Announcement

Collapse

Biblical Languages 301 Guidelines

This is where we come to delve into the biblical text. Theology is not our foremost thought, but we realize it is something that will be dealt with in nearly every conversation. Feel free to use the original languages to make your point (meaning Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic). This is an exegetical discussion area, so please limit topics to purely biblical ones.

This is not the section for debates between theists and atheists. While a theistic viewpoint is not required for discussion in this area, discussion does presuppose a respect for the integrity of the Biblical text (or the willingness to accept such a presupposition for discussion purposes) and a respect for the integrity of the faith of others and a lack of an agenda to undermine the faith of others.

Forum Rules: Here
See more
See less

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

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • 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.'

    Comment


    • 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.

      Comment


      • 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.

        Comment


        • 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).

          Comment


          • 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.

            Comment


            • 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'.

              Comment


              • 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.

                Comment


                • Can We Trust the New Testament?
                  Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?


                  THE MIRACLES

                  This picture of one who in utter faith and obedience is the Father's agent, and therefore the supreme representative of his love and power, is one that comes through all the Gospels. John merely draws it out in the paradox that he is completely one with the Father because the Father is greater than he (John 10.29f; 14.28). And he does this by stressing more than the others both Jesus's total dependence (as the one 'sent') and his complete freedom and intimacy with the Father. There is nothing he has that is not the Father's―and therefore nothing the Father has that is not his.The way in which he draws this out―when Jesus speaks, for instance, of the glory that he had with the Father before the world began (John 17.5)―often makes it sound as if Jesus for him was not a genuine historical human being at all. But that would be completely to misunderstand and misrepresent him. It would deny all that he has to say about the Word being made flesh. Such language is not to be taken at the level of psychological verisimilitude, of what he is most likely to have said (that would make Jesus a madman, as indeed the Jews, who do take it at that level, frequently say), but of theological verity, of what deep down is the truth lying behind him and his person. For the truth about this man is not to be exhausted by his physical origins. At that level, of course, he comes 'from Nazareth', and as a historical individual he is no more preexistent that you or I. (Lack of discrimination at this point has done a good deal in Christian theology to throw doubt on his humanity.) But as the embodiment of the self-expressive activity of God, as 'the Word', he goes back before John the Baptist (John 1.15), before Isaiah (12.41), before Abraham (8.58), and indeed before creation itself (1.1f; 17.5, 24). John never confuses the two levels (people like Nicodemus do that), but like a television or film producer he 'mixes' or superimposes his pictures, with great dramatic effect and often with irony and double entendres.

                  Comment


                  • Can We Trust the New Testament?
                    Chapter 6: WHO IS THIS MAN?


                    THE MIRACLES

                    If we do not distinguish the levels at which the New Testament writers are speaking and take the language of pre-existence like the language of myth and legend literally, as the sort of thing you might have heard if you had been around a tape-recorder, then we have only ourselves to blame―though we do not only have ourselves to put off. But if we can learn to trust the New Testament for what it is trying to say, rather than for not what it trying to say, then we may find ourselves concurring with the claim of St John as much as to of the say of the others, that 'his witness is true'―the real, inner truth of the history.

                    Comment


                    • Can We Trust the New Testament?
                      Chapter 7: WHAT CAME OF HIM?


                      If the question from which the Gospels begin, and indeed which they continue to pose throughout, is Who is this man?, the question to which they lead up and which dominates their second half is What came of him? In a real sense too this question is there from the beginning, since they are all written from the end, presupposing in everything they say about him what came out. And the question What came of him?, like the question Who is this man?, has to be answered both at the historical and at the theological level. In one sense it is a plain story with the events of Jesus's life working themselves out to their inevitable end, and to their utterly unexpected reversal on the third day, told with an attention to detail, a restraint and lack of doctrinal elaboration which is remarkable. On the other hand, 'what came of him' was theological through and through: the Spirit, the Church, the new age, the resurrection order―that total reality which led Paul to exclaim: 'When anyone is united to Christ, there is an new world; the old order has gone, and a new order has already begun' (2 Cor. 5.17). And that could only be described in language, like the language of the birth narratives, which bursts the bounds of factual description. Indeed there is no description of the resurrection―that is left to the apocryphal gospels. Naturally too the meaning colors the facts themselves, and sometimes it is difficult to know what is intended as interpretation and what is event. For instance, the rending of the temple-veil from top to bottom (and notice the symbolism of the direction) at the moment of Jesus's death (Mark 15.38), seen as destroying the barrier between man and God and declaring all things holy, is clearly a highly theological statement―whatever its factual basis, if any (and it has left no trace, amid many portents of the end, in Jewish records). Yet the amount of legendary material in the passion narratives is much less than in the birth stories. They are obviously controlled by the memory of what happened.

                      Comment


                      • Can We Trust the New Testament?
                        Chapter 7: WHAT CAME OF HIM?


                        THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS

                        The story of the death of Jesus and of what led up to it and flowed from it, which occupies such a disproportionate space in the Gospels (a third of Mark and nearly half of John) reflects the decisive importance for the early Christian preaching of the death and resurrection of Christ. It is this that dominates the early sermons in Acts and the Epistles―his birth is not mentioned and his ministry hardly at all (the most it rates is three verses in Acts 10.37-9). The disproportion then should not surprise us and it is clearly not determined by biographical considerations. What surely must surprise us, though, is the manner in which the subject is treated. We should not be led to expect, for instance, that the author of Acts was at all interested in the story of the passion. He follows up that curt summary of the ministry with the baldest possible account of Jesus' end: 'He was put to death by hanging on a gibber; but God raised him to life on the third day' (10.40). Yet how wrong we should be! In fact it is almost certain that Luke takes the trouble to weave together two independent stories of the passion, one which he shares with Mark and Matthew and one from a separate source; and this latter has interesting points of contact with John's, again apparently independent tradition.

                        Comment


                        • Can We Trust the New Testament?
                          Chapter 7: WHAT CAME OF HIM?


                          THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS

                          For as well as their theological interest in the meaning of the events it is surely evident that the early Christians had an interest in the historical story for its own stake. The passion narrative in all the Gospels is the Achilles' heel (and it is a pretty large one) of the theory of many of the form-critics that the Church had no concern for the historical framework of Jesus' life. According to this view, individual units of tradition (miracle-stories), parables, pronouncements and the rest) were simply handed down like collections of loose pearls and the Christian communities neither knew nor cared how they fitted together. The connecting thread, supplied later by the evangelists or redactors, was topical and theological: it affords no confidence for reconstructing the order of events. I believe this to be a perverse and one-sided reading of the evidence, even of the pre-passion narrative. I am convinced that their theological interest did not cancel but rather controlled their historical interest―and that their historical interest did not cancel but rather controlled their theological interest.

                          Comment


                          • Can We Trust the New Testament?
                            Chapter 7: WHAT CAME OF HIM?


                            THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS

                            This again may be illustrated supremely by the Fourth Gospel which, as well a being theologically the most profound, is full of historical and geological details for which no plausible doctrinal or symbolic reason can be found. They are there because that is how it happened―though how it happened, and when, and where, is also, for those with the eyes to see through the detail, of profound significance. Indeed, in a test study I once did of time and place in the Gospel narratives John came off the best, and Luke, surprisingly, the worst. In Acts, where he knew and covered the ground, he is very sharp. His narrative of Palestine, which evidently he did not know, apart from the environs of Jerusalem and Caesarea, is often extraordinarily vague. But it is a tribute to him as a theologian that where he does not know he does not invent: he generalizes. John, however, gives us a much more detailed topographical and chronological framework of the ministry. It is very different from that which we could deduce from the Synoptists alone―beginning with a pre-Galilean ministry of Jesus alongside John the Baptist in Judea and extending in all for at least three years and probably four. (The others mention only one Passover). The Synoptic account can be fitted into it but not vice versa. When we come to the passion narrative there is a major divergence―John dating the death of Jesus before the Passover meal was eaten (John 18.28), the Synoptists treating the last supper the previous evening as the Passover meal (Mark 14.12) and thereby making the trial and crucifixion take place during the festival. The resolution of this problem is far too complex to go into here, and scholars of course differ; but I think it would be fair to say that a majority if English scholars would believe John to be right. Whatever Jesus and his friends may have observed as their Passover celebration, it is almost incredible that the arrest, trial and crucifixion of Jesus could have taken place during the public festival in blatant defiance of all its detailed regulations. It seems far more likely that the Pharisees and chief priests should have pressed to get it out of the way before the festival started, as John says. In any case at this and many other points it is clear that the evidence of the Fourth Gospel has to be taken very seriously, if not preferred. It is in the historical and not simply the theological business.

                            Comment


                            • Can We Trust the New Testament?
                              Chapter 7: WHAT CAME OF HIM?


                              THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS

                              The passion narratives as a whole raise more questions than we can possibly treat here, but at one point in particular it is perhaps worth trying to correct a balance. For much recent popular writing has taken the line that the trial of Jesus is written up in a way that is largely propaganda rather than history. Two distorting tendencies have been detected. The first is an anti-Jewish bias, of seeking to throw all the guilt for the crucifixion on the Jews, while whitewashing the Romans. The second is a rewriting of the evidence to disguise the fact that Jesus and his followers were hand and glove with the Jewish nationalist cause and to dissociate them from the revolt that failed in 66-70 (showing them again to be good citizens of the Roman Empire).

                              Comment


                              • Chapter 7: WHAT CAME OF HIM?


                                THE TRIAL AND DEATH OF JESUS

                                It is to be observed first, as I mentioned earlier, that the Roman historian Sherwin-White, who has studied the story of the trial, like the narrative of Acts, from the point of view of its accuracy on points of law and social practice, gives it high marks. If the whole thing is a rewriting of history (on the Stalinist model), then the Church employed some very good historians. It is in fact the alternative scenarios which have been offered, of Passover plots and Zealot links, that are in my judgement the really tendentious readings of the evidence. It is notable that the Jewish historian Joseph had a very poor view of the Zealots but a very respectful view of Jesus and never suggests any connection between the two movements.

                                Comment

                                widgetinstance 221 (Related Threads) skipped due to lack of content & hide_module_if_empty option.
                                Working...
                                X