Biblical archaeology: good grounds for faith.

What was the world like in Jesus' time? James Charlesworth has spent most of his life digging into ancient texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, to help deepen the world's understanding of Christianity.

Charlesworth, professor of New Testament Language and Literature and editor of the Dead Seas Scrolls Project at Princeton Theological Seminary, says, "The most beautiful thing about Christianity is that if we had scholars spending their whole lives raising questions, in the end we'd only find more and more power in our traditions. We shouldn't be afraid of research."

What does archaeology have to do with faith?

I remember back in the 1970s, a reporter interviewed me on biblical archaeology. When the story came out, I was horrified to see that the headline read, "Charlesworth finds data that shores up the Bible." Where did he ever get the impression that the Bible needed shoring up? Archaeology isn't here to prove anything; it asks questions. I like the idea that archaeology doesn't form faith but rather informs faith.

Faith is an absolute conviction. It's not a feeling; it's a conviction. It doesn't look for confirmation. We don't go around trying to shore it up because it's weak. As Christians, our faith is a personal commitment to God through the story of Jesus. Faith does not need archaeology for its own conviction. It needs nothing. However, a person of faith is a human being who asks questions and who would like to know what Jesus was like, what his world was like. Archaeology is our best and sometimes our only means to reconstruct that time and the lives of its people.

Are some people afraid of what archaeologists might find?

Some of the fundamentalists might be. Personally I think the most beautiful thing about Christianity is that if we had scholars spending their whole lives raising questions about it, in the end we'd only find more and more power in our traditions. We shouldn't be afraid of research.

When I was being interviewed about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the national news media kept asking me, "Don't the contents of these scrolls undermine the Christian faith?" I told them that I couldn't imagine anything in a Jewish library from Jesus' time, or from any time, that would in any way undermine anybody's faith. It can only strengthen and clarify faith.

What are some of the biggest archaeological discoveries from recent years that have helped you understand Christian faith better?

Archaeology covers a wide range. First of all, archaeology is the study of anything found from the past. The Dead Sea Scrolls are archaeological discoveries. The caves at Qumran in modern-day Jordan, where the scrolls were found, are an archaeological discovery. So are all the ancient writings that we've found through the years. One thing we're finding, from the Dead Sea Scrolls and from other ancient texts that have been found, is that they explain many of the terms that Jesus used, such as the "end of time" and "Son of Man." Almost every major term Jesus uses, he never defined.

Some people think, for example, that no one used the term "Son of God" before Jesus, but now we find it appearing in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some of the Galilean miracle workers referred to themselves as sons of God. Clearly that was a term from Jesus' world. So was "Son of Man," which is a term for a celestial, eschatological (the end) judge who has incredible power to judge, rule, condemn, and send people to heaven or hell. To look at the term "Messiah" is even more interesting. There's not one teaching from Jesus on the Messiah, not one question to him from the disciples about the Messiah. But the Dead Sea Scrolls contain a variety of ideas about the Messiah, as well as references to people who are eschatological figures but who aren't the Messiah.

Did Jesus think he was the Messiah?

The ancient writings are clear on one point: only God can declare who is the Messiah. Therefore, anyone who accepts the label of Messiah, or who proclaims they are the Messiah, cannot possibly be the Messiah--because only God can announce the Messiah. So if Jesus thought he was the Messiah, he couldn't accept anyone telling him so because that would prove he was a false messiah. And remember, there were plenty of false messiahs at that time.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are in essence a library representing not just one little group of Jews but almost every type of Jew at the time of Jesus, suggest that many different groups in Judaism at that time were waiting for the Messiah. We can never answer how many. But messianic views were widespread. We know that the time was charged with eschatological fervor. Many Jews living in Palestine at that time believed that this was the end of time. They believed there were two ages--the present age and the age to come--and they thought the present age was winding down. That's what Paul is talking about--when he says, "In the fullness of time God sent forth his son."

Why did the people think the end of time had come?

The Jews at that time were a conquered people. Many who inherited the land from Abraham were losing it because they couldn't pay the Roman taxes on it. Now we can begin to understand Jesus' parable about the tenant farmers because that's what some Jews were becoming. We know that hundreds of thousands of people died around the time of Jesus during the Roman occupation. Jesus wasn't the only one crucified--sometimes 500 people at one time were crucified just outside of Jerusalem. Many Jews had the feeling that God's promises had not been fulfilled. So, they thought, either God is a liar, or else the promises are going to be fulfilled very soon.

Jesus' whole message is charged with this talk of the end, or eschatology--look at the Our Father: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." His parables are eschatological, too. The focus is on the start of God's reign here and now. Jesus is proclaiming that. John the Baptist sent a message to Jesus asking, "Are you the one or should we look for another?" Jesus answered, "Tell him the lame are walking, the blind are seeing, and the kingdom of God is being proclaimed."

How did these ideas about the Messiah spread around the Jewish community.

We have to be careful in reconstructing that time, but I think we can safely say that the Jews, who had no TV or stereo for an evening's entertainment, would go home and sit around the fire and talk. About what? God. They are a people charged with God. Why? What else do they have? They don't have pyramids. They don't have armies. They don't have Alexander the Great. Who do they have? David. What does he do? He writes psalms. What makes the Jews unique and gives them power? Only one thing: their fervor in understanding God.

The Jewish struggle to understand God is very different from the Christian struggle. Christians will ask, which concept is right and which is wrong? The Jews will say, "On the one hand, so-and-so said this, and on the other hand, such-and-such says that." In Jerusalem especially, which was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, the Jews were exposed to people coming in from all around the ancient world. It was one of the great pilgrim cities. Caravans came through on their way to other countries. People were speaking Greek, Latin, Persian, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

All of this knowledge can help us to understand the gospel. Look at Palm Sunday, for example. Jesus decided to go up to Jerusalem. He knew from what happened to John and other prophets that if he stayed with that course, the potential for violence was very high. I think the account in Mark is very clear. He's scared. The disciples are scared. The town is filled with eschatological fervor, messianic excitement. Pilate has had to bring in thousands of troops to keep order. And in walks Jesus. The people are screaming, "Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!" Obviously most of the people who shouted that thought Jesus was the Messiah, and he didn't say, "Quiet, that's all wrong."

Yet some of the Jews, especially the authorities from the temple, were possibly out to get Jesus. All the ancient documents we're finding are showing us how complex and creative Judaism was. It's quite possible that some of the Jews could have been screaming "Hosanna!" on Palm Sunday, and others shouting "Crucify him! Crucify him! Give us Barrabas!" later in the week.

If Jesus' time was filled with all these supposed prophets and false messiahs roaming around, what makes Jesus unique?

It's true that much of what we thought was unique to Jesus we now know was not unique to him. He was not the only miracle worker. There were others. He was not the only one whom people claimed was the Messiah. He was not the only one who spoke in parables. He was not unique in thinking he was the Son of God.

So where is his uniqueness? We have to include Christian conviction. A person who doesn't have conviction would never understand the uniqueness of Jesus. Remember now, there wasn't one single act of Jesus that caused everyone to say, "Aha! He's the Messiah." He feeds the 5,000 or some huge number of people.

Topographers have found a natural amphitheater near Capernaum where 50,000 people could have gathered to listen to someone. So if thousands of people were fed by him--where did they go? Just seeing Jesus, listening to Jesus doesn't elicit faith. The rich young man went away sad. Pilate himself had a conversation with Jesus, but Pilate didn't fall on his knees and say, "I believe you are the Son of God."

Probably one unique teaching is Jesus' command to love our enemies. At the beginning of the century some brilliant Jewish scholars said, "What a fool Jesus was to say love your enemies--no decent person would ever say that." A Jew who knows tradition knows that no Jew said that except Jesus. Jesus preaches love that is not restrictive but rather love that is expanding, inclusive, because that's how God loves. God sends his rain on the just and the unjust, according to Jesus.

Was the Resurrection unique?

There are biblical narratives in which an individual raises people from the dead. Elijah did that, for instance. But I think the earliest gospel record does not say that Jesus rose; it says that God raised him up. That's what Paul said: God raised our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. Remember, Jesus died calling on God: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Therefore, from a Christian point of view, I think the most surprised person Easter morning was Jesus. This says a lot about the uniqueness of Jesus: the only person God has raised from the dead is the one whom Christians proclaim as his son--who, by the way, is still alive.

So Jesus may be unique in a few categories but not in others?

Why do we need uniqueness at all? The only thing we need is God. The presence of God in our lives does not equal the category of uniqueness. There's no confession of faith that says, if Jesus isn't unique, we can't believe in him. We do have a unique confession, though: that Jesus is our way to God. I think we don't spend enough time struggling with the Incarnation. We affirm that Jesus is fully God and fully human, but most of us stop with fully God. If Jesus wanted to speak to his people, he had to speak the language they understood and use the categories they used. What makes him unique is what he puts a stress on. For example, the way he referred to God was "Father." And it's not "my Father" but "Our Father."

