While we were living in Berlin, many years ago, during the Cold War, I recall being confused by a rather common question:
How long are you in Berlin?
The phrasing of this query, at first, sounded to me as if the person wanted to know how long I would be staying in Berlin, not how long I had been living there. What does this odd concatenation of English words mean? It’s actually a word-for-word translation of the original German question, and it reveals a difference in German versus English when it comes to the expression of verbal tense and aspect.
In German, the following sentence is completely normal:
Ich bin seit einem Jahr in Berlin.
Literally, that says: “I am since a year in Berlin.” But that translation doesn’t just sound wrong; it is wrong. A native English speaker would express the durative (i.e., progressive) aspect with a different construction, namely:
I have been in Berlin for a year.
A brain thinking in German does not hear the strangeness of the present indicative in this situation. Similarly, a brain thinking in English has a great deal of difficulty hearing “ich bin” as correct in this context.
Tense and sensibilities
It turns out Greek has a similar sort of construction. In his Greek Grammar, Herbert Smyth explains it succinctly:
The present, when accompanied by a definite or indefinite expression of past time, is used to express an action begun in the past and continued in the present. The ‘progressive perfect’ is often used in translation. (Smyth 1956, p. 422)
Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? (NIV)
Jesus saith unto him, Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? (KJV)
Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? (NASB)
The Greek uses the present tense, but the English does not. A word-for-word translation in this case wouldn’t be merely stilted or awkward — it would be wrong.
We can find examples in the Septuagint as well. For example:
In a recent comment on an old post of mine concerning the overblown claims about the attestation of NT works, Robyn Goss wrote (among other things):
There is an ignored massive network of early non-biblical writings (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Ignatious [sic] of Antioch, Papias), translations (Vetus Latina, Syriac Peshitta, Coptic Bohariic [sic], Codex Sinaiticus), and historical catalogs that document (Muratorian Fragment), and quote from the New Testament texts.
First off, I’m not sure why she listed the Codex Sinaiticus as part of the “ignored massive network,” since I mentioned it in the post and since it isn’t a translation. Perhaps we should chalk it up to the thrill of sprinting through a Gish Gallop. In fact, the translations listed do indeed “witness” to the Greek manuscripts they were translated from. But again, we know precious little about how they came to be. The who, the when, the where, and the why are all inferred.
Second, I will remind readers that my post compared the quality of attestation versus the quantity of attestation. Given a choice between the two, I’ll choose quality over quantity every time. To argue against my thesis by re-asserting the quantity of NT attestation misses the point entirely, I would think. I’ll admit that I have sometimes argued, in the Marxian tradition, that quantity can be a quality of its own, but not here.
Papias of Hierapolis
While we’re on the subject of good, reliable attestation, let’s talk about Papias. He can hardly be part of the “ignored massive network,” since every commentary of Mark I’ve ever read (and that’s a lot) mentions him. Those writers who lean toward the apologetic (possible, ergo must be true) side of the spectrum tell us that Mark was Peter’s translator, and that he wrote down what he remembered, but not necessarily in the right order. More skeptical commentators have written similar things, but with all sorts of caveats. They acknowledge we have many unanswered questions about what Papias actually meant. Continue reading “Is Papias a Reliable Witness to the Gospels of Mark and Matthew?”
Before we get to Wrede, I’d like to quote from the Acts of the Apostles. First, from the Contemporary English Version, which proudly claims to be accurate and “faithful to the meaning of the original”:
Acts 5:30 (CEV) You killed Jesus by nailing him to a cross. But the God our ancestors worshiped raised him to life.
The New International Version, which is the most popular English translation in the world, has a somewhat different take on the same verse. Their team claims to translate scrupulously from the original Greek using word-for-word along with thought-for-thought methods.
Acts 5:30 (NIV) The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a cross.
Readers will no doubt remember this line from Peter’s speech before the Sanhedrin. Here’s another example from Acts 10:39. First, from the Good News Translation, which is still extremely popular. (The CEV and GNT both came from the American Bible Society.)
Acts 10:39 (GNT) We are witnesses of everything that he did in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem. Then they put him to death by nailing him to a cross.
And now the NIV:
Acts 10:39 (NIV) “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross . . .”
Peter is speaking here again. Curiously, the Jews disappear from the GNT and the CEV. We see minor differences, but one thing these verses have in common is the word “cross,” which does not exist in the original Greek. There are no nails or crosses here, only trees. These translations aren’t outliers, either. The New American Standard Bible (“Accuracy you can trust, in the English you speak!”) does it, too:
Peter Preaching in Jerusalem by Charles Poërson, 1642
Acts 10:39 (NASB) “We are witnesses of all the things He did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They also put Him to death by hanging Him on a cross . . .”
What’s going on here? The translators have decided in these cases to substitute the word-for-word method with thought-for-thought. They presume to know what the author was really thinking, so they’re “fixing” (amplifying?) the text for modern English readers.
