounts side by side. Name the writer, the date, the manuscript, the reader. Attribute each belief to those who hold it: Christians believe, Jewish tradition holds, Muslims read, most historians think. Say what the text does and what it has meant. A student who can do that with the Passion narratives, the most contested chapters in the New Testament, can do it with any text she meets.