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.

Inventing the mythical Jesus

Let’s say we want to reform a religion in a new direction. We look for a founder who we can claim fits the kind of profile everyone is expecting. This leader, this messiah, is most likely to be a successful warrior, a general who wins battles of God’s own side. We can’t find one, so we invent a purely imaginary figure instead. Then we explain how he was a total disaster, unable to raise an army, deserted by his followers, and executed by the enemy.

Now, having invented this Jesus guy out of whole cloth, let’s make him related to someone who’s quite well known and respected in our day. Let’s identify this man known to be a faithful and observant Jew as the brother of our messiah. Of course he won’t complain that we’re using his invented messiah brother to justify not observing the law. Even better, let’s tell stories about how this Jesus was at odds with his family while he was alive, but they’ve all come round to be his supporters now. They’ll never dare contradict that.

OK, next let’s root all our stories about him in the recent past, when there are plenty of other people around now who were still around then. People have such poor memories, they’ll all believe they met him anyway.

And of course, we all want to be trusted as the keepers of the flame, this new and super-truthful religion. Let’s portray ourselves as useless, imbecilic cowards who never ever got the point. 15 years ago he was a great teacher who couldn’t even teach his longest standing pupils to understand him. 15 years ago he trained us in his leadership skills so well that we ran away and he got killed. What, you were there and you don’t remember him? What a poor memory you’ve got. Oh you admit it! Good, I thought for a minute you were going to call me a liar.

If we portray ourselves as unlettered fishermen, and pretend to speak with thick Galilean accents, then no-one will guess that we’ve done loads of research on ancient myths of dying and rising gods, and decided to borrow the best bits for our invented superhero. That way we can get ourselves out of the hole we’ve dug by creating a failed messiah as our leader, a defeated warrior as our hero and an executed criminal as our moral exemplar.

Then let’s all die horribly without letting the cat out of the bag. I know that’s a pretty drastic way to persuade people we haven’t made it all up, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

That’s what I call a cunning plan. And I bet you no-one will spot that’s what we actually did for nearly 2,000 years. And then people will point and laugh and sneer at them and call them mythicists, ‘cos we are just so historically plausible.

Oh yes.

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.

On not abolishing the Law or the prophets?

Sometimes the familiarity of a biblical text can obscure its oddities. I’ve been pondering (in a bit of sidetrack from thinking about Matthew’s infancy narrative) the oddity of Matthew 5:17 (and following).

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil.

There are a swirl of historical and interpretative questions around this, which have probably also helped obscure the oddity. Does the “I have come” saying point, as some critics think, to a later ecclesial invention or editing? (I’m not persuaded that that holds as a general argument). Does the following “Amen, I tell you” point to authenticity? Again, I don’t think its presence is an infallible guarantee of historicity, even if it is virtually certain Jesus characteristically began certain teachings with it.

One of the problems is that the Sermon on the Mount is such a thoroughgoing piece of Matthean literary construction (and this paragraph of it ends with a characteristically Matthean reference to “scribes and Pharisees”) that all these sayings are ripped from any narrative contexts which might help us understand and evaluate them. (This was always why form criticism was an essentially ahistorical waste of any questers time!) It is quite possible to invent plausible historical contexts for this saying in either controversies arising in the ministry of Jesus or the arguments of the early church about Torah observance.

The thing I’m puzzling about today, however, is not one of these bigger questions, it is about the language of “the law or the prophets”. I can understand someone abolishing or annulling laws, but really don’t know quite what that would mean in relation to prophecies, and I can understand someone fulfilling the prophets, but not really the idea of fulfilling laws. Each verb only correlates well with one of the nouns, but only metaphorically or by extension with the other.

Matthew, of course, in common with (as far as I can see) the rest of the early church also treats Torah as christological prophecy, and yet here Torah as commandment seems to be mainly in view. So I’m still a bit puzzled.

Of course, there’s a contemporary analogy. Christians are often heard discussing the authority of scripture. I know what an authoritative law is: one that must be obeyed. However, I’m a bit more hazy what an authoritative narrative is (something foundational?), and even more confused what an authoritative poem is (something that gets under the skin?). How do you obey a poem?

It seems (despite that slightly odd “or” where we might expect an “and”, the phrase “the Law or the prophets” is already a generic way of referring to the books taken to be Scriptures, and that Matthew’s (and possibly Jesus’) language reflects the way in that designation as Holy Scripture begins to override the normal linguistic precision we might have expected from the different types of book under discussion.