Can We Trust the New Testament? by J. A. T. Robinson

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MIRACLES

Yet signs of what? The older type of Christian apologetic used to use the miracles as proofs that Jesus was God, or at least the Christ. But this is to misrepresent the New Testament. In his day there were wonder-workers enough (as there are faith-healers today), and casting out demons was no exclusive prerogative of the Messiah―even the followers of Jesus' opponents did that (Luke 11.19; Matt. 12.27). The issue was, whose power were you using? And Jesus is never represented as using his own power. But 'if it is' he says, 'by the finger of God that I drive out the devils, then be sure the kingdom of God has come upon you' (Luke 11.20; Matt. 12.28). John's Gospel brings out precisely the same point. The 'works' are done entirely in the Father's power. Indeed, if Jesus said or did anything in his own name, there was no reason why the Jews should take any notice of him: they would be right to reject him. Always Jesus makes it clear that it is to God, not to him, that 'all things are possible' (Mark 10.27), and that this power is available to everyone who has faith (Mark 9.23). The response to the healing of the paralytic is typical: 'The people ... praised God for granting such authority to men' (Matt. 9.8). The furthest even Matthew with his heightening of the supernatural makes Jesus go is to say [sic?] in Gethsemane: 'Do you suppose that I cannot appeal to my Father, who would at once send to my aid more than twelve legions of angels?' (Matt. 26.53). There is no suggestion that he himself could lay them on because he was God. He is a man of power because he is a man of prayer. But because he is a man of prayer, he knows also it is not the Father's will to win that way.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MIRACLES

It is worth interjecting that there is a false discrimination as well as a true. It is natural to the conservatism of the committed in all of us to retain as much as we can with the minimum of mental effort and to bring in critical consideration to explain or smooth away only what we find difficult (particularly the so-so called 'nature miracles'), But this is to give the impression of 'special pleading'―which in fact it is. Consider, for instance the highly problematic cursing of the barren fig tree (Matt. 21.18-22; Mark 11.12-14, 20-4). Taken literally, it seems to present a petulant Jesus losing his temper with a tree for not having fruit out of season. It is obvious from the context that this was not the point of the story for those who told it. It is evidently an acted parable, in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, of judgement against Israel (for which the fig tree like the vineyard was a stock symbol), which only had leaves to show but no fruit. It is set in the context of a prophetic action (the cleansing of the temple) and a parable (of the wicked husbandmen) that make the same point. Indeed in the independent Lukan tradition there is also a parable of a fig tree with a similar message (Luke 13.6-9). Whether Jesus actually did anything, and if so what, we shall never know for certain. It could be that a spoken warning or an act of prophetic symbolism has been turned into a miracle. In any case the story has to do with the moral character not of Jesus but of Israel. The point, however, is that we cannot bring these considerations in only when things become difficult, and then expect to be credible. All the stories have to be judged by the same theological and literary criteria. We must ask these questions not only to get out of our difficulties but to get into their meaning. For, as John says (and again he is but drawing out what is implicit in the others), they are 'signs'.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MIRACLES

This paradox comes out most forcibly in what the New Testament calls his 'mighty works'. These too are essentially bound up for the Gospel writers with the question, Who is this man? (Mark 4.41). And they are inseparable from his teaching: 'What is this? A new kind of teaching! He speaks with authority. When he gives orders, even the unclean spirits submit.' (Mark 1.27). For us the question of what we call the 'miracles' takes the form of asking 'Did they really happen, and if so how?'. A miracle is thought of as something that breaks or suspends a law of nature. But the men of the first century had no idea of laws of nature; for them the issue did not turn at all on the question of How? Even if in our sophistication we may have more understanding of how, psychologically, some of the healing miracles may have been effected, it would not make any difference to their being in the New Testament sense, 'miracles', that is (from the Latin mirari, wonderful works of supremely gracious acts of God. For to John's contemporaries the issue turned on the question not How? but Who? 'By whose power, in whose name are you doing this?'. 'By whom do your sons cast them out?' Whether therefore such acts (whether of Jesus or others) would now be called miracles or whether they were inevitably described and written up as such, or exaggerated by a credulous age, is entirely secondary―though these are legitimate questions for us to ask and to which to apply our critical tools. We may take a different view of many of them, and we shall, or should want to discriminate here or elsewhere, not dogmatically believing the lot or dismissing the plot, but sifting the processes at work in the telling and transmission of them.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE PERSON OF CHRIST

