More About The Historical Jesus Business

IN HIS CRITICISM of the critical-historical method of slicing and dicing and discarding of the Scriptures, Walter Brueggemann says that he thinks the people who do that have a basic misunderstanding of the kind of literature that the Gospels, and, in fact, all of the Scriptures are.  They aren't histories so the "critical-historical" method treats them as if they were a kind of literature which they are not.  I think one of the best descriptions of what the Gospels are and what that aren't was written by the late Fr. Richard McBrien in his enormous textbook on Catholic Theology, "Catholicism."  After a brief discussion of the non-Christian sources during the period in question, he says:

The most important source for the life of Jesus, therefore, remains the New Testament itself, and the four Gospels in particular.  But when one dips into the Gospels, one finds that they do not present history as we generally understand that word today.  In other words, they would not stand up alongside a lengthy obituary essay in the New York Times as a work of objective reporting and interpretation. [I'll interject that I think McBrien was giving the Times too much credit.]  They provide us instead with a testimony of faith.  The purpose is not to reconstruct the life of Jesus in every chronologically accurate detail, but to illustrate the eternal significance of Jesus through selected examples of his preaching, his activities, and impact of both upon his contemporaries.

The Gospels were written by men of faith for women and men of faith.  They are the product of subsequent reflection on the life of Jesus - a process that required anywhere from thirty-five to sixty years.  They are complex documents because of their peculiar purpose,  because of the diversity of their origin and the audiences to which they were initially addressed, and because of the various stages of development they passed through before reaching the form in which we have them.

That thirty-five to sixty years after the death of Jesus dating of the Gospels is not a firm fact, it is speculative and hardly a product of complete agreement even among experts of good will instead of ulterior motivation.  And there is plenty of ulterior motivation on both sides when it comes to that, may Historical Jesus guys like John Dominic Crossan are rather blatantly self-serving in their preferred dating, late for the canonical books, early for those much later gospels he prefers.  Right now, under the influence of Professor Israel Knoll and a Protestant commentator, whose name escapes me right now, I'm inclined to suspect that the Gospel of Mark may have originally been composed during the period in which Caiaphas was still the high-priest of the Temple since, unlike presumably later Gospels, he is only mentioned by title and not name.  I also would say that if the "Q" hypothesis that explains the common material contained in Matthew and Luke is valid, then it's quite probable that there were other texts concerning Jesus and his teachings that were earlier than that time-frame, as well.  Though, as McBrien and Brueggemann say, those weren't attempts at writing histories.  Arguably Luke's Gospel, with its preface addressed to "Theophilus" might lead someone to suspect that he had something like a primitive historical method in mind when he gathered information (no doubt judging among things as to their dependability) but the product isn't a modern history.  I would also point out that much of modern history, deemed to be that, is hardly all-inclusive or without thematic or ideological or even partisan being absent from what is produced.  There is no way to present the life of a single person with enormous and good documentation in even a multi-volume autobiography or history.  That is nothing that is peculiar to the Gospels, it's the character of any such text.

While all of what Richard McBrien said on the topic is interesting in itself, the known and assumed aspects of the production of the texts as we have them gets really interesting, for me at least, a couple of pages on.

Different Cultures

Furthermore, there are different cultures at work in the production of the New Testament, and these, in turn, generate distinctive theological viewpoints regarding the meaning of Jesus.  These are the cultures of the Palestinian communities of Aramaic/Hebrew-speaking Jewish Christians, of the Syrian communities of Greek-speaking Jewish Christians, of the communities of Asia Minor and Greece with their communities influenced by major individual Christians like Paul and John.  One might also classify these cultures more broadly as Palestinian, Jewish-Hellenistic, and Hellinstic-Gentile.

Only in the past century has biblical scholarship acquired the linguistic and historical data necessary for even recognizing such theological and cultural diversity within New Testament Christianity.  Previous scholarship, for example, had known Aramaic, the language which Jesus apparently spoke.  But the only forms of Aramaic which it had at its disposal came from several centuries before Jesus (Imperial Aramaic) or from several centuries after Jesus (Syriac and Talmudic Aramaic).  "To reconstruct the language of Jesus from such evidence," Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown rites, "was not unlike trying to reconstruct Shakespearean English from Chaucer and the New York Times" (Horizons, vol. 1, 1974, p 43).  The situation improved over the past one hundred years through such discoveries as the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. (For a thorough summary of their contents and significance, see John J. Collins, "Dead Sea Scrolls" The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol 3, New York: Doubleday, 1992 pp 85-101.  See also Joseph Fitzmyer's Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls, New York: Paulist Press, 1992.)  

Sayings of Jesus

In spite of the plurality of stages, layers, forms, and so forth, biblical scholars have reached a consensus regarding criteria for establishing authentic sayings of the historical Jesus: (1) Sayings which contain Aramaicisms characteristic of the Palestine of Jesus' day are more likely to have their origin in Jesus.  (2) The shorter or shortest of two or three different accounts of the same incident is probably the one closer or closest to the source, since authors tend to expand and explain. (3) Sayings or principles attributed to Jesus which are contrary to the developing traditions of the early Church, and which would even have been a source of embarrassment for it, are usually more authentic than those which clearly give support to current attitudes. (4) The same is true of elements in the message of Jesus which make a break with the accepted traditions and customs of Judaism (although this criterion must be used with caution since we are ill-informed about popular Jewish-Aramaic religious practices and vocabulary in early first-century Galilee).  (5) Words and deeds which are attested to by many different sources probably have a strong historical basis. (6) Negatively, sayings which reflect the faith, practices, and situation of the post-resurrection Church cannot be taken always at face value.  All of these criteria must be taken together and used in a mutually self-correcting way.

I've got some problem with some of these. I question if there is enough knowledge of the Aramaic of Jesus's time and place to know what would be "characteristic" in any given word or short phrase.  I'm a little more comfortable with the assumption 2, about shortness perhaps being more credible than a longer version of it.  Not enough is known about where the writer got the account from, people are as apt to elide as they are to elaborate, in my experience.  Especially in an oral transmission of something.   Other than that the "faith, practice and situation of the post-resurrection Church" could be a product of the text as they received and understood it determining that "faith, practice and situation."   I don't think there's any way to know that in the absence of more information than is available.  

In his The Real Jesus, Luke Timothy Johnson makes in interesting point that this whole enterprise of "historical Jesus" stuff makes an odd assumption that the oldest understanding of something is necessarily the best understanding of it.  While that is true for an historical report on an event or person WHEN THERE IS SUFFICIENT PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION AVAILABLE TO COME TO SOME CONCLUSION ABOUT THAT, as a matter of understanding of the phenomenon and teachings and life, death and Resurrection of Jesus, there is no reason to assume that a later understanding of that might well be superior as is the assumption in so many other areas of thinking, writing and research.  As McBrien notes, the information available only in the second half of the 20th century gave scholars a far better base on which to make judgments on the question of the Aramaic language that Jesus almost certainly spoke than would have been available to, say, most Greek speaking and writing members of the early Church.  The Gospels, themselves, note that the closest followers of Jesus didn't understand much of what they heard from him until after his death and Resurrection.  

It's especially odd for the Christian Church to make such an assumption because the entire basis of Christianity is the belief in the Living Jesus, the Living God who is alive and at work in the vastly complex and changing history of human beings, the Earth and the entire Cosmos. Somewhere in "Catholicism" in regard to questions about Women's ordination and the assumption that the Catholic Church in the period of JPII and Benedict XVI was some kind of final stage of its life, it's pointed out that if the Church is still around after 20,000 then the year 2000 will be seen as the "early church."  Right now it's know that there were Women deacons in the Early Church and it's proposed by a number of scholars, on good reasoning, that such "deacons" may well have functioned sacramentally as priests do now.  Such long entrenched policies as a supposedly celibate priesthood were certainly not known in the Apostolic era, Peter was certainly married as, presumably, others who were documented as insiders in Jesus's inner circle of followers.   And Peter is considered to be the first pope, now, though it would be a number of centuries before any of those on that list would know they were popes.  As I've said, I'm quite sure Peter thought of himself as a Jew as one of the earliest Popes was said to have been.

I might type out more of Richard McBrien's discussion of this in coming days.