Bible Books

010

A Thoroughly Modern Historical Jesus

The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning

Stephen J. Patterson
(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), 304 pp., $20 (paperback)

Many a person’s pious picture of Jesus has been shaken by the dozens of recent books on the historical Jesus.

But how does what we are discovering about the Jesus of the first century affect what Jesus means today? Stephen Patterson—who was deeply involved in the Jesus Seminar’s much-ballyhooed deliberations on the actual sayings and doings of Jesus^a—insists that the time has come to flesh out the implications of this research for contemporary Christianity.

At times, Patterson succeeds in this admirable goal. Over all, however, he devotes far less of his study to theological reflection on the historical Jesus than to summarizing and synthesizing the work of the Jesus Seminar and its leading figures, Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg and Burton Mack. Thus The God of Jesus comes across as much more historical than theological and much more derivative than original. Nevertheless, one can sympathize. The two issues—what Jesus meant in the first century and what Jesus means today—are integrally related, and it is not always easy to determine where one leaves off and the other begins. Plus, we have far more evidence of the seminar’s activities than of Jesus’ own.

Not surprisingly, Patterson, largely following the work of Crossan, defines Jesus as in opposition to the oppressive structures of the Roman colonial system of his time. Over and against the Roman Empire, with its system of brokered power and economic exploitation, its multitudes of expendable persons living on the very margins of life, and its brutal violence against subjugated peoples, Jesus advocated an “Empire of God” (as Patterson translates the more common expression “kingdom of God”). The Empire of God as proposed by Jesus is a place that offers life freely to all, brings marginal peoples back into the human community and neutralizes all factors of status (class, family) and exclusion (dirt, shame, sin).

To communicate his radical message about the Empire of God, Jesus used countercultural wisdom and parables. Drawing on the work of Borg, Crossan and Funk, Patterson attempts to demonstrate how Jesus designed his aphorisms and proverbs to reverse common values and to call into question conventional assumptions about how people should order their lives. The parables were carefully crafted to draw listeners into an encounter with another world, the Empire of God, and thereby shatter their own worlds.

Following Borg, Patterson adamantly denies that Jesus was in any sense apocalyptic, though he might have been eschatological in an individual existential sense (“In the preaching of Jesus the Empire of God is neither future nor assuredly present; it exists as a potential to be actualized in the decision to live out of its audaciously presumed reality”).

So what we end up with is a present-oriented, countercultural, social activist Jesus who artfully and persuasively couches his teachings in metaphorical language about God.

Patterson’s discourse may be persuasive “in house,” but those outside of the Jesus Seminar are unlikely to be swayed 011by his arguments. Repeated references to recent scholarly consensus on Jesus as nonapocalyptic, for example, sound imposing on the surface, but a little digging shows that such polls were taken largely among Jesus Seminar participants and thus do not necessarily represent the broad range of New Testament scholarship. And facile reliance on the seminar’s infamous votes (in which red, pink, gray and black beads were used to indicate the likelihood that a saying attributed to Jesus was authentic) does little to inspire confidence. In the end we must ask why the Jesus of Borg, Crossan, Funk and Patterson looks so much like Borg, Crossan, Funk and Patterson.

The responsible critic will make a serious attempt to identify his or her own values and agenda and to inquire honestly as to how they affect the task at hand. Only when the so-called renewed quest for the historical Jesus begins to take this responsibility seriously will it mature and contribute to a wider audience.

Patterson’s most strident and consistent theological argument is that Christian theology must undergo a shift. A previous generation of theologians focused on the early church’s proclamation (kerygma) of Jesus as crucified and risen Lord. But Patterson does not stress the christology of the early church, but rather the theology of Jesus, that is, his radical new conception of the Empire of God. According to his outlook, the incarnation and resurrection are not really the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, but rather the incarnation and resurrection of the life and work of Jesus in the hearts of his followers. “In Jesus’ words and deeds many people experienced the Empire of God as present. That is how people could later speak of Jesus as a divine epiphany,” Patterson writes. Jesus’ followers were so convinced that he was right about God that when he was killed, they felt compelled to proclaim that God had raised him from the dead and thereby vindicated him. Only later were appearance and empty tomb stories appended (more or less misleadingly) to this primal resurrection proclamation.

