The Search for (the wrong) Jesus

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The first half of this decade has been a busy one for questers after the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar capped a decade of self-promotion with the publication of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.¹ Highly publicized forays into the search for Jesus were undertaken by amateurs like Bishop John Spong,² A.N. Wilson³ and Stephen Mitchell,⁴ as well as by such professional biblical scholars as Marcus Borg,⁵ Barbara Thiering,⁶ Burton Mack⁷ and John Dominic Crossan.⁸ In addition to the press coverage of the Jesus Seminar’s regional camp-meetings and articles in major newspapers reviewing and assessing this “New Quest,” the effort has been sufficiently noisy to attract attention in such unlikely quarters as the Atlantic Monthly,⁹ the Humanist,¹⁰ GQ¹¹ and Lingua Franca.¹² And far removed from the promotion mills, John Meier of Catholic University in Washington, D.C., has continued to toil away at the most monumental historical Jesus project of all.¹³

It is safe to say, I think, that all this commotion has created a general impression that the quest is important—although not because, as the Jesus Seminar publicity would have it, scholars will lose their jobs under pressure from reactionary Christians, and certainly not because these questers have come to such firm and unassailable conclusions that the guild of New Testament scholars should close up shop because nothing remains to be done. The opposite is the case—their portraits are wildly varied. In the crisp summary of T.W. Manson, “By their lives of Jesus ye shall know them.”¹⁴ Jesus appears in their pages as Qumran’s wicked priest (Barbara Thiering), as a guru of oceanic peace (Stephen Mitchell), as a charismatic (Marcus Borg) and as a peasant Cynic (John Dominic Crossan).

The real significance of these highly public exhibits is that they have shown the wider world just how shaky some of the premises, and how 022shoddy some of the procedures, are in a great deal of biblical scholarship, both past and present. When I speak of shoddy practices, I have in mind more than the media manipulation of the Jesus Seminar, or the seminar’s periodic pronouncements about who Jesus “really was” before even a portion of the traditions dealing with him have been dealt with (until now the seminar has considered only Jesus’ sayings, not his acts), or its failure in The Five Gospels even to apply its own criteria of authenticity consistently. I refer instead to the lack of true critical scholarship running—in varying degrees, to be sure—through all these publications.

With so many images of Jesus being produced, one would expect some embarrassment over a supposedly scientific method that yields such wildly divergent results, or some debate over what constitutes a legitimately derived image, or a demonstration of why one image should be preferred to another. In fact, practically nothing along these lines occurs. There is much assertion, little argument. Marcus Borg cites a poll he took among like-minded colleagues as his most substantial reason for seeking a “non-eschatological” Jesus.¹⁵

Working through this literature, I have not been able to make up my mind whether its colloquial and casual discourse is a function of sloppiness or of cynicism. I find what appears to be a deliberate sliding back and forth between two understandings of history. On the one hand, the authors claim to be doing “critical scholarship,” without presupposition or bias, with the neutral assessment of sources, with the goal of simply discovering who Jesus “really was.” On the other hand, they assume that this “historical Jesus” should somehow be normative and that, in the light of their “scholarly” deductions, Christianity needs to check its creed as well as its canon. Once more, the Jesus Seminar is an egregious example, claiming out of one side of its mouth that it is practicing the most sober and critical research, yet from the other side of its mouth (both sides represented mostly by Robert Funk, 023chief spokesperson) claiming at the very outset of the project that it intends to use the assured results of scholarship to save Christianity from its evangelical captors.¹⁶

Apart from the usual and noteworthy exception of John Meier, one cannot find in any of these productions a critical reflection on the meaning of history itself, no consideration of its goals, methods or, above all, its limitations.¹⁷ Such conceptual carelessness enables these books to offer the “real Jesus” without ever engaging the truly difficult questions of the methods of historical knowing. Nowhere do these practitioners pause to consider that “history” is not to be equated with “reality” or that in fact “history,” while important, is also a limited mode of human cognition, with a great deal of what all humans consider both “real” and “important” slipping through its rough sieve. To a remarkable extent, one finds in these tracts the same positivistic understanding of history that characterizes the fundamentalism they oppose. The authors fail to inform their readers that to state that the resurrection is not “historical”—that is, it may not be demonstrable from historical sources—is not the same thing as to state that it is not “real.” I am not altogether certain that the distinction has occurred to the authors themselves.

Beyond such shoddy practices, however, there is also the matter of shaky premises. Here we find that these Jesus books bring to the surface some dubious assumptions that have for too long been allowed to pass uncriticized within the scholars’ guild. Perhaps a reason some scholars have been loath to criticize these productions—rather than simply hoping they might go away—is that they employ methods and moves widely used in the field but take them one step further, into obvious absurdity. It is time for the guild not only to reject the reductio, but also to recognize the absurdum, to which it has allowed free play for too long.

The popular publications claim to represent serious scholarship. Serious scholarship can rightly object to being tarred by the brush of self-promotion, meretriciousness, sloppiness and cynicism. The tone of the introduction to The Five Gospels, for example, combines messianism and hucksterism in equal measure, with the delusions of grandeur emitting a definitely paranoid aura. But is the scholarly guild prepared to face up to the fact that these Jesus books also reveal ways of doing business that are at best shaky and at worst plain silly?

