"Alethurgic" Discourses on Jesus. The Gospel-Narrations as "True Discourses" (original) (raw)
Related papers
What You See is What You Get: Context and Content in Current Research on the Historical Jesus
Theology Today, 1995
A century ago, scholarship on the historical Jesus had polarized around two distinct options. To the one side stood the ethical constructions of the liberal Protestants. Optimistic about the use of history in service of theology, endlessly producing studies of the life of Jesus to anchor their religious formulations, these scholars held that Jesus' basic message centered on preaching, in Harnack's famous formula, "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man." To the other side stood scholars less optimistic-indeed, pessimistic-about the Gospels' servicability as witnesses to Jesus. The erosion of scholarly confidence in the Gospels' historical adequacy can be plotted along a trajectory that passes from Lessing's publication of the Reimarus essays in the late eighteenth century to Weiss's book on Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God in the late nineteenth century. This trajectory terminated in the conclusion, summed up by Weiss and energetically extended by Schweitzer, that the kingdom Jesus preached was the kingdom anticipated by his firstcentury Jewish contemporaries: an apocalyptic event, centered on a new or renewed Jerusalem, inaugurated by the messiah, and established by God. Where are we, a hundred years later? Jesus the charismatic healer and existential religious thinker, Jesus the wandering cynic sage, Jesus the social revolutionary, Jesus the prophet of the impending end of days-all of these versions of Jesus populate the pages of the most recent books, all presented with the same calm authority, all constructed through appeals to the same data. If this is progress, we might wish for less of it.
Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 2016
The article argues that current debates over method in historical Jesus studies reveal two competing ‘models’ for how to use the gospel tradition in order to approach the historical Jesus. These models differ over their treatments of the narrative frameworks of the gospels and, concomitantly, their views of the development of the Jesus tradition. A first model, inspired by form criticism and still advocated today, attempts to attain a historical Jesus ‘behind’ the interpretations of early Christians. A second model, inspired by advances in historiography and memory theory, posits a historical Jesus who is ultimately unattainable, but can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did. Advocating the latter approach to the historical Jesus and responding to previous criticism, this article argues further that these two models are methodologically and epistemologically incompatible. It therefore challenges the suggestion that one can affirm the goals of the second model while maintaining the methods of the first model. Keywords
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 2005
This article provides a detailed description of the presuppositions and procedures of a representative group of six scholars currently contributing to the study of the ‘historical Jesus’. The intention of the study was to draft a ‘handbook’, a ‘recipe’, of the best methods and the surest presuppositions for achieving the result of a solid historical conclusion about Jesus. What resulted from the project was not what had been hoped. In fact, what resulted was a deep scepticism about the quest, at least as it is currently being conducted. Though, admittedly, not offering solutions, this article seeks to raise questions about the real potential and usefulness of any quest for the so-called ‘historical Jesus’.
The historicity of Jesus is considered an established fact by the majority of professional historians. However, the historical sources typically cited for Jesus’ historicity are not all of equal value. This article describes these sources and provides the scholarly judgment on each.
Toward a Documented Biography of Jesus
In our own time, many fine works have endeavored to extricate the “historical” Jesus from the Gospelic context of church image and message. The results have been mostly snippets of insight stitched together to accomplish a patchwork portrait that is always impressionistic, and usually colored by the bias of its author. Recent “historical” theories that Jesus was a political rebel causing social disturbances, or was a religious revisionist discarding Torah law, once again fill the literary ether with intuitive fantasy rather than fact. As remarkable a claim as it may seem, my new book, A Documented Biography of Jesus Before Christianity (anticipated release, summer 2015) now presents a profoundly different Jesus than Christians or Jews have met before, trapped in a drama that should deeply move all of us. On the technical side, my method shares nothing with Bultmann’s two-source critical approach--or with the contrarian criteria establishing Geza Vermes’ “Jewish” Jesus. Rather, it depends on hypothesizing historicity of specific events excavated from beneath strata of Christianizing theology if their occurrence illuminates other hitherto obscure scriptural passages. I have labelled my approach, “The method of precipitous insight.” To wit: If an insight into an event in the Gospels is capable of dramatically clarifying thematic and linguistic uncertainties found elsewhere in the text, the insight, called “precipitous,” is elevated to the level of hypothesis. As hypothesis, it may be “tested” by its predicted consequences. If, for example, it links to other text, creating further pronounced insight, the exponential increase in clarity is likely an advance toward a unified theory. Finding the historical core in the Gospels’ “midrashim” The use of “lesson-legends” to amplify and interpret religious truths was a deeply-rooted literary technique of the ancient rabbis. Such legends embellished and dramatized episodes described in the Torah (giving them an extra aura of divine intention) and authoring them was a standard practice in Jesus’ era. The Hebrew name for them, midrashim, meant made-up stories which interpret the meaning of presumed actual events. In the early centuries of our era, such dramatic, theological enhancement through legends was never created from “whole cloth,” but consisted of fancifully embroidering events considered historical, with their imaginative elaboration built on the supposed actual occurrences. Therefore, one may say, a midrash always had at its core an event regarded by its author as historically true. Christianity’s most famous candidates include: Jesus being born from a virgin, his healing incurable diseases, turning water to wine; Jesus contemplating the adulteress brought before him for judgment, his temptation by satan on the Jerusalem precipice, walking on water, calming the storm, feeding thousands from a small basket of food, and giving Peter the keys to the coming Kingdom of God. Additionally, Jesus’ own words were often cloaked in interpretive “midrashic” embellishment, and they too must be the subject of close scrutiny and re-translation in order to unearth what he actually said, and reach the New Testament’s historical stratum. When, like oysters, the Christianizing shells are opened for inspection, the startling drama of Jesus’ life emerges as the “pearls” of history are strung together. The reader should be aware that midrashic analysis is not the same as searching out a natural explanation for seeming miracles. For example, others have suggested that the “miracle of feeding a multitude from a few loaves” may be explained by a storage facility for baked goods to which Jesus had access. Attempting to reduce the “miracles” to mundane episodes by guessing at “plausible explanations” is a false step obfuscating what actually occurred. To speculate in such a manner is to further gloss and conceal the interconnected sequence of unfolding occurrences, burying the actual history beneath the description. The midrashim, it should be stated, differ from parables--meshalim-- which do not have a historical core. Meshalim--are short stories with a lesson meant to interpret or explain a higher moral truth, generally embodied in a scriptural passage. They are familiar to us as the Gospels’ “parables.”
The Historical Jesus ? T&T Clark, 2008
In conformity with the appropriate method, the study proceeds through four chapters of unequal length. 1. The chosen starting point is the present Eucharist. It is as far as possible from the historical Jesus, but at the same time it is the most real element of Christianity: a presence of Jesus Christ and the formation of a community through the fulfilment of a certain Scripture, here and now. This evidently involves a vision of the human being, which it is necessary to clarify. In addition, it is a matter of an institution, that is to say precisely of a structure or of a model, which brings together by agreement a group of elements in which Scripture holds a privileged place. These elements will subsequently be explained in detail one by one, and then analyzed by going back in time. 2. At the other extremity are found the rather remote Jewish realities that surrounded Jesus in the first century, for which the work of Flavius Josephus constitutes a first-rate source. They are gathered together under two headings: first the sacred library, which was not at all at that time an archive rigidly set for centuries, but a still fluid collection with flexible contours; then Galilee, a small rural province with strong Pharisaic and Babylonian ties, as distrustful of Rome as of Jerusalem. 3. Between the two preceding poles appear the four canonical gospels that effectively resist all attempts at harmonization. In order to gauge the gap between the historical Jesus and the Christ that was later preached, they are first examined from a limited angle, by seeking to determine how the disciples became apostles. The conclusion that emerges is that the Gospel of John is the most Jewish and that of Mark to be the least useful in assessing the original milieu, which makes it necessary to reconsider certain current theories on the formation of the Gospels. 4. After these points as well as some others on the way the New Testament is used, to which other sources can be added, we finally reach the life of Jesus. We begin with the elements essential for the confession of the Christian faith (origin, baptism and passion of Jesus), and deal only at the end with his activity and his teaching, on which the Epistles and the Credo are remarkably silent. The conclusion is very modest, but precise: if we remain hesitant or ignorant in regard to the material details of many of the facts, we see on the contrary very well – and this is the essential – how they escaped being forgotten, that is to say how they have given rise to a word, because they have been understood, memorized and especially transmitted. Taken in a very broad sense, the fulfilment of Scripture has played – and still plays – an essential role. Abraham gives us this to understand in the parable of the rich man and the poor Lazarus (Luke. 16:31): “If they do not listen to Moses or the Prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” There are finally two Appendices. The first proposes a collection of non-biblical texts that help in being more specific about the silhouette of Jesus and of his circle. The second provides elements of a French bibliography; in fact, to lighten the presentation, all annotation has been omitted and the technical discussions have been reduced to a minimum, but most of the considerations and the options presented here have been studied and justified in more detail elsewhere; it is fair to add that many are subject to controversy. The chosen starting point indicates clearly that nothing can be demonstrated more geometrico. It is a matter first of all of reflections of a believer for believers. In regard to non-believers or of “misinformed-believers,” the only really useful Christian apologetic is a mixture of testimony and announcement of the Gospel, which moreover necessarily gives rise to objections. Even if it has long been asserted – and Paul recalls this – that the human being has the natural capacity to know God, it is evident that a positive mind can declare, in good faith and with good arguments, that Christianity is a deception, or at least an illusion. Such a one should congratulate herself/himself, since the Christian language offers its services, like a parable; it honours the demands of reason, but it cannot be imposed for fear of reducing the Gospel to a theorem, namely a cultural fact to master.