And we [are] witness of all [the] things he did in both the region of the Jews and [in] Jerusalem, whom also they put to death having hanged [him] on a tree.
I bring all this up, because a great deal of New Testament oddness remains hidden by our “accurate” English translations. The faithful translators will, of course, insist that tree is just a poetic synonym for cross. Do we really know that?
Diversity of Thought in the New Testament
They see themselves as faithful to the text, but they are faithful first to their conception of the Bible. That conception starts from the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God. Here in the rural Midwest, we see billboards that ask “What does the Bible say about . . . ?” These questions reveal the foundational dogma that the Bible has a unified message at its core. The unspoken question for the faithful is “What is the Bible supposed to say?”
The translators of the NIV and CEV feel free to add “missing” words. In the Gospel of John, both translations add “pray” and “prayer” where they don’t exist in the Greek. In the same Gospel, the CEV actually adds the missing name of Jesus’s mother (see 2:1). Did the author of John know her name was Mary? Perhaps. But he never wrote the name.
Today’s NT scholars do admit that some diversity of thought exists in the New Testament. However, the extremely conservative British and American scholars of the early twentieth century were far less tolerant of such notions. When Wrede pointed out passages in scripture that strongly suggest various authors had divergent ideas about when Jesus became the Messiah, they were not amused. But Wrede went further. He said such divergence indicated an evolution of ideas:
Jesus became the Messiah at his death (Paul)
Jesus became the Messiah at the baptism (Mark)
Jesus was the preexistent Son of God (John)
Moreover, Wrede pointed out that our earliest Gospel is a mixture of Mark’s dogmatic invention along with received tradition, and he showed that the author was neither an eyewitness nor a disinterested historian. Finally, his somewhat favorable references to F. C. Baur and D. F. Strauss were certainly more than any self-respecting scholar could allow.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that pious Brits and Yanks savaged Das Messiasgeheimnis and its author, or that the book wasn’t translated into English until 1970. The tradition of reading and opining about Wrede, while diligently not reading Wrede has a long, proud history.
“The meaning of the item”
Mark had an entirely different view of what it meant to be the Messiah.
If they had read Wrede, they would have discovered that he identified a number of core problems with critical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Many of these problems persist.
In the affirmative answer to this question if Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed” the high priest discerns blasphemy—and therefore a crime punishable by death. The blasphemy is usually thought to lie in arrogation to himself by a puny, weak and powerless man of the highest dignity known to Israelites, that of the Messiah sent by God. The tacit or explicit assumption behind this is that if the blasphemy lay in the pretension to divine glory and divine nature, Jesus like the high priest would have been taking the title “Son of God” to have a dogmatic, metaphysical sense and this is historically an impossibility. But to argue in this way is as dangerous as it is frequent. We must never say that if a particular item meant one thing it would not match up with the history of Jesus and that therefore it must mean something else. The meaning of the item is rather the prior question at all times. What history can make of it comes into consideration later. (Wrede 1901/1970, pp. 74-75, bold emphasis mine)
In a literary analysis especially, “the meaning of the item” must go back to the author, not to some imagined historical context. People still make this mistake. They gloss over the surface and look for what lies beneath. They leapfrog over the plain meaning of the text and evaluate matters as if they really happened, and they compare critically the terms Mark uses against the “normative” definitions found in other texts from roughly the same period.
As Wrede explains, calling oneself the Messiah would not constitute blasphemy. He writes:
[T]he mere assertion of messiahship does not, according to Jewish ideas, amount to blasphemy. But it is not any easier to see how a Christian author could find an instance of blasphemy here if he had only the Jewish idea of Messiah in mind. For when all is said the Messiah is not in Jewish eyes a divine being. On the other hand, if Mark understood “Son of God” in a supernatural and metaphysical sense, everything becomes quite clear. (Wrede 1901/1970, p. 75, bold emphasis added)
Many scholars have chastised Wrede for putting too many things under the umbrella of messiahship. Why keep healings and exorcisms a secret, they ask, when being acknowledged as some sort of wonder-worker doesn’t make a person the Messiah? Similarly, they note that nobody would have thought a Jewish Messiah would suffer, die, and be raised from the dead. Well, yes. That’s what Paul said: The claim that the Messiah had died was a “stumbling block” to the Jews. But Mark had an entirely different view of what it meant to be the Messiah.
In this post, we’ll examine the arguments against Wrede presented by Ian Mills on Derek Lambert’s Mythvision Podcast. I’ll start with a list of things he gets right, and then we’ll see where he flies off the rails.
What Ian Gets Right
He doesn’t call William Wrede “Wilhlem.” Surprisingly, this is still a problem. Here’s a short list of some recent works in which the authors use the wrong name. (I tend to blame editors for this mistake.)
Levine, Amy-Jill, Dale C. Allison, and John Dominic Crossan. 2006. The Historical Jesus in Context. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. (p. 6)
Ahearne-Kroll, Stephen P., ed. 2023. The Oxford Handbook of the Synoptic Gospels. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. In this work, Wrede’s name varies, depending on the author:
John S. Kloppenborg: “The spell of Mark would not be broken until Wilhelm Wrede demonstrated that the ‘messianic consciousness’ that was so fundamental to the liberal lives was a creation of Mark (Wrede 1901; ET 1971).” (p. 12) [Note: Wrede said it was not a creation of Mark.]
Candida Moss: “In 1901, William Wrede argued that these sayings form part of a ‘Messianic Secret’ in Mark in which the identity of Jesus is concealed in order to explain how Jesus came to be crucified (Wrede 1971).” (see p. 247). [Note: Wrede said it arose within the tradition in order to explain why no one knew Jesus was the messiah before the resurrection.]
He pronounces Wrede correctly. I recently watched a short (slightly over 3-minute) YouTube video, and at least for the time being I won’t link to it here. Suffice it to say, when the professor in the video pronounced Wrede as “VAIR-duh,” my jaw dropped. I watched the longer, related video behind a paywall, and I can confirm that it was not a momentary lapse.
He says that Wrede identified a persistent motif of secrecy that is found chiefly in Mark.
He rightly believes that Wrede’s methodology was the forerunner of literary-narrative approaches to the Gospels.
He says Wrede is the forefather of redaction criticism.
He correctly identifies (at least partially) Wrede’s solution: The historical Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah. (5:32)
All of this is encouraging. He’s off to a good start.
What Ian Gets Wrong
Problems begin at 4:00. He says that almost no one agrees anymore with Wrede’s solution. That may or may not be true, but what does he think Wrede’s solution is? This is extremely important, because if we don’t know what Wrede actually said — if we get it wrong — then our criticisms of the solution are useless. We are arguing with a Wrede of our own construction.
If we want an honest discussion about what Wrede got wrong or right, we need to know what he really said. Scholars often make two variations on the same mistake.
1. Claiming Wrede said something he actually never said.
2. Claiming Wrede failed to say something that he actually did say.
An honest discussion cannot arise from incorrect baseline data.
This post isn’t part of the series, “Reading Wrede Again for the First Time,” but is more or less an excursus on the state of deficient scholarship surrounding William Wrede and the Messianic Secret (das Messiasgeheimnis). I’m trying out the term Wredegeheimnis to describe the hidden or “Secret Wrede” in modern NT studies.
We’ll take a closer look at some recent examples. By the way, I don’t expect things to improve in Wrede Club. I’m not a scholar, just a guy who reads.
Reigning Champion: Wikipedia
Yes, I fully support the concept of Wikipedia, but I recognize that its execution often falls short of its potential. Wikimedia is part of the overall universe of free and open discourse, which is important now more than ever. However, the article on the Messianic Secret is a complete dog’s breakfast. I will highlight some of the more egregious mistakes below.
♦ How Did the Secrecy Motif Originate?
Wrede suggested that this theme was not historical but was an addition by the author of Mark. [Main topic, para. 2]
No. Wrede held that the author of Mark is not responsible for the theme. It was present in the sources that he had at his disposal. I must point out here that the German Wikipedia page on the Gospel of Mark gets it right.
Das Messiasgeheimnis ist eine von William Wrede erstmals als dogmatisches Konstrukt erkannte Theorie des Markusevangeliums. Er schrieb dieses jedoch der vormarkinischen Tradition zu und benannte drei Elemente dieser Theorie: Schweigegebote an Dämonen, Geheilte und Jünger, Unverständnis und Unglaube der Jünger und die Parabelbelehrung.
The Messianic Secret is a theory of the Gospel of Mark first recognized as a dogmatic construct by William Wrede. However, he attributed it to the pre-Markan tradition. He named three elements of this theory: commands of silence to demons, healed people, and disciples; the disciples’ lack of understanding and their unbelief; and his teaching in parables. (My translation, emphasis mine)
According to Wrede, Mark’s solution was: Jesus always knew it but kept it a secret for the inner group. (emphasis mine)
That’s incorrect. It was never “Mark’s solution.” According to Wrede, there were at least two strands of tradition available to the author of Mark: one in which Jesus keeps his Messiahship a secret, and another in which everyone knows he’s the anointed Son of God. (Wrede also points to another source of tension against the Messianic Secret tradition, namely the fact that the author’s purpose for writing the Gospel is to prove Jesus was the Messiah! We’ll look at this point more closely in a future post.)
♦ Did Wrede Renounce Markan Priority?