If this is the kind of process at work in all the Gospels, synoptic and Johannine, it warns us that we must be prepared to discount as the work of Christian reflection the theologizing to be found in the language and titles used of Jesus (reserved as this use still is in comparison with the Epistles). But it also enables us to see that this talk was not just the invention or creation of the Church. What it did was to take up the enormous implicit claims of Jesus's language, and still more of his actions, and to make them explicit. Who this man was was a man (and there can be no question or doubt about that―least of all in John who used the word 'man' of Jesus twice as often as all the other Gospels put together) who yet stood in a unique relationship to God, speaking and acting for him. He was 'the man who lived God', his representative, his plenipotentiary to whom 'everything was entrusted' (Matt. 11.27)―and yet who was and could do nothing 'in himself' (John 5.30).

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE PERSON OF CHRIST

Yet the one who is seen is utterly and completely a man (This indeed is the offense: 'You a mere man, make yourself God―John 10.33.) The real point of difference was not that he was not human, but is expressed again in the analogy of the same parable of the wicked husbandmen. The servants and the son are equally human (one is not a heavenly being dressed up), but they stand in decisively different relationship to the owner. Nothing describes Jesus's claim better than this relationship of 'sonship' which he lived out in everything he did and was, beginning with his address of the unutterable God by the blasphemously familiar abba (at any rate one critically unshakeable word that he spoke!). And sonship in the New Testament is in the first instance a parable from human relationships. Jesus used the difference between a servant and a son in several of his stories―not only in that just quoted but in that of the prodigal son ('I am no longer fit to be called your son; treat me as one of your paid servants') and in what must be recognized as the parable of the servant and the son in John 8.35: 'A servant has no permanent standing in the household, but a son belongs to it always'. I describe it in this way because in the English version it is translated as 'the son', and in the next verse the parable is indeed specifically applied to Jesus: 'If then the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed'. But originally this language, as Dodd has also shown to be the case in what he calls the parable of the apprentice in John 5.19f: 'A son can do nothing on his own; he only does what he sees his father doing. What father does, son does; for a father loves his son and shows him all his trade'. For the evangelist indeed this is an allegory about 'the Father' and 'the Son', but for Jesus it was almost certainly a parable like the rest. Jeremias has convincingly argued that this is true also of what has been called 'the Synoptic thunderbolt from the Johannine sky' in the 'Q' tradition of Matt. 11.27 and Luke 10.22. It has rightly seemed improbable to critics that Jesus could really have used the language of later Church theology like 'No one knows the Son except the Father and no one knows the Father except the Son'. But the 'the' is here to be seen as the same 'the' that we regularly find in parables, as in 'the sower went forth to sow' or 'who is the faithful and wise steward?' English idiom would use the indefinite article: 'As only a father knows his son, so only a son knows his father.' It is this analogy of the intimate and unique relationship between father and son which Jesus is claiming for himself. The capitalizing of it into talk of 'the Father' and 'the Son' is part of the process of seeing 'stars' for 'points'. Yet, the fact that it has already happened in the tradition lying behind Matthew and Luke shows how far it goes back. A high Christology, as we know from Paul, was very primitive.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE PERSON OF CHRIST

Yet this is no vocation to usurp or replace God. Jesus's utter dependence on the Father remains unquestioned, and nowhere more than in the Fourth Gospel. It is the vocation to represent him, the fearful calling to play God, to live God, to be him to men. And it is the more fearful because this does not mean what we mean by 'playing God', lording it over others, manipulating their lives. Precisely the opposite: it means identifying with them in suffering, serving love. It is putting oneself completely at their disposal―like the son in the parable of the wicked husbandman in whom the patrimony is vested, and therefore more than any other invites elimination: for he alone stands between men and God. As St John interprets it, there is no need to look beyond Jesus: he who has seen him has seen the Father.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE PERSON OF CHRIST

It could indeed be said that Jesus claimed nothing for himself but everything for what God was doing through him. The one thing that is certain is that he did not go around 'saying he was God' (as in the old knock-down argument: 'If he said he was God, then either he was God or he was a bad man'―and the latter can be ruled out). Yet all our sources agree 'that he was condemned for blasphemy' (Mark 14.63f and parallels; John 19.7), for 'making himself God' (John 10:33-36)―not, however, as far as our evidence goes, for arrogating to himself the name of God but precisely for speaking without so much as a 'thus saith the Lord'. This is epitomized in his characteristic and distinctive form of address, 'Amen, I say to you', which it has been remarked contains the whole of Christology in a nutshell. While a pious Jew concluded his prayer with an 'Amen', thus expressing his faith that God would act, Jesus prefaces his words with an 'Amen', thus identifying God with what he would say. In overruling and re-editing the Law with his astonishing contrast 'You have heard that it was said to the men of old (i.e., by God―not by them, as in the AV) ..., but I say to you' (Matt. 5.33, etc), in forgiving sins, in quelling the spirits of evil and powers of nature, he steps in the eyes of his contemporaries into the space reserved for God. He refuses to 'make room' for God. He says that men's attitude to him will decide God's attitude to them. He invites men to come to him for life and rest―but always to himself as God's representative. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that he went around not just talking about God (that would not have provoked the reaction he did) but standing in God's place, acting and speaking for him. 'Take away every hint of this and you are left with a blank.'

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MESSAGE OF JESUS

This is the process that above all we see at work in a new and living light in the Fourth Gospel itself. It is seeing and showing everything 'from the end'―not inventing or creating, but holding everything up for the true light to shine through it, so that in the flesh we can see the 'glory'. John's Gospel is not unhistorical but history really entered into. As Browning made him say in A Death in a Desert, which William Temple called 'the most penetrating interpretation of St John that exists in the English language', 'What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars'. And this process is not unique to the Fourth Gospel: it is occurring in all the Gospels, though usually not so consciously or profoundly. We may trace it in regard to the question, Who is this man?, by showing in greater detail how the titles of glory used by the Church to account for Christ's person, though in their present form the product of its reflection, are the 'stars' that show the 'points'. They draw out and light up what was implicit in the work and words of Jesus and what in his life-time was expressed more in terms of verbs than nouns, in things he did rather than in claims that he made for himself.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MESSAGE OF JESUS

The early Christians, of course, saw Jesus as the Son of Man who was now vindicated to the throne of God as he said he would be. There is reason to think that they subsequently reapplied his words about 'coming on the clouds' (which at his trial in Mark 14.62 fit admirably with their original reference in Daniel to a coming to God in victory out of oppression) to their own expectation (placed on his lips in Mark 13.26) of a coming from God to round off everything. This is all part of the complex question of how far titles of glory (like predictions of resurrection) can be used as reliable evidence of how Jesus himself thought and spoke before the event. The latest assumption is to suspect that these may indeed be heightened and read back in the telling―despite the reverence of which we spoke for the remembered words of Jesus. Or let us say that 'remembering' was not for the early Christians just a neutral exercise in recalling facts. It was as Jesus's words 'Do this in remembrance of me' indicate, or the promise, according to John, that the Holy Spirit would bring everything to the disciples' 'remembrance', a recalling of the past in such a way that did not leave it in the dead past but recreated it as present experience at a deeper level. The sayings and actions of the historical Jesus 'spoke' to them as words and deeds of the living Christ in and through the Church. Yet, as John also insists, the Holy Spirit would not speak 'of himself', inventing and creating out of nothing: he would take the sayings of Jesus and show them in a new and living light.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MESSAGE OF JESUS

Now this last title is the most mysterious of all. It occurs once on the lips of the dying Stephen in Acts 7.56, but never in the Church's preaching or teaching, either in Acts or the Epistles (though it could lie behind Paul's teaching about Christ as the new or heavenly Man). Yet in the Gospels it occurs scores of times―but always and only on the lips of Jesus (and again this applies equally to the Fourth Gospel, except when in 12.34 the crowds ask, as well they might, Who is this 'Son of Man' you are always talking about?). Even at the end of the first chapter of St John, when all the other titles have been used of him, this is the first and only one used by him (1.51). There is no clear indication that while the early Christian may have made little or nothing of it, they still remembered and preserved Jesus's own distinctive vocabulary. What he himself meant by 'the Son of Man' is one of the most disputed issues of New Testament interpretation. I suspect it was used by him partly because it was a parable in itself: it did not carry an easily understood or misunderstood meaning. But it challenged faith and loyalty to one who (like the figure of a son of man in Dan. 7.13-22, a human being representing 'the saints of the Most High' or true people of God) could come to vindication and receive the kingdom only through and out of humiliation and suffering.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MESSAGE OF JESUS

The same resistance [see last sentence in last post -JR] is observable when we turn not to what he said about God but what he said about himself. Here the temptation would have been still stronger to make him claim precisely what they claimed of him. But again there is a remarkable difference. As we have seen, they proclaimed him as 'Lord' and 'Christ'―so much so that within a few years (and the process is virtually complete in the writings of Paul) 'Christ' become no longer a title, 'the Messiah' (as it still is in the Gospel of John―another mark of it primitiveness), but a proper name. But in the Gospels, though the titles 'Lord' and 'Christ' are used of Jesus by others, they are rare, and virtually never occur on his own lips. (Where they do, scholars are almost unanimous in thinking that they are not Jesus' own words―e.g., in Mark 9.41, 'If anyone gives you a cup of water to drink because you are Christ's,' a term which is not in any of the other parallel forms of this saying.) On the contrary, Jesus is evidently uncomfortable with the designation 'Messiah', because it could so quickly slide into the political claim to be 'king'. In Mark's version, so far from acclaiming Peter for saying 'You are the Christ' (as in Matt. 16.17-19, verses which scholars have convincingly argued to be authentic but misplaced), Jesus rebukes him and shuts him up, turning at once to speak of 'the Son of Man' who must suffer and die (Mark 8.30-3).

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

THE MESSAGE OF JESUS

The obvious thing would have been for them to have made Jesus merely the mouthpiece of their preaching―to put back on to his lips, and claim his sanction for, everything that they said about him. But this, unexpectedly, is what we do not find. Let me illustrate.

As we have just seen, their summary of Jesus's proclamation was in terms of the imminent coming of 'the kingdom of God'. Now this is a phrase that is remarkably rare in pre-Christian Judaism, though of course it has its background in the whole Old Testament teaching of God as King. It does not for instance feature in the Dead Sea scrolls. Yet it was constantly on the lips of Jesus. So many of his teaching parables start: 'The kingdom of God is like this'. It was the explanation too which he gave of his actions: 'If it is by the finger of God that I drive out devils, then be sure that the kingdom of God has already come upon you (Luke 11.20). 'Thy kingdom come' was the heart also of the prayer he gave his disciples (Matt. 6.10), and to the very last day of his life he was talking to them about it and looking forward to its breaking: 'I tell you this: never again shall I drink from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God' (Mark 14.25). One would naturally therefore expect it to feature prominently in the Church's message. Yet it does not once appear in the early speeches of Acts, which, though clearly written up by Luke, show many signs in their phraseology of being preaching summaries that go back far behind him. Nor, remarkably, does it occur more than a handful of times in the writings of Paul or John. Evidently it formed a very subordinate part of the first Christians' preaching and teaching. They spoke not so much of the Kingdom as of the Church (a word that by contrast only occurs twice on Jesus' lips and each time in the Gospel of Matthew alone with his strong interest in the Christian community and its problems); and rather than the breakthrough of the reign of God they preached 'Jesus and the resurrection' (Acts 17.18). This does not in the least mean that there was no connection or continuity between the two. Indeed their message was that what Jesus said God would do, this indeed he had done. The one announcement was proclaimed as fulfilled in the other, the further side of that mighty act of God which had inaugurated the new age and set the last things in motion. What is significant, however, is that they came to use a subtly different vocabulary for it. They did not for the most part take up Jesus's words or in recording them put their phrases back on to his lips. There seems to have been a reverence for the remembered speech and acts of Jesus which provided an inbuilt resistance to the temptation to make him merely their mouthpiece or puppet.

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

WHERE IS HE FROM?

This is a relevant question for a Church that deliberately undertook to write Gospels―a form of literature with no exact precedent or parallel elsewhere. Had the first Christians simply confined themselves (as did the Qumran community) to documents setting out their message or reinforcing their teaching, then the question of what relation if any that bore to what Jesus said or did would be secondary and perhaps irrelevant. But for the gospel they preached about him they appealed with open eyes to the gospel he preached when he came into Galilee proclaiming, 'The time has come; the kingdom of God is upon you' (Mark 1.15). And they proceeded to tell the story of what he taught and did and suffered and of how he was vindicated out of death. The second part of that story we shall look at in the next chapter, but what of the first?

Does it matter what Jesus thought of himself or what he said and did? Does it matter whether the church got him right or wrong? Evidently the early Christians thought so, but have we any means of knowing or testing, or are we simply confined to their witness?

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

WHERE IS HE FROM?

Now all these are titles which occur on the lips of others. In the prologues it is the Church speaking, filling out its answers to the question, Who is this man?, and preparing the reader to understand the story that follows. These were the categories, 'a Saviour, who is Christ, the Lord' (Luke 2.11), in which the Church preached Jesus from the earliest days (Acts 2.36), and subsequently they expanded their understanding of him in such terms as the pre-existent 'image' or 'son' of God (see, for instance, Rom. 1.3f; 2 Cor. 4.4f; Phil. 2.5-11; Col. 1:15-20). But what relation does all this exalted language bear to anything that Jesus may have taught or claimed for himself?

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?

WHERE IS HE FROM?

The point of these two prologues, told in picture form, is in fact the same as that of the last, St John's, told in another form of poetry―namely that the life of Jesus, and indeed the life of Christians as children of God, is not to be explained simply in terms of 'human stock or the fleshly desire of a human father' (John 1.13)―though of course that level of interpretation is valid in its own place. Who this man is can ultimately be grasped only by going beyond the processes of nature and history altogether. His explanation or origin, says John, lies in the principle or 'word' behind it all. For he is the self-expression of that divine activity that all along has been coming into its own, first in nature, then in a people, and finally now fully embodied in a person. And so perfect a reflection of it is he that the analogy that comes to John's mind is that which we use when we say of a boy that he is the spit-image of his father―or in the Hebrew metaphor, the 'glory (or reflection) as of a father's only son' (John 1.14). In the Greek at this point, unlike the English version, there are no articles or capitals: it is a simile from human relationships). So John speaks of Jesus as the Word who 'is God what God is' (1.1) as 'God's only Son' or even (and here, as I said earlier, is where the latest papyrus discovery could finally have tilted the balance in favour of the most difficult reading) 'the only one (who is) himself God' (1.18). Yet his opening chapter also goes on to rehearse those more traditionally Jewish titles which the other Gospels give him: 'God's Chosen One' (1.34, the reading adopted in the NEB text); 'the Messiah', or Christ (1.41); 'the Son of God, the king of Israel' (1.49).