Jesus and the Gospels 9780567656193, 9780567656186, 9780567691156, 9780567656209

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
1 Introduction
The popularity of Jesus
One Jesus, many gospels?
This world or the next?
Other interpretations of Jesus
Beginning where we are
Further reading
2 Mark’s Gospel
Miracles
Teacher
Urgency
Conflict
The paradox of Mark’s Gospel
Son of Man and Son of God
Conclusion
Further reading
Questions
3 Matthew’s Gospel
Infancy stories (Chapters 1–2)
The five discourses (Chapters 5–7, 10, 13, 18, 24–5)
Appearances of the risen Jesus (Chapter 28)
Differences from Mark
Matthew’s portrait of Jesus
Conclusion
Further reading
Questions
4 Luke’s Gospel
Infancy stories (Chapters 1–2)
Resurrection appearances (Chapter 24)
Travel narrative (9:51–18:14)
Differences between Luke and Matthew/Mark
Luke’s portrait of Jesus
Conclusion
Further reading
Questions
5 John’s Gospel
Introduction (Chapter 1)
The Book of Signs (Chapters 2–12)
The passion narrative (Chapters 13–20)
Appendix (Chapter 21)
John’s portrait of Jesus
Conclusion
Further reading
Questions
6 Apocryphal Gospels
Gospel of Thomas
Gospel of Peter
Infancy Gospels
Further reading
Questions
7 The Quest for the Historical Jesus
Source criticism
Form criticism
Evaluation
Dissimilarity and plausibility
Further reading
Questions
8 Jesus: Prophet of the Coming Kingdom
Jesus and the Kingdom
Eschatology and the Gospels
A provisional assessment
Further reading
Questions
9 Jesus: Teacher and Sage
Jesus the peasant Jewish cynic
Peasant
Cynic
More cynics?
Wrede and Dodd
A provisional assessment
Two traditions are not enough
Further reading
Questions
10 Political and Ethical Interpretationsof Jesus
Jesus as political liberator
Jesus and His movement: a feminist portrait
Jesus as spiritual and ethical example
The ‘canonical Jesus’ as the Christ of faith
Summary
Further reading
Questions
11 Jesus in Art, Media and Culture
Jesus in art
Jesus in music
Jesus- films
On dealing with the many images
Further reading
Questions
12 How Christology Works: The Gospels in Practice
Twelve factors in Christology
The twelve factors at work
The challenge of Jesus through the Gospels
13 Reflective Postscript
Appendix
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Bibliography
Index of Biblical References
General Index

Citation preview

Jesus and the Gospels Third Edition

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Other titles in the T&T Clark Approaches to Biblical Studies series include: An Introduction to Revelation, Gilbert Desrosiers The Pentateuch: A Story of Beginnings, Paula Gooder An Introduction to the Study of Paul (Third Edition), David G. Horrell An Introduction to the Psalms, Alistair G. Hunter An Introduction to the Study of Ezekiel, Michael A. Lyons Jesus and the Gospels (Second Edition), Clive Marsh and Steve Moyise Joshua to Kings, Mary E. Mills Introduction to Biblical Studies (Third Edition), Steve Moyise The Old Testament in the New (Second Edition), Steve Moyise An Introduction to the Study of Luke-Acts (Second Edition), V. George Shillington An Introduction to the Study of Isaiah, Jacob Stromberg An Introduction to the Study of Wisdom Literature, Stuart Weeks

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Jesus and the Gospels Third Edition Clive Marsh and Steve Moyise

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First edition published 1999. Second edition published 2006. This edition published 2015 © Clive Marsh and Steve Moyise, 2015 Clive Marsh and Steve Moyise have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978–0–56765–619–3 978–0–56765–618–6 978–0–56765–620–9 978–0–56765–621–6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Introduction Mark’s Gospel Matthew’s Gospel Luke’s Gospel John’s Gospel Apocryphal Gospels The Quest for the Historical Jesus Jesus: Prophet of the Coming Kingdom Jesus: Teacher and Sage Political and Ethical Interpretations of Jesus Jesus in Art, Media and Culture How Christology Works: The Gospels in Practice Reflective Postscript

Appendix Matthew Mark Luke John Bibliography Index of Biblical References General Index

1 11 27 43 57 71 81 95 107 121 137 147 157 161 162 162 163 164 167 177 183

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Introduction

Writing the story of Jesus should be quite straightforward. He lived in the geographical area known as Palestine in what is called by the Western calendar ‘the first century’. There is quite a lot of evidence about his life, although like the material about any historical figure, it is not presented in neat and unadorned form. So even if historians need to work at it, we should be able to offer a sketch of his life. But readers of this book will be looking for more than just a sketch. They want to know what Jesus believed and thought. They want to know his actual words. They want to know whether he really did the sort of things the Bible says he did. Providing this is rather more difficult. For one thing, writing about someone’s life requires selectivity. Towards the end of John’s Gospel, we read: ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’ (20:30–1 NRSV). The author is not claiming to be neutral or to be giving a comprehensive account of Jesus’ life. He has selected just those incidents that he thinks will persuade his readers to adopt the position he is advocating. In fact, as we shall see in Chapter 5, he has largely selected a different set of incidents from those found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. A life story is also written from a certain angle. Even though the subject is just one person, the accounts which can be written about that person are numerous. Sometimes that is due to new evidence becoming available (such as letters, a relative speaking up after a long silence, long-lost tapes, or government documents being released). But this is not likely to happen very often for someone who lived 2,000 years ago, though some scholars believe the discovery in 1945 of the Gospel of Thomas is such an event. So writers may simply be offering a different 1

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slant on the person by emphasizing one particular aspect of their life. For example, Mark’s Gospel consists of sixteen chapters, of which the last six are concerned with the final week of Jesus’ life. Indeed, Mark tells us absolutely nothing about his first thirty years. He clearly wasn’t aiming to produce a balanced biography. A third difficulty is suggested by the name we give to our main sources. They are Gospels, accounts of the good news ‘fulfilled among us’ (Luke 1:1). Their aim is not simply to pass on historical data but to proclaim the evangelion (gospel). Thus Mark begins his account with the words, ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’. Christians claim that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was ‘the Messiah’, ‘the Saviour’, ‘the Lord’, or even ‘God’. Such claims naturally affect the way that evidence is handled. For example, those who hold such views are more likely to accept the miraculous element in the Gospels than those who do not. But it is not just a matter of what one will accept or reject. It also affects the sort of questions one will ask. For example, no one seriously doubts that Jesus was crucified. But the statement ‘Christ died for our sins’ (1 Cor 15:3) is a rather different sort of judgement. Historians cannot pronounce on that, but they can ask whether such a view was suggested by Jesus or is the product of later Christian reflection. So writing a definitive ‘life of Jesus’ is far from straightforward. Readers who want to get at ‘the historical Jesus’, regardless of what Christians have made of him, may feel that faith keeps getting in the way. But that is unavoidable. It is, after all, what the Gospels are aiming to produce. On the other hand, Christian readers who only dabble in historical enquiry may be unhappy at what they see being done to the Gospels in the name of history. For historical study is about testing sources, comparing different versions of events, and reconstructing the most likely scenario that explains the evidence. In particular, it will try not to say more than what the evidence allows (for an introduction to the historical study of the Bible, see Moyise, 2013b). But if Christian faith is linked closely to a historical figure, then it is difficult to dispute that such rigorous examination of texts is necessary. This book, therefore, deals throughout with matters of faith and history. The Gospels themselves link the two. Responsible reading of the Gospels requires that we carry on the struggle to clarify how the two are related.

Introduction

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The popularity of Jesus An Internet search with a major online bookstore revealed 177,156 hits for the keyword ‘Jesus’ and 17,231 for ‘Historical Jesus’ at the start of 2014. Jesus is clearly not someone to be confined to the church’s understandings of him, even though it is through Christianity’s careful preservation of four interpretations of his life and significance (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) that so much about him is known. The impact of Jesus’ sacrificial lifestyle, his commitment to a cause, his provocative teaching, his horrific death, his ability to relate to a wide cross-section of people—including those at the bottom of the social ladder—have all been cited as reasons why he has had such an impact. Sometimes people resist what has been made of Jesus (in the church, in the media, in departments of theology). But the historical figure of Jesus continues to be of great interest. We shall, however, need to examine how that influence occurs. Is it just the ‘historical Jesus’ who has that impact? Or is it the particular ‘image’ or ‘picture’ of Jesus that was being propagated at the time? History tends to support the latter view, for it is easily demonstrated that books about Jesus in the nineteenth century were very different from those produced in the Middle Ages or the first few centuries. Furthermore, even within one particular historical period there are many ‘images’ of Jesus. These images differ because of the variety of influences on people’s thinking and believing. For example, people’s image of Jesus today may derive from the Bible, a particular church tradition, films about Jesus, documentaries, study courses, stained-glass windows, and religious art. Thus when we refer to ‘Jesus and the Gospels’, we are not simply speaking about the Jesus of history (Jesus as he was). We are also speaking about the particular ‘images’ of Jesus that are conveyed by these texts.

One Jesus, many gospels? But what are we to do with the fact that so many images of Jesus exist? In this book, we cannot deal with the thousands of images of Jesus made throughout Christian history, in art and on film as well as in words. But even in Christian orthodoxy from earliest times, there have

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been a number of images of Jesus. Irenaeus (c. 200 ce) drew an analogy with the four living creatures of Rev 4:6–7, suggesting that John’s Gospel is like a lion, Luke’s like a calf, Matthew’s like a human being and Mark’s like an eagle (see Appendix). As Richard Burridge notes, this was probably no more than applying the order of the creatures to the order of the Gospels as Irenaeus knew them (1994, pp.  23–32). But it does show that each of the Gospels was seen to offer a different image or portrait of Jesus. However, the task is still to interpret the one Jesus. So we should not overplay this apparent diversity too much. No matter how many biographies and studies of the life and work of John F Kennedy there are (and yet may be), there was still only one JFK. It is important, though, not to pinpoint too easily or quickly where the ‘definitive’ portrayal of a person is to be found. As far as Christian faith is concerned, the four Gospels, when read in the light of the later creeds (especially the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds), are certainly ‘official and definitive’ in their reading of Jesus. But the church is a fallible institution, and its conclusions must always be open to question. If it is claimed that the church’s conclusions about Jesus somehow transcend all possibility of human error, then we need to be aware of the kind of judgement being made (i.e. that God enabled Christians at one particular point in history to speak or write infallibly). So although there is one Jesus there will always be many interpretations of him. Not all of them will be from a faith perspective, but all must deal with faith interpretations (Gospels), even if they dispense with some of the interpretations the Gospels offer (e.g. that Jesus is the Son of God). But because there is one Jesus, and he actually lived, then not all suggestions of what he was like will be equally plausible. It is possible, for example, to deny that Jesus was Jewish (and some have done so, with disastrous consequences), yet all the evidence suggests that he was Jewish and all serious historians regard it as a fact. So any interpretation, whether constructed in faith or not, has to deal with that aspect of Jesus’ life. As simple as it sounds, taking seriously the Jewishness of Jesus has been one of the most important factors in recent debate. Of course, not all ‘facts’ about Jesus’ life are quite so clear-cut. Indeed, as we shall see, the number of ‘facts’ which receive widespread agreement is not large. But then indisputable facts are not the whole story. If from

Introduction

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the first, history and faith were intertwined, then something more than ‘facts’ is being called for. Facts are not to be dispensed with. But the Gospels do not set out to present ‘facts’ alone. Indeed, even historians deal with more than just ‘facts’. Events that seem highly probable must be linked with some imaginative, interpretative leaps (‘if this, this and this happened, then it must have been because of this and that’). And given that Gospel writers and believers are not simply historians, our enquiry will prove an exciting and challenging one.

This world or the next? Many scholars (e.g. Wright, 1996) have suggested that modern presentations of Jesus can be divided into two main categories. Either Jesus was a prophet of the end-time, who expected the world to pass away soon, probably in his own lifetime; or he was a wise and subversive teacher, a teller of tales and a spinner of pithy sayings, who was more interested in what happens in this world than in speculating about the next. Both of these images, as we shall see in later chapters, are firmly grounded in the Gospels, and some readers will conclude from this that they must be simply combined. It might even be suggested that keeping them apart is just a way of keeping scholars of both camps in paid employment! But the scholarly debate has a crucial point to it, for history is never undertaken without purpose. If Jesus thought the end of the world was coming soon (see Mark 1:15; 9:1; 13:30), he was wrong. And this clearly has implications for how he is to be regarded. It is often assumed that the interpretation of Jesus as prophet of the end-time is somehow more Jewish, whereas the interpretation of Jesus as a wise teacher takes his Jewish origins less seriously. But this is not strictly true. Both are attempts to locate Jesus in his own time, and both try to clarify what kind of Jew he was and how he related to other firstcentury Jews. As we shall discover, it may seem easier to note the points of contact between the eschatological, prophetic tradition and the words and actions of Jesus. But this does not inevitably mean that Jesus must have been of that tradition. One other feature common to both interpretations is worth noting. They each make considerable use of the extensive historical research into the social, political and economic conditions of first-century

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Palestine. In the past, such data has featured rather less than it should, probably because of the doctrinal framework (i.e. faith perspective) within which so much enquiry into the person of Jesus was undertaken. More recently, the work undertaken by Sean Freyne (1988, 2004) and Richard Horsley (1987, 2003) on the region of Galilee, by Douglas Oakman (1986) into the first-century Palestinian economy, and by John Jacques Rousseau and Rami Arav (1996), James Charlesworth (2006) and Craig Evans (2012) on the relevance of archaeological findings, is especially significant.

Other interpretations of Jesus However, not all scholars fit neatly into one or other of these two interpretations of Jesus (ironically, not even Wright himself). Thus Ben Witherington (1994) attempts to combine both tracks into a single interpretation (Jesus was both an eschatological prophet and a wisdom teacher). Jon Sobrino (1978) approaches the task from a ‘liberation theology’ perspective, challenging the Western emphasis on abstract doctrine. And Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (1983) offers a feminist reading of Jesus, emphasizing the way in which the basileia (kingdom of God) was embodied within the community which Jesus formed around him. These variations show us that the ‘two-track’ approach is only an approximation. But it is undoubtedly helpful as a way of understanding the two main strands which intertwine within the theologically interpreted life-stories of Jesus, which we call Gospels. But that is only the scholars. Something should also be said about what people beyond the world of scholarship make of Jesus. Undoubtedly the image of Jesus as inspiring teacher is prevalent inside and outside Christianity. Within churches, though, other images gain prominence. Jesus the miracle-worker is especially emphasized as a counterpart to the belief in God’s capacity to transcend the natural conditions of the world. Indeed, the miracles of Jesus have been re-examined in recent scholarship (Meier, Theissen, Twelftree). Unlike so much historical enquiry from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which tended to assume that it had to explain away the miracle-stories in the Gospels, these studies show how the miracles are to be interpreted from their own first-century context. Without such studies, the image of

Introduction

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Jesus as miracle-worker can too easily lead to assumptions about Jesus which begin to lose sight of his humanity. Popular interpretations of Jesus are often prone to ‘Docetism’ (i.e. they suggest that Jesus was ‘really’ God and only ‘appeared’ to be human). But images of Jesus from beyond the world of scholarship are nevertheless important in drawing attention to what scholars might miss, or feel inclined to ‘explain away’.

Beginning where we are Before drawing this introductory chapter to a close, we must consider one further aspect of the way we interpret: the communities of interpretation out of which we approach the figure of Jesus. Of the various methods that have been used to study the Gospels, source, form and redaction criticism have dominated the scene, with literary or narrative criticism joining them from around the 1980s (Moyise, 2013b). Source criticism was concerned with the relationship between the Gospels, in particular, whether one or more of the Gospels used any of the others as a source. Form criticism was based on the observation that the Gospels are like ‘strings of pearls’. The individual units of tradition (known as pericopae) have been ‘strung’ together with simple phrases like ‘after this’ and ‘one Sabbath’. Attention therefore focused on the individual units (parables, miracles, controversy stories, speeches) and how they might have been modified in transmission. Redaction criticism focused on the contribution of the Evangelists, why they wrote and what they were hoping to achieve. This in turn led to an interest in the communities to which they were writing. Why did Mark feel he had to emphasize the suffering of Jesus? Why did Matthew feel he had to emphasize the Jewishness of Jesus? Answers varied (as we shall see), but knowing why someone wrote (their context) is an important factor in understanding what they wrote. More recently, scholars have awoken to the fact that the same is true of interpreters. Any interpreter of Jesus, any reader of Gospels, reads and interprets in a particular setting within a community (or range of communities). If I am a Christian, I shall be reading the Gospels within a church setting (even if not only there). If I am a student of religion, I shall be reading in an academic context (and I may be reading alongside psychologists, sociologists, historians or theologians). I may be reading

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this book for my own interest outside both of those settings, but doing so because I think the Bible is important (culturally or morally) or because I want some more information about Jesus. Even this seemingly individual intent locates me within a particular ‘reading community’. I will have political views, an economic status, a racial background and a sexual orientation, all of which locate me within particular groups of people which affect the way I read the Gospels and interpret the person of Jesus. There is no escaping this, and there should be no attempt to do so. Thus the historical figure can never be ‘the historical Jesus’ alone. He always reflects something of the communities by which he is interpreted. He should never be reduced to their needs. But he would not be considered at all if it were not thought that he was relevant to those needs. Literary or narrative criticism attempted to look at the Gospels as works of art, analysing such things as plot, characterization, narrative voice and temporal shifts. The aim was to analyse the story transmitted by each Gospel and to do so by comparing it with other stories (lives of famous people) or types of story (Greek tragedies). Some literary critics drew a sharp distinction between the ‘world of the text’ and attempts to reconstruct the history ‘behind the text’ but others treated them as complementary (Culpepper, 1983). In particular, if a writer is generally following the ‘lives of famous people’ genre but then departs from it, it may indicate a genuine historical tradition (e.g. Jesus asking God why he has forsaken him is not what one would expect from the hero of the story). We therefore invite readers, before embarking on their own encounter with the Gospel texts themselves, and then with a range of ways in which the Gospels have been studied in the search for the figure of Jesus, to reflect on the communities out of which they read. At least they will then be clearer about some of the reasons why they react to the Gospels in the way they do. And it will be more possible for a creative conversation to take place between reader, Gospels, and the interpretations of Jesus which exist. After such reflection, reading Chapters 2 to 12 of this book should prove even more fruitful.

Further reading A vital tool for studying the Gospels is known as a Synopsis, which sets out the passages in four parallel columns. A useful edition based on the

Introduction

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NRSV is B.H. Throckmorton, Gospel Parallels (1992). There are a number of useful Bible Dictionaries with articles on key topics (really encyclopaedias). See those edited by R.J. Coggins and J.L. Houlden (1990), J.B. Green, S. McKnight and I.H. Marshall (1992; 2nd edn. J.B. Green, J.K. Brown and N. Perrin 2013), J.H. Hayes (1999), D.N. Freedman (2000). Three excellent books which illustrate the variety of assessments of Jesus through the ages are J. Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries (1985), D.F. Ford and M. Higton (eds), Jesus (2002) and J.L. Houlden (ed.), Jesus in History, Thought and Culture. An Encyclopaedia (2003). For a workbook approach to the study of the Gospels, see D. Wenham and S. Walton, Exploring the New Testament: Introducing the Gospels and Acts (2nd edn; 2011). Other useful introductions are P. Perkins, Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels (2009), C.L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels. An Introduction and Survey (2009) and D.J. Scholz, Jesus in the Gospels and Acts. Introducing the New Testament (2009).

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Mark’s Gospel

Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels, beginning at Jesus’ baptism (nothing about his birth) and ending at the empty tomb (no resurrection appearances). For much of church history, it was thought to be an abbreviation of Matthew and hence less important. More than 600 of its 661 verses find a parallel in Matthew, and although early tradition suggests that Mark drew on the memories of Peter (see Appendix), the fact remains that it was not written by an apostle. This probably explains why so few commentaries were written on Mark in the early church and the book fell into neglect. However, during the nineteenth century, scholars such as Lachmann (1835) and Holtzmann (1863) showed that the ‘abbreviation’ theory is untenable. For example, the story of the demoniac and the pigs (Matt 8:28–34) occupies seven verses in Matthew but Mark’s account runs to twenty verses (Mark 5:1–20). The similarities between the two Gospels, particularly in their use of unusual Greek phrases, shows that the church was correct in seeing a relationship between them. But most scholars today believe that Matthew and Luke (at least in the form that we now have them) used Mark as one of their sources. This agreement transformed Mark into a document of great importance, for it was now seen as our earliest source for reconstructing the words and deeds of Jesus. It is for this reason that we begin with Mark, even though Matthew is the first Gospel in our printed Bibles. The flow of Mark’s story is relatively straightforward. At an undisclosed date (compare Luke 3:1), Jesus makes the journey to the River Jordan to be baptized by John. It turns out to be a pivotal moment in his life. The heavens are torn apart (schizō), the Spirit descends on him like a dove and a voice proclaims, ‘You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased’ (1:9–11). He is then led into the wilderness for forty days, ‘being tempted by Satan’. Mark does not include the three 11

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specific temptations that we find in Matthew and Luke. He only tells us (somewhat enigmatically) that ‘he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him’. We are not told what happened next. Based on John 3:22–30, Richard Bauckham thinks that Jesus worked alongside John for a period (1998, pp. 147–71) but Mark does not tell us this. He simply notes that after John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee and gathered disciples. From among these, twelve were specifically selected ‘to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons’ (3:14–15). Only one such ‘sending out’ is actually described (6:7–12). For the most part, the disciples remain ‘with’ Jesus as he embarks on an itinerant ministry of teaching, healing and exorcism in and around Galilee (chapters 2–9). In Mark 10:1, Jesus leaves Capernaum and makes his way to Jerusalem. He enters the city on a colt, retires for the night in Bethany and returns next morning, where there is a skirmish in the temple (11:12–19). Chapter  12, sees him in dispute with representatives of various Jewish groups. Chapter  13, is a long discourse predicting the destruction of the temple and, in some interpretations, the end of the world. Then comes the passion narrative. Jesus is anointed at Bethany, shares a final meal with the disciples, agonizes in the garden of Gethsemane, and is arrested and put on trial (chapter 14). He is then taken to the Roman procurator to be questioned (15:1–15). Pilate finds him innocent but the crowd demand his crucifixion and Pilate consents. He is crucified and buried (15:21–47). The most reliable Greek manuscripts then end with a brief description of the empty tomb (16:1–8), to which later copyists added resurrection stories (printed as a separate paragraph in modern Bibles), which have clearly been taken from the other Gospels (compare Mark 16:12–13 with Luke 24:13–35). Thus Mark presents Jesus’ ministry in two parts. The first ten chapters describe an itinerant ministry in and around Galilee. The last six chapters concern the last week of his life (‘the passion’) in and around Jerusalem. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark does not tell us anything about a miraculous birth or a child prodigy. Mark begins with Jesus’ baptism and moves rapidly to his death. Over a third of Mark’s Gospel is devoted to the final week of his life, earning it the description of ‘a passion narrative with an extended introduction’.

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Many scholars have also noted a thematic division in the Gospel. The first eight chapters present Jesus as a man ‘mighty in word and deed’. But the incident at Caesarea Philippi (8:27–30) seems to be a turning point. Jesus asks his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ They reply with a variety of answers: John the Baptist; Elijah; a prophet. He then asks, ‘But who do you say that I am?’, to which Peter replies, ‘You are the Messiah’. Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’ He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.’ (8:31–5)

Though chapters 9–16 are not devoid of miracles (there are three), the emphasis is on Jesus’ suffering. It is the focus of his teaching (9:30–2; 10:32–4; 12:1–12; 14:8; 14:18–25). And it is the climax of Mark’s story (14:34; 14:65; 15:15–20; 15:34). As Robert Gundry puts it: ‘The basic problem of Marcan studies is how to fit together these apparently contradictory kinds of material in a way that makes sense of the book as a literary whole’ (1993, p. 2).

Miracles Mark records thirteen specific healing miracles (including exorcisms) along with a number of summary statements such as 1:34 (‘And he cured many who were sick with various diseases’). The crowds are exēplēssonto (‘amazed’, ‘astonished’), exēstēsan (‘astounded’) and in 5:42, exēstēsan ekstasei megalē (literally, ‘amazed with a great amazement’). The effect of the miracles is that Jesus’ popularity knows no bounds. In the first chapter alone, we read:

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1:28 ‘At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.’ 1:33 ‘And the whole city was gathered around the door.’ 1:37 ‘When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” ’ 1:45 ‘And people came to him from every quarter.’ According to Theissen (1998, chapter 10), the healing stories fall into a number of categories. Some are narrated in a fairly simple threefold pattern: (a) the illness is described; (b) Jesus either says something or does something; and (c) the person is described as ‘healed’, ‘restored’ or ‘cleansed’. For example, in Mark 1:30–1: (a) ‘Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once’; (b) ‘He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up’; (c) ‘Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.’ Other stories are more complex. For example, the story of the paralytic (2:1–12) and the man with the withered hand (3:1–6) are both interwoven with a dispute. In the first, the ‘teachers of the law’ regard Jesus’ statement that the man’s sins are forgiven as blasphemy. From then on, the healing appears to be subsidiary to the dispute (2:10–11: ‘ “But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—“I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.” ’). In the story of the man with the withered hand, the dispute is over whether it is right to heal on the Sabbath. This time the healing remains central, but not before Jesus has outmanoeuvred his opponents. As well as healing stories, Jesus is involved in some spectacular ‘nature’ miracles. For example, when the disciples are struggling against a sudden storm, Jesus stands up and orders the wind and the waves to be still (4:39). On another occasion, Jesus comes to the disciples by walking on water (6:48). And just before that, he miraculously feeds a crowd of 5,000 from five loaves and two fishes (6:30–44). This is repeated in chapter 8, where seven loaves feed a crowd of 4,000. Proportionately, Mark contains more miracles (which he calls dynameis, ‘mighty works’) than any of the other Gospels.

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Teacher As well as a miracle-worker, Mark presents Jesus as a great teacher. This is seen in at least three ways. First, Mark describes the effect of Jesus’ teaching: ‘They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes’ (1:22). Secondly, Mark gives examples of Jesus confounding his opponents by his superior wisdom and insight. We have already mentioned two examples of this in the healing of the paralytic and the man with the withered hand. When Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, there are more overt examples: the paying of taxes to Caesar (12:13–17) and the nature of resurrection (12:18–27). Thirdly, Mark gives examples of his teaching, though these are relatively sparse compared with the other three Gospels (there is no sermon on the mount, Good Samaritan or Prodigal Son parables, or even the Lord’s Prayer). The two chapters that are particularly concerned with Jesus’ teaching are chapter 4, with its collection of ‘seed’ parables (sower, seed growing secretly, mustard seed), and the apocalyptic discourse in chapter 13. Both appear to be about the kingdom of God. The first speaks of its mysterious growth and inevitable harvest, while the latter speaks of the persecutions and suffering that will precede the ‘coming’ of the Son of Man. The interpretation of this language has been a key feature in understanding Mark’s portrait of Jesus. What was it that Jesus expected to happen?

Urgency One of Mark’s key words is euthus (‘immediately’), used no less than 42 times in the Gospel. It emphasizes the immediacy of the impact Jesus had on people. For example, when he calls the fishermen, ‘immediately they left their nets and followed him’ (1:18). When he gives the order for the leper to be clean, the leprosy immediately leaves him (1:42). When the teachers of the law think Jesus is blaspheming, he immediately knows what they are thinking (2:8). It is for this reason that the two-stage healing in Mark 8:22–6 stands out as exceptional. We have come to expect everything to happen immediately.

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Moreover, given that Jesus comes into Galilee and proclaims, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near’ (1:15), this urgency appears to be eschatological (from the Greek word eschatos, meaning ‘last’). Time is running out. He says to the disciples just before the transfiguration: ‘Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power’ (9:1). And at the conclusion of the apocalyptic discourse, we read: ‘Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place’ (13:30). If the ‘all things’ mentioned here looks back to Mark 13:24–7, he would appear to be predicting the end of the world: But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

On the other hand, if the sun and moon were darkened and the stars fell from the sky, there would be no one left alive to witness ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’. It is clearly figurative language. Indeed, the words come from Isaiah 13:10 and 34:4, where they refer to a historical judgement on Israel’s enemies. The difference is that now these images are being used to describe a judgement on Israel, in which its temple will once again be destroyed (13:2: ‘Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down’). It is clear then that Mark presents Jesus as expecting a cataclysmic event of some kind to happen soon. But there are differences of opinion (as we shall see later) as to whether this is the end of the world or the end of temple religion.

Conflict Mark’s Gospel is a story of conflict. We have seen how Jesus’ claim to forgive sins and willingness to heal on the Sabbath led to opposition from the religious authorities. This leads to a decision to kill Jesus as early as 3:6 (not until 12:14 in Matthew, and 19:47 in Luke). There is

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further conflict in Mark 7, where his opponents accuse him of eating with ‘unclean’ hands. He replies by calling them hypocrites (7:6). In chapter 8, they come asking for a sign and are sent away with the words, ‘Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation’ (8:12). The next few chapters focus on Jesus teaching his disciples, but hostilities are resumed in chapter 11 where he ‘cleanses’ the temple. Once again, the religious leaders vow to kill Jesus (11:18) and set a number of traps. He is questioned over his authority (11:27–33), paying taxes (12:13–17), the status of marriage at the resurrection (12:18–27) and the greatest commandment (12:28–34). But these turn out to be opportunities for Jesus to demonstrate his superior wisdom. When their attempts fail, they arrange to have him arrested, tried before the Sanhedrin and handed over to Pilate. Even on the cross, people abuse him, along with the criminals on his left and right (in Luke, one of the criminals is penitent and believes in Jesus). But behind this human conflict lies a supernatural conflict. As soon as Jesus is baptized, he is sent out into the desert. The word for ‘sent out’ is ekballō, the same word used for Jesus ‘casting out’ demons. Jesus is thrust out to do battle with Satan. We are not told the result, but many scholars believe that Mark 3:20–30 provides the answer. Jesus has been accused of working miracles by being in league with the devil (Beelzebul). He refutes the suggestion by declaring that a divided kingdom cannot stand, a divided house cannot stand and a divided Satan cannot stand (3:24–6). He concludes that ‘no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered’ (3:27). According to Kingsbury, this is the clue to Mark’s understanding of Jesus’ ministry. His exorcisms are signs that Satan’s kingdom is being plundered: God impels Jesus, whom he has just declared to be his Son, into the desert to confront Satan in the place of his abode. For forty days Jesus, sustained by angels, is put to the test by Satan. But far from succumbing to Satan’s assault, which would have alienated him from God, Jesus Son of God proves himself to be stronger than the ‘strong man’. Thus, he overcomes Satan and ‘binds’ him, and so inaugurates the eschatological age of salvation. (1983, p. 69)

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The paradox of Mark’s Gospel Most scholars believe the key to Mark’s understanding of Jesus lies in the way that ‘glory’ passages are juxtaposed with ‘suffering’ passages. For most of the first ten chapters, Jesus is a heroic figure, able to do whatever he likes. His wisdom astounds his hearers. His skill at debating humiliates his opponents. His power silences demons and heals people of their diseases. Yet when he faces death, he does not face it like heroes of the past nor those of the future. Compare, for example, Mark’s account of Jesus’ death with Luke’s account of Stephen’s martyrdom: Mark 15:33–4, 37

Acts 7:58–60

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’. . . Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.

Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him . . . While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he died.

Jesus’ cry of despair echoes the plea in the garden of Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–6). This is sometimes presented as simply Jesus’ reverent submission to God (‘not what I want, but what you want’) but there is more to it than that. First, there is the strong emotional language (‘distressed’, ‘agitated’, ‘deeply grieved’). Secondly, the strong physical language (‘he threw himself on the ground’), a contrast to Luke’s ‘knelt down, and prayed’ (Luke 22:41). And thirdly, the plea to avoid what is coming (‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me’) does not immediately result in Jesus’ acceptance, for Mark tells us that he repeated the prayer ‘saying the same words’ (14:39), and a third time (‘and once more’). The emotional turmoil (some would say despair) echoes the cry of dereliction on the cross. Paradox is also present in Jesus’ teaching ministry, for who, in the end, has he been able to convince? Those of us who work in education know that teachers are evaluated not by what they know but what their students have learnt. According to Mark, the religious leaders oppose him and have him killed. The crowds, who were initially amazed and astounded, call for his crucifixion (15:6–14). The people he grew up

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with take offence at him (6:3) and his own family try and ‘restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” ’ (3:21). This leaves the disciples, those specially chosen by Jesus to be with him. At the close of the parables chapter, Mark tells us that while parables are for outsiders, ‘he explained everything in private to his disciples’ (4:34). In chapters 8–10, Jesus withdraws from the crowds so as to teach the disciples (see especially 9:31). Among the disciples, Peter, James and John are singled out for special instruction and allowed to witness the raising of Jairus’ daughter (5:37) and the transfiguration (9:2). But how much have they grasped? They are rebuked for arguing over who is to be the greatest (9:33), for trying to stop a fellow exorcist (9:39), for forbidding children to come to Jesus (10:14), for criticizing the woman who anoints him (14:6) and for falling asleep in Gethsemane (14:37). Jesus criticizes their lack of faith in the two boat incidents (4:40; 6:50). He is amazed at their lack of understanding over a parable (7:18), and if Jesus says that the crowds have eyes that never see and ears that never hear in 4:12, he says the same of the disciples in 8:18. Apparently, the greatest teacher that ever lived has been unable to convince anyone as to his true nature and mission. Mark therefore presents us with a paradox. The most powerful man who ever lived died in despair, wishing that there was some other way of doing God’s will. The most famous teacher who ever lived is unable to impart understanding even to his closest disciples. Any interpretation of Mark must do justice to these two elements. In particular, it must offer a rationale for why Mark leaves us with such a paradox. The following are the main suggestions for explaining Mark’s paradoxical portrait of Jesus.

Victory only comes through suffering Mark is writing to Christians who are suffering persecution, either in Rome (c. 64 ce) or caught up in the Jewish/Roman war (c. 66–70 ce— see Mark 13:14). They are tempted to think that God has deserted them, for they do not appear to be winning any victories in Christ’s cause. But as Paul discovered, God’s glory is not revealed in strength but in weakness (2 Cor 12:8–10). The burden of Mark’s Gospel, on this view, is to show that even Jesus, with all his mighty power and superior wisdom, could only accomplish his work through suffering. The same will be

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true of his followers. To an earlier generation of scholars (Taylor, 1953; Cranfield, 1959), this was seen as Jesus fusing together the glorious ‘Son of Man’ figure from Daniel 7 with the ‘Suffering Servant’ of Isaiah 53. This is a rather neat solution, but probably too neat. There is little evidence that Jews of Jesus’ day were expecting either a messianic ‘Son of Man’ or a ‘Suffering Servant’. In particular, there are no actual quotations of Isaiah 53 in Mark’s Gospel. The three quotations that do appear in connection with Jesus’ death are Psalm 118:22–3 (‘The stone that the builders rejected’), Zechariah 13:7 (‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered’) and Psalm 22:1 (‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’). A more plausible solution, therefore, is that Mark drew on a number of Old Testament images in order to show that God vindicates the righteous (Moyise, 2001, pp. 21–33). It was the way for Jesus and it will be the way for Mark’s readers.

The crucified Jesus is the mighty Son of God Logically, this can be reversed. Robert Gundry (1993) believes that Mark’s readers are well aware that Jesus suffered and was crucified, for every time they attempt to preach the gospel, their audience remind them that Jesus was a convicted criminal who died an ignominious death. They do not need reminding that Jesus suffered and died, but they do need reminding that Jesus was the mighty Son of God, who won for them a powerful victory. According to the book of Acts, this is what Peter preached at Pentecost: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you . . . this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. (Acts 2:22–4)

Gundry accepts the ancient tradition that Mark was the interpreter of Peter (see Appendix), and thus sees a link with Peter’s sermon. According to Gundry, Mark aims to show how the ‘man attested to you by God with deeds of power’ was crucified ‘according to the definite plan and

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foreknowledge of God’. This is why the Gospel opens with the words, ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’ (1:1) and ends with the centurion declaring, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’ (15:39). If the disciples in the story find this hard to understand, this does not shake the readers’ belief, for not only is it affirmed at the beginning and end of the Gospel, it is also affirmed by God at Jesus’ baptism (1:11) and transfiguration (9:7). On this view, Mark is not trying to correct a Christology that sees Jesus as the mighty Son of God, with a Christology of suffering. Rather, by means of the passion predictions, the torn curtain and the empty tomb, Mark shows that Jesus’ crucifixion was really a mighty victory. Indeed, Gundry even thinks that it was the power of Jesus’ final cry (of victory) that tore the temple curtain.

Jesus was a spiritual rather than a political Messiah It is commonly assumed that Jesus went to great lengths to persuade people that he was the Son of God, the promised Messiah, who would save people from their sins. Why else would God become incarnate, if not to communicate with a lost humanity? But Mark portrays Jesus as frequently commanding silence from those who are healed, and refusing to work miracles to aid belief: 1:34 1:44 5:43 7:36 9:9

The demons are forbidden to say who Jesus is (see also 3:12). The leprosy sufferer is told to tell no one about his cure. Jairus is told to tell no one about the raising to life of his daughter. The crowd must not tell of the healing of the deaf mute. Peter, James and John are not to tell anyone about the transfiguration. 9:30 Jesus wants to keep his presence a secret. Indeed, for Mark, the reason Jesus taught in parables was not to aid understanding but to hide his message from outsiders (4:11–12). And when questioned by Pilate, he did not offer a defence but remained stubbornly silent. All this has been explained on the view that Mark wishes to present Jesus as a spiritual rather than a political Messiah. Had Jesus openly proclaimed himself to be the Son of God or Messiah, it would naturally have been taken as a political claim. He knew that groups like the Zealots would pounce on such claims and try to lead a revolt

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against Rome (as in fact they did c. 66–70 ce). So he veiled his teaching in parables. He spoke about the kingdom rather than proclaiming himself as king. He preferred to use the obscure ‘Son of Man’ (the Aramaic simply means ‘human’) rather than openly declaring himself to be the ‘Messiah’ or ‘Son of God’. But when put on oath to answer at his trial, ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’, he replied, ‘I am’ (14:61–2). On this view, the paradox of Mark’s Gospel is that he is the promised Messiah but very different from the Messiah that was expected.

Jesus was not and never claimed to be the Messiah In 1901, William Wrede published his famous book on the ‘messianic secret’. He highlighted the factors mentioned above but also pointed out that they are full of inconsistencies. For example, how could Jairus possibly say nothing about the raising of his daughter when there is a crowd of mourners outside? And if Jesus is seeking to avoid attention, why does he insist on healing the man with the withered hand in the middle of a synagogue service? Why not wait until the next day and see him privately? Why does he feed a crowd of 5,000 if he wants to remain anonymous? Even the parable theory is inconsistent, for the hearers of the parable of the vineyard know full well that ‘he had told this parable against them’ (12:12). It was not incomprehensible to outsiders, as Mark 4:11–12 claims. Wrede’s explanation for all this was that the early church was faced with a dilemma. They were openly proclaiming Jesus to be the Messiah (because of the resurrection), but Jesus himself never claimed such a thing. The solution was to suggest that Jesus knew himself to be the Messiah but wished to keep it quiet until after the resurrection (on this view, Mark 9:9 is an editorial addition). Unfortunately, trying to impose this theory on the Gospel traditions has led to an incoherent and unbelievable portrait of Jesus. We will have more to say about Wrede and a non-Messianic Jesus in later chapters.

Son of Man and Son of God Any interpretation of Mark must do justice both to the ‘glory’ passages and the ‘suffering’ passages. In terms of Mark’s Christology, this has

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often been discussed with respect to his use of the titles ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son of Man’. The distribution of these titles is curious, for ‘Son of Man’ appears to be Jesus’ preferred title (fourteen times), while Mark clearly wishes his readers to think of Jesus as ‘Son of God’ (1:1, 11; 9:7; 13:32; 15:39). This could be seen as a point in favour of Mark’s reliability. Mark sees Jesus as Son of God, but he does not make Jesus a mouthpiece for his own theology. Rather, he presents Jesus as preferring ‘Son of Man’, even though the early church (according to Acts) seems to have ignored it. On the other hand, Mark presents Jesus as using ‘Son of Man’ as a title, whereas the Aramaic phrase simply means ‘a human being’, sometimes with a self-reference (‘one such as I’). This sounds odd at first but there is evidence in the Gospels that ‘I’ and ‘Son of Man’ bear the same meaning: Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven. (Matt 10:32) And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God. (Luke 12:8)

Did Jesus use the phrase as a self-reference (‘one such as I’), which was only taken as a title when the Aramaic was translated into Greek (the form of the Greek is definitely a title)? It would certainly clarify Mark 9:12 (‘How then is it written about the Son of Man, that he is to go through many sufferings . . .?’), since there are no Old Testament texts which predict a suffering ‘Son of Man’. But in Aramaic, the saying would simply mean, ‘How then is it written about “one such as I”, that he is to go through many sufferings . . .?’ In other words, it could point to a host of passages that predict the suffering of a righteous person. It is also a plausible understanding of most of the other sayings in Mark: 2:10 But so that you may know that ‘one such as I’ has authority on earth to forgive sins. 2:27f The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath; so ‘one such as I’ is lord even of the Sabbath. 10:33 See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and ‘one such as I’ will be handed over to the chief priests.

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13:26 Then they will see ‘one such as I’ coming in clouds with great power and glory. 14:62 You will see ‘one such as I’ seated at the right hand of the Power. Those who dispute this interpretation do so on the grounds that 13:26 and 14:62 are probably allusions to Daniel 7, which speaks of ‘one like a son of man’ receiving ‘glory and kingship’ and an ‘everlasting dominion that shall not pass away’ (Dan 7:14). Jesus, it is maintained, is not just saying ‘one such as I’ but is claiming to be the exalted figure in Daniel’s vision. But the two views are not mutually exclusive. Daniel’s vision contrasts the four beasts, which represent evil empires, with ‘one like a son of man’ (NRSV: ‘one like a human being’), who receives an everlasting kingdom. But when Daniel asks for an interpretation of the vision, he is told that ‘the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever’ (7:18). Jesus may not be saying, ‘I am the Son of Man’, as if this were an expected figure like ‘Messiah’ (‘riding on the clouds’). But he may be alluding to the whole scenario of Daniel 7, in order to express his hope that his obedience unto death will be vindicated by God.

Conclusion The early church believed that Mark was an abbreviation of Matthew and so the book fell into neglect. But most scholars today (Farmer is an exception) believe that Mark is the earliest Gospel and therefore of great importance. In particular, its candid portrayal of a suffering, forsaken Jesus (and the many failures of the disciples) has resonated powerfully with post-war readers (cf. Moltmann’s The Crucified God). More recently, the paradoxical nature of the Gospel (on some readings) has appealed to what many have called our postmodern world. Far from providing ‘answers’, Aichele deduces from the Gospel’s abrupt ending that Mark is not a story which ends happily or comfortably for readers who want the reinforcing of Christian faith. It does not end with a meeting between the disciples and the resurrected Jesus, nor with Jesus seated on the right of God. It does not end with an imperishable message of everlasting salvation spreading out from east to west,

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nor with the end of the reign of Satan, nor with a promise of heavenly glory, nor with Jesus transformed, nor with transformed disciples. (1996, p. 51)

For such things, we have to look to the other Gospels and the rest of the New Testament. Though once regarded as a straightforward historical account of Jesus, Mark is increasingly seen as a profound and somewhat paradoxical book.

Further reading Cambridge University Press has an excellent series on the theology of the various New Testament writings. Bill Telford’s volume on Mark (The Theology of the Gospel of Mark, 1999) is one of the best and looks at the Gospel from historical, literary and theological perspectives. For an insightful exploration of the theme of ‘conflict’ in the Gospel, see S. Garrett, The Temptations of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel (1999). D. Rhoads and D. Michie (Mark as Story, 1982) were the first to use literary methods to analyse the Gospel, and were followed by Bas van Iersel, Reading Mark (1989) and Mark. A Reader-Response Commentary (1998). Rhoads has now produced his own book (Reading Mark—Engaging the Gospel, 2004). For a postmodern exploration of the paradoxes of Mark, see G. Aichele, Jesus Framed (1996). And for a political reading, see R. Horsley, Hearing the Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel (2001). Unlike in the early centuries, there are now numerous commentaries on Mark. For detailed comment on the Greek text, see Gundry (1993), Marcus (2000, 2009), France (2002), Stein (2008). For more general comment, see Hooker (1991), Painter (1997), Witherington (2001), Healy (2008).

Questions 1. What are the main characteristics of Mark’s portrait of Jesus? 2. Which of the four options mentioned on pages 19–22 do you find the most convincing, and why? 3. What do you think Jesus was expecting to happen soon?

