Bible Books

010

Jesus and the Scholars

Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium

Robert W. Funk
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996) ix + 342 pp., $24 (hardcover)

Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus

Gerald O’Collins
(Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) ix + 333 pp., $16.95 (paperback)

Jesus and the Victory of God

N.T. Wright
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) xii + 741 pp., $65 (hardcover), $39 (paperback)

Jesus is a mirror. Authors who seek to portray the first-century Galilean teacher typically reveal their own thoughts, experiences and inclinations instead. The questions they ask and the answers they allow color their portraits of Jesus as much as their research and interpretation of texts.

Three new books are cases in point. Robert Funk’s Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium strips away the beliefs of the past and integrates a newly excavated Jesus into the dominant secular society of the West. Gerald O’Collins’s Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus traces the theological Jesus Christ with minimum alteration to the tradition. N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, the second of five volumes, creates a Jesus who is both historical and useful for theology. Together, these three mark out the field on which the modern battles over Jesus have been fought.

Funk’s broadside against old time religion, fundamentalism, theology and the traditional churches invokes a “real” Jesus who has escaped from the “creedal and experiential dungeons” where he was “entombed at the bottom of [a] three tiered defense” that claims that the canonical Gospels exclusively portray the real Jesus, that the Gospels are complete and reliable historical records and that traditional Christian understandings of Jesus may not be questioned because they rely on the Gospels. In response, Funk calls for a renewed quest for Jesus and for a new reformation that overcomes what he sees as the deceptions of the Christian tradition.

Funk, who directs an institute dedicated to promoting religious literacy and who convened the Jesus Seminar to counteract conservative Protestant fundamentalism, condemns the churches as failures in the modern world. He seeks to provide a secular account of Jesus that can stand on its own in the court of world opinion, without theological sediment and special pleading. He argues the liberal case against the conservatives: Christian traditions that do not make sense outside the church soon will not matter within it, either.

The price Funk pays for his new Jesus is steep and familiar. In the recent work of the Jesus Seminar and in century-old German liberal Protestant theology, Jesus ceased to be an eschatological prophet and the son of God. He was crucified but did not free people from their sins; his body remained in a common grave and he will not come again in the end. According to this version, when freed from the pretentious claims of the gospel authors and the restrictions of the institutional churches, Jesus the secular sage will provide society’s spirituality and inspire human wisdom and moral living.

Funk speaks to his American audience freshly, directly and unambiguously, using his own biography and the history of scholarship on Jesus to challenge widely held assumptions and beliefs. True to his 19th-century Romantic roots, he 012emphasizes the original, creative and radical over the traditional and authoritative. Funk laments the loss of a primitive sense of the immediacy of the kingdom of God and of the human appeal of Jesus as “a robust, real, larger-than-life figure in his own right,” in contrast to the “pale, anemic, iconic Jesus” held in place by “long affective roots.” His goal is clear, but his arguments assume his conclusion. Funk’s immature American yen to go back to the beginning and begin afresh will not stand against the acceleration of the contemporary world. Funk complains that the church capitulated to Greco-Roman culture and became an insider, but he has capitulated to the post-Enlightenment culture into which he seeks to bring Jesus.

The theological tradition, so dismissed by Funk, guides Gerald O’Collins’s concise survey of Christian thought about Jesus the Christ. Unlike the textbook theology (and catechisms) of the post-Reformation and modern periods, he gives constant attention to the humanity of the Christ and to the historical contexts and limitations of Christian thought about God, Jesus, humanity and salvation. O’Collins’s traditional theology stresses communal views of Christ that were worked out over many generations, in contrast to Funk’s rejection of the tradition as it has emerged in conservative American Christianity. O’Collins defends Jesus as the Son of God and second person of the Trinity as persistently as Funk insists that Jesus must be demoted to the status of a humble Galilean sage.

Unlike Funk, O’Collins, an Australian who teaches in Rome’s Gregorian University, gathers up modern themes, concerns and insights into a classic synthesis tuned to modern ears. The topics may be familiar and unexciting (resurrection, Son of God, Trinity, councils, divinity and humanity, virginal conception, redeemer, etc.), but the explanations are clear and attuned as much as possible to modern thought and sensibility.

All is not well with O’Collins’s survey of the Christological tradition, however. Where Funk grapples with questions and doubts that have confused and tormented the modern soul, O’Collins serenely assumes in his readers a sympathetic acceptance of God, Christ and the Christian tradition. Like a good apologist, O’Collins makes the most of what he has, but does not address the fundamental uncertainties that beset Christians and serious students of religion. He implicitly rejects a secular view as firmly as Funk explicitly accepts it, and he defends traditional thought as doggedly as Funk attacks it. In the end, each is true to his starting point but convinces only the converted.

N.T. Wright, former tutor at Oxford and now Dean of Lichfield Cathedral [and a columnist for BR—Ed.], seeks in good British fashion to bridge the gap between history and theology. Many historians judge that little can be known about Jesus because the Gospels reflect the interests, views and interpretations of their mid- and late-first century writers more than they do the views of Jesus. Wright rejects such a skeptical, minimalist view in favor of broader historical questions and hypotheses that try to make sense out of the facts and render history useful to theology.

