The Golden Rule

In light of the recent discussion on historicism versus mythicism and my own post about how there is no ideological neutral position on the historical Jesus, what do people think of this quote from John Dominic Crossan’s, The Birth of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 45, in speaking of the dialectic between historical reconstruction and faith (whatever one thinks of Crossan’s method and conclusions, one has to love his writing style):

This dialectic has its normative model in the canonical gospel-type and its paradigmatic instances in those four gospel-texts.  They show, across the 70s, 80s , and 90s of that first century, how Jesus then becomes Jesus-now, how the historical Jesus becomes the risen Jesus, and how, while you can have history without faith, you cannot have faith without history.   In every generation, the historical Jesus must be reconstructed anew, and that reconstruction must become by faith the face of God for here and now.

He goes on to compare this situation to the Bible, which is at once viewed as inspired Scripture which informs our faith and practice yet is also a critically reconstructed text based (based on the available sources and scholars evaluating and debating the external/internal evidence for a given reading).  What do you think: do you agree or disagree?

“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is” (Schweitzer, 403).  This oft-quoted statement is the conclusion of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus, a book that has long been regarded as the definitive case for the apocalyptic Jesus and put to rest the various Liberal Lives of Jesus of earlier questers.  Yet I want to touch on the article by Helen Bond, which has also been discussed by Mark Goodacre, Jim Davila and Loren Rosson III, which suggests that maybe the “apocalyptic Jesus” is not such a stranger and enigma in our time.

While I place myself in the “apocalyptic Jesus” camp, it does drive me crazy when some treat this view as if it had a self-evident “correctness” and just dismiss rather than critically engage the arguments of Crossan, Mack, Funk (and collectively the “Jesus Seminar”) and others who advocate for a non-eschatological sapiental sage.  Whether one considers Jesus to be an apocalyptic figure or a Cynic-like sage, Jesus continues to hold a huge ideological significance for both conservatives and liberals (see my Hollywood Jesus) and Christians are always going to seek to make him relevent to our world because he is in Johannine language the divine Word (Logos) made flesh (sarx) and thus reveals the character of God.  Consider the volume edited by John Kloppenborg and John Marshall, Apocalypticism, anti-Semitism and the Historical Jesus: Subtexts in Criticism (T&T Clark, 2005) (RBL review) which features a number of well-known scholars on this question (William Arnal, A.J. Levine, Dale Allison, Robert Miller, etc.).  Kloppenborg points out that apocalyptic constructions have been used to support existential interpretations, as an expression of Jesus’ absolute and unparalleled authority (e.g. the kingdom was breaking through in Jesus’ words and deeds, Jesus has the messianic authority to lay aside certain injunctions of Torah), to defend the authenticity of the messianic portrait in the Synoptics, to buttress the Christian belief in the finality of Christ as the climax & goal of history, and to look forward to a transformed cosmos in the future when the divine will is finally done “on earth as it is in heaven” (pg. 13-23).  This is not to say that the evidence may not in fact lead to an eschatological Jesus (I believe it does), but just that there is no ideologically neutral position on a figure that is so important as Jesus.

In the last post I explored Jesus continued status as a cultural icon in media and films.  Indeed, this creative dialogue with the Gospel texts and efforts to make them relevant to modern audiences only continues the process begun by the evangelists themselves, adapting existing traditions of Jesus and retelling/updating the story in new social contexts.  In light of debate on the nature of our sources, scholars will continue to debate questions about whether Jesus was an eschatological prophet or sapiental sage, whether his message was anti-imperial, whether he believed he had a messianic vocation or whether it is even possible to reconstruct the elusive figure behind the theological portraits of the Gospels and their sources.  However, considering Jesus was a marginal peasant from Galilee who received an execution reserved for non-Roman citizens and rebel slaves, it is surprising that we have anything about him and I think the sources we have along with Josephus (Ant. 18.3.3 [removing Christian interpolations]; 20.9.1) and Tacitus (Annals 15.44) are sufficient for demonstrating the basic historicity of a Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified in Judaea under Pilate.  Here are some aspects of Jesus life which are better explained as historical than the product of later myth-making:

