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Archaeological finds have also added to the knowledge of New Testament happenings and brought new credence to Scripture. For example, an inscription unearthed in 1961 at Caesarea confirmed for the first time that Pilate was a 1st century Roman governor, as the Bible reports. More significantly, the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, demonstrate a deeply ingrained 1st century Jewish belief in the imminent arrival of a Messiah-like figure and the need for spiritual renewal -- teachings that anticipate Christ's message. "After the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, you could no longer say there was no historical Jesus," says Theologian Otto Betz of Tubingen, once a redoubt of Bultmannian doubters.
This new confidence was signaled in 1985 when Oxford University's E.P. Sanders proclaimed in Jesus and Judaism, "The dominant view today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of 1st century Judaism." Thanks to historical and textual research, "in a sense we are much closer to the New Testament than scholars were 500 or 1,000 years ago," says Father James Swetnam of Rome's Pontifical Biblical Institute.
What has emerged from this modern diversity of views of Scripture is, not surprisingly, a diversity of Jesuses. One can almost take one's pick.
THE ITINERANT SAGE
For a fair number of liberal Protestant scholars, the historical Jesus was a man not unlike Gandhi, Socrates and other wandering, charismatic moralists. Those who subscribe to this theory reject the idea that Jesus was oriented toward end-of-the-world questions and apocalyptic warnings. Instead he focused on the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the injustices of the world he saw around him. "He was painfully aware of the misery of humankind," asserts James M. Robinson, noted director of Claremont's Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. "He felt he should do nothing to aggravate human misery. As long as there was a beggar without food tonight, how could he store up food in his rucksack?"
This version of the Nazarene, though clearly an empathic type, "is not a comforting figure," observes Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar and former administrator of the Society of Biblical Literature. "He's a troublemaker." Marcus Borg of Oregon State University concurs that this "subversive sage" was, like Socrates, out "to undermine the safe assumptions of conventional wisdom." That he chose to break bread with the lepers and outcasts of his day was a remarkable rejection of established Jewish mores, says Borg. Such scholars perceive a worldly revolutionary at work in the man who insisted, "The last will be first."
THE HELLENISTIC CYNIC
/ An odd variation on the sage theme comes from Claremont Scholar Burton Mack, who sees Jesus as a "rather normal cynic-type figure," using the term not in the modern sense but referring to a particular school of ancient Greek philosophers, Diogenes among them, who advocated virtue and self-control. Like them, he made ample use of a biting sense of humor ("Let the dead bury their dead"). "Jesus wasn't reforming Judaism," Mack insists. "He was just taking up a Hellenistic kind of social criticism."