Did Paul know the Gethsemane story?

It’s widely agreed that Paul very rarely quotes directly from the Jesus tradition, but this almost certainly leads to underestimating how much of it he knew. Here I want to suggest that Romans 8 provides some reason to think he knew something like the Gethsemane story narrated as part of Mark’s passion narrative.

Since Jeremias, at least, it has become commonplace to assert that Jesus regularly addressed God as “Abba”. There are problems with both claims for uniqueness (we know too little) and intimacy (it does not mean “Daddy”) associated with that word, especially in its more popular forms. However, it is clearly the case that the Jesus tradition as we have it remembers that word specifically as the anguished prayer of Gethsemane, and nowhere else.

In Gethsemane according to Mark (14:32-42), Jesus is shown praying in anguish and distress, and the “Abba” prayer is specifically related to seeking obedience. Something similar seems to underpin the theology articulated by the writer to the Hebrews:

In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him (Heb 5:7-9)

in Romans 8, we find a similar range of themes being brought together.

• For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption (14)
• When we cry, “Abba! Father!”  it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, (15-16)
• If, in fact, we suffer with Christ so that we may also be glorified with him. (17)
• the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. (26)

The themes of suffering with Christ, groaning wordless prayer, calling God “Abba”, and being obedient as a son to God, are all interwoven. It seems to me that points towards the possibility that Paul is drawing on the same Jesus tradition Mark narrates and which is also developed by the writer to the Hebrews

If so that would also, of course, suggest a widespread inclusion of the Gethsemane story in primitive Christian passion narratives.

The resurrection and the writing of history

It’s quite common for the virginal conception and the resurrection to get lumped together. Well, they’re miracles, innit. And they nicely bookend the gospel narrative, to boot.

When it comes to discussing them as history, however, it seems to me they are significantly different. I acknowledge there are some who would simply say that discussing both of them as history is equally impossible. I beg to differ, at least in part, when it comes to the resurrection.

The modern understanding of history is one of tracing a narrative of cause and effect. There are variations within that, as to how much is attributed to mass social and economic movements, and even ineluctable geographical and environmental currents, and how much to the decisions and actions of individuals. It is a problem with the latter that many of those decisions and actions are hard to analyse, and the motivations and reasoning underlying them even more so. This has tended to push historians in the direction of undervaluing the individual. Not long ago it was decidedly fashionable to dismiss all concentration on individuals with a sniff as “great man” history. That helps emphasise how much the historical narration of cause and effect is about movements, society, class, economy: they are larger and more measurable than individual people, decisions and actions.

When it comes to the events surrounding the life and death of Jesus, even before any discussion of the resurrection, the concentration on an individual person and a specific event itself sits at odds with leading historiographical trends, without introducing what people have come to call the supernatural. (I see “supernatural” as a philosophical category which is, to say the least, open to theological critique, even if it is often a useful shorthand.)

But back to the resurrection and history. I see one clear difference between stories of the resurrection of Jesus and his virginal conception. I can think of no historical effect which is / would be different for a virginally conceived as opposed to a conventionally conceived Jesus. Mark, who seems not to know of such a conception, portrays a no less miraculous Jesus than Luke, who does. Indeed, it seems that Christian belief in sexual restraint and renunciation in the early centuries leads to greater emphasis on the virginity of Mary, rather than vice versa. By contrast, early Christian history is full of the effects of belief in the resurrection. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that belief in the resurrection is the proximate cause of early Christian history.

The resurrection (as conventionally narrated and believed within orthodoxy) in that sense, stands at an awkward half-way point between historicity and non-historicity. It has no historical cause, but generates historical effects. It comes from outside history, and erupts in history.

It is therefore – as an event and not simply as a belief – investigable at least in part by historians. It is possible to write, for example, a secular and secularising narrative which seeks to give an explanation for the belief early Christians proclaimed, that Jesus was risen. Plenty of people have tried it. It is also possible to write a narrative of Easter with an empty tomb. I can think of four early ones straightaway, but there are also contemporary critical narratives that include and empty tomb while sifting the evidence more sceptically than the evangelists and less sceptically than the secularists.

There are two main responses to these narratives, both sacred and secular. One is to say that any narrative which includes an empty tomb simply isn’t history as modern historiography understands it. It lacks academic rigour and methodological gravitas. End of. The other is to say that the historiographical value of the competing narratives is to be found in their ability to explain the existence and the shape of the earliest churches and the beliefs of their adherents. The better narrative will contain and explain the greatest amount of data most satisfactorily.

Of course, this latter preference presupposes faith seeking understanding at least as much as the former presupposes a closed cosmos. Nonetheless I can imagine (and some people would say they have found it to be so) situations in which a person starting with methodological atheism finds the theistic narrative has greater global explanatory power, and someone starting with a theistic narrative who finds the sociological narrative so persuasive it draws them towards atheism.

In that sense, the resurrection remains in part, at least, open to historiographical exploration in a way the virginal conception isn’t.

Book Note: Craig Evans’ Jesus and his World

I’ve been reading Craig Evans’ Jesus and his World: the archaeological evidence. I shall confess up front that I wanted to like this more than I did.

On the positive side, this provides a very useful treatment of a good range of archaeological evidence touching on the world of Second Temple Judaism within which Jesus moved, and out of which the gospel tradition was shaped. Evans clearly knows the evidence, material and literary, and is able to summarise and correlate it informatively within a concise and accessible format. If he states something as a fact, you can be sure it is well sourced.

Chapters of the book cover Sepphoris (my photo shows an old Roman road there with cart tracks visible) and the religious milieu of Galilee; evidence for early synagogues; literacy in the first century; the priestly establishment and Temple practice; and finally burial traditions (along with a look at some of the controversial ossuaries). All these are useful subjects, and it’s good to have a compendium of the material relating to all of them between the covers of such a concise introduction,

I find myself, however, with more reservations than I expected. In stating facts, for example, he relays the consensus that literacy rates were “somewhere between 5 and 10 percent (and that most of the literate were male) with perhaps somewhat higher rates among the Jewish people.” He goes on to say “I do not dispute this conclusion.” (p66) However, he embeds this statement in a maximising discussion of the evidence for literacy which leaves the reader with a clear impression that really he thinks this is a terribly conservative estimate, even if he cannot prove it, especially as regards Jesus and his closest followers. He may be right to argue that case, but should be more overt about what he is doing. His argument is weakened by failing to emphasise any distinction between reading literacy and writing literacy.

Going back a step, I note the introduction dwells on how the strongest forms of OT minimalism were refuted by mention of the house of David in the Tel Dan inscription, and how the Qumran Scrolls demonstrated Jewish antecedents for using “Son of God” messianically against those who had claimed it a Greek concept. By selecting some cases where archaeology has successfully challenged dogmatic theories, and not those where it questions biblical narrative (Jericho, anyone?) it tends to set the book up as belonging to an “archaeology confirms the Bible” genre. That is not actually fair to all of what Evans writes later, nor to the complexity of the material.

The book does, further, maintain something of an apologetic feel. The chapter on the Jewishness of Galilee, for example, against earlier ideas of “Galilee of he Gentiles” presents a clear summary of the evidence, well marshalled to demonstrate the case. However, Evans spends far too much time deploying his case in refutation of Crossan’s preference for a Cynic peasant Jesus, implausible to any scholar who has never paid their dues to the Jesus Seminar. I suggest the case for Galilean Torah observance (at least on some key issues of diet and ritual washing) revealed by the archaeological evidence would be much better used to ask questions about Jesus’ own Torah observance.

Despite those reservations or cautions, I shall still be placing this on introductory reading lists. Evans is a good communicator who knows his subject, and I know of nothing else which summarise so much useful information so accessibly. I wish, however, he had been less concerned with apologetic questions, and more willing to open up something of the complexity of bringing the material and literary evidence into a creative relationship.