Do we try to make Jesus over in our own image as a 20th-century person?

Sure, that's a temptation. Archaeology can help prevent that by educating us about what his world was like. Albert Schweitzer demonstrated brilliantly that all the attempts to write about the life of Jesus will tell you more about the author than about Jesus. One French author, for example, wondered why Jesus was crying in the Garden of Gethsemane and decided he was regretting all the women he could have wooed in Galilee. This is a French romanticist at work.

I always wonder how offensive we can allow Jesus to be. I would hope that Jesus could be very offensive to me as a human being of the 20th century and I can still call out to God. Why do I have the category that Jesus can't be offensive? Why can't he say to the Canaanite woman something that's very offensive? It's amazing: he tells her that it is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs. How could he say that to the woman? And what about the man who comes to him and says, "I want to follow you but first I've got to bury my father." How could Jesus say, "Let the dead bury the dead"? That was offensive.

Now, one possibility is that in that culture, burying the dead might have entailed many months. But it's still offensive. Do I want Jesus to say those things? Yes. Why? Because he was a real human being. I don't want to say that he can't be offensive. He can be what he was as a real human.

Was Jesus unusually learned for a carpenter from Nazareth?

Yes, and I don't think we can entirely explain why. He had good teachers--John the Baptist, for example. Jesus quoted Jeremiah. He had the psalms memorized. Personally I think his greatest teacher was God. Luke 6 tells us, "Throughout the night Jesus was in prayer to God." The original language suggests the possessive: prayer in which God was obsessing him. Other gospel accounts refer to him praying all night in the mountains. This helps us to understand what's going on in Gethsemane when Peter, James, and John fall asleep. They're probably thinking, "He's at it again."

Have any discoveries helped you to understand specific stories in the gospels?

Plenty. Excavations can show us what a violent time it was. In one excavation in Jerusalem we found evidence of the destruction of the city by the Romans in the year 70: the remains of a woman's arm, burned timbers, masses of ash. The room got so hot the east war fell down. It makes you feel it was burning last night. In that same room we found something absolutely astounding: massive stone jars, stone tables, stone cups, stone plates. Why stone? We know the answer from the gospels and from the Temple Scroll, one of the longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which says that everything in an earthen vessel will be contaminated when certain things happen. Why? Because a clay pot is permeable. The Jews believed that if something polluted came into a room, the pollution would permeate everything it came into contact with. We're learning how uptight many Jews of Jesus' time were about purification. This explains several gospel stories.

Take the Good Samaritan. If you're a priest, and you don't pass by a man who is lying bloody by the side of the road, you might become impure, and then you'd be in grave danger of not reaching God. And if you don't reach God, the whole nation may go to hell because you're the means for them to reach God. The Levite has to pass by the wounded man--he's only following his rules of purity. These men are doing just what they should do. But Jesus is warning them about the dangers of purification.

In the story of the wedding feast at Cana, for another example, Jesus orders servants to pour water into jars, but what are these jars? They are huge stone jars intended for the Jewish rites of purification. The husband had to be careful not to associate with his wife during her menstrual period. During those times they were to sleep in separate beds. A man would supposedly go to hell if he got near a woman who was impure.

So we're seeing isolation, separation. In excavations from the time of Jesus in the upper city of Jerusalem, we're finding dozens of mikvaoth, or ritual cleansing baths. Was this a system that had gone wild with the concept of purity? Jesus' response was, "Behold, I tell you it's not what goes into the human that makes him impure, but what comes out." Jesus was concerned about purity of the heart.

Have any discoveries caused problems in how we understand scripture.

Sure. The Bible is not a history book, after all. Excavations of Jericho, for example, clearly show that when Joshua and others came into Jericho, the city had already been deserted and collapsed for hundreds of years. This doesn't mean this is a false narrative. Instead we begin to understand how the people meant the narrative. They looked up hundreds of years later and saw those massive walls, and they knew Joshua didn't make them tumble but that God did. They were playing the trumpet of celebration that God had given them Jericho.

Have you found any problematic discoveries about Jesus?

For the most part, my experience has been the opposite. Often archaeology has revealed the grounding of gospel stories that many of us thought were questionable. For example, John's gospel mentions the Pool at Bethsaida, which has five porticoes. Now all the experts swore this couldn't exist because a pentagon was not found in ancient architecture. Perhaps the five porticoes were just a symbol for the five books of the Pentateuch. Then archaeologists began to dig-one of the Dead Sea Scrolls describes exactly where Bethsaida would have been. And sure enough, there are five places for porticoes: north, south, east, west, and one portico in the center between the two huge pools.

We've found stones from the temple in Jerusalem from Jesus' time that are absolutely massive: one is over 600 tons. Now you can make sense of the disciples and Jesus going past the temple and the disciples saying, "Master, look at these stones."

Where did these men grow up? In little village houses: archaeologists have excavated a house in Capernaum, which, according to ancient tradition, is Peter's house. I think it probably is Peter's house, but it doesn't really matter. It's the house of a first-century Jew. There were fishhooks on the floor. It had very thin walls, which couldn't support a heavy tile roof. It would have had a thatched roof. So you go back to the biblical narrative that tells about the man who couldn't get into the house in Capernaum where Jesus was preaching. His friends opened up a hole in the roof and let him down on his mat. You can do that with a thatched roof, and that's the kind of roof they had in Capernaum. Now that story makes sense.

Archaeologists have also found the body of a man who was crucified around the same time that Jesus was. His name is Jehohanan.

When they nailed him to the cross, one spike bent because it hit a knot in the wood; and when they tried to take his bones off the cross, they had to cut them off. The spike is still in his bone. Studying those bones brought us to an awareness of how excruciatingly awful crucifixion was.

What was Jesus' crucifixion like?

If you go back to the passion narrative, two things begin to jump out. One is that the Romans knew Friday was a day of preparation for the Sabbath and that Jesus' bones had to be removed by a certain time--an hour or so before the sun set. The second thing is that Pilate asks, "Has he already died?" This indicates that he's surprised at how quickly Jesus died. Now let's imagine what happened. Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane by the Roman soldiers on Thursday evening, and he's in their custody all night. These soldiers are bored; they didn't want to be in this place with all these crazy people and their strange laws. And now here comes some religious guy who thinks he's special; he thinks he's King of the Jews.

According to what we know about Roman soldiers and what they were allowed to do, my impression is that they were allowed to have fun with him, to torture him, to beat him up. They couldn't kill him, because they had to crucify him the next day. But I think he didn't sleep that night. This makes sense of the gospel account that he collapses when trying to carry part of his cross. And once he was put on the cross, I think he was so near death that he lasted less time than the other men who were being crucified with him. They had to have their legs broken. You see, when people are being crucified they can't breathe, and they push themselves up on their legs to breathe; but if the soldiers break their legs, they can't push themselves up and they die. But they didn't have to do that to Jesus because he had already died.

Has archaeology told us anything about the Resurrection?

To answer that I have to make some distinctions about language. To say that Jesus is crucified is a statement of history. You can say it as a Jew. You can say it as an agnostic. You can say it as a martian. We know Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. We know that Pilate existed from Roman records and from inscriptions.

But to say that Jesus was raised by God is not a historical statement. It's a statement of faith, and it's possible only from someone who has made the commitment.

Remember, even the empty tomb was never proof for the Resurrection. Remember that Mary Magdalene finds the tomb empty and says to the gardener, "Where have you put the corpse of my master?" The empty tomb alone does not prove the Resurrection. What if, for example, we did find Jesus' tomb and found his body in it? Would that disprove belief in the Resurrection? Of course not. That wouldn't prove he wasn't resurrected. What do we know about the resurrected Jesus? We know that on the road to Emmaus, Cleopas and his companion didn't even recognize him until the breaking of the bread. Mary Magdalene stands there in the garden and talks to him and doesn't even recognize him. According to Luke and John, he walks through doors. What kind of a body is this? The New Testament says it's a bodily resurrection, but what does that mean? We have to be very careful with our categories: the resurrected Christ is not just a spirit but neither is he simply the crucified body.

Are there any big archaeological mysteries still to be solved?

Where's Herod's tomb? That's one. I would also love to find the five books of Papias. Papias wrote five thick books about the sayings of Jesus not long after John, and we've never found them. Other documents contain long discussions of Papias and quotations from him. He wrote in the beginning decades of the second century. He was quite a scholar, and he talked to people who had known Jesus.

The silliest thing would be for us to say the most exciting discoveries have already been made. I'd prefer to think that the best is yet to come.