In Patterson’s view, the cross, too, moves from the center of Christian theology. The execution of Jesus by crucifixion was not a sacrifice to save humans from sin but a tragedy, another testimonial to the power of the oppressive Roman system that Jesus sought to counter. The cross’s main significance for us now is largely negative, according to Patterson; it is certainly not an appropriate locus for theological reflection. Though Patterson devotes an entire chapter to Jesus’ death, he, with Crossan, does so only as a warning against Christian anti-Semitism. For Patterson, theologies that proclaim Jesus crucified and risen have things backwards, or better, they mistakenly focus on secondary Christological constructs (some of which are highly questionable) and thus overlook what should be primary: Jesus’ theological conception of God’s empire.

In proposing this radical rereading of Jesus, Patterson fails to take on the most outspoken foes of the Jesus Seminar, especially Luke T. Johnson.^b With the German scholar Martin Kähler, who wrote more than a century ago, Johnson affirms the Gospels as a proclamation of Jesus’ words, work and effect on humanity, rather than a hypothetical reconstructed historical Jesus. Patterson perceives this threat to his approach, but he fails to mount an effective refutation of Kähler, Johnson and kerygmatic theology in general.

More importantly, Patterson’s work raises a whole host of significant issues that he fails to address: What role, if any, do the Scriptures have beyond serving as a repository of historical data? Must one be a trained historian to hear the true message, or is the church’s basic proclamation sufficient for Christian faith? How did people appropriate the Jesus 012tradition before the rise of critical historical study? To his credit, Patterson has recognized the limitations of history, but a solution to the problems he identifies awaits another book.

Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation

by Bernard Levinson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 205 pp., $63.95 (hardback)

It has long been recognized that the revelation of the Law at Mt. Sinai is not a unified account. Most strikingly, it is recounted twice in the Bible—from Exodus 19 through Numbers 10 and in Moses’ retelling in the Book of Deuteronomy. At least four blocks of legal material are evident in it: the Ten Commandments, the Covenant Code (given immediately after the Ten Commandments, in Exodus 20:22–23:33), the Priestly laws (the cultic revelations concentrated in Leviticus and Numbers) and the laws recorded in Deuteronomy 12–26.

For some time, scholars have recognized that the Covenant Code predates Deuteronomy, but it has not been clear how Deuteronomy used this earlier legal source. On certain issues, the two are in complete disagreement. In the Covenant Code, for example, one may sacrifice anywhere the Lord causes his name to dwell, and thus at multiple local sanctuaries such as Bethel, Dan and Arad (see Exodus 20:21), while in Deuteronomy worship is only allowed in the place YHWH has chosen to set his name, that is, Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 12:13–14).

In this well-argued book, Levinson shows that Deuteronomy knew the laws of the Covenant Code and constructed its system of legal innovation in conversation with them. Though it would be improper to think of the Covenant Code as scripture in the eyes of Deuteronomy, there is no doubt that the code possessed some level of authority. And for Deuteronomy to propound different laws it had to address the concerns of the Covenant Code. Levinson’s book is a series of close readings of the ways that Deuteronomy reinterprets the laws and concepts of the Covenant Code.

Deuteronomy 12:13–14, for example, gives an exposition of Deuteronomy’s thesis that sacrifice is prohibited at local altars. The law could have been stated quite simply: “Offer your sacrifices at the place that YHWH will choose.” Yet such a simple statement was eschewed for a more elaborate formulation. The law begins with a warning: “Take heed not to offer your burnt offerings in every place that you see, but only in the place that YHWH will choose in one of your tribal territories.” This warning is quite odd, for it does not address the historical fact that Israel worshiped at several local sanctuaries, but instead presumes a propensity for cultic promiscuity: an Israel that would sacrifice anywhere she pleases. Why this odd diction? Close inspection of the altar law in the Covenant Code reveals the reason. In Exodus 20:24 we read: “In every place that I proclaim my name I shall 046come to you and bless you.” The initial clause of the Covenant Code is broken into two clauses in Deuteronomy: “[not] in every place that you see, but only in the place that YHWH will choose.” Levinson shows that Deuteronomy appropriated Exodus 20:24 and then “deftly reworked it” to commend sacrifice at one altar.

The book provides several other examples, including how Deuteronomy shifted Passover from a domestic observance to a pilgrimage festival centered on the Temple in Jerusalem and how it replaced a tribal judicial system based on local shrines and tribal elders with a centralized judiciary in Jerusalem. In each case, the literary formulation of Deuteronomistic law is only explicable on the grounds of a preceding law in the Covenant Code.

Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation suggests how textual authority was viewed by Deuteronomy and how the biblical writers composed new laws while continuing to show deference to the past. Levinson sheds important new light on the authors who created Deuteronomy and on the evolution of biblical exegesis during the biblical period.

A Thoroughly Modern Historical Jesus

The God of Jesus: The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning