Jesus Outside the Gospels

by R. Joseph Hoffman

While the public has easy access to religious literature on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, there is little opportunity for the general reader to assess the more skeptical works of biblical criticism.In Jesus Outside the Gospels, Professor Hoffmann argues that very little is known about Jesus apart from the Gospels. He contends that the Gospels were intended to establish not the history of Jesus, but his divinity. The four books, attributed to men called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written some two generations after the events they intended to describe.Hoffmann analyzes and quotes extensively from non-biblical sources written 1,900 years ago, providing a picture of the man called Jesus that is quite different from the man portrayed in the Gospels. Sources analyzed at length are the Talmud, Josephus, and Tacitus, as well as Gnostic and Apocryphal Gospels. The author holds to a controversial view that the Gospels are in reality the missionary propaganda of a first-century messianic cult and are far from objective biographies or historical annals.Jesus Outside the Gospels is essential reading for anyone desiring a careful and critical study of the New Testament.

Genres: Religion

Paperback

First published March 1, 1984

Reviews

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's risible, at least, that Hoffmmann can here claim that Jewish traditions about Jesus may be MORE historical than the Christian gospels (ideas rejected, if even entertained, by the great majority of modern critical New Testament scholars) and yet, today, reject "Jesus mythicism" and its new rise as being unscholarly.

One need not accept the full historicity of most of the gospels claims of details of a historical Jesus to nonetheless see most Jewish midrash as being reactionary to them rather than reflecting independent literary strands that may, at end, connect to an actual historic Jesus.

Second is his treatment of Josephus.

If the Tolodeth Yeshu, Jesus stories in the Mishnah and other Jewish traditions, do reflect actual historicity about Jesus, wouldn't that make him important enough that Josephus would have written something about him that's not a Christian interpolation, but actually Josephan?

(I consider the whole of the Jesus interjection in Antiquities spurious, not just the phrases that are most obviously Christian fluffery.)

Hoffmann then goes on to present extended Jesus material from the Slavonic version of Josephus' Wars. For unexplained (perhaps inexplicable) reasons, he does this without any scholarly/critical comment about the materials he presents.

Finally, he presents without comment Judas as one of the "Sicarii," as if this were totally accepted scholarly fact. It's not. Not at all.

Again, we don't need secondhand rabbinical material about Jesus to be promoted and touted to know that the Christian gospels' claims about Jesus working in history aren't historical, but rather are evangelizing propaganda.

This book was written 30 years ago; maybe Hoffmann's taken a different stance on the Jewish material by now, or maybe he hasn't. I suspect that, having run into him directly in the online world, that he hasn't, and wold resist calls to do so.

[David S. T. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book sets out to prove that gospels are mostly missionary propaganda rather than actual histories and then it tries to document some of the sources of Jesus. I have mixed feelings about this, of course the gospels were written as John says “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name”, so obviously even if they were trying to be objective they are told through that belief set. Sadly, we don't really have any writings about Jesus when he was alive or shortly after his death. The earliest writings come from Paul and mention almost nothing about the historical Jesus (the author also takes a stance even to the left of critical scholarship and rejects both Philippians and Philemon, while accepting the other 5 usually undisputed epistles). After that we have the gospels written about 40 years after Jesus's death and most people who read those do see a progression in the knowledge of Jesus from the earliest one Mark to the last theological rich one John, to the author this presents some of the proof that through time the stories of Jesus become more myth and embellished.

The other part of the book is the Jesus outside the gospels, with this he quotes the popular phrases found in Josephus, some interesting things which I've never read before like the Jesus references in the Talmud and other Jewish sources, pseudepigraphical texts which show letters of Jesus, Herod and Pilate, the gospel of Thomas and three other apocryphal texts. While these sections were interesting, for example The infancy gospel of Thomas was just plain weird with Jesus as a child killing any other child or adult whom offended him, this section contains my biggest problem with the book. I'm assuming that many of the people reading this book want to read the sources of Jesus outside the gospels, and with these sections he often uses old public domain translations which could be improved, furthermore I was pretty annoyed that he often didn't give credit to the other translators. I realize they're public domain but at least don't pretend you translated them if you didn't. Overall this book is somewhat interesting for information about Jesus outside the gospel, but really just read the table of contents and do a web search for the documents he mentions and you'll get the bulk of the book with the translations he used.