WHEN I BECAME aware of Luke Timothy Johnson's famous critique of the historical-critical method of studying Scriptures I had an unfavorable idea of him. That may have been because his work was used by conservatives to knock the work of someone I was still very impressed with, John Dominic Crossan. Then I read the book, The Real Jesus and I saw that he was a far deeper, far more honest scholar and thinker than Crossan or his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar. As I mentioned, I had already become somewhat more disinclined to trust their work than I had been on first looking into it because I saw some discrepancies on my own, such as Crossan's entirely unevidenced, radically after-the-fact claims about what happened to the body of Jesus after his death. He violated his own claimed standards of judging the reliability of the Scriptures, which had been written far closer to both the witness of the life and ministry of Jesus and his death or within the lifetime of those who had, and by those who had a cultural affinity more like that of Jesus than any late 20th century academic could possibly reproduce in their imagined reconstructions of that.
It's not that I think all of what the historical-critical oriented scholars have produced is bad or worthless, much of the background evidence that someone like Crossan constructs an imagination of life in the milieu in which Jesus lived is informative and, in some ways, convincing. But a lot of even that seems to forget that most of the evidence they produce came from a very atypical population of the human beings living then, people who could read and, especially, write. To say they tended to be outside of the class that Jesus was born into and grew up in would be to say very little about it. Anything much that we find out from the class of the writing class of that time would be an outsider view of things. For someone like Crossan to reconstruct a "typical" Jewish peasant from Galilee from the material he has available is likely to produce someone very unlike any particular such Jewish peasant, not to mention one whose life and person generated the greatest world-wide religious tradition that has lasted for about two thousand years at this point. Whatever else can be said about Jesus, he was not "typical" of any type you could try to shoehorn him into. You could point out that the canonical Gospels are written by those who aren't likely members of the class Jesus and his earliest followers were in, which is fair to point out. But they weren't writing a history or a modern biography, they were writing about a single person. They weren't trying to make him seem plausible due to him being "typical" of the type, they were talking about someone experienced as and taken as extraordinary. If they weren't writing a modern biography or a complete history, they were certainly not engaged in the modern pseudo-sciences of anthropology or sociology.
But this is about the matter of cognition and, as I said, what I think is the inescapable conclusion that any being which is capable of cognition must be considered to be conscious. No one has yet taken up my request to explain how the two can be separated. It happens that when an objection was made to what I said, I remembered something that Luke Johnson said in regard to that and how much it angers opponents when you bring that topic into what they'd like to keep it out of. Even when it is an inescapable, even vitally important issue under discussion.
Epistemology - the critical analysis of cognition - can become in irritant when it demands attention. This is because human knowing seems to work best when the subject is something other than itself. Aesthetic knowledge is better at discerning the beautiful in great art than it is in defining the nature of beauty and how the mind grasps it. In the same way, historical knowing works best when it is puttering around with evidence from the past, but becomes progressively fuzzier when asked about the nature of historical knowledge. Fair enough. Excessive epistemology becomes cognitive cannibalism. But a little bit of it is important as a hedge against easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties in any branch of knowledge.
Which is wiser than just about anything I've ever read or heard related to that topic than anything I ever heard from a "cognitive scientist" or a "neuroscientist," or from just about anyone in the sciences apart from James Shapiro or Arthur Stanley Eddington or a few others I could name. In many instances, perhaps, discussing matters of cognition or consciousness might be put off even for a very long time, but if you're going to pretend to be doing science, as physicists discovered in the early 20th century, you're going to have to address it eventually, if your goal is that level of confidence in what you're discussing. The seeming efficiency of ignoring it is, ultimately, illusory. I will add, just to annoy those who will be annoyed by it, that the science that has most carefully and habitually accounted for such matters is the scientific study of parapsychology, the one rigorous scientific endeavor which has been the subject of a full and concerted effort by those in and outside of science to end any scientific study of it, denying the extremely close following of the rules of science, the rigorous efforts to address their critics methodological criticisms - still coming up with results that are more robustly positive than that found in much other conventional science - and following the most careful and rigorous of quantitative measurements of their findings.
And that's far from the only nugget of perceptive brilliance you get from a close and careful reading of LTJ's work. He goes on to say after that paragraph:
The best practitioners of critical historiography, therefore, are careful to make clear the character of their craft as a limited mode of knowledge, dependent on the frailties of the records of memory and the proclivities of self interest. No serious historian, for example, would claim to render the "real" event or person, whether the event was Pearl Harbor or the person of Douglas MacArthur. The "real" event in all its complex particularity happened only once and cannot be recovered by any means. The serious historian recognizes that a "History of the Attack on Pearl Harbor" is a reconstruction by the historian out of the available pieces.
The "historical Jesus" is a figment of the imaginations of those who a. don't get that the available record which is most likely to give them something to go on is not something you can make an honest history out of. Never mind a biography. That record is the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul, James (who may well have been the brother of the man, himself) the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, the other Epistles, and some few references in the ambient Jewish and pagan literature. It doesn't present a biography or something like a magazine article about someone living now or in the past who left enormous amounts of primary evidence. Even in that case, as Johnson points out, there is nothing like a reproduction of the life of the person or events contained in the best history of the most recent subjects. In the case of Jesus, or, indeed, anyone for whom that is the only record, no such historical-critical treatment can honestly be constructed, so the motives and assumptions and intentions of those doing it become ever more important in making our own critical judgements of their claims.
And the results they come up with are a Jesus too bland and too safe to account for his execution or why anyone should have remembered him at all. I think I remember coming to that conclusion reading what Crossan claimed his ministry was, "open commensality" and an "unbrokered kingdom" that doesn't seem to have been much of a "kingdom" at all, considering Crossan doesn't seem to think God had much to do with any of it. I think Walter Brueggemann was right that those who practice the "historical-critical" method end up with a Jesus which is much like themselves and much to their liking as late 20th century members of secular "enlightenment" addled academia instead of anything that is helpful to anyone. In the end it was seeing nothing that would support any practical means of feeding the hungry, clothing and housing those without, visiting the sick and the prisoner in any of it. It was a Jesus that was only a little better than the one that the worst of late 18th and early 19th century "enlightenment" Christianity came up with. It wasn't even up to the later 19th century standards of the evangelical Social Gospel movement or Christian Socialists did. There would be no reason for anyone to have bothered to keep up the memory of the Jesus of historical-critical invention or, for that matter, much. though not all, of what arose in the wake of the age of scientism, the enlightenment.
The temptation is to keep quoting from Johnson's book because it's all so good and I'd like you all to read it and consider it and to compare it to not only the claims of the members of the Jesus Seminar, from the top quality such as Crossan's work to the quickly arrived at bottom, such as that of Karen King (the one who fell for the forged "Jesus's wife" "scripture" a few years back) or the "fellow" the media huckster Paul Verhoeven, But remembering the claims that get passed of as vastly oversold "historiography" or the incredibly inadequate thinking about cognition and consciousness that gets regularly passed off as science, these days. His observation stands against "easy assumptions and the arrogant certainties of any branch of knowledge".
I have said that I am impressed with the intellectual rigor of modern theology and the kind of scholarship that someone like Luke Timothy Johnson practices than I am in the regular quality of academic and even much of scientific scribblage, these days. Even someone who wrote on a popular level, such as the late Richard McBrien did, is far more impressive in that way than most of the secular academicians and far more than those who prevent a conventional secular-popular level of it. I am not nearly as impressed with those who trade in the historical-critical racket. I wonder if Luke Timothy Johnson was ever on the Terri Gross show which is where I first heard of John Dominic Crossan, I somehow expect not.
I should come out and say, right off, that I'm ever more skeptical about the hypothetical "Q", or that if there was a "Q" it was probably not an independent Gospel but a common source of testimony, probably oral. I certainly don't believe in the entirely unevidenced "Q" community of the early Jesus movement that some other members of that Seminar have made their bread and butter in inventing as a foil for the "establishment" responsible for the canonical Gospels. There's entirely less to base such creations on than there is the Jesus of faith or even the "Jesus" of the historical-critical method. If there's something I really loathe, it's the invention of such stuff as "communities" on the basis of no actual evidence of their existence, at all. But such stuff can get you a PhD these days. I am also entirely unconvinced that the "Secret Gospel of Mark" ever existed, I think it's likely either an ancient rumor or an early modern hoax based on what is purportedly an 18th century copy of an earlier manuscript which doesn't seem to have survived or ever been noticed by anyone else. In modern translation it fits into about two paragraphs. But not a little of the "historical Jesus" stuff cites it as if it's more credible than the Gospel of John for which a closely verbatim fragment survives as the so-far earliest manuscript of a Gospel.
I'd written down a quote from an Anglican Priest of the 1940s who said that it was a wonder and mystery why anyone would have gone to the bother of crucifying the Jesus Christ of liberal Protestantism, though I've lost the slip of paper I made the note in. It's a good question. It's an even better question of why anyone would have remembered the Jesus of modern reconstruction through the historical-critical process. I certainly can't believe in the Gospel of such a Jesus.
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