1. The Crucifixion:  there seems to have been no first century expectation of a suffering, much less crucified, Messiah, in spite of diversity of messianic expectation (cf. Jacob Neusner et al, Judaisms and their Messiahs at the Turn of the Christian Era).  In response to cognitive dissonance created by the dashing of traditional expectations in light of the crucifixion (hence Mark’s messianic secret and retrojection of the passion predictions and disciples inability to comprehend), Christ followers searched the Scriptures again to make sense of it all.  They applied the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (originally a reference to Israel [Isa 44:1] or some prophet[s]),  of martyrdom and vicarious suffering in 2/4 Macc, of the suffering righteous one in the Psalms or Wisdom of Solomon and of the binding of Isaac, to explain the necessity of Jesus’ suffering against all appearances that he was just another failed messianic candidate.  In this case Justin’s Jewish interlocutor Trypho voices a typical objection (after implausibly conceding a suffering Messiah) - ”But we doubt whether the Christ should be so shamefully crucified, for the Law declares that he who is crucified is to be accursed” (Dial. 89.2).
2. Jesus brothers:  Paul knows and has an uneasy relationship with Jesus’ brother James (Gal 1:19; 2:9, 12; 1 Cor 15:7) and there is a clear distinction between speaking about the brothers “in” the Lord (ἐν κυρίῳ) (believers form a fictive family and Paul often speaks of being “in Christ Jesus” [ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ]) and singling out a specific individual as the “brother of the Lord” (τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ κυρίου).  That Jesus had brothers is also attested by the Gospels (Mark 6:3; John 7:3-5) and Josephus reference to James the brother of the so-called Christ (Ant. 20.9), which unlike the debate over the Testimonium Flavianum, is almost universally accepted as authentic.
3. Nazareth:  It makes sense why Matthew and Luke place Christ’s birth in Bethlehem based on Micah 5:2 (though they can’t agree on how Jesus got to Nazareth; in Luke a census causes the holy family to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem while in Matthew the family already lived in Bethlehem but flees to Egypt until Herod dies and then resettle in Nazareth) or they could have put him in the axis mundi Jerusalem.  But why would his association with a small and insignificant village in Nazareth be invented?  On the contrary, it left them open to critique:  “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46); “How can the Christ come from Galilee? Does not the Scripture say that the Christ will come from David’s family and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?” (John 7:42); “you will see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee” (John 7:52).  Matt 2:23 is clearly straining to find some prophetic proof-text (perhaps a play on the word branch [netzer] in Isa 11) to explain the anomaly.  Note that Paul is accused as a ringleader of the sect of Nazarenes in Acts 24:5 (an early title that has been overtaken in the time of Luke-Acts by Christianos [Acts 11:26; 26:28]), a title that continues among some Jewish Jesus groups as attested by Epiphanius and Jerome. 
4. The Baptism:  Why would the early followers invent that Jesus was baptized by John for the forgiveness of sins, when trying to demonstrate Jesus superiority to John?  Note how they try to neutralize this embarrassing fact:  Mark makes the baptism into scene of Jesus’ own vision and commission (which becomes public in Matthew and Luke), Matthew has John the Baptist protest that he should be baptized by Jesus (Matt 1:14), Luke narrates John’s arrest before Jesus’ baptism (Luke 3:19-22), and John has the Baptist testify that Jesus is the Lamb of God and narrates the vision but skips over the baptism.  Also, Jesus close association with the Baptist is attested throughout the memory tradition (Mark 1:4-9; 6:14-16; 8:28; Q [Matt 3:7-10, 12/Luke 3:7-9, 16b-17; Matt 11:2-19/Luke 7:18-35]; L [the birth narrative in Luke 1:5-80 with John and Jesus]; John 1:19-37; 3:22-30; Acts 19:1-4), so granted that not all of these traditions are historical it does show that several Jesus communities closely associated Jesus with John.
5. Hard Sayings:  Take Jesus hardline prohibition of divorce: it is multiply attested, but note how the command is already softened by  exceptions in Matthew into an allowance for divorce in the case of marital unfaithfulness (Matt 19:9) and by Paul in the situation of a believer and non-believer spouse (1 Cor 7:15).   Or take Jesus threat against the Temple:  multiply attested (Mark 11:15-18; John 2:12-22; Thomas 71; Matt 23:38/Luke 13:35 [the house left desolate]) and Mark’s link between Jesus temple action during a major festival and fear of political unrest and Jesus’ subsequent trial and death is plausible.  Yet note the embarassment of the evangelists, for in Mark 14:57-58 it was only a “false accusation” (cf. Acts 6:13-14 where again only “false witnesses” accuse Stephen of saying Jesus of Nazareth would destroy this place) or in John 2:20-22 the saying is only a symbol for Jesus’ body.

There are more examples that could be brought up, such as accusations that Jesus worked with the power of Beelzebub or that he was a “glutton and a drunkard” that are unlikely to have been invented, but I would leave one question.  No scholar questions that the Gospels present a theological Jesus and that the evangelists tried to model Jesus life on various scriptural paradigms (e.g. the Suffering Righteous one, a Moses-like prophet, preincarnate wisdom), but it just seems to me to make more historical sense to see a historical person underlying this creative theological activity than to accept that a number of Jesus groups invented an entire Jesus myth out of whole cloth.