Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Category: New Testament
Mostly straightforward but still some questions arise. Where does New Testament end and Church history and question of Christian origins, also certain roles of Marcion, begin? (Marcion’s argued influence on NT should be included here; also evidence of early readings found in Fathers like Tertullian.) Relevant manuscript discoveries and analysis belong here, including histories of their later copying.
With thanks to Larry Hurtado and the PhD student who brought this to his attention, I have accessed a recently published article that, as Dr Hurtado himself says, “all concerned with the study of NT manuscripts should read”:
As Hurtado himself points out, “the authors are both professional/trained palaeographers, and Clarysse is the founder of the extremely valuable Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB), which provides data on all published/edited manuscripts from the ancient world, and can be accessed online here.”
The point of the recent article? Again, Hurtado:
The object of the recent article is a critique of the tendencies of a few scholars in NT studies to push for early datings of NT manuscripts, sometimes highly improbably early datings.
Of course the one manscript that is of most popular and controversial interest is P52, that small scrap of text from the Gospel of John. I won’t repeat all the details here since they are widely known and readily available on Wikipedia. The main point of interest of this fragment is that it is generally dated to around 125 CE, and that since it was found in Egypt, this date accordingly is evidence that the Gospel of John, generally thought to have been composed in Asia Minor, must have been some time earlier than 125 CE. And since the Gospel of John is widely considered the latest of the canonical gospels, this fragment can serve as evidence for the traditional dating of the Gospels — the last decades of the first century.
Larry Hurtado does not appear to be particularly interested in P52 since he makes no mention of it in his post, though he does mention around 15 other manuscripts.
“the acclamation of the army was in reality a necessary element of imperial power, and the death of an emperor was in fact the time when his exalted status was finally evaluated.” — peppard
Nearly everything I learned in high school about early Roman emperor-worship was wrong. Luckily before I die I’ve since read The Son of God in the Roman World by Michael Peppard and I can now go to my grave with one more misconception eradicated from my mind.
I had once been taught that the people who participated in the forms of emperor-worship did not really believe their object of worship was a god (unless, perhaps, they lived in that more benighted oriental half of the empire). Living emperors, I was told, were not worshiped in those earlier years of Pax Romana. They had to die first. Hence Vespasian’s quip on his death-bed: “Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a god!”
The gulf between the material world and gods was, at least in the West, absolute. Emperor-worship was little more than a game of empty flattery from below and political manipulations from above.
We know better now. That’s not how it was at all. What misled us into the above notion of how things were was our reliance upon the writings of the philosophers like Cicero as the gateway to understanding how everyone else thought and acted. Archaeological and cultural studies research has since demonstrated that worship of the living Roman emperors was widespread from the earliest days of the empire. There was no sharp Platonic gulf between humans and gods among the general populace and imperial institutions.
So what does this have to do with the Gospel of Mark?
How to write about a Son of a Celibate God?
Michael Peppard opens with a little mind game of trying to imagine how an author who wanted to write down for others lots of the stories he had heard about a Jesus who supposedly lived a good generation ago and who was considered to be the Son of God. How would he start, especially given that the god in question was known not to procreate? The clue, Peppard says, lay in that author’s cultural environment. All about you were images, symbols, reminders of your emperor.
I cannot accept Peppard’s presuppositions in his mind-game. The Gospel of Mark is clearly not a collation of reminiscences that someone has collected and cherished over years and wishes to share with others in writing. Such authors have little reason to write anonymously or conceal their sources. Nor do they leave literary clues that their stories are for most part adaptations of other popular narratives such as those found in the Hebrew Bible. Nor do they write cryptically or metaphorically (with unexplained characters, behaviours, sayings and bizarre endings) to convey esoteric theological messages.
