Signs of Life. Rick Fabian
sources for positive history, not only from limits to their own knowledge, but also from their evangelical intention to tell their contemporaries what they believe matters most. Then as now, each interpreter chooses colors for a portrait, and every portrait—from painters calling themselves “scripturally conservative” to the most hypothetical—must be viewed and appraised for the modern artifact it is.
It seems each new publication about Jesus’s time throws fresh darkness on the subject. Said gospel critic H. Benedict Green, CR: the more we learn, the more we must admit Jesus is a man we know very little about.4
Trained historians keep clear sight of how little we know. The Jesus Seminar in the United States has usefully publicized historical criticism of the gospels. Yet I recall a presentation where one member proclaimed, “I think I know who the historical Jesus was; I just don’t like him very much.” That critic was touted as radical, but he was merely out of date. No trained modern historian would claim both to know and dislike Napoleon, let alone a figure two thousand years dead who left only second-hand evidence behind. Many thousands loved Napoleon, and many thousands hated him; but whether you and Napoleon would have liked each other is unavailable information, pure conjecture. The historical Jesus is no different.
Even more challenging, the past is a country none today can visit. True modern history-writing began when the Dutch art historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) studied the fifteenth-century brothers Van Eyck, and the more he researched them, the farther away their world seemed, and stranger. Huizinga’s revolutionary opening deserves quoting fully:
To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us. The contrast between suffering and joy, between adversity and happiness, appeared more striking. All experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life. Every event, every action, was still embodied in expressive and solemn forms, which raised them to the dignity of a ritual. For it was not merely the great facts of birth, marriage and death which, by the sacredness of the sacrament, were raised to the rank of mysteries; incidents of less importance, like a journey, a task, a visit, were equally attended by a thousand formalities: benedictions, ceremonies, formulae.
Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace. Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of winter were more real evils. Honours and riches were relished with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery. We, at the present day, can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed.5
That kills “positive history.” If even sensory experience cannot build us a bridge into past peoples’ lives, a historian must work with what they choose to tell us and past peoples have no thought of talking with us—what can they know of the future? Instead, they talk of their own past. Human thought and behavior change slower than journalists propose, and our continuities typically outweigh our revolutions. So, first of all, a modern historian searches for what ancient peoples say connects them with their own past.
The past is far away from all writers, so all must give reasons for their choices. No proponent claims that the second-century Apologist Justin Martyr or his successors favored the Open Table. Evidence abounds that churches since the age of Apologists have required Baptism before Communion, at least normatively. Nevertheless we claim a stronger continuity with the ancients: our common loyalty to Jesus as our age knows him, and to theology based on scripture study first of all. It was Origen, long before Luther, who established that Christian theology is commentary upon scripture.
Jesus’s Bible
Scripture looks ever backward. The gospel writers write much the way Chinese painters paint landscapes and Western composers write chorales: with allusions to treasured past words and works, which they mean their public to recognize. Gospel writers present Jesus’s sayings and his career in the light of his crucifixion, which was an unknown future for him, but well past for their readers; and they use the yet more distant written past to tell readers what Jesus meant. We must look to Hebrew scripture first of all, in order to understand what the gospels say Jesus is saying.
Today some critics argue that because his parables refer regularly to agrarian life, Jesus must have been a peasant, and so illiterate. Yet others point a few miles from Nazareth to the Galilean city of Sepphoris, a cosmopolitan center where a boy of peasant stock could readily have learned to read the Bible. Synagogues even in small towns like Nazareth and Capernaum were places for study before they became places for worship. Jewish historians tell us scripture was their first textbook, and schoolboys memorized long passages, much as boys do there in a Muslim medrassah today. We will see how internal gospel evidence supports Jesus’s awareness of sacred text. And more than one parable turns on a question of literacy.
For example, the cheating bailiff 6 can read: he helps illiterate peasants to forge new low-rent leases, and so to defraud their landlord, his former employer:
A rich man heard that his majordomo was spending beyond his salary, and told him: “Turn in your accounts, you’re fired.” The majordomo thought: “How will I live without a job? I’m too weak to be a farmer, and begging is shameful. But I do know how to make people welcome me into their homes.” He returned all the sharecroppers’ lease documents, allowing each peasant to sign a new substitute promising only half the rent. [The Master praised the unscrupulous man’s astuteness because his kind dealt more sharply with their own low type than the “enlightened” do.]
This parable, perhaps drawn from local events, was ethically disturbing enough to call for an editorial gloss at its end but the original can hardly be a story told by an illiterate for illiterates to hear. Peasant folktales exalt canny locals who outwit the educated by their native wiles; they do not hold up educated models like the bailiff, whom illiterate peasants cannot imitate.
Jesus’s parables often draw on well-known events or bear multiple interpretations; nevertheless his relation to scripture is one area where we may hope to catch his own beliefs. That enterprise answers more than historical curiosity. The New Testament assigns Jesus unique authority; and the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon likewise ruled that Jesus was not inspired like biblical authors—he spoke with God’s own voice. Thus in Paul’s case we may modify or discard talk about slavery, about women in church, about other matters, but overwriting Jesus is out of the question for his church.
The twentieth century opened with agreement among Bible scholars and liturgy reformers, that Jesus preached God’s future reign would come soon, so his hearers must prepare to handle it. The New Testament uses the metaphor parousia in Greek, or adventus in Latin: this was a regular administrative event, when a provincial governor came auditing tax returns, rewarding loyal officers, punishing treason, hearing appeals, and firming up public order. Here was a ready image for the Hebrew tsedaqah, which throughout the Bible means, “God undoes our enemies and puts things right.” First-century Palestine abounded with groups preparing for God to come like a touring governor, finish off the corrupt world order they knew, and put things right with the Jewish nation properly back on top. So twentieth-century liturgists reformed our worship to restore this rediscovered eschatological emphasis on the future, assuming they were matching Jesus’s teaching.
By 1975, however, Hans Küng’s On Being a Christian warned: modern Christians must come to terms with the fact that Jesus was wrong about the parousia. The world did not end as Jesus had prophesied. On the contrary, Roman imperial power thrived for fourteen centuries more, and embraced Jesus as its new official god. Here was the profoundest challenge scientific research has ever made to Christian orthodoxy, far more threatening than evolution! How could Christians hold faith in an incarnate Lord whose “messianic consciousness” was not only bizarre, but mistaken? What further authority could we give him, seeing his favorite obsession disproved? Assigning authority to an all-knowing Risen Christ (once the mistaken Jesus is gone) would contradict the gospels wholesale. They were written expressly to tell us Who It Is That Is Here Now: so abandoning the historical Jesus would mean abandoning scripture, too.
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