…Mark was the source for Luke and Matthew. There are indeed very strong reasons for this. I will mention a few. [Wrede 1907]
The Wikipedia authors declare:
Wrede’s theory had an inherent inter-relationship with the hypothesis of Markan priority, which Wrede eventually abandoned, but some of his followers accepted. [Main topic, para. 3]
I can hardly believe that my last post in this series appeared here a decade ago. Yes, I knew I hadn’t finished, but never underestimate the power of inertia. Oddly enough, a random YouTube video caused me return to Wrede (and the scholars who don’t read him). Apparently, YouTube’s algorithm noticed I was searching for New Testament videos, and it showed me an NT Pod episode from the lovely Mark Goodacre.
Over that past decade, I haven’t exactly abandoned New Testament studies, but I have spent the bulk of my time reading modern history — mostly books about critical eras, like the decades leading up to the Russian Revolution and the American Civil War. This year, if time permits, I would like to write about these “pregnant” periods in history here on Vridar.
The first rule of Wrede Club is: Nobody reads Wrede
The fact that Goodacre published a book about John’s obvious familiarity with the Synoptic Gospels is great news. I especially love the provocative title: The Fourth Synoptic Gospel. Longtime readers of Vridar will know that Neil and I have often written about how and why John rewrote the Synoptics, especially Mark. And here’s a bonus: The book contains a section entitled “The Revelation of the Hidden Messiah.” He’s referring to the Messianic Secret! Hence, we have two of my favorite subjects inside one dust jacket.
So you can imagine my disappointment when I read the following line:
There is, however, something still more fundamental. John shares with the Synoptics the same literary conceit, that the story is one in which Jesus’s identity is hidden, only to be retrospectively understood in the light of the resurrection. Just as Kähler’s “passion narrative with an extended introduction” gets forgotten when it comes to John, so too William Wrede’s Messianic Secret is usually remembered as a study of Mark’s Gospel alone. (Goodacre 2025, p. 38, emphasis mine)
There is, however, something still more fundamental. John shares Mark’s basic literary conceit that the story is one in which Jesus’ identity is hidden only to be retrospectively understood after the resurrection. Just as Kähler’s ‘passion narrative with an extended introduction’ gets forgotten when it comes to John, so too William Wrede’s Messianic Secret is all too often focused solely on Mark. (Goodacre 2021, p. 86, emphasis mine)
In his original statement, Goodacre implied that Wrede focused solely on Mark; however, upon further reflection (presumably), he said he’s merely remembered that way. And it’s a false memory. Consider how strange it would be to criticize a book originally entitled Das Messiangeheimnis in den Evanglien (plural) for concentrating “solely on Mark.” Note that the original German text spans about 300 pages, and close to half of those pages focus on the other three canonical Gospels. Wrede’s chapter on the fourth Gospel runs 27 pages, which is not insignificant.
Why am I disappointed? Because that’s it. Wrede wrote a book about the Messianic Secret. Yada-yada-yada.
So, what sorts of insights and conclusions did Wrede come to after analyzing John’s Gospel through the lens of secrecy and “hiddenness”? How did the secrecy motif evolve through Matthew then Luke, and finally to John? How did Wrede compare John to Mark? Goodacre doesn’t say. As is so common in modern NT Studies, we are given the “that,” but not the “what.” We’re told that Wrede wrote a book about the Messianic Secret, but he stands to the side as a kind of mute witness. Continue reading “Reading Wrede Again for the First Time, Part 12”
While translating Dibelius’s book on John the Baptist (Die urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Täufer, 1911), I have been contemplating his discussions concerning methods of literary criticism. In particular, how do we identify bits of tradition from the later narrative framework in which they were placed?
Martin Dibelius (1883-1947)
The collectors’ additions are often clearly distinguishable from collected material: Information about changes in location and time,1 remarks of a pragmatic nature,2isolatedsayings of the Lord conveyed according to oral tradition, frequently added simply to insert a catchphrase, and finally, the so-called summary reports,3 with general information about healings.
(Dibelius 1911, p. 4, my translation, italics his)
Don’t imagine that Dibelius thought that separating out earlier tradition, layer by layer would be an easy task. Not at all, but at times the evangelists do reveal some obvious seams, and the “precious stones” stand out from the settings.
Hence, the religious nature of the gospel writings precludes an “objective” historical account in the modern sense. However, the non-literary character of the Gospels assures the likelihood that some elements of the ancient and original tradition could be preserved within the accounts. After all, the authors do not want to create literary works, but rather to preserve and reproduce the tradition that was handed down to them. The fact that they polish the stones, fit them together, and place them in a framework does not necessarily rule out their understanding of the innate properties of these stones. (Dibelius 1911, p. 2, my translation, bold emphasis mine)
Here we see Dibelius giving credit to the compilers of the Gospels. According to his way of thinking, they didn’t write non-literary books because they lacked ability or ambition. Instead, he believed they valued the preservation of tradition above all else.
The image of polished stones set within a frame reminded me of the largely misunderstood metaphor of pearls on a necklace, usually attributed to K. L. Schmidt. In actuality, he said the opposite of what most people think he said:
We could illustrate it with this metaphor: the Markan account is not a necklace made of loosely strung-together pearls between which we can squeeze one sometimes here, sometimes there, but rather a pile of unstrung pearls, even if some pearls will match up from time to time. (Schmidt, 1919, p. 281, emphasis mine)*
At the same time, I became interested in a term Dibelius used, “Sammelberichte,” usually rendered as “summary reports” in English. Obviously, the presence of a summary paragraph at the end of a set of stories indicates a joint or a seam in the narrative. And while searching for cases in which scholars talked about such literary breaks, I came across a truly wonderful analogy for bits of tradition within a later framework.
Soup with Large Croutons (Wikimedia)
Julius Wellhausen’s croûtons-in-the-soup simile aptly describes the evidence and data paradigm needed to re-examine the single authorship of Luke and Acts. While “joints and seams” form the literary intersections that unite segments of written material, they simultaneously define the boundaries where those segments have been linked. That is to say, functionally they both unite and divide. (Walters 2009, p. 43)
The first eight words in the alleged quotation below by James Madison, below, are false.
Here’s what Madison said about democracy:
Democracy is the most vile form of government . . . democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. [The text in boldface is pure fiction.]
The Founders just didn’t trust the ordinary people and deliberately kept them at arm’s length, as can be seen from the way they drafted the Articles of Confederation and then the U.S. Constitution. (Arnheim 2018, p. 25)
Certain conservative authors insist these words from James Madison prove that the framers of the U.S. Constitution distrusted ordinary people and hated democracy. The above example comes from Michael Arnheim (Ph.D., ancient history) who is, according to the editors of the “for Dummies” series, “uniquely qualified to present an unbiased view of the U.S. Constitution.” (Arnheim 2018, back cover)
Uniquely qualified?
James Madison, portrait by Gilbert Stuart
Dr. Arnheim provides no citation for the Madison quote, but you can find the true part in Federalist 10. Since so many versions and editions of the Federalist Papers exist, I’ll cite paragraph numbers rather than page numbers.
Before continuing, however, please be aware that the mischief does not begin and end with the fictional denigration of democracy. Conservatives will often, as Arnheim does, neglect to define the term, knowing that modern readers will conflate the common term “representative democracy” with Madison’s “pure democracy.”
We shouldn’t discuss terms like “constitution,” “republic,” and “democracy” as if they were simple English words. In the context of government, or in this specific case — a history of the U.S. Constitution — these are terms of art. We need to know how the authors at the time defined these terms in order to deal with them honestly. Fortunately, Madison et al. often gave perfectly concise definitions of the terms at hand. On the subject of democracy, he wrote: Continue reading “How Did We Get Here? (Part 3) Are Democracies “Vile”?”
Like Neil, I’ve found it almost impossible to write anything right now. When I try to write about something “important,” I feel unable to move. On the other hand, when I consider writing something “normal” (like a series on translating Mark, which I’ve been planning), it feels frivolous.
We are in seriously dark times. Of course, we’ve always lived in dark times; it’s just that the darkness mostly lay outside our borders, out in our colonial empire, out in the world we dominate. I’m particularly conscious of the darkness now, as I’m reading The Myth of American Idealism, a recently published book by Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky. By the way, that link will take you to Bookshop.org. Using them is a nice way to support local bookstores against the onslaught of the billionaires.
What pushed me finally to touch the keyboard again is the recent attacks on Wikipedia by the fascist Trump regime and the fanatically pro-Israel ADL. You can read details here at Law & Crime. The actual crime Wikipedia has committed is the audacity to tell some of the truth about the genocide in Gaza. It isn’t enough to have unrestricted freedom of action and the unlimited right to control the world militarily (“What we say goes!”). No, all media must also be brought to heel. Freedom of thought consists solely in correct thinking. All else must be silenced.
From the article:
Wikipedia has been criticized by people — including Trump ally and unofficial DOGE leader Elon Musk — as of late for allowing what many have perceived to be “woke” information about current events and topics to be edited in.
Reich Chancellor Musk has decided Wikipedia is unfair to Dear Leader and bad for the Fatherland, and has told his followers to stop donating to them.
Even if you have never supported Wikipedia before, please now consider that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. And as our institutions continue to fail us, left and right, we need to support independent media in all its forms.
As soon as I publish this thing, I’m heading over to Wikipedia to drop some dollars.
Each time I start to write one of these posts, I have to pause when I realize that I haven’t yet introduced some fundamental concept. And I run the risk of leaving the station with passengers standing on the platform, confused by the timetables. I’m thinking of the first time I traveled in Europe and found that the departure board was listed chronologically. In the U.S., we show departures in alphabetical order, by city. So I stood there for quite some time, neurons firing incoherently.
Now imagine if the very word “departure” meant something subtly different in Frankfurt from what it means in Atlanta. Does the departure time refer to when the plane leaves the ground, when the plane pushes back from the gate, or when boarding of the jet is arbitrarily halted? Or does it mean something else altogether?
What is belief?
The political left, center, and right sometimes talk past one another because they often use the same words to mean different concepts. Some fundamental concepts are understood differently on the religious right and the far right. One key example is what it means to believe something. If you’re like me, you presume that belief has something to do with the evaluation of a proposition, in which you use evidence and logic to decide whether something is true. In classes on religion, we’re taught that in certain circumstances evidence and logic sometimes aren’t enough, so we have to take a “leap of faith.” Sometimes, belief needs a kick in the pants. Continue reading “How Did We Get Here? Part 2: Belief”
Like many Americans, I’m still stunned about the 2024 election. In fact, it still feels a bit unreal. The morning after, I decided to suspend my Facebook and Threads accounts for mental health reasons. Doom-scrolling for countless hours will hurt your brain. But enough of that.
Over the past few years, I’ve been studying areas of history, historiography, and the philosophy of history not normally taught in U.S. universities. In particular, I’m focusing on the longue durée. You’ll sometimes see this perspective used “safely” with regard to geography and climate. However, political historians in my country tend to ignore it, chiefly because too many of its practitioners rely on the analysis of Marxian class structures and how they play out over time. Continue reading “How Did We Get Here? Part 1”
I toyed with the idea of presenting the dishonest, decontextualized quotation of Marx that one finds in both Lost Cause as well as libertarian “scholarship,” and then work back until I revealed the original intent. But then I remembered from psychology classes that the primacy effect is extremely potent and realized that I risked sabotaging my own efforts. So instead I’ll begin with what Karl Marx actually thought, to avoid all ambiguity
.
What Marx Thought
In an essay written for the The Vienna Presse, he wrote:
The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question: Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated or not, but whether the twenty million free men of the North should subordinate themselves any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders; whether the vast Territories of the republic should be planting-places for free states or for slavery; finally, whether the national policy of the Union should take armed propaganda of slavery in Mexico, Central and South America as its device. (Marx 1861, p. 71, attributed to Marx and Engels, bold emphasis mine)
What the Many in the British Press Thought
For the moment, let’s lay aside whether or not we agree with Marx. The question is not what we think, but what he thought. In this essay, Marx and Engels were taking a position against many in the British press. Many of the loud and sanctimonious voices in newspapers of the day were saying that the war had nothing to do with slavery. Early on, in this same essay, Marx wrote, concerning contemporary London media:
In essence the extenuating arguments read: The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty. (Marx 1861, p. 58)
The Quote, Out of Context
The modern mischief begins with stripping away all context, and then presenting the implicit (and false) notion that Marx thought the Civil War was simply a war of aggression and dominance, perpetrated by the North. I first came upon this quotation in a truly dreadful book by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. called It Wasn’t about Slavery.
I received an email a few weeks ago [4 Jan. edit: make that a few months ago], in which the sender asked some questions that deserve an extended response. If and when I have the time, I will add more to this post, but I at least would like to start with a broad outline of my understanding of the history of life-of-Jesus research — both in the ways it was actually conducted and in the ways it is currently “remembered.”
The comment that you made is “One thing that struck me recently while reading and re-reading material related to the Quest, including books from the 19th and early 20th century, is how often authors will state matter-of-factly that “of course” the gospels aren’t biographies. This whole gospels == biographies debate seems rather new and not well argued. But since believing that they are biographies is useful for their narrow purposes, it has become the consensus position among today’s scholars.”
I have a few questions regarding this comment.
1. What books from the first Quest, say plainly that the gospels aren’t biographies?
2. Do they know of Greco-Roman biographies?
3. Do they list reasons why they aren’t biographies?
4. How is the current understanding not well argued?
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I am eagerly anticipating your response.
Before continuing, I just want to say I’m stunned that nine years have passed since I wrote that post. Where does the time go?
What Biography?
First of all, the general consensus in the 19th century held that the canonical gospels contained biographical material, but were obviously not like modern biographies. Many modern scholars who write on this subject annoyingly imply that this assessment is somehow new. Nobody thought that was the case, and nobody confused popular biography or hagiography or legendary biography with modern biography.
The question was simply: Can we use the materials at hand — namely, the aforementioned biographical material — to create a broad historical outline of Jesus’ life. In some cases, they referred to such a sketch as a “historical biography” or “scientific biography.” However, as we know from reading Albert Schweitzer and William Wrede, the authors of these “lives of Jesus” made two fatal errors: (1) assuming that Mark, as the first written gospel, could be trusted as an unbiased historical account, and (2) psychologizing Jesus far beyond the limits of reasonable conjecture.
What Quest?
Holy Grail Tapestry
Second, the somewhat sensational title of the English translation of Schweitzer’s A History of Life-of-Jesus Research, (Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung), colors the way we perceive the task at hand. You may suspect that I’m overstating the case, but I think this change of focus is crucial. In the original German, the title — and in fact, the entire work — centers on the scholars and their research. Schweitzer had intended the original title, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, as the attention grabber, but in subsequent editions it was dropped in favor of the subtitle, and in the German world is referred to as History of Life-of-Jesus Research (without the indefinite article).
In English, the very word “quest” evokes a kind of mystic medieval landscape — a verdant, rolling countryside populated with devout knights-errant finding venerated objects, killing mythical beasts, fighting rivals, and saving damsels in distress. In this case, the aim of our quest is not piety or glory, but instead the Jesus of history. Schweitzer’s survey of scholarly research has thus become a romantic historical mission. Continue reading “How Did Scholars View the Gospels During the “First Quest”? (Part 1)”
Once or twice a year, Academia likes to email me a link to Anthony Le Donne’s page, highlighting the third chapter from his magnum opus. In that chapter, entitled “History and Memory,” he introduces us to Maurice Halbwachs and his “seriously deficient” La topographie legendaire des evangiles en terre sainte: Étude de memoire collective. I had once held out some hope that Le Donne would fix this chapter’s more obvious errors, such as calling Helena Constantine’s wife, but that’s never going to happen. So each time I read it, I sigh and shake my head.
The “Deficiencies”
In what ways, specifically, is La topographie lacking? Le Donne noted Halbwachs’s first deficiency was that “he relied heavily upon the account by the pilgrims [sic] of Bordeaux and neglected any part that Constantine played in the localization of holy sites.” It appears by his reference to “pilgrims,” Le Donne doesn’t understand that the first chapter of Halbwach’s book refers to a single Christian pilgrim who probably wrote this work in or soon after 333 CE.
The oldest testimony that we have of a traveler who went to Jerusalem on pilgrimage is a work called “The Account of the Pilgrim of Bordeaux.” We can place the exact date after the phrase: at Constantinople “albulavimus, Dalmatio et Zenophilo consulibus, d.III kal. Jun. Chalcædonia, etc.,” which is to say, 333 CE – 300 years after the passion and death of Christ, 263 years after the destruction of Jerusalem in by Titus, 198 years after the reconstruction of this city (Ælia Capitolina) by Hadrian. The voyage to Jerusalem by Helena, the mother of Constantine, occurred around 326 CE. (Halbwachs 1941, p. 11, my translation)
[translator’s note] Wess. 571, 6-8, “Item ambulavimus Dalmatico et Zenophilo cons. III. kal. Iun. a Calcedonia et reversi sumus Constantinopolim VII kal. Ian. cons. Suprascripto.” In the year 333, CE, these two men – Flavius Valerius Dalmatius and Marcus Aurelius Zenophilus – served joint consuls. See: Cuntz Otto and Gerhard Wirth. 1990. Itineraria Antonini Augusti et Burdigalense. Stuttgart: Teubner. See also: Stewart Aubrey and C. W Wilson. 1887. Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem [Itinerarium Burdigalense]: “The Bordeaux Pilgrim“; (333 A.D.)
Any fair reading of the text must recognize the heavy reliance on the pilgrim’s work. After all, it starts on page 11 and rambles on for 52 pages. Why did Halbwachs spend so much time referring to the pilgrim’s itinerary? He was forthright about his reasons for doing so.
Consider this text: how could we not take some time to study it? It is a unique remnant, closest to the period in which the events recounted in the gospels would have taken place, before which we find only a few texts in the writings of the early Church Fathers, but no continuous account from someone who witnessed the places. (Halbwachs 1941, p. 11, my translation)
He reminds us that the next instance we have of such an itinerary comes fifty years later with the Peregrinatio ad loca sancta by the Galician nun, Egeria (Ætheria).
Fifty years is a long time in a century where, after the construction of Constantine, many new traditions were quickly established. Moreover, in this second 60-page text, Ætheria’s journeys to Sinai, Mount Nebo, Mesopotamia and Cilicia – i.e. places mentioned only in the Old Testament – take up a significant part. Ætheria lived in Jerusalem for three years. She emphasizes ceremonies that take place on different days of the year around the Holy Sepulcher and Calvary, on Mount Zion, at Eleona, and on the Mount of Olives. She describes them meticulously and vividly; but there are only a few topographical indications. (Halbwachs, 1941, p. 12, my translation)
DUCCIO DI BUONINSEGNA: Cristo y la samaritana, 1310-1311
A Foundation
Notwithstanding this heavy reliance, a fair reading of the text must also acknowledge that Halbwachs does not rely solely upon our pilgrim, but quite often uses his work as a kind of baseline — a foundation upon which to compare other descriptions and analyses. Each successive account gives us a new perspective, but the pilgrim’s account is the first nearly complete itinerary of the sites — all the more valuable, because it describes the situation directly after Constantine and Helena made their marks on Palestine.
(I will note here that Halbwachs mentioned Constantine by name over 30 times, which I think you’ll agree is a rather unusual way to “neglect” the emperor. We’ll return to that theme later on.)
Reading the works of the Memory Mavens (specifically, those self-professed experts in the English-speaking world), you might have the impression that Halbwachs had missed the mark with this book. As I mentioned in other posts, Anthony Le Donne and Barry Schwartz had little good to say about it. Le Donne insisted it was “seriously deficient in many ways” (Le Donne 2009, pp. 43-44). Schwartz wrote:
Halbwachs’s greatest failure is his inability to see commemoration as anything more than an elaborate delusion.
It is not just that localizations distort history; the more they distort the better they work. Halbwachs advances a pejorative conception of collective memory, one that distrusts and works to undermine established beliefs. He assumes that memory, as opposed to history, is inauthentic, manipulative, shady, something to be overcome rather than accepted in its own right. That commemoration is a selective celebration rather than an inferior version of history escapes Halbwachs. He cannot fully grasp what sacred sites accomplish, how they transmute reality to mobilize and sustain religious sentiment and, above all, elevate Jesus and sustain faith in what he did and represented.
(Schwartz 2005, p. 49, emphasis mine)
After several paragraphs of scolding Halbwachs, he proclaimed:
From the social memory standpoint, then, our object of study is not the authenticity of the Gospels; it is rather the Gospels as sources of information about the popular beliefs of early Christianity.
(Schwartz 2005, p. 50)
Are we to infer that Halbwachs didn’t know that? After reading Halbwachs’s introduction (which today’s scholars will not do), we might come away with a different interpretation. In his essay, Schwartz was focused on gleaning information about what happened in first-century Palestine. He chastised both Bultmann and Halbwachs for their skepticism under this section header: The Cynical Discipline (p. 45). He suggested that both men smugly swept aside all gospel evidence, happy to declare any and all traditions as inauthentic.
“Just wait a bit. Soon there will come a new species of men – narrow, hard, and systematic – who will go further in the direction of ruthless criticism and denial. Then you will miss Mr. Renan.”
La topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte: étude de mémoire collective
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been working on an English translation of Halbwachs’s La topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte (The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land). A paperback version with its vivid red cover, sitting at the foot of my bed, has been catching my eye for many months. Recently, I finally picked it up and started reading it again, happy to find that he wrote in not some impenetrable scholastic French, but in a rather conversational (yet still quite proper) register.
I had three years of French in an American high school, so my competence is suspect. However, starting several years ago I’ve been working at getting better with the help of Duolingo and Pimsleur. That said, I often find myself entering sentences into various online services to compare my translations to theirs.
The Original Source
One of the sentences that popped out at me was this one from the last paragraph of the introduction:
Si, comme nous le croyons, la mémoire collective est essentiellement une reconstruction du passé, si elle adapte l’image des faits anciens aux croyances et aux besoins spirituels du présent, la connaissance de ce qui était à l’origine est secondaire, sinon tout à fait inutile, puisque la réalité du passé n’est plus là, comme un modèle immuable auquel il faudrait se conformer.
(Halbwachs 1941, p. 9)
I have translated this passage as:
If, as we believe, collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past, if it adapts the image of ancient events to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present, knowledge of what was originally there is secondary, if not outright useless, since the reality of the past is no longer there as an immutable model to which one has to conform.
(Halbwachs/Widowfield 2023, bold emphasis mine)
It sounded awfully familiar. And then I remembered a Halbwachs quotation in Memory and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity that I hadn’t been able to find in the original text. Schwartz wrote:
In The Legendary Topography of the Gospels, he declares, “If, as we believe, social memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past, if it adapts the image of ancient facts to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present, then a knowledge of the origin of these facts must be secondary, if not altogether useless, for the reality of the past is no longer in the past.” (Halbwachs 1992b, 7).
(Schwartz 2014, p. 19, bold emphasis mine)
Back in the day, I had been confused, because Schwartz’s bibliographical citation for “Halbwachs 1992b” contained this note:
Translated into English as pages 193–235 in On Collective Memory. Edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [orig. 1941]
The unsuspecting reader (in this case, me) might think La Topographie had been translated in its entirety and placed at the end of the English translation of On Collective Memory. However, if you’ve read my series on the Memory Mavens, you will recall that it was only the final chapter — the conclusion — that Coser translated.
The fact that Goodacre published a book about John’s obvious familiarity with the Synoptic Gospels is great news. I especially love the provocative title: 
So, what sorts of insights and conclusions did Wrede come to after analyzing John’s Gospel through the lens of secrecy and “hiddenness”? How did the secrecy motif evolve through Matthew then Luke, and finally to John? How did Wrede compare John to Mark? Goodacre doesn’t say. As is so common in modern NT Studies, we are given the “that,” but not the “what.” We’re told that Wrede wrote a book about the Messianic Secret, but he stands to the side as a kind of mute witness. 
