Bond and Jesus

Not James, but Helen. Introductions to biblical and theological topics are ten a penny, but good introductory books are much harder to find. I’ll be commending Helen Bond’s The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed both to my students and to interested others as a really good introduction.

Bond covers the ground in an orderly and effective way, beginning with an helpful sketch of how Jesus studies developed, and an outline of the available sources for study. Like most historians, she concludes that the synoptic gospels provide the main sources for any reconstruction.

In the second part of the book she develops what she calls snapshots of Jesus, although each chapter actually offers a reflection on a different aspect of reconstructing the historical Jesus in broadly chronological order, after first having set out a summary of the historical context. She looks at birth narratives (which she finds to be largely theological creations), then at the current state of knowledge of the Galilean context, before beginning her reconstruction proper with John the Baptist.

She goes on to explore in successive chapters the message of Jesus, the healings and exorcisms, the friends and then the enemies of Jesus. An interlude chapter looks at the place and significance of Jerusalem before concluding chapters on the cross and finally the resurrection.

Throughout this journey, she shows herself a thoughtful and informative guide, always insisting on returning to the sources and the most probable facts that a contemporary historian can read out of them. She is sceptical of scholars who either indulge in too doctrinaire a methodology (such as an over-investment on criteria) or who try to select facts to fit a sociological model (eg peasant unrest). Crossan’s reconstruction is the one most often in her cross-hairs, and rightly so. 

She acknowledges the problem of clashing world views in trying to ascertain exactly what healings, exorcisms and powerful deeds Jesus carries out, although is clear that the historian needs to say Jesus was widely believed to be an effective and extraordinarily powerful wonderworker. As she notes, some people will draw the line in different places between the actual deeds Jesus did and the way in which they were magnified in the telling. I would, however, have liked to see more stress for the reader new to these questions on the nature of “miracle” as a post-Enlightenment category alien to the texts.

Unusually for a book on the historical Jesus, she finishes with the resurrection, insisting (I would say quite rightly) that the belief of the early Christians, that is the effects of whatever happened to Jesus after the crucifixion in vision, conviction or actuality need to be treated as historical phenomena in their own right. Without fully stating her own answer to that question, she points out how exceptional the category of resurrection applied to one man in the middle of history actually is.

Inevitably, there are quibbles. No two people’s reconstructions of the historical Jesus are the same. For example, I think the continuing career of the Baptist in the early part of Jesus ministry is one of the few instances when the historian should prefer John to the synoptics. Conversely, when the fourth gospel portrays a split between Jesus and his brothers, I am more inclined to see a later division between the Johannine and Jerusalem churches than a split between Jesus and his blood family. I have a larger disagreement about the Pharisees, but she ably represents a medium position between many conflicting views which is certainly plausible.

There are also two typos I noted which are unfortunate in a beginner’s text. The US  critic who gave far too much credence to the criterion of double dissimilarity was Norman Perrin, not the more recent and contemporary Nicholas. (p17). And Herod the Great’s dates as king are not 37-34 BCE, but 37-4 BCE. (p59).

However, quibbles and typos aside, I have to say this is a very readable and very reliable guide which will indeed help the perplexed and the beginner alike arrive at a fairly sure starting point for further exploration. It is as good a grounding in a controversial subject as I have come across, delivered in a remarkably succinct and lucid package.

When speeches were more than sound-bites

Today is Cicero’s birthday. My picture of Marcus Tullius Cicero is nowadays hopelessly coloured by the cynical (and I think quite accurate) portrait of the man in Steven Saylor’s excellent Roma sub rosa series, featuring Gordianus the Finder. 

Cicero was, I think, as dedicated to climbing the greasy pole as any modern politician, and at least as good at putting his own spin on his own achievements as any modern media manager. (One the great attractions of the Gordianus series is the way Saylor applies a hermeneutic of suspicion to Cicero’s speeches, which is nowhere showcased better than in his deconstruction of the Cataline conspiracy.)

However, where Cicero puts all modern politicians to shame is in his rhetoric. Yes, he uses it to manipulate the audience and massage the facts into compliance, but he does so magnificently, marrying form to function, pleasingness to persuasion and  elegance to evidence in making in case.

He was certainly capable of the sound-bite – “O tempera, O mores” probably wars with “Cui bono?” for the most quoted – but he located these in reasoned, impassioned and fluent discourses that appealed at their best to the heart through the mind and the mind through the heart.

Is it too much to suggest that our modern political discourse lacks something in comparison?

The multiple embarrassments of Jesus research

Over at the Jesus Blog, Anthony Le Donne (author of a very accessible introductory book on historical Jesus research) is posting some excerpts of an interview with Mark Goodacre. In the second part, Mark says of the traditional criteria for determining authenticity (which are steadily falling out of scholarly favour):

[Sanders] used what he called various "tests" as a means of cross-examining the source material, and it is an excellent way to train new students. … When I teach the "criteria", I introduce them and then illustrate them, discuss them, and point out the problems. I think it’s a great way of learning historical method.

Now I think that’s about right. Each criterion is, if you like, a crystallisation of a particular historical method. The point is to be sensitive to the historian’s methodology and not to have a sure-fire recipe for a chimerical historical objectivity. The methodological concept is what matters.

However, in the first part Mark takes aim at a particular combination of criteria:

I am baffled by the fact that scholars can argue simultaneously that a given tradition is both "embarrassing" and "multiply attested". This appears self-contradictory and frankly ludicrous to me and it suggests that something is wrong somewhere.

We might quibble over the word embarrassing, but I think that this points to a very interesting combination, and I suggest it does have some value, which can be illustrated from the traditions concerning John the Baptist.

Mark’s narrative of Jesus’ baptism, which I think all the other gospel writers know, is brief, and his references to the Baptist’s disciples concerning John’s burial are almost told in passing. Matthew presents John hesitating about the appropriateness of baptising Jesus, Luke minimises the event by preceding it with a note of John’s imprisonment, noting the baptism briefly, and transferring the vision of the Spirit to Jesus’ active post-baptismal praying, John glides over the event entirely. John also (as does Luke in Acts) shows some evidence of the continuing existence of disciples of John who have failed to become disciples of Jesus as a practical and theological problem for the early church.

What I suggest those traditions show is that the gospel writers all feel that there is a core tradition too important to omit, and that the three later evangelists all demonstrate different (and probably independent) responses to the difficulty it causes them.

Essentially, I suggest, that is how “multiple attestation” and “embarrassment” might work together, by showing a multiplicity of un-coordinated responses to a piece of tradition which suggests it is a) important to them and b) causes them theological or narratological problems.