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Matthew’s Gospel

Since Matthew contains over 90 per cent of Mark, one might assume that its picture of Jesus is essentially the same. There is, for example, the same juxtaposition of powerful miracle-worker and suffering death. Matthew includes all but two of Mark’s miracle-stories, and Jesus’ only words from the cross are, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (27:46). He also follows Mark’s structure of a Galilean ministry, which reaches a climax in Peter’s confession, followed by a final week in Jerusalem. The Galilean ministry begins with the same sense of urgency (‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’), and there are similar conflicts with demons and religious leaders. However, Matthew differs from Mark in at least four significant ways. First, he includes two chapters of infancy stories. Mark tells us nothing about Jesus’ birth or early life. Matthew begins with a genealogy, which traces Jesus’ lineage back to Abraham. He then tells us of the miraculous conception of Jesus, the visit of the magi, the flight to Egypt, and the subsequent settling in a town called Nazareth. On its own, Mark could be interpreted as meaning that Jesus was an ordinary man until his experience of God at his baptism (a view known as adoptionism). Matthew makes it clear that God was involved in his life from the very moment of conception. Indeed, his conception was a work of the Holy Spirit (1:18). Secondly, Matthew presents Jesus’ teaching in five major blocks or discourses (chapters 5–7, 10, 13, 18, 24–5). The first of these is usually called the ‘sermon on the mount’. This is where we find the beatitudes (‘Blessed are the poor in spirit/those who mourn/the meek’), the Lord’s Prayer, and the parable of the wise and foolish builders. Chapter  10 appears to be an expansion of Mark’s sending out of the twelve (Mark 6:7–12), with additional teaching on discipleship and persecution (Matt 10:17–42). Mark’s collection of ‘seed’ parables (Mark 4:1–34) is 27

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expanded to include the parables of the ‘wheat and tares’, ‘hidden treasure’, ‘costly pearl’ and ‘net’ (Matt 13:24–52). Matthew 18 begins with the saying about receiving the kingdom like a child (Mark 10:15) but leads into a discourse about relationships within the church. And Matthew 24–5 contains an expansion of Mark’s apocalyptic discourse (Mark 13:5–37), which now ends with a sequence of parables (‘faithful servant’, ‘ten virgins’, ‘talents’, ‘sheep and goats’). Thirdly, Matthew narrates a reunion between Jesus and the disciples in Galilee (28:16–20). We do not know whether Mark intended to end his Gospel abruptly for theological reasons or if the original ending was lost, but Matthew differs from our earliest manuscripts of Mark in that he provides a ‘happy’ ending. The women overcome their fear and set out to tell the disciples about the empty tomb. On the way, the risen Jesus appears to them and they ‘took hold of his feet, and worshipped him’ (28:9). Then Matthew describes the reunion of Jesus and the disciples in Galilee where they too ‘worshipped him; but some doubted’ (28:17). The Gospel ends with the triumphant commission to go and ‘make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you’ (28:19–20). Fourthly, there are a number of differences between Matthew and Mark when they each tell the same story. Most scholars believe these to be Matthew’s changes to Mark, though it has to be said that it is difficult to find a consistent rationale that explains them all. For example, many of Matthew’s stories are shorter than the version in Mark, but that is not true of the temptation narrative, in which Matthew includes three specific temptations. Some of Mark’s secrecy sayings have gone, but not all of them. If Matthew was unhappy with this element of Mark, why did he not remove them all? We shall now look at each of these four areas of difference in more detail.

Infancy stories (Chapters 1–2) Mark opens his Gospel with the words, ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ Matthew begins, ‘An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ It is evident from this that Matthew wishes to tie the story of

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Jesus far more closely to Jewish history than Mark does. The opening words in Greek are biblos geneseōs (‘book of origins’), which links Matthew’s story with God’s creative acts at the very beginning (Gen 2:4; 5:1). Mark tells us that Jesus is ‘Son of God’ which Matthew will affirm elsewhere, but here he emphasizes Jesus’ continuity with David, king of Israel, and Abraham, the father of Israel. It is probably for this reason that the NRSV has chosen to translate christos as ‘Messiah’ in Matthew 1:1 but ‘Christ’ in Mark 1:1 (virtually as a surname). Also of note in this very Jewish opening is the fact that the genealogy mentions three women by name (Tamar, Rahab, Ruth), all of whom are Gentile or have Gentile connections. Several suggestions have been offered for this. It could be that it anticipates the admission of Gentiles into the people of God (Matt 28:19–20). Or it might anticipate the role of Mary in the birth of Jesus, though Matthew’s emphasis is more on Joseph. A third possibility is that Matthew is making a more general point about God, who uses people from all walks of life to fulfil his purposes. Many readers will know the infancy stories through nativity plays where Matthew, Luke and a little imagination are combined. Matthew’s account does not actually describe the birth of Christ. It simply tells us that Joseph ‘had no marital relations with [Mary] until she had borne a son’, that this son was named Jesus, and that this happened in the time of King Herod (1:24–2:1). What Matthew does emphasize is the way that these events are a fulfilment of scripture: All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’, which means, ‘God is with us.’ (1:22–3; cf. Isa 7:14) They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” ’ (2:5; cf. Mic 5:2) Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’ (2:14–15; cf. Hos 11:1)

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Herod . . . killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’ (2:16–18; cf. Jer 31:15) There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, ‘He will be called a Nazorean.’ (2:23; source unknown)

Study of these and the many other quotations in Matthew has led some scholars to the conclusion that the author is a converted Jewish scribe and that the Gospel is the product of a school of interpretation. Krister Stendahl (1968), for example, draws parallels with the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were the product of a community engaged in scripture study, intent on showing that the ancient prophecies were coming true in their own history. To do this, they used a number of interpretative techniques. For example, scripture was known in a variety of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts. This was exploited by the Qumran interpreters by choosing the reading that best supported the author’s point. Matthew does the same when he quotes Isaiah 7:14, not according to the Hebrew, which speaks of a young woman (almah) conceiving, but a Greek translation which uses the word ‘virgin’ (parthenos). Another technique was to change the actual wording of the quotation in order to clarify its true meaning (in the eyes of the interpreter). In Matthew’s quotation of Micah 5:2, both the Hebrew and the Greek say that Bethlehem is the least among the rulers of Judah but Matthew has inserted the word oudamõs (‘by no means’), effectively reversing the meaning (‘by no means least among the rulers of Judah’). The aim is not deception. The readers probably know what the original quotation says. Rather, it is a way of making the point that now that Jesus has been born in Bethlehem, it will no longer be considered least among the rulers. Modern exegesis would prefer to make the point in two stages. It would first quote the text accurately and then point out that an ironic reversal has taken place. But first-century exegesis was happy to combine these in a single modified quotation.

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If Stendahl is correct, then it is hard to believe that the author is a tax-collector, as Christian tradition has maintained (see Appendix). Indeed, the question of the authorship of the Gospel appears confused from the very beginning. In Mark 2:14, the tax-collector is called ‘Levi son of Alphaeus’ and does not appear in the list of the twelve (though there is a James, son of Alphaeus in Mark 3:18). In Matthew’s Gospel, the tax collector is now called Matthew and does appear in the list of the twelve (Matt 9:9; 10:4). Now our two earliest witnesses to the authorship of the Gospels are Papias (c. 130 ce) and Irenaeus (c. 180 ce), who both speak of Matthew as recording ‘the sayings’ (Papias) or ‘his gospel’ (Irenaeus) in the Hebrew tongue (see Appendix). Irenaeus adds that this was when ‘Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel in Rome and founding the church there’. Several questions arise from this testimony, however. First, did they have actual evidence for this view or were they simply making a deduction from the change in the name of the tax-collector? Secondly, both claim that Matthew wrote in the Hebrew tongue but the Gospel, as we have it, was certainly composed in Greek. Indeed, the majority of scholars believe that the author used the Greek text of Mark as one of his sources. Thirdly, what does Papias mean by ‘the sayings’? This could be referring to a collection of Jesus’ sayings rather than to what we know as Matthew’s Gospel. And fourthly, when were Peter and Paul founding the church in Rome? It is clear from Paul’s letter to the Romans (c. 55 ce) that he is not the founder of that church (Rom 1:8–13). Does Irenaeus mean ‘establishing’ rather than ‘founding’? Or is this simply a second-century defence of the pre-eminence of the Roman church and the apostolic authorship of the four Gospels? Most scholars today accept that the author, who is not named in the Gospel, must remain anonymous, though the traditional view still has its supporters (e.g. France, 2007).

The five discourses (Chapters 5–7, 10, 13, 18, 24–5) Each of the five discourses ends with a formula like ‘when he had finished these sayings’ (7:28; 11:1; 13:53; 19:1; 26:1), which suggests a deliberate plan to interweave narrative and discourse. Furthermore, from the length of these discourses and their position in the Gospel, it

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also seems that the author had an eye for symmetry. The first and last are long discourses of around 100 verses; the middle two are the shortest discourses of around 40 verses; and the central discourse, seen by some as pivotal, has 52 verses. Chapter(s)

Theme

5–7

Discourse on righteousness

10

Discourse on missionary work

13

Discourse on the kingdom

18

Discourse on the church

24–5

Discourse on things to come

(109 verses) (42 verses) (52 verses) (35 verses) (97 verses)

Since this is a sizeable collection of teaching, one might ask where this material came from and what sort of picture of Jesus it offers. One suggestion is that when Papias says that Matthew ‘compiled the Sayings in the Aramaic language’, he is not referring to the written Gospel but to an earlier ‘sayings’ source. If this is correct, then it could be that Matthew’s Gospel draws on a tradition that goes back to the tax-collector and a tradition that goes back to Peter (i.e. Mark). This would be a neat solution to the authorship question but is no more than a speculation. So what picture emerges from this material? Clearly it portrays Jesus as a great teacher. One of the intriguing aspects of Mark is that while it tells us that Jesus taught with authority, it does not actually tell us much about what he taught. This is remedied in Matthew, where Jesus delivers his teaching in five great blocks, just as the Psalms and the Torah are each divided into five books. Bacon (1930) focused on the latter and argued that Matthew presents Jesus as a new Moses, bringing a new law to God’s people. Thus Jesus delivers his great discourse on righteousness from a mountain and specifically links his teaching with that of Moses (‘You have heard . . . But I say to you’—5:21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43). There are many similarities in their birth stories, notably the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ (Matt 2:16–18; Exod 1:15–22) and the mention of Egypt. And when Jesus ascends the Mount of Transfiguration, his face shines, as did the face of Moses at Mount Sinai (Exod 34:29–35). Further parallels can be found in Dale Allison’s excellent study, The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (1993). Others have drawn attention to the ‘wisdom’ nature of Jesus’ teaching. Far from issuing threats about the end of the world, much of this

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material focuses on a particular type of lifestyle. Burton Mack (1997, pp. 32–3) believes that Matthew has taken this from the sayings source commonly called Q which, according to his summary, presents Jesus as a wandering Cynic philosopher. Thus Jesus: ● ● ● ●

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

criticizes the rich and their wealth; criticizes hypocrisy and pretension; is fearless in the presence of those in power and authority; renounces those supports generally considered necessary for human life; calls for voluntary poverty; offers a challenge to fearless and carefree attitudes; preaches an etiquette for unashamed begging; preaches an etiquette for responding to public reproach; preaches non-retaliation; urges disentanglement from family ties; has a strong sense of independent vocation; is concerned for personal integrity and authenticity; issues a challenge to live naturally at any cost; preaches reliance on the natural order; is single-minded in the pursuit of God’s kingdom; is confident in God’s care.

The discourses on missionary work (chapter 10), the kingdom (chapter 13) and things to come (chapters 24–5) all have parallels in Mark. But the discourse on the church (chapter 18) stands out as a particular characteristic of Matthew. The promise to Peter in Matthew 16:19 that ‘whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven’ is extended to the church in 18:18. Immediately before that, we are told: If another member of the church (RSV: ‘our brother’) sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church (ekklēsia); and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church (ekklēsia), let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. (18:15–17)

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Appearances of the risen Jesus (Chapter 28) Unlike Mark’s Gospel, which appears to end abruptly, Matthew narrates the promised rendezvous in Galilee, where the disciples worshipped Jesus (though some doubted). Then Jesus proclaims, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me’ (Matt 28:18). He then commands them to make further disciples, to baptize them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to teach them to obey all that he has commanded. What is extraordinary about this is the way that Jesus now appears to be the mouthpiece for Christian doctrine. One might expect a command to baptize in his name, but here we have the Trinitarian formula that was to become the mark of Christian orthodoxy. Could Jesus have said this? Conservatives will answer in the affirmative. If Jesus is the Son of God, who has been raised from the dead, of course he would know about the Trinity and be fully aware of his place within the Godhead. But it is not quite as simple as that, for if we look at the rest of the New Testament, we find that the early church baptized in the name of Jesus (Acts  2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5; Rom 6:3), not in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Can we accept that a few weeks after Jesus gave this command, they forgot it until it was revived in the second century? Most scholars prefer the view that Matthew has simply inserted the formula that was being used in his church (e.g. Gundry, 1994, p. 596), just as he inserted his version of the Lord’s Prayer (compare Matthew 6:9–13 with Luke 11:2–4). The Gospel ends with the promise, ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (28:20), mirroring the beginning of the Gospel, where Emmanuel was explained as ‘God with us’ (1:23). Furthermore, the church is given the promise that when ‘two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’ (18:20). Thus a significant aspect of Matthew’s Christology is the presence of God in the story of Jesus, a story that did not come to an end with the crucifixion (Luz, 1995, p. 32). As we will see later, Matthew does not go so far as John, who speaks of a pre-existent relationship between God and Jesus. But he does speak of the presence of God in Jesus and the ongoing presence of Jesus in the Christian community.

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Differences from Mark It is very difficult to posit a consistent rationale for all of Matthew’s differences from Mark. Most scholars believe them to be deliberate changes by Matthew, though other explanations are possible. For example, it may be that he had more than one version of a story and sometimes chose that rather than Mark’s. Or he may have used an earlier version of Mark, which was later revised (Luz, 1995, p. 7). Some of the differences which are thought to be significant are the following:

The voice crying out in the wilderness (Matt 3:3) Mark opens his Gospel with a quotation from ‘the prophet Isaiah’ (1:2). But what immediately follows are words from Mal 3:1 and Exod 23:20 (‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way’). Only after that do we find the words of Isa 40:3 (‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’). Most scholars believe that Matthew has ‘corrected’ Mark, moving the Malachi/ Exodus quotation to later in the Gospel (11:10) so that words from Isaiah follow the ascription to Isaiah. Those who transmitted the Gospel manuscripts took a different course: they changed Mark’s ‘the prophet Isaiah’ to the plural ‘the prophets’ (the reading found in the King James Bible).

Plucking corn on the Sabbath (Matt 12:1–8) Mark’s stark account could suggest that ‘one such as I’ (or ‘Son of Man’) is free to break the law (Mark 2:23–8). Matthew agrees with most of Mark’s wording but has a quotation of Hos 6:6 (‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’), which offers something of an explanation. This Old Testament text is clearly of some importance to Matthew as he also includes it in his story of the calling of Levi/Matthew (9:13).

Parable purpose (Matt 13:10–15) In using the Greek word hina, Mark appears to say that Jesus told parables ‘in order that’ those who are outside might be kept from seeing (Mark 4:12). Matthew also has this saying but uses the Greek word

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hōste, implying that this was the result of speaking in parables but not necessarily their purpose.

Miracles in his home town (Matt 13:54–8) Mark bluntly tells us that Jesus ‘could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them’ (Mark 6:5). Matthew appears to ‘explain’ this by saying that Jesus did not do many miracles there ‘because of their unbelief ’.

The conclusion to the ‘walking on water’ incident (Matt 14:32–3) At the end of this incident, Mark condemns the disciples ‘for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened’ (Mark 6:52). Matthew concludes on a much more positive note: ‘And those in the boat worshipped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God”.’ Mark never has the disciples calling Jesus ‘Son of God’.

Peter’s confession (Matt 16:16–19) In Mark, there is some ambiguity as to how Jesus regarded Peter’s confession (Mark 8:29–30). In Matthew, not only does Peter’s confession include the words ‘the Son of the living God’ (cf. last example), but Jesus congratulates him and gives him this special promise: Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

Matthew’s portrait of Jesus Founder of the Church Matthew’s Gospel is the only Gospel to use the Greek word ekklēsia. The choice of the twelve disciples to parallel the twelve tribes of Israel was

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clearly an act of community formation, though this is never made explicit in Mark (contrast Matt 19:28). But in the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is reported as saying, ‘I will build my church’ (16:18). And in chapter 18, specific instructions are given to ‘tell it to the church’ (18:17).This emphasis on ‘the church’ can also be seen in the parable of the lost sheep. In Luke, the conclusion to the parable is that ‘there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety nine righteous people who need no repentance’ (Luke 15:7). But in Matthew, it is about members of the church who go astray (Matt 18:10–14). John Riches explains: Whereas Luke refers to the ‘lost’ sheep (Lk. 15:4) and explains the parable in terms of repentance (v. 7), Matthew speaks about the sheep ‘going astray’ (Mt. 18:12) and explains the parable in terms of ‘not being lost’ (5:14). Luke’s parable is about bringing those outside the group in; Matthew’s about the need to do all in one’s power to ensure that the erring member is not finally lost to the group. Matthew’s concern here is clearly that of the pastor who is seeking all means in his power to hold his congregation together. (1996, p. 74)

The careful arrangement of the teaching into five blocks facilitates Matthew’s use as an instruction manual for church leaders: they deal with conduct, mission, the kingdom, settling disputes and waiting for the end. In Mark, discipleship means ‘take up your cross’, that is, be willing to die for Christ. Matthew agrees with this but also offers practical advice on living in community, embarking on mission, and waiting for the arrival of God’s kingdom. Thus according to Powell, one of the reasons for writing Matthew’s Gospel was probably that the author felt that ‘Mark contains no effective doctrine of the church’ (1998, p. 75).

Son of God For Jack Kingsbury (1988), ‘Son of God’ is the key title in Matthew, the one that interprets and gives content to all the others. Thus in Peter’s confession, Jesus is not just Messiah but ‘Son of the living God’ (16:16). The high priest not only asks if Jesus is the Messiah but whether he is

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the ‘Son of God’ (26:63). The disciples worship him as ‘Son of God’ in the conclusion of the ‘walking on water’ incident (14:33). The crowd at the crucifixion criticize Jesus because he called himself ‘Son of God’ (27:43). The infancy stories stress that Jesus is God’s Son. The three specific temptations revolve around sonship (‘If you are the Son of God . . .’). And most significant of all, Jesus declares: All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. (11:27)

In Mark, Jesus only speaks obliquely of himself as ‘Son’ (12:6; 13:32), but in Matthew there is an explicit reference to an intimate relationship between Father and Son. Schnackenburg says of this verse that the ‘mutual knowledge of Father and Son is a loving familiarity, a knowledge that approaches a vision of each other’s essence’ (1995, p. 98). This is perhaps reading too much into a single verse, though as we will see in chapter 5, it would be an accurate description of John’s Gospel. But it does mark an ‘advance’ (in the sense of being more explicit) on what is said in Mark’s Gospel.

King of Israel However, alongside these ‘Christian’ categories must be set the fact that Matthew is commonly recognized as the most Jewish of the Gospels (cf. the early testimony that it was composed in Hebrew). Whether or not Bacon is correct in seeing the five discourses as a parallel to the Torah, the allusions to Israel’s history are certainly extensive. Jesus is described as the ‘son of David’ (nine times). In contrast to the hateful King Herod, Jesus is Israel’s true king. He has come to fulfil the law, not abrogate it (5:17). Indeed, contrary to popular belief, Jesus’ ministry was not to everyone but only to the ‘lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (10:6; 15:24). He assumes that the disciples will continue in traditional Jewish piety (‘When you fast . . .’) and even advises obedience to what the Pharisees teach (23:3), though not to what they do. Thus we should not be too hasty in assuming that Matthew presents Jesus as the model of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The title ‘Son of God’

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might be bursting the wineskins of traditional Jewish interpretation(s) but it is still some way from the later Christian creeds. And though Jesus appears as ‘founder of the church’, it should be remembered that he was a Jew, not a Christian. His concern in his earthly life was a mission to fellow Jews, even prohibiting his disciples from preaching to outsiders. And when he wants an illustration of an outcast, the person who will not listen to the church is to be regarded as a ‘Gentile and a tax collector’ (18:17). For some, this is evidence that the author of the Gospel is unlikely to be either a Gentile or a tax-collector.

Critic of contemporary Judaism Not only is Matthew the most Jewish of the four Gospels, it also contains the most extreme critique of Judaism. Two passages stand out in particular. In the trial, the Jews are made to say: ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ (27:25). Whatever Matthew’s intention in writing this (it did not come from Mark), it has fuelled the most horrific anti-Semitism down the centuries. And if we are tempted to write this off as simply Matthew’s bigotry (as some do), chapter 23 has Jesus delivering a terrible series of woes against the Pharisees. It has often led to a caricature of firstcentury Judaism as ‘pettifogging legalism’. But Sanders (1985, 1993) has challenged this picture. There are no extant texts, he says, which suggest that first-century Jews believed they had to earn their salvation. Far from it; despite the diversity and forms of Judaism in the first century, they were united in their view that they were inheritors of a covenant of grace. And when they did sin, the sacrificial system was there to restore the relationship. Most commentators believe that Matthew has allowed his own experience of conflict between church and synagogue to influence his portrait of Jesus here. Schnackenburg, for example, says that Matthew 23 ‘bears the special signature of the evangelist, who fills it with his criticism of contemporary Judaism’ (1995, p.  83). And Matthew’s frequent references to their synagogues and their teachers (4:23; 7:29; 9:35; 10:17; 13:54) tend to support this. On the other hand, others have pointed out that Jesus’ criticisms are no worse than that of an Amos or Jeremiah, so that the epithet of ‘anti-Semitist’ is misguided. Jesus did have some strong things to say to his contemporaries but that does not amount to anti-Semitism. It is a critique from within, not racism from outside.

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Conclusion By incorporating almost all of Mark into his Gospel, Matthew naturally shares many of its characteristics. But he has developed the picture of Jesus to bring out his own particular emphases. Jesus is the founder of the church. He is Son of God, a figure worthy of worship, whose presence with the disciples fulfils the promise of Emmanuel, ‘God with us’. He is also Israel’s true king, the promised Messiah, whose earthly ministry was confined to the Jewish people. But the scope is ultimately universal. Jesus’ final command to the disciples is to go and make disciples from all the nations. And as churches sprang up throughout the known world, they adopted Matthew’s Gospel as the ‘church Gospel’. It told them of their foundations, transmitted Jesus’ teaching in topical blocks, and pointed them towards the coming of the kingdom. From the evidence of later centuries, Matthew’s Gospel must go down as one of the most successful revisions ever made. At the same time, some would argue that it began the process whereby the abruptness and paradoxical nature of Mark’s story was ‘toned down’ and made into a more coherent and religiously satisfying story.

Further reading Ulrich Luz has written the Cambridge volume, The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew (1995) and has also written a highly esteemed multivolume commentary that has now been translated into English (1992, 2001, 2005) and a useful set of studies to accompany it (also 2005). For a literary approach, see J.D. Kingsbury, Matthew as Story (1988) and M. Davies, Matthew (1993). For a survey of the major issues in Matthean scholarship, see G. Stanton, The Interpretation of Matthew (1995), H. Clarke, The Gospel of Matthew and its Readers (2003) and D.M. Gurtner and J. Nolland (eds), Built Upon the Rock: Studies in the Gospel of Matthew (2008). For issues concerning the infancy narratives, see S. Moyise, Was the Birth of Jesus According to Scripture? (2013a). For detailed comment on the Greek text, see Gundry (1994), Luz (above), Davies and Allison (1988/91/97), Hagner (1993/95), France (2007) and Turner (2008). For more general comments, see Schnackenburg (2002), Steiner (2003), Keener (2009) and Talbert (2010).

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Questions 1. In what ways does Matthew differ from Mark? 2. What are the key themes in Mathew’s infancy stories (chs 1–2)? How are they developed in the rest of the Gospel? 3. According to the sermon on the mount (Matt 5–7), how are Jesus’ disciples supposed to live their lives?

