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

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

FORM CRITICISM

Source and form criticism have provided valuable tools for accessing the traditions that have gone to the making of our Gospels. (We can use them too on the Epistles, for the patterns of instruction they disclose reflect the same community interests.) But in all this the evangelists themselves tended to take a back seat. They have been in danger of being relegated to scissors-and-paste men who pieced together documentary sources or suppliers of the string on which the beads shaped by the processes of oral tradition were arranged. But this is seriously to underrate them―even though the traditional picture (still there in Jesus Christ Superstar!) of the individual Apostles sitting down to write their memoirs has gone for good.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

FORM CRITICISM

Let us watch this tool at work in the kind of questions he asks. For example, Did the early Church reapply the parables in which Jesus warned the Jews of the religious crisis in which they stood so as to alert its own members to be ready for the second coming? Why not?―these stories were too good to waste on situations and audiences that were now past. Did they go over them so as to draw out point by point who stood for whom, as for example, in Matt. 13.37-9: 'The sower of the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world; the good seed stands for the children of the Kingdom, the darnel for the children of the evil one. The enemy who sowed the darnel is the devil. The harvest is the end of time. The reapers are angels'? Naturally―the instruction of simple converts demanded it. Did they elaborate the stories to make additional points―even if this did introduce strange matter―e.g., in the parable of the great feast in Matt. 22.7: 'The king sent troops to kill those murderers and set their town on fire" (while the supper was getting cold!)? Did they fuse one story with another as they collected them―thus creating for instance, the difficulty in Matt. 22.11-14 of why the man picked up off the streets was blamed for having no wedding garment? Did they add riders at the end of the parables to point moral or morals―like the whole string of them in Luke 16.9-13 to explain away the very difficult story of the unjust steward? Again, of course they did―as preachers have ever since. But once we recognize these and other tendencies at work we can begin to make allowances for them. We can 'aim off' and so get closer to the mark as we seek to recover the original teaching and meaning of Jesus. Then we can reapply that teaching and meaning, rather than some secondary application to it, to our own situation.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

FORM CRITICISM

It was understandable in the first flush of excitement about the new light which asking these questions shed on the life of the Church that the conclusion should be drawn that the more the Gospels have to tell us about the early Church the less they have to tell us about Jesus. And some of these critics like Bultmann and to a lesser extent his English disciples, have, as I said earlier, been in my judgement unwarrantably skeptical about the historical value of the tradition. This is indeed the reputation the form-critics have got themselves. I recall my own theological college principle, when giving me one of the more conservative and constructive of their works, saying: 'I wouldn't let everyone have this!'

Yet other scholars have shown that this need not be the case at all. Jeremias, for instance, in his book The Parables of Jesus (a model of how a New Testament scholar applies the tools of his trade) uses these and other techniques to peel away the layers of development and, by discounting the tendencies and interests which these questions reveal, get back to what underlay them.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

FORM CRITICISM

Tools of literary criticism are closely related to those which work, not on documents, their dependence and sources, but on the motivations in the life of the community which shaped and passed on the traditions. These are the tools of what, somewhat unhappily, I think, has come to be called 'form' criticism. The starting point was an analysis of the forms that moulded the separate units of material, such as are strung together in St Mark's Gospel, before they were written down and began to be subject to the influence of literary processes. But the really significant thing was the kind of questions which the form-critics, who started their work in Germany after the first world war, came to ask of the material, whether in its oral or written state. These questions were not so much concerned with who wrote it or where he got it from but with the interests in the life of the growing Christian communities that made this material relevant to them and therefore conditioned the shape in which it was preserved and passed on. What, for instance, had it to say to the conflicts and controversies of the early Church with the main body of Judaism, or to resolving issues of doctrine and discipline that arose within the developing congregations, or to the policy-decisions about the admission of Gentiles to the Church, or to the moral instruction of new converts, or to settling matters of worship and ministry, or to answering difficulties and objections such as the apparent delay in the Lord's return? To meet these and other needs, stories or sayings of Jesus were recalled, adapted or recreated to convey what the living Christ would say to his people now in their situations of suffering or perplexity. We see this process at work in the Epistles, as St. Paul draws upon and interprets a word of the Lord to discern what he takes to be the mind of Christ (though, it is to be noted, when he does not have one he says so: he does not think to invent one). What the form-critics have enabled us to perceive is that the Gospels, just as much as the Epistles, are Church books and therefore sources in the first instance for its life and theology.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

SOURCE CRITICISM

It is too early yet to say what will come out of the re-opening of the question, (Many would hardly even be aware that it is open.) I would guess that each of the theories has been too simple to account for all the evidence. The solution of the Synoptic problem will I suspect turn out to be more complex than any that puts the Gospels as we now have them in a simple line of temporal succession, with B using A, and C using B and/or A. I believe that all of them developed over much of the same span of time, partly overlapping and interacting. Apart from their distinctive traditions, they incorporated two main streams of common material. These are (a) the so-called triple tradition (because it is shared in different parts by all three evangelists), which Mark, usually, I would judge, though not invariably, tends to preserve in its most primitive state, and (b) the double or 'Q' tradition drawn on by Matthew and Luke, where again one has to judge on the merits of each instance which has retained the more primitive version. The earliest form of a saying or story may therefore on this view be found in any of the three―or for that matter, as we shall see, in John. I shall illustrate this in the sample I take later to exemplify all the critical tools at work. But whether one operates with the hypothesis of a single overall priority or judges each case more individually, the object of the exercise is the same. It is to assess the material in its various strata so as to be able, like the archaeologist, to place it and get it to 'speak' to us about the developing tradition. If some piece of material bears marks of being more distant from source, that does not mean it is useless. It may have much to tell us about tendencies at work within the life of the church, which can then throw light on the history of all material. We can begin to see things 'in depth' and not on the surface only. It adds a new dimension to our vision and discrimination.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

SOURCE CRITICISM

The dominant hypothesis among New Testament scholars is that Mark is the first Gospel, used independently by Matthew and Luke, but that these latter also drew on a common source (consisting mainly of sayings rather than happenings) usually known by the symbol Q―as well as each using sources of material distinctive to himself. This consensus has of late been challenged though not I think shattered. Some retain the priority of Mark but believe that Luke used not a hypothetical 'Q' but Matthew. Others go back to putting Matthew first, with Mark second and Luke third, or with Luke second and Mark third, each one knowing and using his predecessors. There are even one or two scholars who would argue that Luke is the first Gospel. I mention this confused state of affairs not to go into the pros and cons but as a word of warning that what is usually taken to be one of the most assured of the 'agreed results' of Gospel criticism remains a hypothesis; and it is thoroughly healthy that all hypotheses should be re-examined and questioned from time to time. So far from concluding that there is such uncertainty that one may as well believe anything or nothing, the proper response, as in any science, is a reasoned reassessment and a chastened humility.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

SOURCE CRITICISM

But we must move on from textual to literary or source criticism. As its name implies, this is concerned with questions of authorship, date, literary sources and documentary relationships. In the Gospels in particular it seeks to study and explain the close similarity at many points between the first three―so-called the Synoptic Gospels because they 'look together' at the life of Christ with a sort of stereoscopic vision. There is too much verbal agreement between them for this to be coincidental or due merely to common oral tradition. Either they are using each other or they have written sources in common―or both.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

Unfortunately, however, textual decisions are seldom so simple as that. A convincing case can often be made on both sides, as in the instance of the longer or shorter text of the Lukan version of the last supper I mentioned in the last chapter. And when does the harder reading become so difficult as to be incredible? A notable instance (of some theological importance) is to be seen in John 1.18. The best manuscripts, now strongly reinforced by the latest discovery of an early papyrus, instead of the familiar words, 'No one has seen God: the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,' read 'the only-begotten God'. This is so difficult even to translate intelligibly (see the NEB margin) that, against the judgement of recent editors of the Greek New Testament, both the RSV (even in its second edition)) and the NEB conclude that what John really intended to say was 'only-begotten Son'. Scholars too will diverge in their assessment of whether to pay more attention to the weight of manuscript evidence (in this instance unusually one-sided) or to the reasons why in any particular case poorer manuscripts may have preserved the better reading. In fact, for all the accumulated wisdom and knowledge, the state of play in textual criticism is probably as fluid at the moment as it has been for some time. Yet this is a sign of the softening of old dogmatisms (as in many of the natural sciences) rather than of chaos. It is not a reason for giving up in despair.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

There are no cut and dried answers. As a general working rule one can say that the shorter reading is to be preferred to the longer (on the ground that things get added to Scripture more easily than omitted) and the harder to the easier (on the ground that the easier is more likely to be a correction than vise versa). One could illustrate the preference for the shorter―and also the tendency of the scribes to assimilate―by the Lord's Prayer. We have already mentioned the way in which the doxology later got tacked on to the version in Matthew (6.9-15). But if you look at the version in Luke (11.2-4), you will see at the bottom of the page in the NEB a variety of other manuscript readings which expand his shorter and simpler clauses, usually to bring them into line with Matthew's. The preference for the more difficult reading is well illustrated in Mark 1.2f. which runs in the NEB: 'Here is my herald whom I send on ahead of you, and he will prepare your way. A voice crying in the wilderness , 'Prepare a way for the Lord; clear a straight path for him'"'. But the first half of the quotation ('Here is my herald... prepare your way), unlike the second, is not from Isaiah but from Malachi. Some knowledgeable scribe evidently spotted this and corrected it to: 'In the prophets it stands written'. This is the text followed by the AV. The RSV relegates this reading to the margin. The NEB thinks it so obviously secondary that it doesn't even bother to mention it.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

There is first the tool of textual criticism, which we looked at in the last chapter and so need not spend much more time on now. As well as providing a general presumption of what manuscripts are likely to give the best and most ancient readings, this also enables him to ask in a particular case, How can you explain the existing variations? Is one reading likely to be a correction, to ease what seemed to the copyist a difficulty? Is there any reason why this unusual choice of words or this hard saying should have been invented if it was not original? Is the longer reading an explanatory gloss or an expansion of a shorter one, or is the shorter one due to an accidental or even deliberate omission? Has the reading in one Gospel, originally distinct, been assimilated to the parallel passage in another, particularly in familiar sections where the scribe may unconsciously be harmonizing the two versions? Or is the eccentric text just a mistake?

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

How does a New Testament scholar set about sorting out 'What you can believe and what you can't'? I have put those last words in inverted commas because that is never how he himself would put it. He would want to ask, What does this story or this saying tell us? Perhaps it may turn out to tell us more about what the early Church was interested in than what Jesus is likely to have done or said―and be just as valuable and true for that. It may be important evidence for reconstructing the whole developing picture of first-century Christianity―which itself produced the Gospels. No more than the archaeologist will the biblical critic dismiss finds because they do not come from the most primitive strata.

But first let us look at some of the tools that he has available and which themselves have been fashioned and refined by patient and dedicated study.

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

MODERN TRANSLATIONS

From the point of view of trusting the New Testament, as opposed to reading the Bible 'as literature' (for which it was never 'designed'―despite the popular book of that title), I would urge you henceforth to equip yourself, if you don't have one, with any good modern translation. The American RSV and the English NEB have the authority behind them of official committees of the Churches. (For convenience I shall usually quote from one of these―though I shall often go straight to the Greek.) But there are others, like that of J. B. Phillips, The Jerusalem Bible or Good News for Modern Man, which have their individual freedoms and advantages. In the next chapter I shall be going on to speak of the 'the tools of discrimination' with which the scholar tackles his critical task. The least the laymen can do is to acquire and use the tool most accessible to him, a good translation in contemporary English―which is itself one of the most important end products of that long and laborious process.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

MODERN TRANSLATIONS

I am not the least meaning to disparage―merely to detach the reader from dependence on what for Bible study is a very blunt instrument. For such is the attachment to the AV that many people still talk of it as though it were the original. (In fact when I was a student I remember fundamentalists who were highly suspicious if you went behind it to the Greek, just as there were Roman Catholics who took the same attitude to the Latin Vulgate). When the NEB came out people always were asking me, 'Why did you change that?' I found it difficult to convince them that we 'changed' nothing. We never started from the AV nor had it in mind at all. In fact it was probably easier for us to put it out of our minds (not that we tried to) than it would have been for any other group of Englishmen. For most of us had probably not consulted it in our scholarly work for years. Indeed when I tried to find a copy for quoting in the course of writing this, I couldn't find one in the house. I had to borrow from my neighbor!

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

MODERN TRANSLATIONS

The AV is of course one of the priceless treasures of the English language and no one wishes to decry its beauties or see it lapse. It is however worth remarking how uneven a translation it is (King James's men worked largely as individuals, unlike subsequent revising panels). Its merits are usually judged on its purple passages―like 1 Cor. 13. But even this, the famous hymn, shows how derivative and indeed arbitrary a translation it was: at least eighty percent of the wording was taken over from Coverdale, and so far from 'charity' being the inspired original which modern versions have 'ruined' by substituting 'love', it was King James's men who went out of their way to change Coverdale's 'love' on this and practically no other occasion. But in between such great passages there are others where one wonders whether even those who translated it understood what they were writing: try for sense of the obscurer parts of 2 Corinthians! It is questionable too whether much of it was good idiomatic English of any age. I doubt if any Englishman ever used either the phrase 'fire of coals' (John 18.18) or 'coals of fire' (Rom. 12.20)―except in the latter case now as a quotation from the AV. Both are crudely literal renderings of the Greek, which in turn are crudely literal renderings of the Hebrew idiom―the sort of work that in school would be heavily marked down as translation English. Or take Luke 21.21: 'Let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto' (i.e., though you would not know it, the city of Jerusalem). Now 'the countries' was never English for the countryside: it just happens that the Greek for 'countryside' is a plural noun―so down it went.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Can We Trust the New Testament?

Continuation of Chapter 2: FACTS AND FALLACIES

MODERN TRANSLATIONS

The answer again is, overwhelmingly, Yes. The number of places where the translations are actually wrong is minute. But time and again modern versions follow a more reliable text, bring out the sense more accurately in the light of scholarly research, and above all communicate it in a language that makes it more meaningful for us. 'The conservatism of the committed' includes a strong investment in what Englishmen call the Authorized Version, Americans more accurately the King James Version. For it has never been authorized. In fact if I this time were to conduct a wager, I am prepared to bet that most of my readers, if asked what the title comes from, would point, if anywhere, to the words on the title page: 'Authorized to be read in churches'. Yet if they actually look this up they will find that what is says is 'Appointed (that is, assigned or provided) to be read in churches'. And this was altered from the title page of the earlier Bishops' Bible, which had 'Authorized and appointed to be read in churches'. So the 'Authorized' Version came to be called by the very word it omitted! In fact it simply acquired its authority by usage, and it took a long time to establish itself. In the 1662 Prayer Book, nearly sixty years later, not only were the Psalms still in the Coverdale version of the previous century but sentences from Scripture which the revisers themselves put in (like the 'comfortable words' in the Communion service) were not yet in the King James Version.

To be continued...