COMMENTARY: The harmony Class at St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Houston is a rare collection of people from a variety of disciplines who come together on Sunday morning to discuss books or topics of mutual interest. Both my wife and I have been asked to "teach" the class on a number of occasions. "Teaching" the Harmony class means introducing some facts about a given subject and fielding questions or refereeing the ensuing discussion. As you can surmise from my opening statement below, I had been a bit too zealous in bringing the, to me, fascinating arguments and insights being published by various theologians to the class for an extended time. Except for the first paragraph, I used this same introduction when I sent the first book summaries out to some of my former students.
INTRODUCTION December 1997
Dear Harmony Class Friends,
I fear that ineptitude in trying to share with you my enthusiasm for recent developments in New Testament theology may have brought about a completely unintended avoidance response in some of you. If true, I must face the unhappy prospect of being guilty of your missing out on what may well be the most important evolution in Christian spiritual thinking in our lifetime. So I ask your help in exculpating me from this burden by suffering through this Christmas memo. We Harmonians have discoursed theology, psychology, ethics, politics, history, mysticism, parenting, and you-name-it. We have verbally wrestled with profound and trivial issues of living for a sum of hours together greater, in all probability, than the time spent in like pursuits with our families, our ministers or any other group. You have flattered me by identifying me as one of your teachers and, thus, I feel I owe you an apology for letting my fascination with Biblical analyses to cause any of you to turn away from exciting and important insights revealed in the last few years by the "new theologians".
Now that I’m not teaching 80+ hours a week, I’ve had more time to look over some of the books being published by the "Jesus Seminar" authors and one of these days I may even get around to arranging my notes into a "Layperson’s Guide to the New Christian Theology". But in the meantime, this is my first progress report and I’d like to share it with my most critical audience.
REPORT
Gospels Within Gospels
Let me remind you that even the earliest of the four Gospels in the NT canon was not written until more than 50 years after Jesus’ death and that there are no actual manuscripts, or even fragmentary parts, that date from earlier than 100 years later. Variations in the wording among the manuscripts that are physically available suggest that the gospels went through considerable alteration and editing as they were copied and passed along in the early church. One of the reasons for the many versions of the Bible put out by various publishers is the fact that different interpreters will select wordings and translations on whichever sets of all the possible variants are in keeping with their own priorities. The objective of the Jesus Seminar participants has been to identify words and ideas that are consistent with what they feel might have most likely come originally from Jesus. In this type of analysis, one of the most interesting developments, to me, has been the finding of "gospels within gospels".
QUELLE -- One instance of this has been the reconstructing of a source to which Matthew and Luke apparently both had access; but apparently no original copies have ever been found. The rationale for hypothesizing this source (called Q, the first letter of the German word "quelle" for "source") is simple enough -- although the writers of the two gospels are never known to have met or even been aware of each other’s existence, portions of text in the two gospels are identical, word for word. The most reasonable explanation for this similarity is that both had copies of the same resource document to work from; hence, "Q". By comparing Luke and Matthew and extracting what is very similar, a facsimile could be extracted of at least that part of the "Q Gospel" which both authors felt important enough to become a part of the good news they were writing about.
THE SIGNS -- The second instance of selective reconstruction involves the gospel of John. The author of John was evidently very well versed in literary Greek and wrote quite masterfully; there is a poetical quality to his prose that can be sensed even in translation. Yet in the text of John there are a number of abrupt and not very artistic transitions in narrative and style. Since these are most often associated with passages which concern the signs that identify Jesus with the long expected Jewish Messiah, scholars hypothesized that one of the sources that John may have had available to him was a document which listed these signs. If this document were one with which the audience for John’s gospel would have been familiar, there would have been no necessity for John to reword the text or to provide explanatory transitions. By extracting the material of John that was associated with these passages, a rough reconstruction of this "Signs Gospel" has been obtained.
POSSIBLE TRUTHS
So what? What do these parlor games with cryptic texts have to do with the Christian religion? In as much as the Christian religion is affected by the human being called Jesus, these new texts present us with new ways of looking at our formal religion and our personal beliefs.
What sort of a gospel does Q turn out to be? It is a "sayings" gospel. Apparently, it is a collection made earlier than (or at about the same time as) Paul’s ministry, of what purports to be a record of the words of Jesus. These sayings include much of the Sermon on the Mount, instructions to disciples, prayer, condemnation of the Pharisees and a number of aphorisms. In many ways Q reads like a New Testament version of Proverbs. But it is perhaps even more remarkable for what it doesn’t contain: no parables, hardly anything about Jesus himself, no birth story, no ministry, no passion narrative, no resurrection evidence and absolutely no basis for what the church proclaims as the most vital part of the gospel, the forgiveness of sins through the sacrifice of God’s Son. The conclusion forced upon us by this negative evidence is that, to at least some of the original followers, Jesus was not a savior but a teacher worthy of their devotion for what he said and how he lived, not because he was looked upon as the son of God.
The whole purpose of the Signs Gospel, which also dates roughly from the middle of the first century, is centered on listing proof texts to support the claim that Jesus was the Messiah. This Messiah was to be a human prophet/king who would lead Israel in the fulfillment of its historical destiny. The good news of the Signs Gospel was that the Messiah had come; Jesus of Nazareth had been the anointed one. Of course, after the temple was destroyed in 70 AD, most loyal Judeans would have felt that a true Messiah would somehow have prevented this from happening. It is a tribute to the genius of the author of John, writing several decades later, that he used these signs as evidence that God revealed Himself in Jesus.
LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES
So here we have at least two early groups of those who responded to Jesus of Nazareth without identifying him as more than human. The question raised by these responses is how and why did the son of man evolve into the Son of God? A feel for the timing involved here is important. Let me remind you of some dates (all CE, the politically correct form of AD): Jesus died ~30, Q gospel written down ~50, Gospel of Thomas (another sayings gospel) written ~50, Paul’s ministry and letters 50-60, the Signs
gospel written ~60, Mark ~70, Matthew ~80, Luke ~90, John ~95, Christianity becomes legal 313, Council of Nicea ~325, surviving copies of "Bibles" ~340.
We, just like the Bishops at the Council of Nicea, look back at the reports of events that occurred while Jesus lived from the perspective of belief systems that developed in the intervening years. The customs, creeds, liturgies and theological discussions which had grown up over three centuries influenced the fourth century church hierarchy in deciding what writings to include in the official canon for church use and in the components of the official creed which defined those who could claim to be true Christians. The Nicene Creed states the necessary and sufficient beliefs as: our one God has three natures -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Father made all things, the Spirit came from the Father and the Son and is the Lord and Giver of life and spoke through prophets, the only Son is Jesus who was begotten before the world was formed, was the same substance as the Father and came down from heaven for man’s salvation by being incarnated as man through the Virgin Mary, was crucified and buried but rose again and returned to heaven; the Son will come again in judgment. The creed also included a statement of beliefs in one church, in baptism for the remission of sins, in resurrection of the dead and in a life everlasting. Other than general assumptions that there was one God and that Jesus and other prophets spoke what they felt God had revealed to them, none of the articles of faith stated in the Nicene creed are found in the earliest gospels (indeed few of them are fully supported even in the canonical gospels). We are forced to conclude that belief in these tenets could not have been the basis for discipleship in Jesus’ lifetime.
FRAUD AND DELUSION?
How did all these notions about Jesus arise and why did they become essential to the early church? My reading of the modern theologians leads me to conclude that the "how" has more to do with Jesus’ death than his life; the "why" more with human psychology than with divine revelation. Because the facts brought to light by recent theological analyses seem to emphasize the humanness of the historical Jesus, I think the publicity that accompanies their publication often wrongly creates the impression that they imply modern Christians have been duped into worshipping a Christ who was invented by second and third century bishops rather than centering their devotion on the God of whom Jesus spoke. Certainly there are features of contemporary mainline and fundamentalist belief requirements that were vitally important for the survival of the early church but have lost their pertinence to the modern situation and these can be fairly criticized as outmoded. But there is a widespread, if not unanimous, recognition of the fact that the "Jesus Event" involved something that went beyond the sayings of a radical sage or even the expectations of an anointed leader; something that catalyzed the release of an enormous energy capable of transforming and redirecting a civilization.
One factor (the "how") that is closely associated with the Jesus Event has to do with experiences of his friends after his death. There seems to have arisen among the group of Jesus’ closest followers a conviction that Jesus was seen and heard for some time after his death on the cross, but then went away again. Three of the canonical gospel writers mention these appearances and they were interpreted early on as signs that Jesus had a special relationship with God and that the disciples would also be favored by God through a promised comforter who would be present with them.
The methods of science are inappropriate to determine whether these convictions were "real" in a physical sense, since subjective phenomena can’t be reproduced under controlled conditions, but their psychological reality is undeniable. The disciples acted on these assurances and subsequently convinced an ever-growing number of believers.
At this stage, the second factor (the "why") came into play. It is highly unlikely that we would ever have heard of this sage of Galilee if indeed he had only been thought of as a sage of Galilee. Probably a sizable component of the crowds he attracted to him came because of his reputation as a healer, perhaps merely out of curiosity, and this by itself wouldn’t have been enough to inspire worship. It was necessary for Jesus to have been thought of as someone unique and powerful, someone who had a special relationship with the source of all power, someone more than a Messiah, more than a king, more than an emperor. The identification of Jesus as a special manifestation of God himself was probably a necessary step which our human natures demanded two thousand years ago and which is apparently still generally necessary today from the evidence furnished by the healthy growth of the fundamentalist church membership in our time.
So these two factors: the conviction of the disciples that their rabbi, Jesus, had returned from the dead and the need for humans to believe in the extraordinary, were woven together with Jewish, Greek and other traditions to accomplish the perpetuation of Jesus consciousness. These developments led to the elaborate formulation of the articles for calling oneself a Christian acceptable to the early church and still required by many denominations today. However, today there are also many individuals who don’t require such proofs in order to believe and who, in fact, are repulsed by the logical consequences of belief in some of these articles. To these individuals, then, it is indeed welcome good news that there was, in the message of the historical Jesus, sufficient inspiration for establishing a relationship with God that doesn’t require the traditional articles of faith. It seems to me that this is one of the most important consequences of the evidence uncovered by contemporary biblical scholars, for it implies that our individual spiritual development depends more on our day by day moral decisions and less on our conformity to some predetermined liturgy.
In my recent readings on these and allied subjects, I can recommend for your perusal any of the following (which I’ll get around to summarizing one of these days):
The Lost Gospel Q; ed. M. Borg, 1996 -- the short introduction by Thomas Moore is especially well written.
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and The God We Never Knew; M. Borg, 1994 & 1997 -- a fresh look at our ideas about Jesus and God.
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography; J.D.Crossan, 1994 -- a picture of the historical Jesus derived from evidence supplied by the earliest reports and gospels.
Who Tampered with the Bible; P.Eddy, 1993 -- a government information analyst applies her methods to NT texts and concludes that Jesus’ important good news was that there is really no need for a church.
The Complete Gospels; ed. R.J.Miller, 1992 -- a collection of the texts of gospels which circulated in the early church including M,M,L&J, Q, Signs and 14 others.
The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins; B.L.Mack, 1993 -- an analysis of the construction of Q and its relationship to early Christian beliefs.