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Luke’s Gospel

Like Matthew, Luke differs from Mark by including infancy stories, resurrection appearances and additional teaching. However, the infancy stories and resurrection appearances are completely different from those in Matthew and the teaching is not interspersed in blocks. Most of the teaching falls within an extended travel narrative (Luke 9:51– 18:14), which comes between the healing of the epileptic boy (Matt 17/ Mark 9) and the rich young ruler (Matt 19/Mark 10). It is here that we find Luke’s most famous parables, such as the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), Great banquet (Luke 14), Prodigal Son (Luke 15), Shrewd manager (Luke 16), Lazarus and Dives (Luke 16), and Persistent widow (Luke 18). By placing them all here, Luke includes a great deal of teaching material without disrupting the basic story line present in Matthew and Mark. Some of this extra teaching finds parallels in Matthew’s five discourses. For example, he has a version of the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2–4), which is found in Matthew’s sermon on the mount (Matt 6:9–13). He has a group of sayings about causing divisions within families (Luke 12:49–53), which closely resembles sayings from Matthew’s mission discourse (Matt 10:34–6). He has the Yeast parable (Luke 13:21), found in Matthew’s Kingdom discourse (Matt 13:33), the Lost sheep parable (15:4–7), found in Matthew’s church discourse (Matt 18:12–14), and the comparison of the end-times with the days of Noah (Luke 17:26–7), found in Matthew’s Apocalyptic discourse (Matt 24:37–8). For most of the twentieth century, this was explained by reference to a hypothetical source which scholars called Q (from the German Quelle, meaning ‘source’). The idea was that Matthew and Luke both had access to a story line from Mark (or perhaps an earlier version of Mark) which they supplemented with around 200 verses of Jesus’ teaching from 43

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Q. Matthew used it to construct his five great discourses, whereas Luke placed most of it in his extended travel narrative. Thus the solution to the so-called ‘synoptic problem’ (how to account for the similarities and differences between Matthew, Mark and Luke) was that Matthew and Luke both used Mark and Q. We will say more about this in chapter 7.

Infancy stories (Chapters 1–2) If Matthew’s account focuses on Joseph and Bethlehem, Luke’s account focuses on Mary and Jerusalem. The impression given by Matthew is that Joseph lived in Bethlehem (Matt 1:18–2:2), fled to Egypt to avoid the wrath of Herod (2:14) and only ‘made his home in a town called Nazareth’ (2:23) after Herod had died. The action is controlled by the angelic messages to Joseph, first to make him aware of the extraordinary pregnancy (1:20–1); then to tell him to flee to Egypt (2:13); thirdly to tell him to return to Israel (2:19–20); and lastly, to tell him to settle in Nazareth (2:22). In Luke, we are told that Mary was already living in Nazareth when an angel visited and told her about the pregnancy (Luke 1:26–38). She then visited her relative Elizabeth, who was also pregnant, and stayed for three months. Then, because of the census (not mentioned by Matthew), Joseph and Mary made their way to Bethlehem, where she gave birth to Jesus ‘and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn’ (2:7). Eight days later, they took Jesus to be circumcised (2:21) and when the time of purification was completed (40 days), they went to the temple to offer the designated sacrifices (‘a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons’). After these religious observances were completed, they returned to Nazareth where Jesus ‘grew and became strong’ (2:40: no flight to Egypt is mentioned). Each year they returned to Jerusalem for the Passover festival and on one such occasion, when Jesus was 12 years old, his parents began the journey home without him. When they returned to look for him they found him discussing and debating with the teachers of the law (2:46). Though very restrained compared with later infancy narratives (see chapter 6), there is something of the ‘child prodigy’ motif present in Luke.

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Luke also includes a genealogy of Jesus but he places it at the end of chapter 3, rather than beginning his Gospel with it. It contains a number of interesting features. For example, it begins by telling us that ‘Jesus was about thirty years old when he began his work’, our only reference to Jesus’ age (though see John 8:57). When he says that Jesus was the ‘son of Joseph’, he is mindful of the virgin birth story and adds ‘as was thought’ (Luke 3:23). And whereas Matthew’s genealogy goes back to Abraham, the father of Israel, Luke takes it back to Adam, the father of the human race. Most commentators think this is because Luke is a Gentile writing to Gentiles, though Strelan (2008, p.  106) thinks he was a Jewish priest and Kuhn (2010, pp. 102–6) thinks he belonged to an elite Jewish family. For the church tradition that Luke was the companion of Paul and the person mentioned in Col 4:14; 2 Tim 4:11 and Phil 24, see Appendix. Furthermore, apart from the line from Abraham to David and the mention of Zerubbabel, Luke has a completely different set of names from Matthew (and a great many more), including a different father for Joseph. One suggestion for the latter is that Matthew has given us the line through Joseph, whereas Luke traces it through Mary (Heli becomes Mary’s father, who adopted Joseph as heir because Mary was an only child). However, there is also a different set of names from David to Zerubbabel, so that Nolland (1989, p. 174) suggests we should probably look for theological rather than historical explanations for these discrepancies. He sees this in the taking of the genealogy back to Adam (who is ‘son of God’) and through Nathan rather than Solomon, because Solomon’s line is said to have come to an end in Jeremiah 22:24–30.

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Resurrection appearances (Chapter 24) The promise of a reunion between Jesus and the disciples in Galilee (Mark 16:7) is fulfilled in Matthew. Luke, however, records only appearances in Jerusalem and this appears to be deliberate, for the angel’s words at the tomb now remind the disciples of Jesus’ words ‘while he was still with you in Galilee’, rather than a reunion in Galilee: Mark 16:6–7

Luke 24:5–7

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.

Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.

Several features stand out in Luke’s resurrection stories. First, the bodily nature of the resurrection is emphasized. The disciples are invited to touch Jesus’ hands and feet and he eats a meal in front of them (Luke 24:39–43). Secondly, Jesus explains how the scriptures speak about him (24:45–7). Unfortunately, we are not given any specific passages or interpretations: only that ‘everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled’. Thirdly, given that Luke has also written a sequel to the Gospel (‘The Acts of the Apostles’), where the disciples meet to break bread and pray (Acts 2:46), the fact that Cleopas and his friend recognized Jesus when he broke the bread (Luke 24:30–1) takes on special significance. As Talbert says, the story ‘not only serves as a bridge between the meals the earthly Jesus had with his disciples and the later church’s Eucharist, it also says that at such meals the presence of the risen Lord was known: Jesus is alive and one place of his recognition is at the breaking of bread’ (1982, p. 230). Talbert also offers this insightful comment: The distinctiveness of this understanding of the Eucharist may be seen when it is compared with that of the fourth Gospel and of Paul. In the fourth Gospel the Eucharist is the cultic extension of the incarnation: through its physical elements one experiences

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contact with the divine world just as one did through the flesh of Jesus in the days of his incarnation (cf. John 6). In Paul the Lord’s Supper is the moment in which one remembers (identifies with, participates in) Jesus’ death much as the Israelites-Jews remembered (participated in) the events of the Exodus at their Passover meal (cf. 1 Corinthians 11). Luke sees the Supper as the extension of the meals with the earthly Jesus and in anticipation of the messianic banquet, a meal at which one experiences the presence of Christ as the disciples did after the resurrection. (1982, p. 231)

Lastly, Luke ends his Gospel with a description of the ascension, where Jesus ‘led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven’ (Luke 24:50–1). This is slightly puzzling since all the events of Luke 24 appear to take place on the same day (vv. 13, 36, 50), suggesting that Jesus ascended on the evening of Easter Sunday. But Acts 1:1–8 states that Jesus was with them for 40 days before the ascension. Since the same author wrote both works (Acts 1:1), one can only presume that Luke is saving the 40 days for the sequel and so passes straight to the ascension in Luke 24:50–2.

Travel narrative (9:51–18:14) Opinions vary as to whether this section should be called a ‘travel narrative’. The very stylized beginning (‘When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem’) marks it out as special, and we are given reminders of the journey at Luke 13:22 and 17:11. But Luke’s interest is hardly geographical. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem ‘because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem’ (13:33). He has an appointment with ‘what must be’ (9:22; 17:25; 22:37; 24:7). Evans (1990, pp.  34–6) thinks the inspiration for presenting teaching within the framework of a journey comes from the book of Deuteronomy. He notes that the journey begins with Jesus sending disciples to go ahead of him, as did Moses (Luke 10:1–16; Deut 1). He gives them the double commandment to love God and neighbour, just as Moses gave the ten commandments (Luke 10:25–7; Deut 5). He tells

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them how he has bound the stronger one, just as Moses gave instructions about defeating stronger nations (Luke 11:14–26; Deut 9–10). He speaks about clean and unclean (Luke 11:37–12:12; Deut 12) and communal judgement (Luke 12:54–13:5; Deut 13). And the discussion of inheritance rights for good and bad sons (Deut 21) forms an interesting background to the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32). Not all of Evans’ parallels are fully convincing but it remains an interesting hypothesis. The parables of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) and Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) are probably the best known of Jesus’ parables and could be said to characterize Luke’s understanding of Jesus. In the first, a lawyer asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus refers him to the Law and the man correctly deduces that he should love God with all his heart, soul, strength and mind and his neighbour as himself. He then asks Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ Jesus does not offer a definition, such as ‘anyone in need’, but tells the now famous story: A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ (Luke 10:30–5)

By stating that the Priest and Levite passed by on the other side, the story denounces those who claim to serve God but show no mercy to those in need. However, the story is more complicated than that for the answer to the lawyer’s question (‘Who is my neighbour?’) should simply be the person in need. But Jesus asks him, ‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ The lawyer has to admit that it was the Samaritan and is then told to ‘Go and do likewise.’ Thus the story works on many levels: religious duties should not come before acts of mercy; acts of mercy

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should not be confined to one’s own community; acts of mercy are not the prerogative of one group. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, a wayward son demands his share of the inheritance so that he can leave the family home and indulge his desires. It ends in disaster and the son is forced to return—with his prepared speech: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands’ (15:18–19). The hearers are then asked to reflect on the reactions of the father, who rejoices that his lost son has been found, and the older son, who thinks the prodigal has got what he deserved. Once again, the parable can work on many levels but it is clearly making a point about God’s love, which is ready to welcome the sinner back into the family. Like Matthew, Luke has a set of ‘woes’ against the Pharisees, though the settings in each Gospel are very different. In Matthew, the woes follow disputes about ‘paying taxes to Caesar’ and ‘marriage at the resurrection’ (Matthew 23). In Luke, they occur much earlier in the narrative, while Jesus is dining with a Pharisee (Luke 11:37–53). Astounded that Jesus did not wash his hands before eating (a dispute about ritual, not hygiene), the Pharisees are denounced by Jesus for:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

cleaning the outside of cups but being full of greed and wickedness; tithing herbs but neglecting justice and love; wanting the seats of honour; being like unmarked graves; loading people with burdens and doing nothing to help; building the tombs of the prophets whom their ancestors killed; being guilty of the blood shed from Abel to Zechariah; taking away the key of knowledge.

All of these are present in Matthew 23 but in the order 5, 3, 8, 2, 1, 4, 6, 7. If these come from Q, as many scholars believe, then this sayings source clearly had some very strong things to say about contemporary Judaism. Prophets have been sent to warn Israel but they have been killed or abused. As a result, this generation is guilty of the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation. (Luke 11:50–1 = Matt 23:35–6)

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Luke’s travel narrative is also the setting for the Lord’s Prayer. In Matthew, this occurs in the sermon on the mount, along with the beatitudes. But in Luke, the beatitudes occur in 6:20–3, while the Lord’s Prayer comes in 11:2–4. The form of the prayer is also different. It is of course possible that Jesus said this prayer on many occasions and Matthew and Luke have reported two of them. But the solemn nature of it (‘When you pray, say . . .’) suggests that it was special and intended to be memorized. Most scholars believe that when Matthew and Luke reached the place where they wished to incorporate the prayer, they cited it in the form that was being used in their respective churches (much as Christians would today).

Differences between Luke and Matthew/Mark Since Matthew shares about 90 per cent of Mark’s stories, the Gospels have much in common, despite some notable differences. Luke, on the other hand, only shares about 50 per cent of Mark and so the additional material (infancy stories, resurrection appearances, travel narrative) play a much greater role in determining the overall character of the Gospel. This can also be seen in some of the stories all three Gospels have in common.

The crucifixion (Matt 27:33–56/Mark 15:22–41/ Luke 23:33–49) The grimness of the crucifixion scene is highlighted by Matthew and Mark by stating that Jesus was also abused by the two men being crucified with him, and especially that his final words from the cross were, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Luke’s account is more optimistic on both counts. First, he tells us that one of the men being crucified acknowledged his guilt (‘we indeed have been condemned justly’) and says to Jesus, ‘remember me when you come into your kingdom’. Jesus replies, ‘Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ This is intended as a promise to the penitent man but it is also a statement of Jesus’ own confidence. Far from feeling forsaken, he himself is about to enter paradise and so it is not surprising that Jesus’ final words from the cross in Luke are not from Psalm 22:1 (‘My

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God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’) but from Psalm 31:6 (‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’). The effect is a much more reverent and trusting picture of Jesus accepting a martyr’s death.

Rejection in his home town (Matt 13:53–8/ Mark 6:1–6/Luke 4:16–30) Both Matthew and Mark have an account of Jesus returning to his home town and being rejected, and they both place it immediately before their account of the death of John the Baptist and the feeding of the 5,000. Mark’s version reads like this: On the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ (Mark 6:2–4)

Luke also has a story where Jesus is in a synagogue in Nazareth and a similar exchange takes place. First, the response is initially positive (‘All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth’). Secondly, they ask about Jesus’ background: ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ And thirdly, Jesus responds with the same proverb that ‘no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town’. But there the similarity ends. Luke places the story at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and it is much more elaborate. Jesus is asked to read from the scroll of Isaiah and finds the place where it is written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor’ (Isaiah 61). He then sits down and declares, ‘Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ Now it is of course possible that we are dealing with two separate rejections, but it seems more likely that Luke is wishing to make a theological rather than a chronological point. By placing this story at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, he tells the reader how to understand Jesus: He is the anointed prophet of Isaiah 61 who brings good news to the poor. That Luke is less

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concerned with chronology can be seen by the fact that as it now stands, this incident takes place before the calling of the disciples (5:1–11). Indeed, the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (4:38–9) now comes before Peter is called to be a disciple!

The role of Jesus the servant (Matt 20:20–8/Mark 10:35–45/ Luke 22:24–7) A third example is a small difference which has nevertheless caused much debate. Matthew and Mark both narrate a dispute over who is the greatest disciple, which prompts Jesus to define leadership in terms of service, in contrast to Gentile leaders, who lord it over their people: Matt 20:25–8

Mark 10:42–5

Luke 22:24–7

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.

You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.

The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors.

It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave;

But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.

But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves.

Just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.

For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.

The major difference is that in both Matthew and Mark, the sayings end with a doctrinal statement about Jesus’ mission: He came to give his life as a ‘ransom for many’ (lutron anti pollōn). The use of the preposition anti (‘instead of ’) suggests a sacrificial understanding of Jesus’ death,

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but as this saying is absent from Luke, Talbert thinks that Luke understands Jesus’ death primarily as martyrdom rather than as sacrifice (1982, p.  212). He supports this by noting that in the evangelistic speeches in Acts, both Peter (2:38; 3:19; 5:31; 10:43) and Paul (13:38; 17:30; 26:18) preach the forgiveness of sins, but never as the purpose of Jesus’ death. Other scholars have suggested that this is making too much of an omission, and point out that Luke’s dialogue appears much later in his Gospel and so may be recording a quite different incident.

Luke’s portrait of Jesus Prophet As we have noted, Luke begins Jesus’ public ministry with the Nazareth sermon, where Jesus declares, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me’ (Luke 4:18). His reply includes the proverb that a prophet does not receive honour in his home town. In the story of the raising of the widow’s son at Nain (which parallels Elijah’s miracle in 1 Kings 17:17–24), the crowd conclude, ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’ (Luke 7:16). During the travel narrative, Jesus must reach his goal ‘because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem’ (13:33). And on the road to Emmaus, the disconsolate disciples speak of Jesus as a ‘prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people’ (24:19). Whatever else he might be, Luke clearly portrays Jesus as a great prophet.

Friend of outcasts and sinners Richard Burridge (1994) uses the ancient symbol of the ox/calf as ‘bearer of burdens’ to characterize Luke’s presentation of Jesus. It is a humanitarian portrait, particularly concerned for the foreigner and outcast. Samaritans were regarded with particular disdain by the Jews, but Jesus tells a parable which highlights the compassion of a Samaritan. When ten people suffering from leprosy are healed, only one returns to show his gratitude, and it is a Samaritan (17:16). And when James and John want to call down fire on a Samaritan village, Jesus rebukes them (9:51–6). Women figure prominently in Luke’s Gospel. The infancy stories focus on Mary’s role, rather than Joseph’s. Indeed, Mary’s response to the angel (‘let it be with me according to your word’) is in direct contrast to

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that of Zechariah (‘How will I know that this is so?’). We hear of Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, and Anna, who is called a prophet. We hear of Mary and Martha, the widow at Nain, and the woman who has been crippled for eighteen years.Women appear as Jesus’ travelling companions and benefactors. On the way to the cross, Jesus says to the daughters of Jerusalem, ‘do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children’ (23:28). And after the crucifixion, it is the women who discover the empty tomb. As Joel Green says,‘their faithful witness is set in contrast to the response of the male disciples, who regard their news as only idle talk (24:11) until it is confirmed by other men’ (1995, p. 93).

Saviour of the world Though Luke is clear that Jesus did not significantly engage with Gentiles in his earthly ministry (according to Acts, that is Paul’s job), the universal aspect of the Gospel is stressed in a number of ways. We have already mentioned the extension of the genealogy to Adam. Luke also extends the quotation of Isaiah 40:3 to include the words ‘and all flesh shall see the salvation of God’ (Luke 3:6). In the Nazareth rejection story, it is his mention of Elijah and Elisha ministering to people outside of Israel which angers the people (4:28). Blame for Jesus’ crucifixion is shifted towards the Jews with Pilate declaring three times that Jesus is innocent (23:4, 14, 22). Indeed, some have argued that the joint project of writing Luke-Acts was to show that Christianity is a religion worthy of the Roman Empire, with both Jesus and Paul innocent of all charges. Certainly a number of things that might have caused offence are missing. According to Hans Conzelmann (1960), one of these ‘offences’ was the (evidently mistaken) idea that the world was about to end (Mark 13:24– 30; 1 Cor 7:25–31; 1 Thess 4:13–18). Either because this was too subversive or simply because it had not happened, Conzelmann argued that Luke wished to remove this emphasis and replace it with an indefinite church age. Thus in his introduction to the parable of the pounds (Luke 19:11–27 = Matt 25:14–30), Luke says that Jesus told this parable ‘because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately’ (19:11). And in the apocalyptic discourse, Luke alone has the phrase, ‘and Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled’ (21:24). Conzelmann argued from this that Luke divides history into three periods. The first is the time of preparation, the

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Old Testament period up to and including John the Baptist (16:16). The second is the earthly ministry of Jesus, the theme of Luke’s first volume. This is why the original title of Conzelmann’s book was Die Mitte der Zeit (‘The Middle of Time’). The third period is the age of the church, ‘the times of the Gentiles’ and the theme of Luke’s second volume. This theory has been extremely influential and many scholars now speak of Luke writing a ‘salvation history’ (Tuckett, 1996, p. 34). But the view that Luke wished to remove any sense of imminent catastrophe cannot be sustained. Luke includes parables about staying alert (‘thief in the night’; ‘servants awaiting their master’s return’), and includes the ‘generation’ saying in the apocalyptic discourse (‘this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place’). The main debate today is whether cosmic language like ‘the powers of the heavens will be shaken’ (21:26) or ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ (21:27) refers to the end of the world, or the end of particular political or religious regimes. We will discuss this further in chapters 8–9.

Lord According to Acts, Peter concludes his Pentecost speech by saying, ‘Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified’ (Acts 2:36). Luke is so convinced that ‘Jesus is Lord’ that he uses it almost unconsciously. For example, in Luke 12:42 he writes, ‘And the Lord said’. In Luke 19:8, ‘Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord’. But what did Luke understand by the term? Was it simply a statement of Luke’s allegiance (like Rabbi or Master)? Or was it more than that? Some have argued that since the Greek translators of the Hebrew scriptures rendered the divine name (YHWH) by kyrios, calling Jesus kyrios is tantamount to calling him God. But we should note two things. First, it is unnecessary to suppose that all of the occurrences of kyrios in Luke-Acts have the same meaning. It is clear that sometimes it is no more than the polite ‘Sir’ (Luke 7:6). Secondly, in those cases where an exalted meaning is intended (Luke 1:43 has Elizabeth calling Mary the ‘mother of my Lord’), there is a conceptual difficulty that would take centuries to sort out. Put simply, how could Elizabeth possibly think that Mary’s unborn child is the God she has worshipped all her life? It is a problem that comes to the fore even more in John’s Gospel, as we shall see.

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Conclusion Luke is the longest of the four Gospels, both in the number of words and its scope (annunciations and births at one end, appearances and ascension at the other). In common stories, it sometimes appears less harsh than Mark, though it shares with Matthew the stern judgements against the Pharisees. The long travel narrative contains some eight or nine chapters of teaching, which might give credence to the view that Jesus was an itinerant wisdom teacher. But as a whole, Luke presents Jesus as God’s anointed, an Israelite prophet with a message of judgement for oppressors and compassion for the downtrodden. It is what many people imagine a biography of Jesus should be like—and what many people imagine Christians should be like. If Matthew produced a Gospel for the church, Luke produced a Gospel for the world.

Further reading The Cambridge volume is written by Joel Green (The Theology of Saint Luke, 1995). See also the collection edited by C. Tuckett, Luke’s Literary Achievement (1995) and his guide to the Gospel, Luke (1996). For a liberation reading, see M. Prior, Jesus the liberator (1995) and for a literary approach, see C.H. Talbert, Reading Luke (2002). Two useful studies are C.K. Rowe, Early Narrative Christology: The Lord in the Gospel of Luke (2006) and R. Najnadella, Dialogue not Dogma. Many Voices in the Gospel of Luke (2011). For detailed comments on the Greek text, see Fitzmyer (1981/85), Nolland (1989/93), Bock (1994/96), Bovan (2002, 2013). For more general comments, see Tannehill (1996), Lieu (1997), Green (1997) and Knight (1998).

Questions 1. How do Luke’s infancy stories differ from those in Matthew? 2. What are the main themes of Jesus’ teaching in Luke’s travel narrative (9:51–18:14)? 3. Has Luke ‘softened’ the crucifixion scene?

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John’s Gospel

Despite the differences between Matthew, Mark and Luke, they are called the ‘synoptic Gospels’ because they can be arranged in a synopsis (‘with sight’, i.e. ‘seen together’). They all follow the same basic story line. For example, despite minor variations in order, we can easily list twenty incidents that are common to all three:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Baptism by John Temptation in the wilderness Calling of disciples Healing of Peter’s mother-in-law Healing of a paralytic Calling of Levi/Matthew Plucking corn on the Sabbath Man with the withered hand Parable of the sower Stilling of the storm Mission of the twelve Feeding of the 5,000 Peter’s confession Transfiguration Rich young ruler Blessing of the children Triumphal entry on a donkey Cleansing of the temple Apocalyptic discourse Last supper

However, when we come to John, we are immediately aware that we are reading a very different sort of Gospel. Of the twenty items listed above, only five are found in John (3, 12, 17, 18, 20), and then with significant 57

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differences. For example, the cleansing of the temple comes right at the beginning of the Gospel (2:12–25) rather than at its climax. The last supper does not mention any special words over the bread and wine, but describes Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. And while Peter and Andrew are among the first disciples called by Jesus, their calling takes place in Judea while John is baptizing (1:35–42), not in Galilee after John has been arrested (Mark 1:14–20). The feeding of the 5,000 offers an important point of contact (John 6 = Mark 6) but unlike the synoptics, this is not part of a Galilean ministry which is then followed by a single journey to Jerusalem. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is frequently in Jerusalem (2:13; 5:1; 7:10; 10:22–3). Indeed, it is only because John mentions these festivals that Jesus’ public ministry is reckoned to be about three years. From the point of view of time references, it would be possible to fit all of the events in the synoptic Gospels into a single year. John’s Gospel easily divides into four sections. Chapter 1 consists of an extended prologue, the ministry of John the Baptist and the gathering of disciples. Chapters  2–12 consist of miracles and teaching, though unlike the synoptics there are no parables or exorcisms. Chapters 13–20 form the passion narrative and the Gospel finishes with a sort of appendix (21), which most scholars believe was added later (20:30–1 looks like the original ending). The Gospel ends with this claim: This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (21:24–5)

This has traditionally been taken as evidence that the author of the Gospel is the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’ (21:20), namely John, son of Zebedee (see Appendix). But it would be odd for John to say of himself, ‘we know that his testimony is true’. It is more likely that the author(s) of the Gospel (the ‘we’ in the above passage) are claiming to have used traditions that go back to John. Thus it would appear that the names that became associated with the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) point more towards the source of the traditions than actual authorship. In this, they parallel the way that Moses became associated

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with the Torah, Solomon with wisdom and David with psalmody, though much of this material is clearly not written by them (e.g. Proverbs 30–1; Psalms 73–85).

Introduction (Chapter 1) Though John begins with an introduction which includes a Christological statement, narrative concerning John the Baptist and the call of the first disciples, each of these is strikingly different from their synoptic counterparts. For example, Mark’s Christological statement consists of a single verse (‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God’). John has eighteen verses describing the person of Christ, his relationship to God and his role in salvation: In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him . . . in him was life, and the life was the light of all people . . . The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world . . . He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth . . . From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace . . . No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1:1–18; abbreviated)

It is generally agreed that John is drawing on the idea of divine wisdom to describe Jesus as the agent of creation and redemption (see Proverbs 8). Paul calls Jesus the ‘wisdom of God’ (1 Cor 1:24) and the theme appears in other hymnic passages in the New Testament (Col 1:15–20; Heb 1:1–3). However, John focuses his thought on the idea of the divine logos ‘which enlightens everyone’. This idea had a rich history in some strands of Greek thought (such as Stoicism), and some believe that John chose it in order to appeal to a Hellenistic audience. But the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that such ideas are by no means alien to Hebrew thought. Indeed, since Judea had been subject to Hellenistic influence

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for nearly three centuries, the two backgrounds need not be seen as mutually exclusive. Like the synoptics, John presents the Baptist as Jesus’ forerunner and even includes in 1:23 the same quotation from Isaiah 40:3 (‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord” ’). But there are three notable differences in John’s presentation. First, he is at pains to show that John the Baptist was inferior to Jesus and claimed nothing for himself. Even in the prologue, he inserts the comment that John ‘was not the light’ (1:8). When the narrative begins (1:19–28), John is asked a series of questions (‘Who are you?’; ‘Are you Elijah?’; ‘Are you the prophet?’), each of which he denies (‘I am not the Messiah’; ‘I am not’; ‘No’). And later in chapter 3, when ‘a discussion about purification arose between John’s disciples and a Jew’ (3:25), John the Baptist says of Jesus, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (3:30). Clearly there is to be no confusion as to who is the superior. The second difference is that John the Baptist’s testimony to Jesus is far more explicit. For example, when he sees Jesus, he says, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (1:29). And a few verses later, we read, ‘I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God’ (1:34). Thus John the Baptist is presented as having explicit knowledge of both the person and work of Christ (cf. Luke 7:19). The third difference is perhaps the most surprising of all, for John’s Gospel does not actually narrate the baptism of Jesus. Indeed, our author seems to have gone to great lengths to give us the details without narrating the event. Thus the Baptist testifies that Jesus is the one sent from God, for he saw ‘the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him’ (1:32). But the actual baptism of Jesus is not narrated. Why? One suggestion is that disciples of the Baptist (Acts 18:25) were claiming that John must have been greater than Jesus, for he not only came first but was the one who baptized Jesus. Another suggestion is that perhaps the author is making a polemical point about the sacraments, since John’s Gospel also omits the institution of the Eucharist. We will say more about this later. Finally, John and the synoptics narrate the calling of the first disciples, but there the similarity ends. In the synoptics, they are fishing in the Sea of Galilee when Jesus passes by and says to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for people’ (Mark 1:17). At once, they leave their nets and follow Jesus. In John, we learn that the disciples were formerly disciples

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of John the Baptist and that Andrew goes to fetch Simon with the words, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (1:41). When Simon comes to Jesus, he is given a change of name: The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus . . . One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter). (John 1:35–42)

The Book of Signs (Chapters 2–12) Unlike the numerous healings and exorcisms in the synoptic Gospels, John selects just seven stories, which he calls sēmeia (‘signs’). The feeding of the 5,000 and the walking on water are found in the synoptics, but the other five are unique to John:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Water into wine (2:1–11) Official’s son (4:43–54) Invalid at the pool (5:1–14) Feeding of the 5,000 (6:1–14) Walking on water (6:16–21) Blind man (9:1–12) Raising of Lazarus (11:1–43)

It is interesting that there are no exorcisms in John, despite the fact that Jesus is accused of having a demon on three occasions (7:20; 8:48; 10:21). Also interesting is the way that the last five of these ‘signs’ all lead into a long discourse about who Jesus is and where he comes from. Indeed, in the case of the invalid at the pool, the healing (5:1–14) seems almost inconsequential compared with the discourse that follows (5:15–47). The story of the feeding of the 5,000 leads to Jesus’ acclamation, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be

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hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’ (6:35). The raising of Lazarus gives Jesus the opportunity to proclaim, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die’ (11:25–6). Indeed, it appears to be by design that there are seven such ‘I am’ sayings:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

I am the bread of life (6:35) I am the light of the world (8:12) I am the gate for the sheep (10:7) I am the good shepherd (10:11) I am the resurrection and the life (11:25) I am the way, and the truth, and the life (14:6) I am the true vine (15:1)

Each of these begins with the revelation formula egō eimi. This has a rich history in profane and sacred literature, and most commentators refer to the discussion found in Rudolph Bultmann’s famous commentary (1971, pp. 225–6). He says that the expression is used in four different ways: It can describe who someone is (‘I am Ploutos’, ‘I am El-Shaddai’); or what they are (‘I am a shepherd’, ‘I am the first and the last’); it can identify the subject with a given action (‘I am he who arose as Chepre’, ‘I am the one who brought you out of Egypt’); or as a recognition formula (‘I am the one you are looking for’). A particularly important background is the Greek translation (known as the Septuagint or LXX) of Exod 3:14, where the Hebrew is rendered egō eimi ho ōn (literally, ‘I am the one who is’). John’s use of these seven egō eimi sayings, along with the seven signs and many discourses, led Bultmann to describe this section of the Gospel as ‘The Revelation of the Glory to the World’.

The passion narrative (Chapters 13–20) The second half of the Gospel is the passion story, but again with some surprising differences. First, while it narrates a final supper with the disciples where the betrayal of Judas is predicted (13:26), it does not report any special words over the bread and wine. Instead, the focus is on Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Some have suggested that John is

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wishing to make a point about the sacraments, either a warning that they do not guarantee salvation (as perhaps in 1 Corinthians 10) or, more positively, that those who were not present at the last supper have not missed out. This would fit with Jesus’ reply to Thomas, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’ (20:29). The Gospel is aiming to mediate an experience of Christ that is even greater than being originally present with him. Secondly, instead of the agony of Gethsemane and Jesus’ request that the cup might pass from him, John gives us four chapters of theological reflection on what later theology would call ‘the persons of the Trinity’. Jesus is returning to the Father and the Father will send the Holy Spirit, who ‘will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you’ (14:26). The Holy Spirit is the ‘Spirit of truth’ (16:13), whom Jesus will send to ‘guide you into all the truth’. Just as Jesus bore witness to the Father, so the Spirit will bear witness to Jesus, taking what is his and making it known to his disciples. This is brought to a tremendous climax in the prayer of John 17 (sometimes called the ‘High Priestly Prayer’), where Jesus prays for himself, the disciples and those that will believe through their testimony: I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed . . . But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves . . . I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us . . . (17:4–21; abbreviated)

Thirdly, when we return to the story of Jesus’ passion, we are aware of a different focus. The emphasis is not on his suffering but on how he is returning to the Father. Thus in the story of his arrest, when the guards come and ask for Jesus of Nazareth, he answers with the recognition formula egō eimi (‘I am he’), whereupon ‘they stepped back and fell to the ground’ (18:6). Thereafter, Jesus must take the initiative for his arrest (for Jesus must return to the Father). He asks them again, ‘For whom are you looking?’ and replies, ‘I told you that I am he. So if you are looking for me, let these men go’ (18:8). As Bultmann notes, this is not so much

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a request as an order. The disciples do not flee in John’s Gospel; they are dismissed. Fourthly, far from remaining silent before Pilate, Jesus almost teases him with his superior wisdom and insight. Pilate asks him, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ and Jesus replies, ‘Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?’ (18:34). So Pilate concludes that he is a king but Jesus replies, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’ (18:37). Pilate can only reply, ‘What is truth?’ The earthly ruler is no match for the man from heaven. Fifthly, instead of Mark’s ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34), John is much more like Luke, with a number of sayings from the cross, all of which are positive. The first urges his mother and the beloved disciple to look after one another (19:26–7). The second (19:28) is a request for a drink—not because he is in need but ‘in order to fulfil the scripture’ (what scripture is not clear). And the last saying, Jesus’ final word from the cross before dying, is tetelestai (‘It is finished’). Jesus has come into the world to do God’s will and is now returning. Everything has gone according to plan.

Appendix (Chapter 21) The main reason for seeing this as an appendix is that chapter 20 seems to come to a natural conclusion: ‘But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.’ But then we have a further appearance to the disciples while they are out fishing (back in Galilee), a reinstatement of Peter, and a final claim for the reliability of the Gospel traditions. Of particular interest is the final dialogue between Jesus and Peter, and the author’s comment on this. Peter asks what will happen to the beloved disciple. Jesus replies, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ The editor then feels the need to add the comment: ‘So the rumour spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?” ’ Some have concluded from this that it was the death of the ‘beloved disciple’ that precipitated the crisis that led to the production of the fourth Gospel.

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John’s portrait of Jesus Divine The overwhelming impression that John’s Gospel leaves is its emphasis on the divinity of Christ. Its opening sentence prepares us for this: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.’ That itself is not surprising. The author of Hebrews can call Jesus ‘the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being’ (1:3), and Col 1:19 says, ‘For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.’ What is surprising is that this exalted theology is found on the lips of Jesus himself. Thus in the dispute about healing the man at the pool on the Sabbath, Jesus does not argue (as in Mark 3:4) that it is surely better to do good on the Sabbath than evil. Rather, the argument is that since God is working on the Sabbath, so is Jesus (5:17), leading to a long discourse about the relationship between Father and Son (5:19–47). And according to the author of the Gospel, the point of the controversy was that: For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God. (5:18)

In chapter 8, Jesus questions their claim to be Abraham’s children with the accusation that they are really children of the devil (8:44). When they respond that he is the one who has a demon, Jesus says, ‘Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad’ (8:56). The implication is not lost on them. They respond with the question, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ This gives Jesus the opportunity to declare, ‘Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am (egō eimi)’. And if this is not clear enough, in another dispute, Jesus says, ‘The Father and I are one’ (10:30). The Gospel ends how it began, with an unequivocal declaration of the divinity of Christ, this time from the testimony of Thomas, who says, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (20:28).

Messiah If Jesus knows of his pre-existence and divinity, he also knows of his role as Messiah and King. In the dialogue with the woman at the well

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(4:1–30), the woman confesses her own faith in the words, ‘I know that the Messiah is coming . . . When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us’ (4:25). Jesus responds, ‘I am he (egō eimi), the one who is speaking to you.’ Indeed, though the disciples occasionally lose their way in John’s Gospel (e.g. 4:31–3), they recognize the messiahship of Jesus at their very first meeting: One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah.’ (1:40–1) Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ (1:48–9)

Nevertheless, it is interesting that John does not subordinate messiahship (‘God’s anointed’) to deity (‘God’s Son’). In Nathanael’s reply above, the two affirmations are placed side by side, as they are in the purpose statement of 20:31: ‘But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.’ It does not appear to be John’s purpose to elevate divinity above messiahship. The two belong together.

Bringer of eternal life One of the most remarkable differences between John and the synoptic Gospels concerns eschatology, for apart from the occasional reference to the last day (6:40), the burden of Jesus’ teaching in John is that those who believe in Jesus have eternal life here and now (e.g. 3:15, 3:16, 3:36; 4:14, 4:36; 5:24, 5:39; 6:27, 6:40, 6:47, 6:54, 6:57, 6:68). They are not waiting for a kingdom, nor are they concerned about a coming judgement. Indeed, those who believe in Jesus will not be judged at all. They have passed from darkness to light. And though John does portray Jesus as predicting the destruction of the temple, the editorial aside tells us that actually ‘he was speaking of the temple of his body’ (2:21). The key phrase ‘kingdom of God’ (14 times in Mark, 32 times in Luke) and Matthew’s equivalent ‘kingdom of heaven’ (32 times in Matthew) only

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occurs twice in John, both in the Nicodemus episode (3:3, 5). As Moody Smith says: The meaning of Jesus is not worked out against an apocalyptic, eschatological scheme, but rather the meaning of eschatology is redefined in light of the coming of Jesus. (1995, p. 106)

Subordinate to the Father While John’s emphasis is undoubtedly on the divinity of Christ, the Gospel strongly emphasizes Jesus’ obedience and subordination to the Father. Thus ‘the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing’ (5:19). The same applies to Jesus’ teaching: ‘I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak’ (12:49). Indeed, Jesus can even declare, ‘the Father is greater than I’ (14:28). Although John emphasizes the divinity of Christ, it is never as a rival to God the Father. There are also several specific references to his humanity. For example, he stops by the well because he is ‘tired out by his journey’ (4:6). He weeps by the grave of his friend Lazarus (11:35). At the crucifixion, one of the guards thrusts a spear into his side ‘and at once blood and water came out’ (19:34). And the word used for the incarnation in 1:14 is sarx (‘flesh’). With all the emphasis on the oneness between Jesus and the Father, we might have expected a more personal word. But John says, ‘And the Word became flesh.’ Some have suggested that this might be a deliberate safeguard against the view that Jesus only seemed to be human (‘Docetism’). It is certainly a concern in the Johannine epistles that anyone who does not acknowledge that Jesus came in the flesh is an ‘antichrist’ (1 John 4:2–3; 2 John 7).

Conclusion Maurice Casey, in his book Is John’s Gospel True? (1996), answers his own question with an emphatic No! If the synoptic Gospels bear any relationship to the historical Jesus, then it is clear that he did not openly proclaim his divinity, deliver five chapters of Trinitarian theology before

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his arrest, or face death without flinching. John is telling us things that did not in fact happen. According to Ernst Käsemann, John’s Gospel is ‘naively docetic’ for it does not describe a genuine human life (as one might expect from a genuine incarnation). Rather, Jesus’ earthly life is ‘merely as a backdrop for the Son of God proceeding through the world of man and as the scene of the in-breaking of the divine glory’ (1968, p. 13). Other scholars have a more positive view of John’s historical and theological worth. For example, Richard Bauckham (1998, pp. 147–71) denies that the chronologies are as contradictory as is often claimed. Thus John’s picture of Jesus and John ministering together in Judea (1:29–42; 3:22–36), while making visits to Galilee (John 1:43) is quite plausible. Then, after John was arrested (Mark 1:14), Jesus returned to Galilee via Samaria (John 4) and called some of his earlier followers to leave everything and follow him (Mark 1:16–20). He then embarked on an itinerant ministry of Galilee (about which John is silent, apart from the feeding of the 5,000), but making pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts (John 5, 7, 10), about which the synoptic Gospels are silent (see also Anderson, 2006, pp. 154–92). As for the theology, Rudolph Schnackenburg acknowledges that there are many differences with the synoptics but claims that John’s Gospel ‘reveals more of the will, the motives, and the inner driving powers that moved Jesus’, and that though the ‘historical dimension cannot be directly grasped’ it can be experienced and ‘does not produce dreams and fantasies’ (1995, p. 322). The author of the Gospel is quite clear that his insights are based on hindsight (2:22; 12:16; 20:9) and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (14:26), and the Gospel was to be extremely influential in the development of the creeds. As Marianne Thompson puts it: The differences between John and the Synoptics reflect different approaches to the best way to express the reality and significance of Jesus’ person for those who believe . . . John means to tell the reader what, in his view, was really going on . . . in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. (1996, pp. 33–4)

The problem is that most readers down the ages have (mistakenly) assumed that the exalted theology of John’s Gospel was uttered word

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for word by Jesus. As we shall see in chapter 7, the majority of scholars today dispute this.

Further reading The Cambridge volume is written by D. Moody Smith (The Theology of the Gospel of John, 1995). See also the introduction in this series by J. van der Watt (An Introduction to the Johannine Gospel and Letters, 2007) and by R. Edwards (Discovering John, 2004). Pioneering a literary approach to the Gospel, R.A. Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (1983) still has much to offer, as does M. Stibbe’s John’s Gospel (1994). There are several excellent collections of essays which illuminate different approaches to John: R.A. Culpepper and C.C. Black (1996); J. Ashton (1997), F.F. Segovia (1996/8), D. Orton (1998) and R. Bauckham and C. Mosser (2008). For detailed comment on the Greek text, see Brown (1966/1970), Bultmann (1971), Schnackenburg (1968/1982), Barrett (1978). For more general comment, see Talbert (1992), Culpepper (1998), Smith (1999), Keener (2003), Lincoln (2005), Bruner (2012).

Questions 1. What are the main themes of John’s prologue (1:1–18)? How are these themes developed in the rest of the Gospel? 2. What is the function of the ‘I am’ sayings in John’s Gospel? 3. What is the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit in John’s Gospel?

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Gospel of Thomas Early church writers speak disparagingly of a Gospel of Thomas, but until 1945 its contents were unknown. Half a century earlier, various Greek fragments dated from about 200 ce had been found at Oxyrynchus in Egypt, and occasionally received comment. But it was only through the discovery of the Coptic text at Nag Hammadi that these fragments were identified as part of the lost Gospel of Thomas. Perhaps because it was found among a whole series of heterodox texts, many of a gnostic flavour, early opinion regarded Gospel of Thomas as a second-century distortion of the canonical Gospels (Grant and Freedman, 1960). But more recently, it has come to play an important role in Jesus research, for several reasons.

It contains parables that look primitive Ever since Adolf Jülicher (1899) demonstrated the tendency of the second-century church to allegorize the parables, scholars have been suspicious of allegorical features in the synoptic parables. For example, the parable of the sower (Mark 4:3–9) is followed by an explanation of the four soils (4:13–20). Some scholars concluded that Mark or early church tradition had added this in order to draw out the meaning for a new audience. Other scholars replied that the explanation is in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and that there is no textual warrant for removing them. However, Gospel of Thomas 9 contains a version of the parable that lacks the allegorical explanation. Did the author of Gospel of Thomas remove it, or has he preserved a more original form than the synoptic Gospels?

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Gospel of Thomas 57 contains a version of the parable of the ‘wheat and tares’ which is less than half the length of Matthew’s version (Matt 13:24–30, 36–43). If the two are compared, explanations like, ‘The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man’ (Matt 13:37) and ‘The Son of Man will send his angels’ (Matt 13:41) look suspiciously like ecclesiastical additions (cf. Jeremias, 1972, pp. 81–5). Gospel of Thomas 20 contains a simpler form of the mustard seed parable (‘It is like a grain of mustard seed, smaller than all seeds. But when it falls on cultivated ground it puts forth a large branch and provides a shelter for the birds of heaven’). And in Gospel of Thomas 65, there is a version of the parable of the vineyard which lacks many of the allegorical features found in Mark. For example, Mark’s inclusion of the fence, pit, winepress and tower all make the allusion to Isaiah 5 more explicit. The father is to send his ‘beloved son’, an obvious reference to the words at Jesus’ baptism and transfiguration. And in Mark, not only are the tenants destroyed, but the vineyard is given to others, an obvious allusion to the development of Gentile Christianity. The version in Gospel of Thomas reads: A good man had a vineyard. He leased it to some farmers so that they would cultivate it and he would receive the fruit from them. He sent his servants so that the tenants would give him the fruit of the vineyard. They seized his servant, beat him and almost killed him. The servant returned and told his master. His master said, ‘Perhaps they did not recognize him.’ He sent another servant. The tenants beat him also. Then the master sent his son. He said, ‘Perhaps they will respect my son.’ Those tenants knowing he was the heir of the vineyard seized him and killed him. He who has ears, let him hear. Jesus said, ‘Show me the stone which the builders rejected. That is the cornerstone.’ (Gospel of Thomas 65–66, text from Elliott’s The Apocryphal New Testament, 1993)

It contains sayings that look primitive Koester (1990, pp.  107–13) lists 27 sayings in Gospel of Thomas that have parallels in Mark. Many of them are quite similar, but a case can be made for some of them being more primitive than Mark’s version, which is generally longer:

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Jesus said, ‘No prophet is acceptable in his own village; a physician does not heal those who know him.’ (Gospel of Thomas 31; cf. Mark 6:4–5) They showed Jesus a gold coin and said to him, ‘Caesar’s men demand taxes from us.’ He said to them, ‘Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar; give to God what belongs to God, and give to me what is mine.’ (Gospel of Thomas 100; cf. Mark 12:14–16) The disciples said to him, ‘Your brothers and your mother are standing outside.’ He said to them, ‘Those here who do the will of my Father are my brothers and mother; it is they who will enter the kingdom of my Father.’ (Gospel of Thomas 99; cf. Mark 3:31–5) Jesus said, ‘It is impossible for anyone to enter the house of the strong man and take it by force, unless he binds his hands; then he will be able to pillage his house.’ (Gospel of Thomas 35; cf. Mark 3:25–7)

Its greatest affinity is with Q Of the 79 sayings that Gospel of Thomas has in common with the synoptic Gospels, 46 of them have parallels with the hypothetical Q source, commonly regarded as earlier than Mark (Koester, 1990, p.  87). Of particular interest are the parallels to the sermon on the mount/ plain. Gospel of Thomas contains four beatitudes, found in sayings 54, 68 and 69: Blessed are the poor for yours is the kingdom of heaven. (54) Blessed are you when you are hated and persecuted, and where you have been persecuted they will find no place. (68) Blessed are they who are persecuted in their heart; these are the ones who have truly known the Father. Blessed are those who are hungry for the belly of the needy will be filled. (69)

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Matthew and Luke have much larger collections (Matt 5:3–12; Luke 6:20–3) which, according to the majority of scholars, derive from Q. If this is the case, then it is clear that both Luke and Matthew have made certain changes to Q. For example, consider the beatitudes on poverty and hunger: Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. (Luke 6:20) Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matt 5:3) Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. (Luke 6:21) Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. (Matt 5:6)

The difference between these two versions is that Luke imagines Jesus to be talking about real poverty and hunger, whereas Matthew thinks of them in religious terms. Which is the more original? The majority of scholars think that Luke is closer to Q here and that Matthew has introduced the theme of righteousness, as he also does in the persecution saying (‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake’). But if that is the case, then the version in the Gospel of Thomas (‘Blessed are the poor for yours is the kingdom of heaven’) is closer to the original than Matthew’s version. Furthermore, in the saying about those who hate you, Matthew says ‘on my account’ (Matt 5:11) but Luke has ‘on account of the Son of Man’ (Luke 6:22). Now it may be that both of these go back to an original Aramaic saying which meant ‘one such as I’, and that this explains the difference. But in terms of the Greek texts, Luke has Jesus using the phrase as a definite title, whereas Matthew does not. Which is more original? Most scholars would opt for Matthew’s self-reference rather than Luke’s explicit ‘Son of Man’ saying. But this is precisely what we find in Gospel of Thomas, so in this instance, the version of the saying in Gospel of Thomas is closer to Jesus’ words than Luke’s version. At the very least, all this should mean that Gospel of Thomas deserves a hearing when one is trying to understand the teaching of Jesus (hence Funk and Hoover, The Five Gospels, 1993).

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Gospel of Peter In 1886–7, an eighth-century fragment of the Gospel of Peter was discovered at Akhmim in Egypt. As with Gospel of Thomas, scholars originally saw it as a second-century distortion of the canonical Gospels, but Crossan believes it is based on the same source (what he calls ‘the cross gospel’) which underlies all the passion narratives. Certainly its use of the Old Testament appears to be less sophisticated than in the canonical Gospels. But it also contains some fantastic elements, such as Jesus being led out of the tomb by two heavenly beings, a ‘talking cross’, and a description of the risen Jesus whose head ‘reached beyond the heavens’. The fragment begins with Pilate washing his hands, and it seems intent on exonerating him and blaming the Jews (Elliott, 1993, p. 151). It ends with words supposedly from Peter: But we, the twelve disciples of the Lord, wept and mourned and each one, grieving for what had happened, returned to his own home. But I, Peter, and my brother Andrew took our nets and went to the sea. (60) So they took the Lord and pushed him as they ran and said, ‘Let us drag the Son of God along now that we have got power over him.’ And they put upon him a purple robe and set him on the judgement seat . . . And they brought two malefactors and crucified the Lord between them. But he held his peace as (if) he felt no pain. And when they had set up the cross they wrote: ‘This is the King of Israel.’ And having laid down his garments before him they divided them among themselves and cast lots for them. But one of the malefactors rebuked them saying, ‘We are suffering for the deeds which we have committed, but this man, who has become the saviour of men, what wrong has he done you?’ And they were angry with him and commanded that his legs should not be broken so that he might die in torment. (6–14) Now it was midday and darkness covered all Judea. And they became anxious and distressed lest the sun had already set since he was still alive. It stands written for them: ‘The sun should not set on

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one that has been murdered.’ And one of them said, ‘Give him to drink gall with vinegar’ . . . And many went about with lamps (and) as they supposed that it was night, they stumbled. And the Lord called out and cried, ‘My power, O power, you have forsaken me!’ And having said this, he was taken up. And at the same hour the veil of the temple in Jerusalem was torn in two. (15–20) But the scribes and Pharisees and elders . . . were afraid and came to Pilate, entreating him and saying, ‘Give us soldiers that we may guard his sepulchre for three days, lest his disciples come and steal him away and the people suppose that he is risen from the dead, and do us harm’ . . . Early in the morning, when the Sabbath dawned, there came a crowd from Jerusalem and the country round about to see the sealed sepulchre. Now in the night in which the Lord’s day dawned . . ., there was a loud voice in heaven, and they saw the heavens open and two men come down from there in a great brightness and draw near to the sepulchre. That stone which had been laid against the entrance to the sepulchre started of itself to roll and move sidewards, and the sepulchre was opened and both young men entered. When those soldiers saw this, they awakened the centurion and the elders, for they also were there to mount guard. And while they were narrating what they had seen, they saw three men come out from the sepulchre, two of them supporting the other and a cross following them and the heads of the two reaching to heaven, but that of him who was being led reached beyond the heavens. And they heard a voice out of the heavens crying, ‘Have you preached to those who sleep?’, and from the cross there was heard the answer, ‘Yes.’ (28–42)

Infancy Gospels As we have seen, Matthew and Luke felt the need to prefix the story of Jesus with a brief account of his birth and one story about his childhood (Luke). Some scholars regard these as legends, but they are fairly sober compared with what was to follow. Infancy narratives flourished in the

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second and third centuries, the most famous being the Protoevangelium of James. There are over 100 extant Greek manuscripts of this document, and translations into Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Sahidic, Slavonic and Armenian (Elliott, 1993, p. 48). The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew supplies additional proof-texts for the flight to Egypt and return to Nazareth, while The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (no connection with the Gospel of Thomas) provides stories of Jesus’ childhood. What is surprising about The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is that the child prodigy also has a dark side, wreaking vengeance on those who oppose him. The following extracts have been arranged chronologically, according to subject matter: In the ninth month Anna gave birth. And she said to the midwife, ‘What have I brought forth?’ And she said, ‘A female.’ And Anna said, ‘My soul is magnified this day.’ And when the days were completed, Anna purified herself and gave suck to the child, and called her Mary. Day by day the child grew strong; when she was six months old her mother stood her on the ground to see if she could stand. And she walked seven steps and came to her bosom. And she took her up saying, ‘As the Lord my God lives, you shall walk no more upon this earth until I bring you into the temple of the Lord.’ And she made a sanctuary in her bedroom and did not permit anything common or unclean to pass through it. (Protoevangelium 5:2–6:1) And when the child was three years old (Joachim) placed her on the third step of the altar, and the Lord God put grace upon her and she danced with her feet, and the whole house of Israel loved her . . . And Mary was in the temple of the Lord nurtured like a dove and received food from the hand of an angel . . . And the priest said to Joseph, ‘You have been chosen by lot to receive the virgin of the Lord as your ward.’ But Joseph answered him, ‘I have sons and am old; she is but a girl.’. . . And the priest said to Joseph, ‘Fear the Lord your God.’. . . And Joseph was afraid and received her as his ward. (Protoevangelium 7:2–9:2) Now when she was in her sixth month . . . Joseph entered his house and found her with child. And he struck his face, threw himself down on the ground on sackcloth and wept bitterly . . . And the priest said, ‘You have consummated your marriage in secret . . . I

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will give you both to drink the water of the conviction of the Lord, and it will make your sins manifest . . .’ And the priest took it and gave it to Joseph to drink and sent him into the hill-country, and he returned whole. And he made Mary drink also, and sent her into the hill-country, and she returned whole. And all the people marvelled, because sin did not appear in them. And the priest said, ‘If the Lord God has not revealed your sins, neither do I judge you.’ (Protoevangelium 13:1–16:1) And on the third day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary went out of the cave and, entering a stable, placed the child in the manger, and an ox and an ass adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Isaiah the prophet, ‘The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master’s crib.’. . . And on the journey there were with Joseph three boys, and with Mary a girl. And behold, suddenly there came out of the cave many dragons; and when the boys saw them they cried out in great terror. Then Jesus got down from his mother’s lap and stood on his feet before the dragons; and they worshipped Jesus and then departed. Then was fulfilled that which was said by David the prophet, ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, dragons, and all you ocean depths.’ (Pseudo-Matthew 14, 18) When this boy Jesus was five years old he was playing at the crossing of a stream, and he gathered together into pools the running water, and instantly made it clean . . . Having made soft clay he moulded from it twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath . . . Joseph cried out . . .‘Why do you do on the Sabbath things which it is not lawful to do?’ But Jesus clapped his hands and cried out to the sparrows and said to them, ‘Be gone!’ And the sparrows took flight and went away chirping . . . After this he again went through the village, and a child ran and knocked against his shoulder. Jesus was angered and said to him, ‘You shall not go further on your way’, and immediately he fell down and died . . . When he was six years old, his mother gave him a pitcher and sent him to draw water and bring it into his house. But in the crowd he stumbled, and the pitcher was broken. But Jesus spread out the garment he was wearing, filled it with water and brought it to his mother. (Infancy Gospel of Thomas 2, 4, 11)

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His father was a carpenter . . . and received an order from a rich man to make a bed for him. But when one beam was shorter than its corresponding . . . Jesus stood at the other end and took hold of the shorter piece of wood, and stretching it made it equal to the other. (Infancy Gospel of Thomas 13) And when he was twelve years old his parents went according to the custom to Jerusalem . . . And while they were returning, the child Jesus went back to Jerusalem . . . they found him in the temple sitting among the teachers, listening and asking them questions. And all paid attention to him and marvelled how he, a child, put to silence the elders and teachers of the people, elucidating the chapters of the law and the parables of the prophets . . . But the scribes and Pharisees said, ‘Are you the mother of this child?’ And she said, ‘I am.’ And they said to her, ‘Blessed are you among women, because God has blessed the fruit of your womb. For such glory and such excellence and wisdom we have never seen nor heard.’ (Infancy Gospel of Thomas 19)

Unlike the Gospel of Thomas, almost all scholars believe that these accounts are late and fill in the gaps left by the canonical Gospels. They do not, therefore, add anything to our knowledge of the historical Jesus. But that does not mean that they are unimportant. For one thing, some would say that they are only continuing the trend begun by Matthew and Luke and finding full expression in John. They are not to be dismissed simply because they contain later reflection. Later reflection may contain genuine insights that were hidden from those that were ‘too close’ to the events. Furthermore, these Gospels show us the sort of portraits of Jesus that were being propagated in the second and third centuries. And these centuries were of crucial significance in the development of doctrine. For example, the controversy of whether Mary should properly be called Theotōkos (‘God-bearer’) is undoubtedly illuminated by the texts above. And as church history shows, it has greatly influenced the way that Jesus has been regarded. One of the characteristics of the modern study of Jesus is its use of a variety of extra-canonical material. Some of it, like the Gospel of Thomas, may contain actual sayings of Jesus. Other texts, such as the Dead Sea

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Scrolls, Jewish apocalypses, wisdom collections and secular papyri are all used to provide an appropriate context for understanding Jesus. The view that nothing outside the Bible is relevant to an understanding of Jesus is now a minority position. Scholars of all persuasions regularly use texts from outside the Bible to inform their study, even if it is still true that the majority give pre-eminence to the canonical books. How they go about that task is the theme of the next chapter.

Further reading The texts quoted in this chapter are from J.K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Paperback edn; 2005), which contains a number of other texts, along with useful introductory material. There are a number of good introductions to the Apocryphal Gospels, ranging from the slim volume of P. Foster, The Apocryphal Gospels: A Short Introduction (2009) to the more detailed works of H-J. Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels: An Introduction (2003) and B. Ehrman and Z. Pleše, Apocryphal Gospels. Texts and Translations (2011). For more detailed studies, see S. Gathercole, The Composition of the Gospel of Thomas. Original Language and Influences (2012) and P. Foster (ed.), The Non-Canonical Gospels (2008).

Questions 1. Which of the texts listed in this chapter do you think has the greatest claim to authenticity—and why? 2. If we are sceptical about some of the sayings in these apocryphal Gospels, should we be similarly sceptical about the canonical Gospels? 3. Compare the texts of the parable of the vineyard in Matthew, Mark, Luke and Gospel of Thomas. Which text can best explain the origin of the others?

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The Quest for the Historical Jesus

Imagine you were joining the ranks of Ray (King of Kings, 1961), Zeffirelli (Jesus of Nazareth, 1977) and Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988) and were making a film about Jesus. How would you go about it? Would you seek to harmonize all the material found in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, so that Jesus drives out the moneychangers at the beginning and end of his ministry and dies on the cross uttering sayings of forsakenness and victory? Or would you make a selection of stories that best illustrate the meaning and significance of Jesus’ life, as you see it? A third option would be to attempt to discover the earliest and most reliable material in the Gospels (and other sources) and base your film on that. For the last two centuries, New Testament scholars have principally been engaged in the third of these approaches: seeking a reconstruction of the historical Jesus based on the earliest and most reliable sources. The starting point was source criticism.

Source criticism In seeking to reconstruct the past, historians will look at the age and nature of the sources, their relationship to one another, and the purposes for which they were written. An event is more likely if it is attested by several independent sources, especially if they can be shown to be early and relatively free of bias. It is also more convincing if it can explain ‘what happened next’, that is, if it can give a plausible explanation for the emergence of the other sources. In the case of the Gospels, we have seen that Matthew, Mark and Luke have many stories and sayings in common, but also exhibit a number of differences. John is very different from the synoptic Gospels but does contain a few stories in common (e.g. John the Baptist quoting Isaiah, feeding of the 5,000, triumphal entry). Source 81

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criticism is the name given to that branch of study that seeks to ascertain the relationship between the Gospels (Moyise, 2013b, pp. 13–31). As we have already noted, the ancient theory that Mark was an abbreviation of Matthew was reversed in the nineteenth century. Many of Mark’s stories are in fact longer than the version in Matthew and the theory that emerged was that Matthew and Luke are both expansions of Mark. Furthermore, as well as adding their own infancy and resurrection accounts, both include around 200 verses of teaching, which often appears in different contexts (e.g. the Lord’s Prayer) but is very similar in terms of wording. Scholars deduced from this that Matthew and Luke both had access to a collection of sayings, which they called Q. In terms of dating, Mark was thought to have been written in the 60s, perhaps during the persecution of Nero (c. 64 ce) or, in the light of Mark 13:14, just before the destruction of Jerusalem (c. 67–70 ce). Luke’s more accurate reference to ‘Jerusalem surrounded by armies’ (21:20) was thought to betray knowledge of this event, and so was dated in the 80s, with Matthew a little earlier. Q was thought to be about the same date as Mark or a little earlier. Prior to these written documents, the Jesus tradition was transmitted orally.

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This had a profound effect on understandings of Jesus, for features such as Matt 16:18 (‘I will build my church’) and 28:19 (‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’) were now regarded as secondary, part of Matthew’s own ecclesiological interests rather than actual words of Jesus. If Mark and Q are our earliest sources for the historical Jesus, then it would appear that he had little interest in founding a church. Similarly with Luke. If Mark is our earliest source for the ‘rejection in his hometown’ story (Mark 6:1–6), then Luke’s account of Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah and declaring ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4:21) has no direct value for our understanding of the earthly Jesus. It is simply Luke’s expansion of the story to illustrate themes that are important to him. As for John, some scholars agreed with Clement of Alexandria (see Appendix) that John knew the synoptic Gospels but decided to write a different sort of narrative (‘a spiritual Gospel’). Others thought that the differences are so great that he must have written independently of the synoptics. Either way, it was generally held that John’s Gospel (at least in its final edition) belongs to the end of the first century and has little to contribute to the quest for the historical Jesus. Source criticism, then, was thought to have substantiated the ‘liberal’ portrait of Jesus, for explicit claims to be the Messiah, Son of God and Founder of the church appear to be absent from our earliest sources. In an age that was strongly influenced by the theory of evolution, the idea that understandings of Jesus developed from Jewish prophet/Wisdom teacher (historical Jesus) to Messiah/Son of God (New Testament) to ‘God of God, Light of light’ (Creeds), was compelling. The major issue was whether such development was an inspired unfolding of what was implicit in the early sources (and hence true) or a distortion of them (and hence false).

Form criticism Mark had become a very important source for reconstructing the historical Jesus, but it was still written 30–40 years after the events. Was it possible to get behind Mark and discover earlier forms of the stories and sayings? Form criticism, as it was known in the Englishspeaking world, thought it was. Drawing on studies of folk literature,

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scholars such as Bultmann (1921) and Dibelius (1921) suggested that oral traditions are modified during transmission according to certain predictable rules. For example, stories that end in a punchline (‘The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath’) transmit the punchline with great accuracy, since it is necessary to make the point, but are much freer with the rest of the details (as in telling a joke). This explains why Gospel stories often differ in peripheral details but agree closely in the punchline. In terms of the historical Jesus, it means that we can assign a high degree of probability to the punchline, but very little to the details. For example, Mark 2:18–19a reads: Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, ‘Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’ Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they?’

The punchline is Jesus’ pithy saying that wedding guests can hardly be expected to fast while the groom is with them, and is probably an authentic saying of Jesus. However, the introduction is simply a matter of scene-setting, as we can see from Luke’s very different introduction: Then they said to him, ‘John’s disciples, like the disciples of the Pharisees, frequently fast and pray, but your disciples eat and drink.’ Jesus said to them, ‘You cannot make the wedding-guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you?’ (Luke 5:33–4)

Healing stories generally adopt a typical 3-fold form, where the magnitude of the problem is first emphasized, the cure is described, and proof is offered that the cure has been successful. One can see this pattern in Mark’s Gospel: Mark 1:30–1

Mark 1:40–2

Mark 7:32–5

Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once.

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’

They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him.

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Mark 1:30–1

Mark 1:40–2

Mark 7:32–5

He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.

Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose, Be made clean!’

He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’

Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

Bultmann concluded from this that additional details, such as the dialogue in Mark 2:9 (‘Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven”, or to say, “Stand up and take your mat and walk”?’) are most likely secondary. Mark has combined a miracle-story with a dispute about forgiveness, and it is only by unravelling them that we can get back to the actual words of Jesus. Thirdly, Bultmann suggested that as traditions are passed down they are modified to suit the new context. Thus in connection with the ‘wedding-guests’ saying, several things have changed since Jesus first uttered it: (1) Jesus has been crucified, and the early church believed that his death was no accident but was part of God’s purposes; (2) despite the aphorism, the early church does in fact practise fasting, as we can see from Acts  13:2; (3) the marriage analogy of bride and groom has been applied to Christ and the church (Eph 5:25; Rev 19:7). Thus what we now find in Mark’s Gospel is an expansion of Jesus’ saying to make it fit the new circumstances: The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day. (Mark 2:19b–20)

Though the Christian public was shocked to hear that nearly two-thirds of the sayings recorded in the Gospels were not actually uttered by

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Jesus, it still left a considerable body of material that was thought to be close to the very words spoken by Jesus (in translation). The problem was that a Jesus based only on these verses was very different from the Jesus proclaimed by the churches. (See Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 2003.)

Evaluation Though it is still true that most scholars accept Markan priority in some form or other, the theory is not without its problems. In particular, there are cases where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark, both in additions and omissions, which cannot be put down to coincidence. Consider, for example, the taunt to prophesy that occurs in Mark 14:65/Matt 26:67– 8/Luke 22:63–4. Mark 14:65

Matt 26:67–8

Luke 22:63–4

Some began to spit on him, to blindfold him, and to strike him, saying to him, ‘Prophesy!’

Then they spat in his face and struck him; and some slapped him, saying, ‘Prophesy to us, you Messiah! Who is it that struck you?’

Now the men who were holding Jesus began to mock him and beat him; they also blindfolded him and kept asking him, ‘Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?’

Mark’s version is enigmatic. Why on earth should those who are abusing Jesus ask him to prophesy? Matthew and Luke provide an answer to this: Jesus is to prophesy concerning who struck him, and it is therefore part of the taunting. Now it is just about possible to imagine this happening by coincidence, since Mark’s story cries out for clarification. But what seems incomprehensible is for Matthew to then omit the reference to the blindfold, the very basis for the proposed clarification. As it stands, there is very little reason for thinking that Matthew is a clarification of Mark. If anything, it is even more bewildering. Another example is in the healing of the paralytic (Matt 9:1–8/Mark 2:1–12/Luke 5:17–26). On the hypothesis of Markan priority, Mark’s scene-setting (‘Then some people came, bringing to him a paralysed man, carried by four of them’) was changed by Matthew and Luke by (1) adding the words ‘just then’ (idou); (2) omitting the reference to ‘four of them’; and (3) adding the words ‘on a bed’ (epi klinēs). This latter is particularly significant since when Mark tells us later that the man

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was lying on something (vv. 4, 9, 11, 12), he uses a different word (krabbatos = mat). Matt 9:2

Mark 2:3

Luke 5:18

And just then some people were carrying a paralysed man lying on a bed.

Then some people came, bringing to him a paralysed man, carried by four of them.

Just then some men came, carrying a paralysed man on a bed.

Furthermore, Mark’s version of Jesus’ question (2:9) says: ‘Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Stand up and take your mat and walk”?’ On the view of Markan priority, Matthew and Luke both decided to omit the phrases ‘to the paralytic’ and ‘take your mat’. This could be seen as an obvious abbreviation since Mark is rather wordy, but in the conclusion to the healing, both also change Mark’s ‘went out before all of them’ to ‘went to his home’. Matt 9:5, 7

Mark 2:9, 12

Luke 5:23, 25

For which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?

Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’?

Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’?

And he stood up and And he stood up, and went to his home. immediately took the mat and went out before all of them.

Immediately he stood up before them, took what he had been lying on, and went to his home.

The changes in the paralytic story can of course be explained if either Matthew or Luke knew the other. They would then be able to see what changes were made to Mark and decide whether to follow them or not. This is the theory of Michael Goulder (1989) and Mark Goodacre (2002), who propose that Mark came first, was expanded by Matthew, who added infancy stories, blocks of teaching and resurrection appearances, and that Luke then used both Mark and Matthew. He supplied different infancy and resurrection stories, and rearranged much of the teaching into his long travel narrative. On this theory, there is no need for Q as a fixed document since the common material is now explained as Luke’s use of Matthew.

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It is more difficult for this theory to explain the taunt episode, however. The problem here is that it does not seem that Matthew used the version of Mark which has come down to us. Thus many scholars are now adopting a more complicated solution to the synoptic problem, where an earlier version of Mark (proto-Mark) was used by earlier versions of Matthew (proto-Matthew) and Luke (proto-Luke). The versions that have come down to us are not only revisions of these earlier proto-versions, but might well have influenced each other. The consequence of this for the quest for the historical Jesus is that we can no longer assume that Mark always has the earliest version of an incident or saying. Each episode or saying must be considered on its own merits. As for Form criticism, although Bultmann’s work is still regarded as one of the greatest works on the Gospels, his theory that oral tradition is governed by fixed ‘rules’ has been discredited. Stories are often embellished in the ways that he suggests, but not always; sometimes they are shortened. It depends on what the hearer/speaker is trying to accomplish. There is no ‘rule’ that unembellished three-fold miraclestories are always more original than more complicated forms. The story of the paralytic might have been preserved precisely because Jesus made the connection between healing and forgiveness. In practice, a judgement is being made about what is most likely to be original and what is most likely to be secondary, but this then assumes the very thing that we are trying to establish. In particular, though dissimilarity with later church beliefs still plays a role in the modern quest, dissimilarity with the Judaism of Jesus’ day (in order to highlight Jesus’ distinctiveness) is now seen as a false (even anti-Semitic) criterion. Scholars today tend

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to speak of ‘plausibility of context’ rather than ‘dissimilarity with Judaism’.

Dissimilarity and plausibility Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all written by Christians seeking to propagate their Christian beliefs. Words or actions of Jesus that run counter to these tendencies (sometimes called the criterion of embarrassment) have a strong claim to authenticity because they are unlikely to have been added by the early church. For example, since young converts are generally baptized by more mature members of the church, it is unlikely that the church would have invented the story that Jesus was baptized by John. It implies that John is the mentor and Jesus the disciple. Indeed, we can see from Matthew’s account that the story required some sort of explanation: Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. (Matt 3:13–15)

The criterion of dissimilarity suggests that Jesus was indeed baptized by John, though the dialogue, not found in any of the other Gospels, looks like a later explanation. Thus the criterion works in two ways: it adds probability to sayings or actions that run counter to later Christian beliefs, and it reduces the probability of sayings or actions that support them. As a further example, consider the words recorded in Mark 13:32: ‘But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.’ Would the early church have invented a saying that ascribes ignorance to Jesus? It seems unlikely, since it is easy to see how opponents would use it to undermine the belief that Jesus was divine (as indeed they did). On the other hand, if the saying is genuine, then it means that Jesus did refer to himself as the son, albeit obliquely, a conclusion of some Christological significance. Alongside the criterion of dissimilarity is the criterion of plausibility: Jesus must be a plausible figure in the Jewish world of his time. For

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example, after Jesus has healed the man suffering from leprosy, he says to him: ‘go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them’ (Mark 1:44). This is entirely in keeping with all forms of Judaism known to us but is contrary to the practices of the Pauline churches, which sat loose to the ritual requirements of the Law (Rom 14:14). Thus it meets both the criteria of ‘plausibility of context’ and ‘dissimilarity from later Christianity’. It is rightly regarded as a genuine saying of Jesus. This has caused a radical rethink of Jesus’ relationship to the Law. It has often been assumed that, like later Christianity, Jesus was hostile to the ritual and ceremonial aspects of the Law, believing that it inevitably led to ‘legalism’. But many scholars today think that Jesus was essentially law-abiding, observing the Sabbath, attending synagogue, praying at the appointed times, and only eating ‘kosher’ food. That Jesus attacked various abuses of the Law is not to be denied, but so did the prophets before him and so did those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. The point is that these are attacks from within rather than attacks from outside. They do not amount to a repudiation of his ancestral faith. For example, the aphorism that ‘there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile’ (Mark 7:15) has often been taken as Jesus’ repudiation of the food laws. Indeed, Mark seems to confirm this understanding when he adds, ‘Thus he declared all foods clean’ (7:19). But considering that Jesus has just criticized the Pharisees for rejecting a commandment of God in order to keep their Corban tradition (7:9), is it likely that he is now abrogating what amounts to a significant section of God’s Law? Crossley (2004, p.  204) suggests the answer lies in the beginning of the story (7:1–4), which tells us that the dispute is about handwashing rituals, not food laws. We know from other sources that there were moves to expand such laws to include defilement passing from hand to food to eater, via contact with liquid. Jesus is denying this expansion of the Law (known as halacha) by declaring that food is not defiled in this way. The status of food that God’s Law declares unclean is simply not in view. It has also caused a rethink of a number of familiar stories. Thus in those parables where a master entrusts something to his servants (Matt 25:14–30; Luke 19:11–27) and then returns demanding an account of their stewardship, most Christian scholars have assumed

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that Jesus is referring to his second coming. But would any Jewish hearer have thought that? Tom Wright (1996, pp.  612–53) argues that they would be much more likely to assume that the return of the master is a reference to God’s return to his people in exile. Jesus is not predicting his own second coming, but telling his hearers that the long-awaited return of God is imminent and they must be ready for it. As we shall see in the next chapter, many scholars have found the key to understanding the historical Jesus to be his role in bringing Israel’s story to completion. It is sometimes referred to as the eschatological Jesus. A rather different picture has emerged from those who consider the Gospel of Thomas to be an early source for Jesus’ teaching. We have already seen how a case can be made for regarding some of its sayings as early, but Koester goes much further: One of the most striking features of the Gospel of Thomas is its silence on the matter of Jesus’ death and resurrection—the keystone of Paul’s missionary proclamation. But Thomas is not alone in this silence. The Synoptic Sayings Source (Q), used by Matthew and Luke, also does not consider Jesus’ death a part of the Christian message. And it likewise is not interested in stories and reports about the resurrection and subsequent appearances of the risen Lord. The Gospel of Thomas and Q challenge the assumption that the early church was unanimous in making Jesus’ death and resurrection the fulcrum of Christian faith. Both documents presuppose that Jesus’ significance lay in his words, and in his words alone. (1990, p. 86)

When this is combined with the work on Q by Kloppenborg (1987), who thinks that the eschatological themes of ‘judgement on this generation’ and the ‘coming of the Son of Man’ are later additions to Q, the way is paved for reconstructing a non-eschatological and nonMessianic Jesus. In the past, many scholars have considered Jesus’ eschatological claims to be genuine because they evidently caused problems for the later church. As the author of 2 Peter says: First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, ‘Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all

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things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!’. . . But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. (2 Pet 3:3, 4, 8, 9)

But another argument is possible. It is clear from Paul (1 Cor 7:29; 1 Thess 4:15) that the early church believed the end was coming soon and so on the criterion of dissimilarity, sayings of Jesus that support this should be regarded with suspicion. On this view, Jesus offered a critique of the power structures of his day but certainly did not predict the end of the world. It was the furore caused by stories of Jesus’ resurrection, ecstatic experiences in the Spirit, and growing persecution that led the early church to the view that Jesus would return soon and save them. When they came to write Gospels, shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 ce, they had convinced themselves that Jesus not only predicted their suffering, but he had also promised that it would not last for very long. On this view, the eschatological Jesus was a creation of the early church. However, the fact that applying these so-called ‘criteria of authenticity’ has led to such different reconstructions of Jesus raises a fundamental question: Is the reduction of the Gospel material in this way the best approach to capturing the character of Jesus? Dale Allison (Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination and History, 2010) begins his study with a review of how memory works and suggests that what we should be looking for is ‘recurrent attestation’, that is, those themes and motifs that occur throughout the Gospels. The fact that a story is found in more than one Gospel should not be allowed to minimize its value as evidence. Of course the variations make it difficult to decide precisely what was said and done but that should not take away from the memory that these are the sort of things that Jesus said or did. As Dunn (2003) puts it, the differences are best explained as ‘performances’ of the tradition (e.g. the Lord’s prayer) rather than literary changes (though that has sometimes happened as well). Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2008) goes much further and argues for the ongoing role of eyewitnesses in the transmission of the material. The assumption of the Form Critics was

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that a fairly long period of unregulated oral transmission took place before anything was written down. But it is much more likely that the disciples took notes with them when they were sent out to preach and shared memories and traditions when they met together (Acts  4:23). According to Bauckham, the differences in the Gospels are not to be explained as unregulated ‘developments’ but as the ‘testimony’ of particular apostles. In the chapters that follow, we will look at the origins of the eschatological Jesus and some of its modern exponents (chapter 8), followed by those who see Jesus as primarily a non-eschatological teacher and sage (chapter 9). The fact that such different reconstructions are possible suggests to some that more attention should be paid to the cultural context of particular scholars (e.g. Crossley, 2008, 2013). Thus in chapter 10, we look at some reconstructions of Jesus that have emerged from political and feminist theology, as well as those who view him from the perspective of particular church beliefs. This is extended in chapter 11 to include representations of Jesus in art, media and culture. Chapter  12 then reflects on how all this works in practice, summarised in twelve factors that need to be taken into account in the ongoing quest to say (or express) something of significance about the figure of Jesus.

Further reading An introduction to source and form criticism, as well as other ideological approaches to the Bible, can be found in Moyise (2013b). For a workbook approach to the issues discussed in this chapter, see G. Theissen and A. Merz, The Historical Jesus (1998) and D. Wenham and S. Walton, Exploring the New Testament: Introducing the Gospels and Acts (2011). Three important works that highlight the role of memory are J.D.G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (2003), R. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2008), and D.C. Allison, Constructing Jesus (2010). For an introduction to the important role that Q plays in modern scholarship, see J.S. Kloppenborg, Q the Earliest Gospel. An Introduction to the Original Stories and Sayings of Jesus (2008) and for extracts and a short biography from the compilers of over 300 representations of Jesus spanning the centuries, see D.F. Ford and M. Higton, Jesus (2002).

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Questions 1. What would be the difficulties of making a film about Jesus that included everything in the four Gospels? 2. What is it that is distinctive about Jesus? On what criteria would you defend your answer? 3. The church has its doctrine of Christ. Why should it be interested in a quest for the historical Jesus?

8

Jesus: Prophet of the Coming Kingdom

Some say it’s all Albert Schweitzer’s fault. Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which first appeared as Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), surveyed the many attempts from Reimarus (1778) to Wrede (1901) to uncover the ‘Jesus of history’. After offering his lengthy, but exhilarating, journey through past efforts, Schweitzer then added his own. It was a landmark in the modern study of Jesus. Even though most of its features were far from original, his account has sent reverberations through New Testament study, and through all efforts to try to understand the historical figure of Jesus, ever since. In a nutshell, Schweitzer was saying that Jesus was essentially a prophet of doom. The end was nigh and Jesus thought that God was going to break into history in his own lifetime. When this did not happen, Jesus initially thought he had made a mistake. But his mistake was not the conclusion that the end was coming soon. Rather, it was his failure to realize that he himself was to play the decisive role in bringing this about. So the events in Jerusalem which led to his crucifixion are to be understood as Jesus’ attempt to hasten the end and allow God’s kingdom to overtake human history. Schweitzer brought to the forefront of modern scholarship the sheer distance and strangeness of the figure we are studying. Or, to put it a different way, by showing just how important eschatology was for Jesus, Schweitzer presents us with a Jesus who does not fit easily within most people’s interpretations (spiritual example, wise teacher, ethical guide, divine envoy, political agitator). In order to explore this, we need to ask what Jesus meant when he spoke about the kingdom. What was it that he expected to happen soon?

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Jesus and the Kingdom As Schweitzer shows, many nineteenth-century portraits of Jesus simply tried to make him too contemporary, so that he could function as a confirmation or corrective of the theology of the time. The pictures of Jesus then being propagated were suspiciously similar to the religious values of their authors. The Gospels were being read selectively, and important aspects of the evidence were being overlooked. But in 1892, Johannes Weiss published a brief but influential study called Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (finally translated into English in 1971). Weiss realized that even though people were ready to talk about Jesus and about his preaching of the kingdom of God, some of what was actually contained in the Gospels about that kingdom (and in particular when that kingdom was to come) was being ignored. Weiss therefore set about a detailed study of the Gospel evidence, drawing the results of his enquiry together in a series of ten conclusions. Here are some of his key statements (1971, pp. 129–30):

1. Jesus’ activity is governed by the strong and unwavering feeling that the messianic time is imminent . . . 2. [The] actualization of the Kingdom of God has yet to take place . . . The disciples were to pray for the coming of the Kingdom of God, but men (sic) could do nothing to establish it. 3. Not even Jesus can bring, establish, or found the Kingdom of God; only God can do so . . . 5. Although Jesus initially hoped to live to see the establishment of the Kingdom, he gradually became certain that before this could happen, he must cross death’s threshold . . . the coming of the Kingdom cannot be determined in advance by observation of signs or calculation . . . 8. The land of Palestine will arise in a new and glorious splendor, forming the center of the new Kingdom. Weiss does not wholly overlook the fact, even in his concluding statements, that in the canonical Gospels there is a sense in which the kingdom of God has already broken into history. But it is clear, particularly from statement 2, just where his emphasis lies. He also notes the ignorance of Jesus (Jesus himself does not know when the end will come), the limited power of Jesus (he cannot bring about the end),

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and the ‘this-worldliness’ of the kingdom of God (the solid earth of Palestine will be the focal point). One final aspect is worth highlighting: Weiss’s account shares with Schweitzer’s an emphasis on the conviction that Jesus thought he was achieving something by dying. This last point may sound strange to readers used to seeing the Gospels through the lens of later Christian interpretation. But it is by no means obvious from the Gospels alone that Jesus deliberately went to Jerusalem to ‘usher in the kingdom’ or ‘make atonement for sin’ or ‘reconcile humanity to God’. Whatever Christian interpretation has made of Jesus’ death (Christians would say ‘rightly made’), historically it may simply have been a gross miscarriage of justice. He may have been unwilling to die (Mark 14:34). He may have had no specific plans to cause a disturbance when he went up to Jerusalem (which may have been the first and only time he went to Jerusalem or the last of a number of visits). In highlighting this point, as a link between Weiss and Schweitzer, we are illustrating just what kind of challenge is entailed in trying to separate out ‘Jesus’ and ‘the Gospels’. Trying to find out about Jesus in and through the Gospels, but only reading them with Christian eyes (i.e. within the context of the New Testament, understood as scripture, and in relation to church life, past and present), can prevent us from asking some key questions, the answers to which might prove (ironically) profoundly important for Christianity. Both Weiss and Schweitzer were Christians. They did not set out to be critical of Christianity in any way. They each believed that they were being ‘more historical’ in their respective readings of the canonical Gospels. Though we shall see in the final chapter of this book that a simple polarity of Christian/theological versus historical/objective readings of Jesus and the Gospels cannot be maintained, it is clear that the attempt to try to locate the Jesus of history is going to have theological implications. It is, in other words, always likely to make Christians, and perhaps Jews too, ‘think again’ about Jesus. The Weiss–Schweitzer approach to the study of Jesus was revolutionary. The new (or rediscovered) picture of Jesus as eschatological prophet dealt a critical blow to the more easily accessible, comfortable images of Jesus which were being offered in late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Europe. It sent people scurrying to the Gospels themselves to see if the picture was right. And it is a picture which has found supporters ever since. In the present day, one of its most eloquent and authoritative

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supporters is E.P. Sanders, the American New Testament scholar. In two books, a weighty scholarly volume Jesus and Judaism (1985) and a smaller, more popular, text The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993), Sanders offers a clear portrayal of Jesus as a Jewish prophet with a keen awareness of his own personal significance for the coming of God’s kingdom. Crucial to Sanders’ approach is a comprehensive study of first-century Judaism (on which he is an authority), which enables us to locate Jesus within a plausible religious world. Sanders’ conclusion is that Jesus fits within ‘Jewish restoration eschatology’. Sanders’ enquiries lead him to regard Jesus as a prophet who sees the kingdom as future but imminent, his own role being to enable Israel to be gloriously reconstituted by God in the near future. The resulting picture of Jesus is thus similar to that of Weiss and Schweitzer in stressing the eschatological dimension of Jesus’ preaching, teaching and wider ministry, and in focusing upon the historical Israel. Sanders has a rather different explanation of the death of Jesus, however, viewing it as a piece of political intrigue resulting from the offence Jesus caused to the Jerusalem authorities. He therefore does not fall into line with the view that Jesus somehow intended to die on the trip to Jerusalem, as if he sensed that he had to offer himself in order for the end to occur. Sanders thus adheres more firmly to the view that the future, and the kingdom, really are God’s alone. But his picture of Jesus is nevertheless sufficiently close to that of Weiss and Schweitzer for us to draw them alongside each other and class them as what we may call the first of two major tendencies, or trajectories, in the study of the historical Jesus.

Eschatology and the Gospels Is the Weiss–Schweitzer–Sanders approach a plausible reading of the Gospels? Central to Schweitzer’s understanding of Jesus is the material found in Matthew 10, the sending out of the twelve. According to Schweitzer: the whole of the discourse at the sending out of the Twelve, taken in the clear sense of the words, is a prediction of the events of the ‘end time’, events which are immediately at hand, in which the

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supernatural eschatological course of history will break through into the natural course of history. (2000, p. 330)

Schweitzer saw the mission of the twelve as a last-ditch preaching campaign, summoning people to prepare for the End. This is the linchpin of Schweitzer’s argument. But lots of other material gathers round it. Schweitzer reads the suffering predictions, found prominently in Mark, as an aspect of the eschatological expectation which Jesus embodied in his preaching and teaching. He understands the temptation element within the Lord’s Prayer (‘lead us not into temptation’) as an eschatological motif (so NRSV: ‘do not bring us to the time of trial’— Matt 6:13). And the apparent attempts of Jesus to escape the crowds (Mark 6:30–3) are read by Schweitzer as indicators that Jesus wanted to be with his disciples to await the coming of the kingdom. Schweitzer considers both the baptism (‘he saw the heavens torn apart’) and the last supper (‘I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God’) to be eschatological events. Jesus headed for Jerusalem to compel the kingdom of God to come, aware that he had to give up his life ‘for many’ (Mark 10:45; 14:24). Crucial for Schweitzer’s argument is his reading of Jewish apocalyptic literature (e.g. Daniel, Enoch, Psalms of Solomon), for it is within the framework of such texts that early Christianity emerged. Schweitzer is noting the importance of eschatological fervour in first-century Judaism, and reading the figure of Jesus through it. As he put it in an earlier edition of The Quest of the Historical Jesus: The self-consciousness of Jesus cannot . . . be illustrated or explained; all that can be explained is the eschatological view, in which the Man who possessed that self-consciousness saw reflected in advance the coming events, both those of a more general character, and those which especially related to Himself. (1954, p. 365)

His drawing attention to the importance of Jewish apocalyptic links him directly with Weiss before him and Sanders and Allison after him. Weiss’s exposition of ‘the coming transformation’ and the nature of the judgement which will accompany the arrival of the (imminently future)

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kingdom of God finds him dipping into the books of 4 Ezra and Enoch to set up the context for such passages as Mark 13:24–5. The cataclysmic events which are anticipated in such texts in turn provide the context for Weiss’s reading of passages in which Jesus seems to refer to a new heaven and a new earth (Matt 19:28; Mark 14:25). With regard to judgement, Weiss admits that it is unclear from the Gospels whether Jesus believed that those who are to be condemned as a result of the final judgement will be annihilated or subjected to eternal torment, for Mark 8:35 seems to contradict Matt 25:41, 46 (Weiss, 1971, p. 99). It is clear, however, that the judgement and the kingdom’s coming are directly linked (Mark 9:43–8). If the kingdom is coming soon, then so too is judgement. Despite the common ground between Weiss and Schweitzer in locating Jesus and the Gospels within the tradition of Jewish apocalyptic literature, they differ in one significant respect: Schweitzer still believed that Matthew was the earliest Gospel (it is the most Jewish) but Weiss accepted the arguments of Lachmann (1835) and Holtzmann (1863) that Mark was the earliest, though he doubted the accuracy of Mark’s chronology. This difference between Weiss and Schweitzer can be read in two ways: (1) The apocalyptic view is so compelling that it does not matter which Gospel was the earliest – both Gospels support such a view; or (2) Other factors, such as the decision to locate Jesus within the apocalyptic stream of Judaism, are imposing an interpretative grid on the Gospel material. We will return to this in subsequent chapters. E.P. Sanders supports Mark as the first Gospel to be written. His use of the Gospels, however, finds him traversing the whole synoptic material, picking up his evidence piece by piece. Sanders is clearly a scholar who operates after the form critics, his work thoroughly informed by the conviction that you have to take each story and saying on its own merits. Unlike so many studies of the Gospels, though, Sanders prefers to focus on the actions, rather than on the sayings, of Jesus. His reasoning is simple: you can’t put too much weight on odd turns of phrase which are not even preserved in Jesus’ first language. It is better to try to find out what Jesus did, in order to make sense of him. Nevertheless, Sanders thinks that if we calmly survey all of the kingdom sayings, we shall see that most of them place the kingdom up there, in heaven, where people will

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enter after death, and in the future, when God brings the kingdom to earth and separates the sheep from the goats. (1993, p. 176)

In other words, Jesus does teach that the kingdom is of God and is in the future, but his actions demonstrate this more clearly. Like Weiss and Schweitzer, Sanders is keen to locate Jesus within his Jewish milieu and suggests that this is an apocalyptic trajectory, from John the Baptist to early eschatologically minded Christianity (1 Thess 4:16–17). But Sanders is less impressed than earlier scholars about the value of trying to prove that first-century Jews expected a divine ‘Son of God’ or ‘Son of Man’ to appear. Rather, without doubting that early Christians made rapid links between Jesus’ miracle-working, his evident lofty self-claims, and currently available titles of dignity, Sanders prefers to focus upon all the events from the life of Jesus which he can conclude actually happened (with the greatest degree of probability, that is). Together they suggest that Jesus made sense of his own life in terms of the imminently arriving kingdom of God. Like most contemporary scholars, Sanders makes much of the miracles, and stresses the importance of seeing them in their firstcentury context. Problematic though they may be for interpreters today, in first-century terms, although striking, they are not so extraordinary that those who perform them should be regarded as divine (see Matt 12:27). What is more, the significance of Jesus’ miraculous actions would be seen as signals of the eschatological time only by those who were already ‘in the know’. Much more significant for Sanders is a series of actions through which Jesus seems to place himself firmly within (and possibly at the end of) the prophetic tradition. The gathering of ‘the twelve’ (even if the precise twelve cannot be listed without difficulty) is one such act. The significance of the number was not lost on Matthew, who has Jesus saying to the disciples, ‘you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel’ (19:28). On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus performs three actions which can each be regarded as prophetic. Firstly, he rides into Jerusalem on an ass, fulfilling, according to Matthew, the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9. Secondly, he overturns the tables of the money-changers in the temple, although there is debate as to precisely what he was objecting to. And thirdly, he shares a significant

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meal with his closest friends and allies, which, according to the synoptic Gospels, coincided with the Passover meal. Sanders is therefore looking for signs within the activity of Jesus which indicate who he thought he was, and what he thought he was doing. He admits that Jesus seems to subvert some of what would be expected of an eschatological prophet. Jesus is interested in sinners, repentance and judgement. But though he has close contact with sinners, he does not appear to require them to repent first. He does want people to behave better than they do; indeed, says Sanders, Jesus is something of a moral perfectionist. However: He did not . . . address a message to Israel to the effect that at the end there would be a great assize at which Israel would be vindicated and the nations rebuked and destroyed; and it seems that he did not make thematic the message that Israel should repent and mend their ways so as to escape punishment at the judgment. (1985, p. 115)

Though Jesus is to be understood eschatologically, parts of the Gospels show that early Christianity had not quite understood Jesus’ particular brand of ‘restoration eschatology’. The ‘summary text’ of Mark 1:15 is, says Sanders, misleading. Repentance was not the hallmark of Jesus’proclamation of the kingdom of God in the way it had been for John the Baptist. For Sanders, then, Jesus is a radically consistent Jew, whose respect for the law was such that ‘we should be very hesitant to accept the common view of New Testament scholars that he had actually opposed the Jewish law’ (1993, p. 224). Most of the cases where Jesus is alleged to have broken the Jewish law (Mark 2:1–12, 23–8; 3:1–6; 7:1–23) prove to be nothing of the sort, either because they are unlikely to have happened as written, or because they assume a law has been broken when it has not. Sanders admits to ‘two points where Jesus asserted his own authority’—the commandment to ‘let the dead bury their own dead’ (Matt 8:21–2) and his calling of sinners, already mentioned. But these do not constitute the wholesale rejection of the law which is commonly assumed. Rather, Jesus’ place within Judaism is as a person who had a high self-claim, precisely because he saw that the future transformation by God of the present world order was imminent. Far from a rejection of Judaism, this was Judaism’s fulfilment, and Israel’s restoration. The end was indeed nigh.

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A provisional assessment From this first, extended look at one composite image of Jesus (the Weiss–Schweitzer–Sanders trajectory), we are confronted with an inevitable circle of interpretation, which is always the case when we try to understand a historical figure. A basic picture is used to read the texts, yet it is the texts which have supplied the picture in the first place. That particular circle must either be entered at some point, and followed round, or it must be broken, and an alternative put in its place. But we must note the merits and impact of this image of Jesus before suggesting ways in which it might be mistaken. Its main merit is its strong attempt to place Jesus appropriately within first-century Judaism. In other words, this line of interpretation is most likely to respect Jesus’ sheer historical distance from us. In respecting what may appear as the strangeness of the apocalyptic imagery, the interpretation resists the tendency to accept too easily certain Christian assumptions about Jesus, merely because the primary texts are themselves Christian. Secondly, this picture of Jesus is based on a critical evaluation of the Gospel material. In particular, it builds on the critical consensus that the most reliable material is found in Mark and Matthew. Weiss, Schweitzer and Sanders disagree as to which Gospel came first, but they all agree that Mark and Matthew should take pride of place in any historical reconstruction. Thus these scholars would claim that they have not simply ‘opted’ for an eschatological portrait of Jesus. It is the dominant image in our earliest and most reliable sources. However, as we have already noted, not all scholars would agree with this judgement. Thirdly, as Sanders stresses, we have a picture of Jesus which seems to make sense of how the John the Baptist movement could have become Pauline Christianity, via Jesus. When the emergence of early Christianity is viewed in that way, it is difficult to conclude that Jesus was anything but an eschatological figure, that he thought of himself as such, and that he spoke and acted accordingly. We must, though, note some possible problems. First, we must ask whether eschatological expectation was quite so fervent at the time of Jesus as this theory seems to presuppose. Although most textbooks on ‘Judaism at the time of Jesus’ readily map out a range of hopes about the future within Judaism, it is not clear that any one tradition of expectation

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was dominant. Nor is it certain that Jesus can be linked easily with one particular strand of eschatological expectation. As John Riches states: Jesus certainly looked for some imminent act of intervention on God’s part . . . I am doubtful whether he, any more than John the Baptist, spelled that out in very full terms. The Gospels certainly do. (1990, p. 104)

In other words, an affirmation that Jesus expected God to act does not easily translate into the fine detail of how Jesus understood that action. Schweitzer, for one, may be reading Matthew’s own interpretation of the eschatology of Jesus rather too quickly as if it were Jesus’ own. Furthermore, it is quite possible that Schweitzer himself may have been caught up in ‘end of century’ fever at the time when he was reassessing the rather tame Jesuses proposed by the scholars before him. A second question about this eschatological reading of Jesus arises from what we mean by ‘eschatology’ and ‘apocalyptic’. A number of scholars have questioned the ease with which ‘apocalyptic’ becomes linked with a sort of other-worldly cataclysmic event (Wright, 1992, 1996; Borg and Wright, 1998). Although this may highlight Jesus’ strangeness to twenty-first-century ears, it may also lead us astray. ‘Apocalyptic’, after all, simply means the revelation of that which was hidden. Jesus may well have believed himself to have a significant role in God’s ultimate self-revelation. ‘Ultimacy’ thus reflects the apparent eschatological dimension in Jesus’ teaching and doing: his speech and acts are crucial events. But ‘other-worldliness’ may not be in his mind at all. His reference to a coming kingdom of God might have little to do with an imminent series of cataclysmic events. Thus our wrestling with the Gospels may be a matter of trying to disentangle an admittedly eschatological message from a crassly literal interpretation of it. As we shall see in our next chapter, that is precisely what many contemporary scholars do think. In this regard, Wright’s work is especially interesting. His conclusions about Jesus logically place him in this chapter. For Wright, it is clear that Jesus is an eschatological figure. With Jesus, the end has come. This means that all that Israel had hoped for was coming to fulfilment in and through the words and actions of Jesus: the return from exile was happening (Wright, 1996, pp. 249, 268); evil was being defeated (pp. 243, 461, 481); Yahweh was returning to Zion (pp.  204–6, 463, 481). But

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Wright’s redefining of apocalyptic in ‘this worldly’ terms, which he claims to be more true to first-century meanings, enables him to construct a picture of Jesus that is both eschatological and also rooted within the socio-political climate of first-century Palestine. This line of questioning does not, then, necessarily oppose an eschatological understanding of Jesus. It merely forces us to say more precisely what we mean by it. It may be that the particular eschatological fervour ‘discovered’ by Weiss and Schweitzer belongs more to the early church (1 Cor 7:29–31; 1 Thess 4:15) than to Jesus. A third angle of questioning invites a direct counter to Sanders’ method. Even granted Sanders’ point that you shouldn’t read too much into the odd Greek word, what if Sanders’ emphasis upon actions over sayings has led him to play down the significance of Jesus’ apparently being a teacher of some kind? Or what if some of the more incidental, routine actions of Jesus, such as breaking social taboos, suggest a strategy of social subversion rather than apocalyptic destruction? Perhaps Jesus’ understanding of the imminent action of God in human history (the coming of the kingdom of God), though thoroughly Jewish in form and content, was highly original and has to be understood in the light of all that Jesus said and did.

Further reading A good place to begin is the more popular book by E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (1993), followed by the more demanding book by N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (1996). There is a useful evaluation of this whole approach in C.C. Newman (ed.), Jesus and the Restoration of Israel (1999). It should be noted that this eschatological reading of Jesus is not the only way of understanding ‘Jesus within Judaism’. Geza Vermes sees strong similarities between Jesus and Galilean holy men of the same period (Vermes, 1973, 1993, 2003). Richard Horsley wants us to look at the wider political ramifications of Judaism at the time of Jesus, to prevent our viewing the ‘religion’ of Judaism too narrowly in late twentieth-century terms (Horsley, 1987, 1994, 2003). And Freyne (1988, 1994, 2004) explores the importance of Galilee (as opposed to Jerusalem) as the context within which Jesus is to be understood. Craig Evans provides a helpful summary of the

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significance of archaeological findings for understanding Jesus and his world (2012).

Questions 1. What is meant by saying that Jesus was an eschatological figure? 2. What was it that Jesus expected to happen soon? 3. Is it possible to interpret Mark 13:24–7 as describing the destruction of Jerusalem?

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We ended the previous chapter noting that questions can be raised about understanding Jesus primarily as an eschatological figure. In this chapter, we examine a different interpretation of Jesus. This stresses the way in which Jesus focuses upon this world (which he seeks to transform) rather than on any kind of apocalyptic future. In some versions of this interpretation, Jesus’ role as teacher is highlighted over that of prophet. However, this ‘trajectory’ of interpretation will be a much looser alliance than was possible in the previous chapter.

Jesus the peasant Jewish cynic To turn from the work of Weiss, Schweitzer and Sanders to that of the contemporary biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan is to enter a different world. In a number of books written over many years (but, for our purposes, especially in 1991 and 1994), Crossan has been offering an interpretation of Jesus and the early Christian movement which challenges many long-held assumptions about Christianity’s origins. At the heart of Crossan’s exposition is a view of Jesus as a ‘peasant Jewish Cynic’. We must therefore begin by appreciating the full force of each of these terms as Crossan understands them, before going on to note how he has reached his conclusions.

Peasant In keeping with much contemporary Jesus research, Crossan locates Jesus socially and economically in a first-century Palestinian context (Oakman, 1986; Horsley, 1987). Geography is also important. For Jesus 107

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was from Galilee, from Nazareth, ‘a tiny hamlet whose population has been estimated at anything from twelve hundred to two hundred people’ (Crossan, 1994, p.  26). Nazareth was only about three miles from Sepphoris, a large town (perhaps even a ‘city’), and so Jesus would have had contact with the well-to-do and culturally sophisticated. But that, says Crossan, was not his own background. Being more of a rural Galilean, his primary work would have been ‘among the farms and villages of Lower Galilee’ (Crossan, 1991, p. 422). If he was a carpenter, as Mark 6:3 may suggest (the precise meaning of the Greek word tektõn is disputed), then this implies he would be a maker of farming implements which he would sell around the region. And as such, socially he would have ‘belonged to the Artisan class, that group pushed into the dangerous space between peasants and Degradeds or Expendables’ (1994, p. 25). In other words, although Jesus is socially and economically not in the lowest stratum of first-century Palestinian society, he is not far from it. In Crossan’s view, Jesus began as a follower of John the Baptist, who ‘was an apocalyptic preacher announcing, in classical Jewish tradition, the imminent advent of an avenging God’ (1994, p. 38). Crossan is not, however, convinced that Jesus remained consistent with John the Baptist’s way of seeing things. The major question is not whether Jesus began as an apocalyptic believer but whether he continued as such and whether, when he began his own mission, he did so by picking up the fallen banner of the Baptist. (1994, p. 46)

Matt 11:7b–9 (paralleled in Luke 7:24b–6 and Gospel of Thomas 78) suggests that Jesus is quite different from John. This tradition is hardly likely to have been invented by early Christians, who seem to have been inclined to develop the eschatological interpretation of Jesus. Equally, the fact that it has not been suppressed or removed is a point in favour of its authenticity. Crossan notes that Jesus’ form of Judaism seems to have conflicted with the apocalyptic strand. He is much closer to the Jewish wisdom tradition. Whatever may have been the cause of this ‘conversion’ of Jesus (possibly the death of John the Baptist), the result was that Jesus focused primarily on the here and now.

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An alternative to the future or apocalyptic Kingdom is the present or sapiential vision. The term sapiential underlines the necessity of wisdom—sapientia in Latin—for discerning how, here and now in this world, one can live so that God’s power, rule, and dominion are evidently present to all observers . . . It is a style of life for now rather than a hope of life for the future. (1994, p. 56)

It is, however, important to note that Crossan claims to be able to retain an ‘eschatological’ element to his interpretation of the kingdom of God, even though he rejects the apocalyptic strand. By ‘eschatological’ Crossan means ‘world negating’. And this, he says, is very much part of his wisdom-oriented reading of Jesus. Jesus is no less suspicious of the world of which he is a part, even though he differs from John the Baptist’s apocalypticism.

Cynic The world-negating aspect of Jesus’ teaching and practice relates directly to the third component in Crossan’s description of Jesus as a ‘peasant Jewish Cynic’. ‘Cynicism’ is a Greek philosophical movement which goes back to the fourth century bce. The extent to which it was a widespread movement throughout the Mediterranean world is disputed in New Testament studies today. However, there are undoubtedly features of Jesus’ practice which relate to Cynic-like practices, even if it is difficult to demonstrate explicitly that Jesus was linked to Cynicism. The most striking similarity between Jesus, his followers and the Cynics relates to what they wear. Crossan thinks that Luke 10:4 (Q) is earlier than Mark 6:8–9, and sees the command not to wear sandals as the original version. Thus Jesus’ followers would have looked like wandering Cynics. But what about the carrying of possessions? Here there are apparent differences. Cynics were to carry a wallet, a staff and a cloak with them at all times, even if the cloak was to be old and torn. Jesus’ followers were told to take no bread or bag or money, though they were permitted a staff to aid walking. Why the difference? Crossan’s explanation is simple:

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They are not urban like the Cynics, preaching at street corner and market place. They are rural, on a house mission to rebuild peasant society from the grass roots upward . . . they could not and should not dress to declare itinerant self sufficiency but rather communal dependency. (1994, pp. 118–19)

Jesus therefore started a Cynic-like movement, possibly as a result of his own contacts with Cynics in Sepphoris (which was, after all, a ‘GrecoRoman city’). However, he modified their practice, given his own background as a rural Galilean from the artisan class. But what was Cynicism about? In practice (which is where Crossan wants to put the emphasis), it meant overturning social conventions and resisting the normal assumptions of civilized society. Jesus was concerned to question and challenge the way in which Greco-Roman society took shape in first-century Palestine. Thus he embarked on an itinerant ministry which focused on the rural poor, his outlook profoundly influenced by peasantry, Judaism and Cynicism. But what form did this mission take? Crossan’s exposition of Jesus’ life and teaching focuses, not surprisingly, on the socially subversive elements recorded in the Gospels. This does not simply mean Jesus’ eating habits, shocking though they were (‘All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner” ’, Luke 19:7). It also relates to Jesus’ healing and exorcistic activity. To modern readers, this aspect of Jesus’ ministry sets him apart from all others and has often been used to ‘prove’ his messiahship or divinity. But Crossan suggests that a close reading of the Gospels shows that the focus is actually on social inclusion. Jesus does not perform healings and exorcisms in order to confer some special status on the sick (or himself). He restores them, both individually and socially. His aim is to reintegrate those who have been ostracized by society, such as those suffering from leprosy, the possessed, the haemorrhaging woman. Crossan has no qualms, then, about claiming that ‘the historical Jesus had both an ideal vision and a social program’ (1991, p. 349). Unlike the Weiss–Schweitzer–Sanders Jesus, Crossan’s Jesus is focused on the here and now. There is a kingdom to be preached and enacted, but it is a present, sapiential kingdom and is not simply to be awaited. And God

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is certainly not to be coerced or petitioned, in order to bring it about. In keeping with the Jewish wisdom tradition of which Jesus is a part, loyal to his economic and social background, and influenced by the ascetics he may have come across who questioned the administrative and political heavy-handedness of the Roman authorities, Jesus set about a practical programme of transforming Galilean society by the personal influence of a small movement of people. According to Crossan, the heart of the original Jesus movement was: a shared egalitarianism of spiritual and material resources. I emphasize this as strongly as possible, and I insist that its materiality and spirituality, its facticity and symbolism cannot be separated. The mission we are talking about is not, like Paul’s, a dramatic thrust along major trade routes to urban centers hundreds of miles apart. Yet it concerns the longest journey in the Greco-Roman world, maybe in any world, the step across the threshold of a peasant stranger’s home. (1991, p. 341)

More cynics? We have given a lot of space to Crossan’s work because it has proved influential in New Testament study. It would be wrong, though, to think that Crossan is alone in challenging the view of Jesus as primarily an eschatological prophet, who looked to an imminently future kingdom of God. Nor would it be right to claim that this recent, predominantly North American way of interpreting Jesus is completely new, though the connection with Cynicism and the use of the Gospel of Thomas is distinctive. We must now look at other scholars who take a similar approach to Crossan, and at some precursors of the emphases of this second major strand of Jesus-interpretation. Marcus Borg is an especially interesting interpreter of Jesus because at the same time as contributing major research into the Jesus of history (Borg, 1984, 1987, 1994a), he has also made several attempts, in a way that many Jesus scholars do not, to draw out the implications of his work for practical everyday Christian faith (Borg, 1994b, 1997; Borg and Wright, 1998). Borg should be considered alongside Crossan

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because he has so strenuously resisted the image of Jesus as an eschatological figure. At the same time as offering an understanding of the social and political background of Jesus (1984), and a reading of Jesus as ‘sage’ (‘teacher of wisdom’) and ‘revitalization movement founder’ (1987, pp.  97–149), his picture of Jesus adds a number of features to those gleaned from Crossan. First, Borg addresses what for long has been considered a ‘no-go zone’ in modern biblical scholarship: Jesus’ spiritual experience. Without delving too deeply into Jesus’ inner life (not as deeply as John Miller in his 1997 work Jesus at Thirty), Borg is nevertheless prepared to consider the kind of spiritual experience which must have been known by one who did the things that Jesus did. Accepting the strangeness of the firstcentury world which we are seeking to interpret, Borg stitches together a number of features of the Gospel accounts of Jesus which cannot be sidestepped: visions, his practice of prayer, and the authoritative impact his person seemed to have on others. A second feature is that Borg retains a prominent place for Jesus’ role and function as a prophet, even though he offers a non-eschatological interpretation of Jesus. This raises the question as to what kind of prophet Jesus was, if not the kind suggested by the Weiss–Schweitzer– Sanders tradition. Borg’s understanding links Jesus directly with the classical prophets of Israel and their roles as God’s messengers, operating out of ‘the intensity of their experience of the Spirit’ (1987, p. 150). The prophets, however, were quite clearly political, in the sense that they read the signs of the times; they weren’t predictors of the future with a special hotline to God. They followed, says Borg, a three-fold pattern of indictment, threat and call to change, accompanying their spoken message with symbolic actions. Jesus followed a similar pattern of ministry at a particular time of crisis in his people’s history. Rather than connecting his reading of Jesus with the Weiss–Schweitzer–Sanders tradition, however, Borg prefers to see Jesus’ own prophetic convictions in terms of ‘the threat of historical catastrophe for his society’ (1987, p. 157). It is wrong, then, to make Jesus too other-worldly. And this, for Borg, seems to be the essential error behind the eschatological reading of Jesus. It was certainly present in Schweitzer’s interpretation of Jesus. Whether it was equally true of Weiss and Sanders is not easy to judge. Borg is stressing more than either of those scholars that the sense of urgency in Jesus’

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mission and ministry is more concerned with social, economic and political factors than with the expectation of an otherworldly kingdom. Furthermore, he wants to emphasize these necessary elements, without claiming that Jesus’ mission and ministry is reducible to them. In other words, social, economic and political factors do not explain away Jesus’ ministry, as if his relationship with God and his own inner life somehow did not count. Borg is at pains to see how a spiritual life interweaves with such elements. Jesus’ prophetic role leads him to advocate ‘the politics of compassion’ in place of ‘the politics of holiness’, and this inevitably leads him to offer a fundamental challenge to Judaism, but always from within. Wright’s interpretation of Jesus has many points of contact with Borg’s. As we saw in the previous chapter, Wright, too, wants to point out the concrete aspects of the words and actions of Jesus. He is sceptical of readings of Jesus which understand the kingdom of God in some other-worldly sense. On the contrary, says Wright, even apocalyptic visions are essentially about this-worldly events: there is no justification for seeing ‘apocalyptic’ as necessarily speaking of the ‘end of the world’ in a literally cosmic sense . . . we must read most apocalyptic literature, both Jewish and Christian, as a complex metaphor-system which invests space-time reality with its full, that is, its theological, significance. (1992, pp. 298–9)

But ultimately Wright feels unable to accept Borg’s argument for a noneschatological Jesus. For even though Wright has no desire to push the aims and actions of Jesus beyond this world, nevertheless, his reading of Jesus in the Gospels leads him to conclude that Jesus himself thought that, in him, the end had come. Whether through collusion with the ruling powers (Sadducees) or armed resistance (Zealots), Jesus was convinced that Israel must return to God or face the consequences. He thus has much in common with Sanders’ ‘Jewish restoration theology’, even though there are also elements in common with the more diverse group being considered here. All of this shows just how slippery such terms as ‘kingdom’, ‘eschatology’ and ‘apocalyptic’ can be, as is particularly apparent when we consider the earlier work of William Wrede and C.H. Dodd.

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Wrede and Dodd Glance at most textbook treatments of Wrede and you can be sure that the word ‘radical’ will not be far away. If German New Testament scholarship at the end of the nineteenth century was known to be radical, then Wrede was certainly one of the reasons for this. With hindsight, his questions, though searching, were not that extreme. It was more the novelty of his willingness to pose them and to take some challenging lines of thought to their logical conclusion, which proved most shocking. For our purposes, we need to note two of his insights. The first concerns the framework of Mark’s Gospel. The earliest testimony to Mark (Papias) says that ‘Mark, who had been Peter’s interpreter, wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered’ (see Appendix). This admission of inaccuracy had not been of great concern to the church since Luke claimed to have written ‘an orderly account’ and Matthew became the church Gospel. But as Mark was increasingly being recognized as the earliest Gospel and as providing the narrative framework for Matthew and Luke, this conclusion became crucial. If Mark is not in order then neither are Matthew and Luke, and so it becomes doubtful whether a ‘life of Jesus’ (in the sense of a biography) can be written. Wrede’s second insight was the idea of the ‘messianic secret’. Wrede was puzzled by the fact that the Gospel writers portray Jesus telling his disciples and those who are healed to keep his identity secret, while performing miracles that led to huge acclamation. Wrede’s conclusion is simple: Jesus did not ask people to keep quiet. The command to silence is a fictional element in the narrative, introduced by Mark (or those before him) as a sort of apology for the disciples’ failure to recognize at the time what the church later proclaimed about Jesus’ identity. According to Wrede, Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah and did not think of himself thus. It should be noted that this does not automatically nullify the church’s teaching. It is clear from the New Testament that the resurrection of Jesus caused a radical re-evaluation of his earthly life. Perhaps ‘messiahship’ was kept from him, just as Mark admits that Jesus did not know when the ‘Son of Man’ would come (13:32). But the idea that Jesus did not know that he was the Messiah is more disturbing. Wrede’s contribution to Gospel research, and its relevance to this chapter’s subject-matter, should now be clear. The possibility of a non-

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messianic Jesus, recovered by a Christian scholar, opens up a new range of options for Christian interpretations of the Gospels. No longer need one conclude, even as a Christian, that the Gospels must lead one to a Jesus who knew himself to be the Messiah and claimed himself to be such. Perhaps Jesus was so different from current expectations that the term ‘Messiah’ was inappropriate. After all, many of the messianic expectations (conversion of the Gentiles, universal peace, new heaven and earth) had clearly not happened (and still have not). In what sense would Jesus have thought himself to be the Messiah when many of the messianic expectations remained unfulfilled? The possibility of a non-eschatological Jesus was given further support by the British scholar C.H. Dodd three decades later. In a number of publications, beginning with The Parables of the Kingdom in 1935, Dodd espoused the view that Jesus promoted a ‘realized eschatology’: the kingdom is not simply a future hope, but was present in Jesus. Such passages as Matt 11:2–11; 12:28 (= Luke 11:20); Mark 1:14–15; Luke 7:18–30; 10:9–11; 10:23–4 (= Matt 13:16–17), