Chilton’s chronology in *Rabbi Jesus*

[BartholomewB]

In his book Rabbi Jesus, Bruce Chilton gives no explanation for his innovative dating. He claims that Jesus was born in AD 2 and served a five-year “apprenticeship” under John the Baptist from 16 until John’s death in 21, when he returned to Nazareth at the age of 18. Thus Jesus supposedly began his public ministry a full decade before the Crucifixion. Chilton sees him as an itinerant rabbi based in Capernaum when Pontius Pilate arrived in Caesarea to take up his duties as prefect in 26. From 27 to 32, Antipas’ threats forced Jesus to keep away from Galilean territory and gather his followers in Syria. In 31-32 Jesus spent the last year of his life in Jerusalem, aged 30.

In a subsequent essay entitled The Chronology of John’s Death, Chilton argued his case for dating the execution of John the Baptist to AD 21, seeing a linkage with Aretas’ invasion of Antipas’ territory in 36. However, this argument has no bearing at all, that I can see, on Jesus’ biography.

If Chilton had offered an explanation of his revisionist dating, his readers could at least make an attempt to follow his reasoning. As it is, my inclination is to reject the whole thing as a preposterous fantasy.

Amazon.com

 

[Dan_Defender]

a five-year “apprenticeship” under John the Baptist

I don’t believe any of these claims but the most shocking to me is this one. Why would Jesus need a ‘spiritual’ apprenticeship?? doesn’t make any sense.

 

[billsherman]

If Chilton had offered an explanation of his revisionist dating, his readers could at least make an attempt to follow his reasoning.

You are spot on here. As Carl Sagan once wrote “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” His claims to re-date much of what we understand about the timeline of Jesus’ life simply do not have the (any?) evidence to back them up. Dating the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry is not possible with precision, but we have pretty solid evidence that it must have been around the late 20s-early 30s, and it lasted only a few years (most scholars settle on a three year ministry).

As it is, my inclination is to reject the whole thing as a preposterous fantasy.

I wouldn’t go that far, but I would view it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

 

[BartholomewB]

Thank you, Bill. I first read Chilton’s Rabbi Paul and liked it a lot. That encouraged me to follow up with his Rabbi Jesus, but this funny business with the chronology has left me wondering whether I ought to be on my guard in the case of the Paul book as well.

 

[OddBird]

Yeah.

I can’t fill up the chronological blanks, but I do have a general comment

Chilton is representative of what is called the “Third Quest of the historical Jesus”. It’s yet another try to get back to the “bare bones” of Jesus’ life, which operates on the classical distinction made, in the words of Bultmann, between the “Christ of the faith” and the “Jesus of history”.

It’s not uninteresting, but the results are dubious at best. The Third Quest insists in particular on Jesus’ identity as a Jew, hence some affirmations totally unsupported by tradition like the fact he’d been the apprentice of John the Baptist (because young rabbis in the Hebrew tradition usually had a master, so he just went looking for the most plausible one).

The problem is that however one proceeds, the results are always heavily biased by the scholar’s own subjective presuppositions. You always end up learning more about the scholar himself (or herself) than about Jesus. The quest for the historical Jesus, in its globality, wielded hugely different results on who the “historical Jesus” is supposed to have been. And I’ll say nothing of what I think of the methods of the Jesus Seminar, where scholars decide on whether a logion is authentic or not by voting.

Chilton is not the most “out there” though. Some (not recognized as serious scholars by the general scientific community, thankfully) have written that after his resurrection, Jesus went to India and studied in an ashram.