Three such practices surface in virtually all these books, leaving one to wonder whether anything like recognizable historical research is going on.

The first is the way the hermeneutics of suspicion is applied to virtually everything in the New Testament and to virtually nothing outside it. The canonical Gospels, one is led to think, are the least likely source of knowledge about Jesus. If they are to be used, they must be purified of later accretions or distortions brought from a faith perspective. They must be read in the light of apocryphal writings, or some earlier source excavated from within them, or some social-scientific model. Indeed, the only sources that cannot be referred to are the other writings of the New Testament!

Thus, despite the fact that Paul’s letters are the earliest datable sources for anything about Christianity (c. 50–64 A.D.), and despite the fact that Paul’s letters attest to a number of separate points in the Jesus story as found in the canonical Gospels, and despite the even more striking point that Paul’s interpretation of the Jesus story as one of radical obedience to God and self-donation to humans is precisely the same as that found in all four canonical Gospels and only in them among all Jesus traditions, the evidence from Paul is not considered historically relevant.

What’s going on here? Why shouldn’t the earliest narrative sources and the even earlier testimony of Paul receive credit as historical evidence? The reasons are more ideological than historiographical. One is a commitment to a conflict model of earliest Christianity that goes back to the Tübingen School (mid-19th century) but was given powerful new life over 30 years ago under the influence of Walter Bauer.¹⁸ This model has elevated the legitimate perception of a diverse early Christianity into the dogma that it was a disparate movement of deeply opposed forces. In recent scholarship, furthermore, it seems as though none of these diverse Christian movements knew anything about any of the others. So Burton Mack (The Lost Gospel) can posit the 40-year development of a “Q community” in Galilee completely untainted by any influence from either the Jerusalem church or the Pauline churches.

This flies in the face of the evidence of both Acts and Paul’s letters, which, while candid about the tensions in the early movement, nevertheless show a remarkable level of communication and cooperation between leaders, including Paul. To avoid this problem, the current model must throw out most of Acts and expurgate much of Paul. But without the controls provided by these ignored sources, reconstructions quickly (as in the case of Mack) fly off into fantasy.

Paul in particular must be excluded from this recent Jesus research for another reason: In contrast 025to the Protestant theology that for years dominated biblical scholarship, in which Paul was the good guy who championed the principle of righteousness by faith, various liberation ideologies now dominate research. In these, Paul appears as the first and greatest enemy. In contrast to the itinerant Cynic peasant Jesus (imagined by John Dominic Crossan), Paul is the urban householder. In contrast to the woman-defined Jesus and the wisdom-driven Jesus movement (imagined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza), Paul is the proto-patriarch. In contrast to the gay magician Jesus (imagined by Morton Smith¹⁹), Paul is the hateful homophobe. In other words, to have an ideologically correct Jesus, we must exclude the complexity of an ideologically deviant Paul. But this, I need scarcely point out, is not critical history. It is the uncritical canonization of an ideological assumption.

A second tendency found not only in these Jesus books, but in New Testament scholarship as a whole, is, once these relatively stable controls have been excluded, an amazing confidence concerning the way pieces can be rearranged. The new questers claim to be able to determine, by means of various “criteria,” whether sayings attributed to Jesus are “authentic.” They also claim the ability not only to detect within extant, unified, literary compositions a variety of earlier sources, but also to discern to the minutest detail various levels of redaction within such sources. Next they assume that behind every composition is a community and that one can move from the literary configuration of a text to the historical, social and ideological configuration of a specific community.

Armed with such assumptions, the Jesus Seminar can assert with unjustified confidence that Jesus could not have spoken certain parables or have made certain declarations. But for a long time, on the basis of just such circular and subjective criteria, determinations have also been made concerning which letters were “really” from Paul or which undesirable parts of his letters must have also been interpolations. In a similar fashion, the Jesus researchers can trumpet the isolation of the so-called Q Gospel (the material shared by Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark) as a discrete written source that can be subdivided into levels of redaction. But so have scholars for decades diced up the Pauline letters 2 Corinthians and Philippians into separate sources to be shuffled into different stages. Burton Mack can use the levels of redaction in Q to describe the history of a putative Jesus community in Galilee. Why not? The dissected pieces of Philippians were used by Willi Marxsen to “reconstruct” the history of conflict in Philippi.²⁰ Similarly, the severed sources of 2 Corinthians have been used to “trace the history” of Paul’s relations with that church,²¹ and the various stages of redaction in the Johannine corpus have been used to discourse confidently on the history of the Johannine community.²² So the new questers follow in this well-trodden path. None of this, however, is real history, but rather an elaborate paper chase. It is the result of an obsessive need to do history with sources inadequate to supply what is sought from them, leading to a distortion of historical method, chimerical historical reconstructions and the destruction of the only genuine witnesses for earliest Christianity we have, the discrete literary compositions of the New Testament.

The final tendency of the recent Jesus research—especially visible in Borg and Crossan—is the embrace of so-called social-scientific models. To paint his portrait of Jesus, Marcus Borg appeals to the sociological type of the charismatic chasid, which Geza Vermes posited on the basis of Honi the Circle Maker and Chanina ben Dosa from rabbinic literature.²³ John Dominic Crossan, on the other hand, appeals to the category of the peasant.²⁴ Having tossed out the narrative controls found only in the Gospels and the writings of Paul, models like these are obviously needed; no matter how many “pieces” of the Jesus tradition are determined to be “authentic,” they cannot by themselves ever yield a profile of Jesus. No pile of pieces can ever reach meaning, for meaning can come only from pattern.

The same tendency we have observed in this Jesus research has also become prevalent in the study of earliest Christianity, where again there are too few pieces even to make a decent pattern, especially after the only narrative framework available, that of Acts, is thrown out as tendentious. To meet this void, some sort of “scientific” model—anthropological or sociological—has been invoked to provide a pattern into which the pieces can be fitted. The need to do history demands that the pieces fit into some universally intelligible law of conflict or development. The result is that the unique is collapsed into the universal, the particular disappears into the general. Nothing new and surprising is encountered—only an instance of a universal law.

In the case of Jesus, the tendency allows this most distinctive and individual of humans only the range of possibilities available to a sociological 044abstraction. Jesus must think like a peasant, speak like a peasant, do what a peasant would do. Forget messianic consciousness or sense of unique sonship. He can’t even be literate! The employment of such models enables the pieces to be put into a new combination, in place of the pattern provided by Paul and the Gospels. Is it a more “historical” pattern? Only if one thinks that “brandy-imbibing, cigar-smoking, British imperialist” adequately captures the significance of Winston Churchill.

Something other than disinterested historical research motivates these recent Jesus books. Present in all of them is a clear reformist goal, based on the conviction that traditional Christian belief is a distortion of the “real” Jesus. Already with Paul, they hold, the Jesus movement was corrupted into the Christian religion. For Crossan and Mack, the distortion of Jesus’ goals precedes the creed and is found in the narrative form of the canonical Gospels themselves. These scholars want a new understanding of Jesus and Christian origins to have an impact on the cultural phenomenon called Christianity by removing what Mack calls “the privilege of the Christian myth.”²⁵

This implicit—and sometimes explicit—theological agenda operates on two assumptions that have been around since the birth of the historical critical method. The first is that historical knowledge is normative for faith: If historical research comes up with a “different Jesus,” then Christianity will have to change its ways.²⁶ The second is the assumption that a religion’s origins define its religious essence, so that the first understanding of Jesus was better than any development of that understanding. But these are not properly historical observations. They are, rather, ideological commitments.

The production of such poor historiography and such confused theology in the same package suggests that these authors (like so many others in the biblical guild) are caught within some deep and unresolved conflicts concerning the proper or legitimate functions of critical biblical scholarship, and concerning the usefulness of an overarching historical model as the dominant paradigm for biblical studies.²⁷ After all, how much history can we really do with these ancient fragments? In their hands, what is called “history” is really a camouflaged form of cultural critique of contemporary religious observance.

The frenzied dismantling of the narratives of the New Testament, the scavenging of “usable pieces” from the wreckage, the pasting of such pieces into a new pattern derived from anthropology or some other social science—this effort increasingly appears to be an attempt to avoid or replace the unmistakable image of Jesus limned in the pages of the New Testament. The writings of Paul (and 1 Peter and Hebrews) and the canonical Gospels converge in presenting an image of Jesus that is instantly graspable and has been unfailingly grasped by those whose lives have been transformed in its pattern.

This image, constructed by the narratives of the New Testament (including the narrative fragments of non-gospel compositions) and found only in these compositions as such (not in their pieces), is emphatically not the developed, dogmatic Christ of church doctrine (true God and true man), nor is it the historical Jesus reconstructed from bits and pieces (true Cynic and true peasant). It is, rather, the etching of a certain human character, a model of the disposition of human freedom in obedience to God and in service to others, an identity so distinctive that it is readily grasped even in literary mimesis, like that of Dostoevksy’s Prince Myshkin (in The Idiot) or Melville’s Billy Budd.²⁸

If critics within Christianity, or critics of Christianity, would openly challenge that image, not on the basis of its historicity but on the basis of its religious or moral coherence and adequacy,²⁹ something far more critical and interesting would be done with the New Testament than we find in the tired rationalist reductions that try to make history do criticism’s work.

The first half of this decade has been a busy one for questers after the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar capped a decade of self-promotion with the publication of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.1 Highly publicized forays into the search for Jesus were undertaken by amateurs like Bishop John Spong,2 A.N. Wilson3 and Stephen Mitchell,4 as well as by such professional biblical scholars as Marcus Borg,5 Barbara Thiering,6 Burton Mack7 and John Dominic Crossan.8 In addition to the press coverage of the Jesus Seminar’s regional camp-meetings and articles in major newspapers reviewing and […]