From: Elizaphanian (Elizaphanian@members.v21.co.uk)
Date: Wed Oct 16 2002 - 22:49:13 BST
Hi to the Jesus freaks. :-)
This isn't exactly what Steve asked for, but I thought it might be useful,
and as I had it to hand...
(It's a very rough first draft of part of one of the chapters in my book. Of
course, any and all comments are welcome, but it's not written in MoQ-ese!)
Sam
www.elizaphanian.v-2-1.net/home.html
'God has four people recount the life of his incarnate Son, in each case
differently and with inconsistencies. Is this not just in order that the
literal word is not taken too seriously, and that the spirit may be given
its due? In other words a mediocre account is to be preferred.'
Wittgenstein, 193#
In the last chapter we looked primarily at the Old Testament, and I picked
out some themes to try and give a flavour of the understanding of God
presented within those books. I also briefly touched on the effects of
Biblical criticism, which have demonstrated, for example, that the book of
Genesis has been composed from a number of different sources. What I would
like to do in this chapter is look in more depth at the New Testament, to
try and explore what we can know about Jesus. Just as with the Old
Testament, of course, we need to remember that we are not dealing with
straightforward texts which yield straightforward anwers. We still need to
struggle with the material, if we are to give the spirit its due.
The New Testament is made up of 27 books, including four gospels and the
Book of Acts, these last five making up half of the total length. Of the
remaining books, twenty one are 'epistles' - basically letters written from
one person to another, or to a group of people, and the last is the Book of
Revelation, which is a form of apocalyptic literature. The gospels are the
most important parts of the New Testament, so I shall be concentrating on
them here, but I will be referring to the others as I go on, when they are
useful to bring out a particular point (particularly Paul's letters).
The first thing to note about the gospels is that they are all written in
Greek. This has important implications - Jesus spoke in Aramaic, so (with a
few exceptions) we do not have any direct record of Jesus' actual words,
everything has gone through one translation already. Furthermore, the use of
Greek indicates the Hellenistic context within which the gospels were
composed, making it probable that the authors were educated people living in
or around one of the Greek cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Secondly,
the gospels exhibit a common structure (which is why they can be called
gospels in the first place): they all describe various events in Jesus'
life, particularly stories about healing, and include passages of Jesus'
teaching, often in parables; they all describe Jesus' subsequent trial and
crucifixion, and then conclude with an account of the resurrection;
importantly, they are all anonymous. Finally, they are each concerned to
show Jesus in a particular way, that, in the opening words of Mark's gospel,
'This is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God'. In
other words, they are primarily theological texts. To import modern
historical standards into our assessment of these texts is anachronistic -
they weren't designed to be compared to modern works of historical
scholarship. Which isn't to say that we cannot glean historically useful
information from them, only that if we assess them purely on one criteria
and find them wanting, we will miss their point entirely. So what sort of
things are the gospels?
It is now commonly accepted that the Gospel of Mark was the first gospel to
be composed. There are a number of reasons for this. To begin with, a
comparison of the text of Mark compared with the text of Matthew shows that
some 90% of the verses in Mark are repeated or echoed in Matthew; and
similarly much of the material in Mark is also in Luke. This observation
gives rise to what is known as the 'synoptic problem' - what is the
relationship between these gospels? (These three gospels are collectively
referred to as the 'synoptics', meaning that they look at things from the
same point of view. This leaves John to one side, because it is
significantly different, and I will talk about John later on). If we were
teachers in a school, and pupils handed in work showing this degree of
overlap then we would be confident that there had been some level of
collaboration between the different authors. In the same way, contemporary
scholars are convinced that there is some form of literary dependence
between these gospels, that one gospel writer copied material from another.
Which way did the dependency flow? The main arguments for saying that Mark
came before the other two synoptic gospels are these:
? Mark is the shortest gospel, and does not contain important material, eg
the birth narratives, the Sermon on the mount or descriptions of the
resurrected Jesus;
? Mark has much more of an 'eye-witness' feel, in the sense that there is
more concern with incidental detail, (eg Mark 2.2-4);
? if we imagine that one writer deliberately changed another's wording, then
it is more intelligible to think that Matthew changed Mark, in the interests
of improving the Greek or simplicity and clarity;
? an argument could be made for saying that Mark's gospel is less
theologically developed, although this argument is controversial; and
finally
? the order of events in Mark seems to be determinative for the other two,
and not the other way round. In other words, Mark's order of events is
always followed by either Matthew or Luke, and it is never the case that
Matthew and Luke agree on the ordering of an event against Mark.
This gives an indication of the way in which biblical scholarship tries to
establish a perspective on the gospels, by examining internal evidence from
the texts themselves, comparing it with external evidence (if any) and then
coming to a conclusion. The question then arises, how did the gospels come
to be written in the first place?
Firstly, and most obviously, the gospels were written after the events
described within the text itself. Mark's gospel is generally believed to
have been composed between AD65 and AD75, the first gospel to be written, ie
some forty years after Jesus' crucifixion. Secondly, the gospels were the
products of Christian communities, in other words those who viewed Jesus in
the light of the resurrection. Following the first Easter, stories and
beliefs about Jesus circulated amongst the remaining disciples, and we have
records of some of the most primitive statements of belief preserved within
some of the texts of the new testament itself (eg the Christ hymn from
Philippians). As a result of being the product of a Christian community, the
gospels contain much material that was used by the communities, either
liturgically in worship, or for teaching. The gospels therefore contain
material that has passed through a process of adaptation. This material, of
course, will already have been taken up within the oral tradition of a
particular community, and that process will, rather like the natural
processes of gossip (or chinese whispers), have had an effect upon the
material that we now have. To put this process into a crude framework, we
can say the following: the gospels as we now have them will show traces of
three stages of development. The first is material that could be traced back
to Jesus himself; the second is material that was preserved and cultivated
within the oral tradition; and the third is material that was added to the
text by the author of the gospel, the evangelist, himself.
It is quite possible that the author of Mark was inspired to write his
gospel by the deaths of those people who had been eye witnesses to the
events described, who, assuming that they were the contemporaries of Jesus,
would have been around 70 at this time. The traditional interpretation is
that Mark's gospel records the witness of Peter himself, but that is
unlikely to be true. In any case, the important thing to bear in mind is the
way in which the gospels indicate an interpretation of the life of Jesus - a
painting rather than a photograph. What we have in the four gospels are four
different portraits of the one person, Jesus. Can we know anything with
certainty about this man?
For a long time the Soviet encyclopaedias asserted that there was no
historical figure called Jesus, and that this person was an invention of the
first Christians themselves. No serious historian concurs with that view. To
begin with, there are some records of Jesus in non-Christian sources, the
most important of which are in the writings of the Roman historian Josephus,
a contemporary of Jesus, who refers to Jesus as a 'wise man', ie a
travelling preacher and teacher. However, the gospels themselves are the
primary sources of evidence about Jesus. The fact that they were constructed
for theological purposes does not invalidate their use as historical
documents - it merely means that scholars need to be careful to sift the
evidence available. A number of criteria can be employed to assess how
reliable information contained in the Gospels is, and can help to determine,
for example, at what stage of development certain elements of the gospels
were formed. The five main criteria are:
? multiple attestation - if something is predicated of Jesus which comes
from a number of different sources (eg in Mark and in Paul) then it is more
likely to be authentic;
? dissimilarity, or uniqueness - if something is predicated of Jesus which
is strikingly original in the context of first century Palestine, then it is
quite likely to have come from Jesus himself (this needs to be used with
caution; it assumes that Jesus was the originator of the teachings);
? coherence - if an aspect is either strikingly against the grain of the
narrative, or against the purposes of the evangelist, then it is more likely
to be authentic. Conversely, if it fits too easily with the purposes of the
writer, particularly if it 'demonstrates' a particular doctrine, or evidence
of a 'Post-Easter' faith, then we need to exercise caution;
? Aramaic style - if an aspect can be shown to derive either from Aramaic
language or customs then it is more likely to be authentic; finally
? Enemy claims - if an aspect is included as part of a criticism of Jesus
voiced by people hostile to him, and that material corresponds to other
elements, then it is more likely to be authentic.
Of course, these may seem very vague criteria, and it could well be that it
is impossible to discern much within the gospels that goes back to Jesus
himself. However, I do not think that we need to be quite so despondent.
There is actually quite a large body of information that we can assert about
who Jesus was, and feel quite confident that, even if particular aspects
might be questioned in degree, as a whole the picture is coherent and
justified. What is this information? I would suggest the following as a
summary of what can be known with some confidence:
? There was a man named Jesus of Nazareth who lived in Palestine c 30 AD
? He was an itinerant preacher
? Who began his ministry as a disciple of John the Baptist
? He did not preach a new doctrine of God, but rather
? He preached a 'renewal' of Israel which involved a return to faith
? The principal image of this teaching was 'The Kingdom of God'
? That faith was primarily concerned with merciful justice and forgiveness
? To which end he mixed freely with people excluded from society
? He was a charismatic healer and exorcist
? He enjoyed a particularly intense relationship with God
? He did not claim to be the 'Son of God' in an exclusive sense, but rather
? His self-designation was 'Son of Man', which means 'human one'
? He came into conflict with the Jewish and Roman authorities
? He was crucified under Pontius Pilate
These are things that can be known with some degree of certainty....
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 10:37:58 GMT