But I do believe Peppard asks a valid question. How would an author who knows the theological systems found in writings like those of the letters attributed to Paul begin to tackle a metaphorical narrative (a parable, if you like) to portray his beliefs about the Son of God? As Peppard writes: Continue reading “Jesus as Counter-Emperor in the Gospel of Mark”
In chapter 15 of volume 1 he captures the essence of a curiosity in the New Testament that seems to generally fly right over the heads of anyone prone to take reputed Holy Writ far too seriously. How often do we hear even professors of religion declaring that the Christ Myth is patently false because the apostle Paul wrote that Jesus had a body! They are usually more specific than that. They’ll say Paul wrote that Jesus was born to a woman! And that Jesus had flesh and blood. There it is! In plain print! Jesus was no myth!
The sorts of passages they’ll usually quote are:
Galatians 4:4-5 But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,to redeem those under the law
Romans 1:3 concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh
Romans 8:3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh,
Colossians 1:21-22 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because ofyour evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death
1 Timothy 3:16 Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory.
1 Peter 3:18 For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,
1 Peter 4:1 Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin,
1 John 4:1-3 Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.
2 John 1:7 For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.
Frank Zindler delves a little into the consensus dates for these texts and other extra-biblical writings expressing similar thoughts. I’m in the mood for a much simpler post for now so here’s the pertinent point: Continue reading “Did Jesus Have A Body?”
At one point Peppard “tries to imagine how a listener attuned to Roman culture might understand the dove”, the bird associated* with the Spirit as it descended from heaven at the baptism of Jesus. (Peppard’s approach stands in contrast to most interpretations in that they have sought to explain the dove in terms of Palestinian and Babylonian Jewish traditions.) After discussing bird omens in Roman culture generally, he comes to a survey of the dove in particular. In Roman literature the dove was often regarded as standing in opposition to the eagle, that bird of prey well known as the symbol of Roman imperial power.
Romans Read Omens Like Jews Read Scriptures
One could say that Romans used omens to interpret and explain their experience of the world in analogous ways to how Jews used Scriptures to interpret and explain their experience of the world. (The Son of God in the Roman World, p. 116)
augur
There were the official readings of the flights of birds in the quadrants of the sky by colleges of augurs. There were also interpretations of individual flights of birds that were sanctioned by common opinion.
As for the meaning of the dove descending at the baptism of Jesus, Peppard suggests the widely varying views found in the literature are possibly the consequence of scholars failing to study this image within the full range of the cultural milieu of the earliest evangelist and his readers.
Peppard brings forward “the Roman historian and collector of tales” Suetonius. In his several “lives of the emperors” Suetonius speaks of many bird omens, and according to Peppard, they are all related to two themes, “and two only”:
It is not my main purpose to argue for or against Wrede’s thesis. That isn’t why I’ve embarked on this reading expedition. My reasoning is straightforward: Before we agree or disagree with Wrede, we ought to know what he really said. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, The Messianic Secret had a profound impact on NT scholarship. Yet that impact is mostly misunderstood and largely muffled by scholars and laymen who opine on the subject with only the most cursory reference to the actual source material.
I note with some sadness the historical irony here. Wrede continually asked his fellow scholars to stop ignoring Mark. Instead of asking, “Why did Jesus do that?” we first should ask, “What did Mark mean when he wrote that?” Having learned nothing from The Messianic Secret, scholars now ignore both Wrede and Mark.
The vast majority of scholars who talk about the Messianic Secret are clearly ignorant of Wrede’s work. They waste our time by rehashing arguments that Wrede already convincingly addressed and discredited. And they do a disservice to their students and the reading public who get a distorted view of what the Messianic Secret is all about.
A short autobiographical digression
When I left the USAF back in ’92, I ended up working for a consulting company that specialized in information technology (IT) management, and which also dabbled in business process re-engineering (BPR). We became heavily involved in helping the Air Force with the merger of the old AF Systems Command and AF Logistics Command into the combined AF Materiel Command. Specifically, we were to assist them in deciding on a single set of IT standards, methods, processes, etc.
I found myself in the unexpected role of facilitator in round-table discussions, with a group of high-ranking, strong-willed people who had larger-than-life egos. They were all rulers of their fiefdoms, and quite unaccustomed to being told how to run their businesses.
My job was to keep the discussion on an even keel, to make sure everyone contributed to the discussion, and to gently guide the group to a consensus. One of the rules that we followed (and which I enforced) was this: Before anyone could disagree with a previous point, he or she had to restate it to the satisfaction of the person who had made that point. You would be amazed at how well this rule works not only in de-escalating tensions but in saving time.
How does it save time? Well, people don’t hear very well when they think they and their cherished beliefs are under attack. So when Mr. X would speak up and say, “I disagree with Ms. Y, because the real problem with . . .” My job was to say, “Hang on. Explain what Ms. Y said.” Immediately his posture would change. Instead of leaning forward aggressively, he would usually sit back, reflect a moment, and say: “Well, I think she said . . .” The ensuing give-and-take helped to clarify the issues at hand, and more often than not, Mr. X would admit that he had misunderstood Ms. Y. Frequently they found that they were actually in “violent agreement.”
I tell this story to explain why I have such a strong conviction about understanding a work before criticizing it or proposing “better” explanations. The vast majority of scholars who talk about the Messianic Secret are clearly ignorant of Wrede’s work. They waste our time by rehashing arguments that Wrede already convincingly addressed and discredited. And they do a disservice to their students and the reading public who get a distorted view of what the Messianic Secret is all about.
“Don’t get the wrong idea about me.”
I almost hate to bring up Bart Ehrman again as a bad example, because it’s starting to look as if we’re unduly picking on him. He is not uniquely wrong at explaining Wrede; in fact in some respects he’s better than most. However, his assessment of the Messianic Secret motif is very instructive with respect to the idea of “different kinds of messiahs.” In his survey textbook, The New Testament, he summarizes Wrede’s thesis. He misses many of the nuances of Wrede’s arguments, but he’s generally accurate.
However, because Ehrman sees the gospel of Mark as an “ancient religious biography” (see Chapter 4), and because he fails to understand that Wrede’s questions are more about Mark, not the historical Jesus, he finishes his assessment by shooting over the heads of Wrede and Mark, offering the following historical explanation to what is essentially a form-critical question:
Let’s conclude this series on John Dominic Crossan’s new book, The Power of Parable. Last time we looked at the Gospels of Matthew and Mark; this time Luke-Acts and John.
Crossan argues that the Gospels are not histories or biographies of Jesus but are fictional parables and Jesus is their central character. Now Crossan does not doubt that there was a real, historical Jesus. But you won’t find him in the Gospels, he says, at least not on a face-value reading of them. To see Crossan’s arguments that Jesus was indeed historical (even though the most important evidence about him is fictional) see the first post in this series: Crossan’s Proofs That Jesus Did Exist. (Did you “find it persuasive”? Nor did I.)
(For the uninitiated, “Find it persuasive” is a stock phrase used by biblical scholars to apply in the positive or negative to arguments they do or do not like. It replaces the tedious need to find an evidence-based and logically valid argument to address a view that supports or contradicts one’s personal beliefs and tastes.)
Question:
If the authors of the Gospels wrote fiction about Jesus, is it necessary to postulate an historical Jesus to explain the Gospels?
Now this question is more than just a “mythicist” question. Of course it has implications for the question of whether or not there ever was an historical Jesus. But can’t we ask that same question without any of the mythicist-historicist invective we have come to expect of it? Forget the mythical-historical Jesus debate. Let’s address the evidence, the Gospels, without fear or favour. First things first.
So let’s start with Crossan’s discussion of Luke-Acts.
I recently confessed that I have too often written with the assumption that my points are surely so well-known that there is no need to explain them. This post attempts to make amends for one such recent gaffe. I explain why I claimed Hoffmann is out of touch with most scholarship with his views of the Judaism of Jesus’ and Paul’s day.
In my latest post addressing Hoffmann’s argument for an historical Jesus, I dismissed his claim that Paul came from a tradition that knew only a vengeful God incapable of forgiveness. I assumed most readers would know that such a view of the Judaism of the early and mid first century is widely understood to be a misinformed caricature of reality. One commenter pulled me up on that point.
So here I quote views of scholars on the nature of Judaism, and the Pharisees in particular, in the time of Jesus and Paul. First, here are Hoffmann’s words:
[Paul] finessed his disagreements into a cult that turned the vindictive God of his own tradition into a being capable of forgiveness.
I brushed this aside with the following comment:
I am astonished that Hoffmann would write such an unsupportable caricature as if it were fact. His view is surely out of touch with most scholarship that has addressed this question.
So I pulled out books from my shelves that I could quickly identify as having something to say about this question. I avoided any titles that might be associated with scholars of mythicist leanings or left-right-out-radicals, however. I tried to stick to well-known or highly respected names in the field and especially to include relative “conservatives” in the mix.
So here are the sorts of things I have been reading over the years and that have led me to conclude that certainly a good number of scholars no longer accept Hoffmann’s characterization of Judaism or Pharisaism today. Note the number of times they denounce as a modern myth any notion that God was harsh or that Jews did not know divine forgiveness.
In recent years, many Christian scholars have come to realize that this Gospel picture of the Pharisees [i.e. severely and cruelly legalistic, hypocritical and self-righteous] is propaganda, not fact. Our main source of authentic information about the Pharisees is their own voluminous literature, including prayers, hymns, books of wisdom, law books, sermons, commentaries on the Bible, mystical treatises, books of history and many other genres. Far from being arid ritualists, they were one of the most creative groups in history.
Moreover, the Pharisees, far from being rigid and inflexible in applying religious laws, were noted (as the first-century historian Josephus points out, and as is amply confirmed in the Pharisee law books) for the lenience of their legal rulings, and for the humanity and flexibility with which they sought to adapt the law of the Bible to changing conditions and improved moral conceptions. . . . (p. 19) Continue reading “Pharisees and Judaism, Popular (Gospel) Caricatures versus Modern Scholarly Views”
Person hiding face and showing posture of shame (while wearing a Sanbenito and coroza hat) in Goya’s sketch “For being born somewhere else”. (Francisco de Goya). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Was Paul ashamed of his “claim to knowledge by revelation”?
Ed Jones recently sent me an email in which he once again repeats his view that the text of the Sermon on the Mount we find preserved in Matthew is authentic Jesus-movement tradition, while on the other hand Paul’s letters represent a “Great Mistake.” He writes:
Paul had one abiding problem – as he acknowledged “I was born out of time”; he never met the HJ [Historical Jesus], and thus denied the one indisputable basis for authority, apostolic witness. The best Paul could do was to claim knowledge by revelation. To make sense of this point one needs the get the history straight. Christian Origins and Jewish Christianity are serious misleading misnomers. [The term] “Christian” was first used of Barnabas and Paul’s mission in Antioch [Acts 11:26]; it was never used of the Jesus movement. (Ed Jones)
I have to disagree with at least two of Ed’s assertions. First, I wouldn’t put too much stock in the Acts of the Apostles when it comes to biographical information about Paul. In fact, anyone who argues that the Judean and Galilean followers (i.e., the “disciples”) have a claim on authenticity while Paul was a charlatan should certainly hold the Acts at arm’s length. For here we have an apologetic, late (second-century CE) work that desperately tries to gloss over Peter’s and Paul’s differences while practically erasing James altogether. Moreover, we have no evidence that Paul himself ever used the term “Christian” or for that matter would have even recognized the term. The only other NT book that uses Christian is the first epistle of Peter, also a very late work.
There’s that word again
Second, Paul never said he was “born out of time.” I fear we will never be rid of this awful translation. In 1 Cor. 15:8 Paul said, rather, that he was the ektroma. As I wrote earlier:
This translation masks an unusual word – ἐκτρώματι/ektromati — which refers to a miscarried fetus (ektroma). The untimeliness of the birth does not refer to lateness, but to being born too soon, and presumably means that Paul was calling himself some sort of monster. However, his meaning is far from clear and has long been the subject of debate. (Me)
Lately I’ve been researching the terms “born out of due time” and “ektroma,” and I’m now leaning toward Robert M. Price’s conclusion. But first some thoughts on terminology.
This post was to conclude my series on Crossan’s new book, The Power of Parable, but since it is taking longer to complete than I anticipated I’ll post here only on Crossan’s treatment of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Luke-Acts and John can wait.
The Parable Gospel According to Mark
According to Crossan the author of this Gospel was not writing a history or biography of Jesus but a parable about church leadership and the meaning of true Christianity.
The author, says, was probably writing in Caesarea Philippi to refugees from the recent war against Rome. These people, Crossan says, “had lost everything — their lands and possessions, their homes and their loves, their hope and maybe even their faith.” (p. 173) (I shake my head a little every time I hear a theologian or any believer write about loss of faith as if it were something worse than losing loved ones and homes.)
So what was Mark’s parabolic message to these people?
In his gospel, Mark claims that false prophecy led Jerusalem’s Christian Jews astray by promising them that the (second) coming of the Messiah would save them from . . . Roman destruction. And, says Mark — with parabolic hindsight and fictional creativity — Jesus had warned against that very delusion . . . .
Furthermore, Mark lays full responsibility for that mistaken conflation of the coming of Christ with the coming of Rome on the shoulders of the Twelve, that is, on their misunderstanding of Jesus . . . . (p. 171)
Mark is writing a story to castigate the Twelve for getting Jesus wrong in every way.
He criticizes the Twelve
for failing to follow the mode and style of (servant) leadership of Jesus;
for failing to lead a united Jewish and Gentile Christian community instead of an exclusively Jewish one from Jerusalem;
for failing to understand that performed miracles for both the Jews on the western side of the lake and the gentiles on the eastern side.
Mark is taking what he sees as the sins of the Twelve throughout the forty years after Jesus (from the late 30s to the early 70s) and re-writing them so they appear in a story setting of their time with Jesus.
But there’s a problem. Crossan also knows that almost all of those Twelve were dead by the time Mark was writing. He intimates that Mark is writing a parable about problems in his own day and that have relevance for all Christians since. Continue reading “Gospels as Parables ABOUT Jesus: Crossan, part 3 of 4”
Whatever else Paul was, he was the greatest revolutionary in history when it comes to the God-concept. His ideas were completely unhistorical and at odds with Jewish teaching: he finessed his disagreements into a cult that turned the vindictive God of his own tradition into a being capable of forgiveness. Needless to say, the way he arrives at this is angstful and tortured, but he gets there in the end–not through tradition and law, but through a strategem: ”Christ the Lord.” His turnabout from Judaism was so complete that his only intelligent interpreter, Marcion, believed he must have been speaking of a completely different God. . . .
Hoffmann has argued that the most fundamental reason we should believe Jesus was a historical figure (at least the figure Hoffmann sees after he strips away most of what the Gospels say about him) is that he was so typical of his time. Paul, on the other hand, must be seen as so atypical of his time.
But leaving that discussion for another time, what I find odd in Hoffmann’s claims here is his view of Judaism in the time of Paul. He equates Judaism of Paul’s time with a vindictive God tradition incapable of forgiveness. I am astonished that Hoffmann would write such unsupportable caricature as if it were fact. His view is surely out of touch with most scholarship that has addressed this question.
Sad, it seems to me, that so much of the mythicist argument is based on what Paul does or doesn’t say about Jesus, considering there is a world of thought there that, cast to one side, makes it virtually impossible to know what Paul was talking about. Mythicism, among it many other dubious achievements, has achieved a new level of illiteracy in relation to Paul’s ideological and religious world. . . .
And this comes from someone who has recently argued that we can know that Paul was addressing the illegitimacy of Jesus when he wrote that Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law” in Galatians 4:4! I have often addressed current scholarship on the writings of Paul. I know of mythicist arguments that draw reasoned conclusions on the basis of the scholarship specializing in Paul. I would like to see Hoffmann himself engage with Pauline scholarship itself, and arguments based upon it, rather than appear to completely bypass it and fault mythicists who take the trouble to take it seriously.
Photo credit: Wikipedia)
His “biographers” tell the story of a man who preached a kind of mock civil disobedience, but was as critical of Jewish legalism and ritualism as it was of Roman boots in Jerusalem. They tell us he gathered an unpromising following of women and yokels (Celsus’s words, not mine), failed to achieve whatever it is he wanted to achieve, and died among thieves as an enemy of the nation.
There is absolutely nothing improbable about this story. . . .
Unfortunately for Hoffmann’s case, this is the very story that the “biographers” do not tell about Jesus. This story is entirely what Hoffmann sees when he looks at the Gospels as if they are a Rorschach test. Continue reading “Initial response to Hoffmann’s latest”
Richard Bauckham is not a mythicist. I have no doubt he would emphatically oppose the very idea. General readers probably know him best for his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony in which he argues the Gospel narratives were sourced from traditions guaranteed by eyewitnesses of Jesus. I happen to think that book was one of the worst pieces of nonsense I have ever read and suggested it might best be explained by issues related to an illness from which Bauckham was recovering at the time he wrote it. But when Bauckham is not attempting to do history he can be very interesting. So I’m thrilled to write something positive about a Bauckham book for a change.
Cover via Amazon
God Crucified was first published in 1998 and reissued as a chapter in a larger volume, Jesus and the God of Israel, two years after Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Bauckham argues that the New Testament consistently portrays Jesus as part of the Godhead itself. The earliest Christology was a “High Christology”. That is, views about Jesus did not gradually evolve from the time of “the resurrection appearances” through a series of graduating exaltations until he was eventually worshiped alongside, or as part of, God. He was identified with God by the earliest Christians before any of the New Testament was written.
This view of Jesus was derived from an interpretation of the passages in Isaiah where God is said to both reside in the highest places where he sits as supreme ruler over all creation, and also with the lowly on earth, in particular with the suffering Servant. God raises that suffering Servant from death to be with him in the highest places, too, thus identifying himself with that one who had been abased.
Bauckham believes that this view (that I address in more detail in this post) explains how the human Jesus came to be identified with ruler of the universe. I think Bauckham’s argument holds perfectly for “Christ crucified”, but runs into problems when one tries to relate it to a pre-crucified human Jesus. I wonder if his argument better supports mythicist scenarios that argue Jesus was initially a figure who only took on flesh or a form of flesh for the short time necessary to be crucified.
Crossan would never say the gospels are “only” parables about Jesus. He would say something like: “The gospels are parables about Jesus and that’s what makes them so shockingly subversive and provocatively challenging for us today. They humble our prejudicial absolutes. They remind us that Jesus can never be fully trapped by our human imagination. Parables about Jesus delicately provoke us into a stunning paradigm-shift by means of a participatory pedagogy and a collaborative eschaton.” (I have mixed and matched phrases from Crossan here to produce this hypothetical “quotation”.)
But he does say that they are parables about Jesus nonetheless.
Crossan writes for believers who love to listen to well-educated and sophisticated theologians preach sermons that are introduced with rambling stories and then turn to paradoxical and punning turns of phrase (“It is never just about food. It is always about just food.” “Even if ironic, [parables] are always irenic.”) that are served as spiritual wisdom. He uses imperatives to draw readers into following his line of thought: “Watch now as I turn to . . .” “Think about this . . .” “Look at those words. . . ” “Hear that story against. . .” “Wonder for a moment why . . .”. He strains on every page to make the Bible relevant to the modern Western reader, even if that means leading readers to think of the words and deeds of Jesus through modern ideals and concepts of educational philosophy. Crossan’s Jesus remains the unblemished paragon who lived out his (Crossan’s) highest ideals at all times — “Think, therefore, about this: Does Jesus change his mind or does Matthew change his Jesus?“ (p. 187). Jesus’ God is always Crossan’s nonviolent God who seeks collaborative working relationships with humanity at all times.