Wright uses the extraordinarily abundant and fruitful results of recent scholarship on Second Temple Jewish life and thought to explain comprehensively how Jesus fit into Jewish society, what his aims were, why he was executed, how the early church developed from Jesus’ life and 013teaching, and why the Gospels were written as they were. Though many New Testament scholars limit themselves to what each gospel says about Jesus, Wright confidently constructs a large-scale narrative that seeks to account for all relevant data, answer all cogent questions and fit them into a coherent whole. This enormous project already totals 1,200 pages in its first two volumes (volume one is The New Testament and the People of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992]).

Wright is more optimistic than most that he can recover a history of Jesus from the Gospels. Wending his way through a century of research, Wright finds a Jesus who is an eschatological prophet expecting God to restore Israel (the kingdom of God) and overthrow the present world order. Jesus promotes a radical revolution in Jewish life in opposition to the Temple authorities, but rejects violent revolution against them and Rome.^a Wright conceives of his project as a “penitent history,” which may be the “long and dusty road back to reality, to confrontation, and perhaps to reconciliation” among the disputed views of Jesus. He calls his own work, and that of many sympathetic scholars, a “third quest for the historical Jesus,” (as opposed to the original, 19th-century, quest and the new, post-World War II quest, which includes Robert Funk). Though Wright’s questions and judgments speak to historical problems, his clarity of purpose and comforting synthesis owe more to theological interests and presuppositions than he admits. He asks many of the same questions as O’Collins, but answers them with more detailed and adequate (and lengthy) analyses of the texts in their first-century world. His historical Jesus will attract many seeking a positive, unified, coherent vision of Christianity and Christology, but not those immersed in secular society.

Where do these authors and the many others who have written about the historical Jesus in the last 20 years leave us? Comforting words that obscure the intellectual and emotional questions and crises facing Christianity will not appease modern and post-modern anxieties. Jesus is not simple and we demand complex answers. To this extent Robert Funk is correct, but he defers entirely to contemporary presuppositions of what is rational and credible and to the anti-religious biases of the modern period with the vague hope that his newly liberated Jesus will somehow shake up society. His thorough acquiescence to American culture may lessen intellectual tension, but it will generate no reform.

N.T. Wright’s exhaustive analysis of the first century does Jesus more justice than many portrayals, but it provides little more certitude about the big questions he wishes to answer. Historians ask questions, choose data, judge their reliability and fit them together under the influence of their cultural contexts and personal experiences. What Wright wants—a hisorically solid Jesus—history probably cannot give. Despite all his criticism of others, Wright has conceded too much of the theological task to history. Comprehensive theories of humanity, society and thought demand more engagement with the theoretical methods of philosophy, and in this case theology, than Wright concedes. Theology, not history, will finally solve the theological and intellectual crises in Christianity that he so cogently describes.

So perhaps Gerald O’Collins’s reappropriation of the classical Christology will save the day. His synthesis of ancient and modern themes is written in a slightly more contemporary idiom than many of 014its predecessors, but he grapples too gently with the problems of theological language and argument so as not to rock the boat. The lack of a conclusion to his survey symbolizes sharply that the task of theological inquiry into Jesus remains seriously incomplete. Despite the intelligent efforts of Funk, O’Collins and Wright, the rift between the biblical-classical tradition and the modern world remains to be bridged.

Oral and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature.

Susan Niditch
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996) 169 pp., $19

How did the stories, poems, laws and other writings of ancient Israel end up in the Hebrew Bible of today? The material may have been passed on first by word of mouth and then in short written documents, which later—in a golden age of authors and writing—were put together into larger documents that we now call the J, E, P and D strands. Finally, everything was gradually put together into final form. At least, this is the way most scholars think it happened.

Susan Niditch offers a different picture. She argues that in traditional cultures, like ancient Israel, literacy was not like it is today. Books did not exist, only shorter pieces of writing on various materials. Later, scrolls were produced, but these were relatively few and not easily accessible. The oral and the written were not two separate and successive stages but always existed together in interplay within a continuum. The balance between the two shifted, of course. At first, people relied more on the oral and less on the written. Later, writing was used more and more. Still, Niditch claims, the culture as a whole remained traditional, that is, with a worldview attuned to an oral mentality. So, to appreciate Israelite culture and literature, we need to understand the interaction between orality and literacy.

Oral style, or as Niditch calls it, “oral register,” is highly conventional, with lots of recurring elements, like repeated phrases in poetry or plot patterns in stories. Particular stories and poems, as well as their style, were known to all, and so, as the poets and tellers of tales performed, they were always repeating language that sounded familiar and had rich associations with the other traditional material that everyone knew.

By discussing a range of biblical passages, Niditch tries to show that her view of the interplay and shifting balance of the oral and written fits with what we know from the Bible and the ancient Near East. At the oral end of the continuum she would place the prophets, by definition speakers to an audience (perhaps using written notes, perhaps not) whose sayings were only set down fully in writing later on. At the literary end of the spectrum would be the author of Chronicles, an author who composed in writing and even copied from other writings, such as parts of Samuel and Kings.

Niditch tries out a reconstruction of the process. She identifies four features: dictations of oral performances, recorded versions of oral works that had crystallized into a fixed form, written imitations of oral style, and written compositions. All this is only an educated guess, as Niditch knows.

This picture of the interplay between the oral and written rings true, although there is plenty of room for discussion. The book is especially useful because it offers serious, original scholarship in a style accessible to general readers.

Jesus and the Scholars

Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium