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

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  • #61
    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...

    Comment


    • #62
      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...

      Comment


      • #63
        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...

        Comment


        • #64
          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...

          Comment


          • #65
            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...

            Comment


            • #66
              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...

              Comment


              • #67
                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...

                Comment


                • #68
                  Can We Trust the New Testament?

                  Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                  REDACTION CRITICISM

                  So, since the second World War, there has been a further tendency, to focus on what has come to be known, perhaps equally unfortunately, as 'redaction' criticism (if only because to the layman it sounds like 'reduction'!). Once again we owe the phrase to the Germans―abetted this time by the Americans. It comes from the word 'redactor' (to be distinguished in these nuclear days from 'reactor'), meaning editor. This approach recognizes that the Gospel writers were considerable molders of the tradition in their own right―though there has been a tendency to turn them into 'theologians' theologians' with depths and subtleties of patterns they might have been hard presses to recognize! Yet they were not thinking up things in the isolation of their studies. For they too were spokesmen of Church communities.


                  To be continued...

                  Comment


                  • #69
                    Can We Trust the New Testament?

                    Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                    REDACTION CRITICISM

                    Since we have illustrated the other two kinds of criticism from the Synoptic Gospels, let us turn for an example of this last to the Gospel of John. For John is above all the evangelist who has set his stamp upon everything he writes. It has been said of him that he seems to be saying to us 'la tradition c'est moi!', Yet this Gospel as redaction criticism sees it is not the product of one old man reflecting upon the memories of his youth. He is an editor using sources and traditions which have come down to him, but shaping and adapting them to the needs and questions of the community. Thus, it is envisioned by a recent writer, John's church (whoever he was) is going through a crisis: members of it have been publicly banned from the local Jewish synagogue for confessing Jesus as the Christ. So, drawing upon traditions from a 'book of signs', he writes up the story that we have in John 9, which describes how Jesus encouraged a blind man who had suffered a similar fate. The 'history' in the story is the history of the group at the end of the first century or whenever it was, not of Jesus' time; but the message is what he, Jesus, is saying to the church.

                    Again in the first flush it seems to me that greatly inflated claims have been made for this method. It has tended in the direction of seeing the Gospels as all theology and no history (except in the secondary sense just mentioned). It can also be very subjective and hypothetical. You have to begin by supposing your local community thrown out of the synagogue (needless to say there is no actual evidence of this). The rest is reading back or reading in; and the significances found often reflect the ingenuity of the scholar as much as anything inescapably present in the material. Yet again the perspective can yield valuable insights. We are able to see the way in which a powerful personality like St Paul's imposes itself on all he writes. We should not dream of interpreting a particular passage except through 'his' mind. So too there is a Markan message and a Lukan theology which colors even what they take over from others. Everything they write has to be viewed through that glass of vision.


                    To be continued...

                    Comment


                    • #70
                      Can We Trust the New Testament?

                      Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                      THE TOOLS IN USE

                      By now it might be thought that the words and acts of Jesus must be pretty well unrecoverable: all we can speak about with any confidence is the Christ of the Church's faith and preaching. And this has been the conclusion of many. I believe it is a false conclusion. I shall be spelling this out in relation to some of the big New Testament questions in the chapters that follow (especially chapters 6 and 7). But it might perhaps be helpful to sum up this one by taking a specific passage and demonstrating what I have called these tools of discrimination in actual use. I hope it will show how they can yield judgements which are not just picking and choosing what we like. They can help us to discern with some objectivity what is likely to go back to Jesus and what is not. This does not, of course, mean that others would not come to contrary assessments. But at least it is not simply a matter of arguing about tastes.


                      To be continued...

                      Comment


                      • #71
                        Can We Trust the New Testament?

                        Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                        THE TOOLS IN USE

                        I choose a passage which is in each of the first three Gospels, where clearly there is literary dependence of some sort, and which can therefore illustrate all the types of criticism that I have been describing. To follow the comparisons the reader will have to look at all three versions together, and for this an invaluable tool is a 'synopsis' of the Gospels which sets them out (or at any rate the first three) in parallel columns. There are various editions of these, but the easiest and simplest for the English reader is one called Gospel Parallels, based on the text of the RSV. So if you have this or can get hold of it, turn to the parable of the 'wicked husbandman' (p. 142). If not, have open together or put markers in your Bible at: Matt. 21.33-46; Mark 12.1-12; and Luke 20.9-19).