For Crossan, the gospels are a particular type of parable. They are “Challenge” parables. He means they challenge their hearers to think and act differently. That sounds to me like a preacher injecting modern meaning and relevance into texts for the benefit of his parishioners who are looking for a reason to keep valuing the Bible. So, even though this “Challenge” theme predominates Crossan’s discussion, I will not make it the heart of my summary and will try to focus on his argument that the Gospels are themselves parables — although part of the reason Crossan sees them as parables is bound up in his interest in the theme of “challenge”.
I am splitting a single review I have written of John Dominic Crossan’s new book into two posts. This is the first.
His book, The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus, reminds me of John Shelby Spong’s Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes . . .. Both explain why their respective authors think pretty much everything you read in the Gospels is fiction, but both conclude with assurances that you should still believe in Jesus anyway. For Spong, following Michael Goulder, everything in the gospels is a form of narrative midrash. For Crossan, it is all parable. (Not that Crossan disputes the place of midrash in the gospel (p. 178).)
Before I address his argument that the Gospels are parables about Jesus let’s look at how he “saves” Jesus from the fiction of the gospels.
Crossan’s argument for an historical Jesus
[D]id Jesus ever exist as a historical figure in time and place? Is he like Julius Caesar — a factual figure, but enveloped in clouds of parable? Or is he like the Good Samaritan — an entirely fictional character of Christianity’s parabolic imagination? My answer is that Jesus did exist as a historical figure. That conclusion derives from two historical considerations — two types of proof, one external, the other internal. It does not arise from any dogmatic presuppositions. (p. 247)
In the Gospel of Mark Jesus avoids publicity, silences those he heals, and muzzles demons who recognise him. Unfortunately, the earliest evangelist never mentions why Jesus maintained secrecy.
William Wrede considered it damage control to explain why Jesus himself had never claimed to be the Messiah. Jesus avoided the title because it was inappropriate prior to his resurrection, as Mark seems to imply by having Jesus command Peter, James, and John, “to tell no one about what they had seen” on the Mount of Transfiguration, “until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. (p. 139, “Secrecy and Recognitions in the Odyssey and Mark: Where Wrede Went Wrong” by Dennis R. MacDonald, in Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative.)
Dennis MacDonald proposes that Jesus was intent on keeping his identity hidden (directly or indirectly) from those who had the power to kill him until the time for crucifixion had come. He says that, contra Wrede, Jesus revealed his identity before the resurrection, though. He revealed it for the first time to his enemies at his trial, thus prompting them to declare him a blasphemer and have him executed.
Tim Widowfield is probably gritting his teeth at this point because he knows that MacDonald has, like so many other NT scholars, simply gotten Wrede wrong. Firstly, Wrede did and did not say that in the Gospel of Mark Jesus maintains secrecy. Wrede acknowledges that in Mark’s Gospel Jesus is often open about demonstrating his messiahship before large crowds. The secrecy is maintained in the sense that the crowds don’t understand who he is despite all his miracles. Moreover, Wrede in fact said that Jesus did not hide his Messiahship on several occasions before his trial and resurrection. The least ambiguous of those moments was when he entered Jerusalem to acclamations that he was the delivering Son of David.
MacDonald argues that the alert reader can see a pattern in the way Jesus would sometimes make an effort to silence others while at other times encouraging them to declare widely a miracle he had just performed. (Wrede says there is no pattern. There is only contradiction and tension.) MacDonald says that this pattern is discerned when one compares the Gospel with another famous work in which the chief character, Odysseus, strives to conceal his identity to nearly all except a few close associates (to whom he reveals himself by “signs” that only they can recognise) until the climactic moment of killing and salvation. Continue reading “Where Wrede Went Wrong? MacDonald vs Wrede on Why Jesus Tried to Hide His Identity”
With thanks to Larry Hurtado and the PhD student who brought this to his attention, I have accessed a recently published article that, as Dr Hurtado himself says, “all concerned with the study of NT manuscripts should read”:
