I have been asked by the editors of the jshj, Robert Myles and Sarah Rollens, to reflect on the topic of teaching on Jesus from a critical historical perspective. In taking up this challenge, it allows me to look back over 30 years of pedagogy, from Aotearoa-New Zealand to England, and I note particularly the differences between institutions and over time.

As with all historical studies, it is worthwhile setting our subject in context. When I began teaching, I was fairly fresh out of my PhD (at Edinburgh) and came from a period of living in the Gambia, Africa, where my husband was working at the African Centre for Human and People’s Rights. Living there, woken every morning by roosters and barking dogs, I would sometimes consider how the ‘traditional’ unmechanized village life and extended family relationships I lived amongst would have been not so entirely dissimilar to those of ancient Galilee, or at least closer to it than I had experienced in the modern West. In the Gambia my life was focused on caring for our baby daughter, and, when I could, preparing my PhD and another book for publication. I was also continually tinkering on a fictionalized version of the Jesus story, which led me to consider all kinds of lifestyle aspects of ancient Judaea, from food to fabric, while also re-reading the revised Schürer,¹ among other works. (I will mention here too that my fictionalized story has never seen the light of published day, and reads to me now as a kind of alternative version of The Chosen.)

Returning to New Zealand and getting employment in Religious Studies at the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, I had to slot my teaching into existing Bachelor of Arts courses, one of which was Formative Christianity: 25–450 ce. As the date range indicates, I was expected to go from Second Temple Judaism to Chalcedon. However, there were two 2-hour classes per week over 14 weeks, so there was space to explore topics. I could recite Schürer for the first session.

This was a time before much computerized technology. The internet was only vestigially beginning, but email had started. I gained contact with other scholars via an email listserv group ioudaios, established by Steve Mason at York University.² This was extremely useful for keeping me up to date on publications, and participants also discussed issues with each other. Generally, though, I was desperately writing lectures, making good slides, and photocopying material onto transparencies for the overhead projector, if not using the wonderful epidiascope.

One of the great things about the University of Waikato at this time was that once the courses were on the books, how you taught them was in your own hands. One could be creative. What I wanted to do was get people to think about the ancient world holistically, as a very different cultural environment from contemporary settler-colonized New Zealand. I wanted students to think creatively about characters living in a foreign world. These students were usually straight out of school, and most were not from Christian backgrounds. They were taking Religious Studies as a supporting subject in other degrees. They were largely Pākehā (European heritage) and also indigenous Māori, but also some other ethnic backgrounds. Waikato was and is a publicly funded university on Māori land, leased by the iwi (tribes) Waikato-Tainui. It was/is committed to a bicultural ethos whereby at least some aspects of tikanga (Maori custom) were expected to be adhered to. Māori iwi act as a consultative body (Te Rōpū Manukura) to the University Council. That in itself meant some engagement outside the usual ‘European/North American’ mode of operation, even though most courses still sat within the paradigm of what was normative in higher education within that mode. There was nevertheless more emphasis on flexibility, conversations and relationships than I think was usual elsewhere, and I got to learn about tikanga and te āo Māori (the Māori worldview) from Māori colleagues.

I remember this session very well. I gave the students licence to dress appropriately for their roles, and many of them put some effort into it, arriving from various bathrooms in a variety of bathrobes, towels, and vaguely ‘Oriental’ hats. I particularly remember the white-clad Essenes, looking rather stern and superior. My colleague Dennis Green, who taught Jewish Studies, took the role of Ananus, and he and I also dressed in some garments we thought appropriate. I think I wore a sheet.

This turned out to be a great improvised drama, as well as highly educational, and in terms of a learning experience for the group it was sensational. But I also remember it involved far more work than I had expected, in leading each of the different workgroups to the right resources and discussing all the issues with them, and not just in class time. In fact, I never ran this again. There’s the thing: you can devise something that works brilliantly pedagogically, but it can eat you up too. As teachers, we only have so many hours in the day. Our second child was born in 1994 and I took a break.

I am quite amazed by my bold language, as a young academic. At Waikato University, as with other universities in Aotearoa-New Zealand, students for a 3-year Bachelor of Arts degree take a Major subject (e.g. History, Religious Studies) and then Minor supporting subjects (Anthropology, French, whatever), rather than following one specialization only. I was interested in knowing whether the History department would include the course as part of a History Major. However, my emphasis on the course being purely historical was also slightly defensive. I was keen to ensure that historians accepted that studying Jesus was not a topic that was remotely ‘theological’.

In this letter, I seem to have had all the positivist confidence of a Leopold Ranke, whose job was to get dispassionately to the heart of the evidence. I was confident, and highly influenced by the Third Quest as it stood at that time. Sanders and Vermes were my guides.³ I held Paula Fredriksen⁴ and James Charlesworth in high esteem.⁵ I had sat in an adjoining table to Charlesworth at a conference in Jerusalem a few years prior and was struck by how he had talked to his companion of how ‘we’ were now much more certain about the details of Jesus’ life than ever before. There was a momentum about the Third Quest: it was absolutely possible to work out what was historically true about John, Jesus and Paul, and there was no particular theory other than the ‘empirical’ historical-critical method that was necessary to assess matters, aided by the somewhat useful tool of the nuanced criteria of authenticity and increasing knowledge of the ancient Palestinian environment. I remember being invited to participate in the Jesus Seminar (which I couldn’t attend, due to the distance and expense) and – at this time – I would have been quite happy to give my assessments in the correct colour for all the elements presented.

In due course I found myself teaching in both the departments of History and Religious Studies at Waikato. But I also had a year at Harvard University’s Divinity School in the Women’s Studies of Religion Program, where I had the opportunity to audit a course run by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. By this time, 1998, my interest had broadened into addressing issues of the history of early Christian women. I ran my own ma course at Harvard on Women in Nascent Christianity, and began to utilize Schüssler Fiorenza’s feminist methodology. It is not often recognized in more recent discussions concerning memory and the historical Jesus, but her work In Memory of Her⁶ in fact pioneered a memory approach. It asked why certain things were remembered in writing: who was being marginalized, when the light was shone largely on certain male actors? Her work emphasized how little of the whole story we had, and brought to light how very rhetorical our material was. It asked us to reflect on how we read, and where we were positioned: the politics of interpretation.⁷ Importantly, her methodology shifted me away from my prior confidence in terms of empirical historiography, and made me more aware of the viewer as well as the viewed. But, unlike some of the post-Derrida faction in Harvard Divinity School, Schüssler Fiorenza herself did not devalue history. She told me she distrusted claims to objectivity, but that one could still, with deep self-awareness, aim to be impartial. One had to do history, not ignore it. It wasn’t just another discourse.

To boost awareness of historical methodology I had as a graded assignment a task in which every student would choose one of the growing number of new (Third Quest) books on the historical Jesus, and try to work out why particular perspectives were being presented. What were the particular insights offered, and how did these reflect the author’s own position? Did the author have any blind spots? Who were they writing for? The students had to present the works of each author to the class, in a review, and be questioned on their ideas. They asked, for example: what was so wrong with Jesus being eschatologically minded, in the view of John Dominic Crossan,⁸ or others in the Jesus Seminar? Why was this a problem? How can we begin to assess the evidence? During this period I had a sabbatical in my maternal homeland of Denmark, at Copenhagen University, and benefitted from further testing of the reliability of historical ‘facts’ from the Copenhagen school. When I was there, Crossan came and gave a lecture, and, in reply to someone who queried why Jesus could not have believed in judgement and an apocalyptic future, and argued a case, Crossan said, ‘You may be right, but I could not believe in that Jesus.’

I then had a career break, spent more time at home, and wrote other things, including a novel that had nothing to do with the ancient world. I did teach an adult education class on the historical Jesus, but I did not keep up particularly with publications, and became more interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran. After I began teaching at King’s College London, England, in 2009, I was in given command of Jesus in Context, taking it over from Lutz Doering. It was once taught by Graham Stanton, and I used Stanton’s book as a course text.⁹ I still do use it, because of its accessible introduction to the literature as well as his careful assessments suited to undergraduates. This is the course I continue to teach. The course was run initially at second-year undergraduate level and then as a third-year. Over the years I have tweaked it. It has waxed and waned in terms of popularity, so sometimes I have about 50 students, and sometimes just 20.

Unlike at Waikato, King’s had decided to split longer courses into modules some years before I arrived, so Jesus in Context is taught over just 10 weeks, with only 2 hours of class time each week. This class is divided up between a lecture (1 hour) and a seminar, with readings and questions, and I split the class into workgroups, depending on the size of the group. My lectures are now supported by a rich Powerpoint presentation I work on to create a stimulating show. I like to use as much art, material realia and archaeology as possible.

In terms of the changing components of the course outline and bibliography, it is clear to me that we have gone from the Third Quest to something else, but in its module form I do not have so much time to explore method, and this simply has to be woven in at different points. I have concentrated on context and key topics. Initially they were as follows:

1. –The historical quest for Jesus: history, basic problems, recent proposals
2. –Sources and criteria in the historical quest for Jesus
3. –The religious and social context: Second Temple Judaism
4. –The geographical and political context: first-century Galilee and Judaea
5. –John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism
6. –The Kingdom of God and Jesus’ teaching
7. –Jesus’ healings and exorcisms
8. –Jesus and women
9. –Debate: Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians
10. –Jesus’ passion and death

Now, the course outline is different, reflecting my own interests and recent publications, as well as the interesting new perspectives of memory studies.¹⁰ I do not have separate classes on context. The topic of Jesus’ female disciples and other matters of gender, which has constituted a major area of my research,¹¹ has been syphoned off into another module. In the latest incarnation of the programme, I have been lucky to have as a guest speaker James Crossley, who has led the students into a deeper meta-critical reflection of the ‘quests’, using his expertise on the topic, and on issues of class conflict.¹² But I do not begin with the quests; I begin with getting the students to think about doing history itself, and what ‘evidence’ is. How do we know anything about the past? I get them to imagine Jesus and then talk about his actual likely appearance,¹³ issues of race and representation, identity, and the basic information we have about him. I use the images of Laura James (see Illustration 1), to push the students away from thinking about a ‘white Jesus’.¹⁴

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Jesus Commissions Mary Magdalene © Laura James, 2021. Used with permission.

Citation: Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 22, 2 (2024) ; 10.1163/17455197-bja10034

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I put up a lot of links and materials on the online course pages, and hope that students explore them. I find it particularly helpful to direct them to Dale Martin’s course at Yale University, ‘Introduction to the New Testament: History and Literature’, which is open access.¹⁵ This helps many who have no or little biblical knowledge. His lecture (no. 13) on the historical Jesus is excellent.

I do find it increasingly hard to get through the grounding the students need to understand the subject, let alone tackle the issues of methodology, in a short space of time. I was once asked what century Jesus lived in, so I always make sure I give dates right at the start. I get good feedback for having interesting, engaging lectures, but sometimes students find my lectures too information heavy. These are not students of history; they are doing degrees in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, overall, and most have not previously studied Classics, Ancient History or Bible. At King’s, unlike at Waikato, we are not able to put in prerequisites for their choices of modules. Overall, my students appear to be less biblically literate than in the 1990s, so more basic information needs to be established. The students who are biblically literate have at times been self-styled ‘Bible believers’, and may object to the way that Jesus is studied as a historical person. I was told once that I was ‘calling God a liar’ by applying a critical approach to the Gospels.

Today I have a broad range of students – Muslim, Christian, Jewish, agnostic, atheist – of different ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. That is a great advantage, as I find I learn from different perspectives. I can also get endorsements from certain readings – say, about John’s immersion being concerned with ritual purity¹⁶ – from Muslim or Jewish students, on the basis of their own religious tradition, whereas in the case of Christians I often think there is a resistance to breaking from a sacramental model of baptism when it comes to John. Time and again, I find Christian students do not quite ‘get’ the concept of ritual purity. I have learnt from a Zoroastrian student, which has helped me better understand the spiritual aspects of Zoroastrianism that intersect with Second Temple Judaism. I am often fascinated by the discussions that can take place in class time.

I would say though that, despite all my years of experience, the Jesus in Context course is harder to teach. It is still rewarding, and I delight in the lightbulb moments of students getting to grips with Jesus’ healings in the light of ancient ideas of demons and exorcisms, or anthropological parallels, and so on, but to do justice to this material we do need time to turn it over.

Students also learn by the assessment pieces they do. At Waikato my Historical Jesus course had four assessment components: book review: 20%; research paper (essay): 40%; presentation: 10%; test: 30%. At King’s for many years there was a coursework essay and a final exam, worth 40% and 60% respectively. I set as the coursework assignment a critical review of two recent books on the historical Jesus, asking them to compare, guiding students on different perspectives and approaches, and asking them to assess what seemed plausible or not. I was able to bring in a range of studies that focused on new questions regarding Jesus, including books that critiqued the way the Third Quest was done. However, in recent years it was decided in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s that we should reduce the number of assessed pieces our students submitted, and the entire module should be assessed on the basis of one final essay of 4,000 words or a written exam paper. I chose the essay option. This means that the students choose only one topic. It also means that the students become selective about what classes they attend, and do not necessarily get the full course (though they may listen to my recorded lectures and access materials from the online platform). They choose their topic, attend that class, and prioritize writing an essay on that single topic. There is a formative essay now for a book review, but, since it is optional, only a few students bother with it.

Because of all this, the class experience is very different from how it was when I started off, for students and for me as a teacher. I cannot rely on them knowing what has gone before in terms of building up a knowledge base. I cannot build a strong community of students. I sometimes engage by email or in an online meeting with students I have barely seen in class, as they ask me for feedback on an essay plan. The institutionally-directed changes seem to inhibit rather than enhance holistic student learning. As for essay assessment, one may well need to question whether it is viable in an environment where there is widespread use of ai writing applications. It is officially banned, but – I suspect – widely employed.

When I present the criteria of authenticity today it is as a fairly blunt instrument, tied up with a particular phase of scholarship, and I ask students to try it out looking at different parallel passages. The one thing students do still find useful is the criterion of embarrassment. It dawns on them that people re-wrote previous material in the light of current concerns. They get redaction criticism, and even – in the end – the rhetorical dimensions. But the question remains of how far back we can go. I ask them: if Matthew and Luke have done this to Mark, what material does Mark do this to? How can we read between the lines? What isn’t said?

And perhaps in asking such questions this is the most important transferable skill we can offer.