                        To be continued...

                        Comment


                        • #72
                          Can We Trust the New Testament?

                          Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                          THE TOOLS IN USE

                          I have chosen this passage also because there is now an interesting 'fourth column' available in yet another version. This is the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel whose text only turned up in a major discovery made in Egypt about the same time as that of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Palestine. This was of a whole library of Gnostic books. The Gnostics were heretical Christians from the second and third centuries AD whom we previously knew only through the 'refutations' of the orthodox. They believed in salvation by knowledge ('gnosis') brought from the supernatural world and communicated to a spiritual élite. One of the effects of this discovery has been to throw doubt on the claims of some scholars that the central New Testament message of a heavenly Redeemer was itself derived from Gnostic myths. It is becoming clear (or at any rate clearer) that these myths are speculative and mystical versions, and perversions of the Christian preaching. They also show something else, well illustrated by this particular sample from the Gospel of Thomas, which in fact reveals remarkably little sign of Gnostic coloring. This is that translations of the teaching of Jesus were preserved alongside our canonical Gospels for a long time. For this 'Gospel' (though it is really just a collection of sayings) dates from at least a hundred years from his death and yet appears to go back to a tradition independent of our Synoptic Gospels and to be at some points more primitive. (The question of its dependence or independence is a delicate judgement, and not all scholars would agree, but this I think is where the evidence is pointing.)


                          To be continued...

                          Comment


                          • #73
                            Can We Trust the New Testament?

                            Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                            THE TOOLS IN USE

                            Since its text is not so readily available, I will give it in full:
                            He said, A good man had a vineyard. He gave it to husbandmen that they might work it and he receive its fruit at their hand. He sent his servant, that the husbandmen might give him the fruit of the vineyard. They seized his servant, they beat him, and all but killed him. The servant came and told his master. His master said: Perhaps they did not know him. He sent another servant; the husbandmen beat the other also. Then the master sent his son. He said: Perhaps they will reverence my son. Those husbandmen, since they knew that he was the heir of the vineyard, seized him and killed him. He that has ears, let him hear.

                            Clearly this is the same story as in our Gospels, and by comparing all four versions we may see the kind of things that happen to a story on the way. Let us simply draw attention to some of the more significant.


                            To be continued...

                            Comment


                            • #74
                              Can We Trust the New Testament?

                              Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                              THE TOOLS IN USE

                              In the introduction to the parable ('A man planted a vineyard and let it out to tenants') Mark and Matthew have the words 'and set a hedge around it and dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower', but Luke and Thomas do not. They are details that are irrelevant to the rest of the story and are derived from and are clearly intended to echo the similar parable in Isa 5.1-7. Since the details at one point depend on the Septuagint translation rather than the original Hebrew, it is improbable that they go back to the story as Jesus told it. They are evidently added to reinforce the point to the reader that 'the vineyard of the Lord's host' stands, as in Isaiah, for 'the house of Israel' and to stress the loving care of God for it.


                              To be continued...

                              Comment


                              • #75
                                Can We Trust the New Testament?

                                Continuation of Chapter 3: THE TOOLS OF DISCRIMINATION

                                THE TOOLS IN USE

                                Now the very fact for the Christians telling it the story is still about the history of Israel and is a warning addressed by Jesus to the Jewish leaders (as they themselves well recognized) is significant. For the form of this story (of a man going away, delegating responsibility and requiring the fruits of it on his return) is repeated in several of Jesus's parables―of the servant entrusted with supervision (Matt. 24.45-51; Luke 12.42-6), the ten virgins (Matt. 25.1-13). the talents or pounds (Matt. 25.14-30; Luke 19.12-27), the door keeper (Mark 13.33-7; Luke 12.35-8). In every other case it applied, not to the old Israel but to the Church, to warn it to be ready for the return of Christ. So if the Church made up this story we should expect its point to be the same. We may therefore have good confidence that it goes back to Jesus, and (unlike the others) is in its original setting. Nor in the Synoptic Gospels (in contrast with the Gospel of Thomas) has its context been lost by its becoming part of a collection of parables, such as we find, for the Church's teaching purposes, in Mark 4 and Matt. 13. In Mark and Luke it stands by itself (though Matthew has put other parables round it) towards the close of Jesus's ministry as a final and most explicit challenge to the Jewish leaders to accept him as the one whom God was sending to them.


                                To be continued...

                                Comment

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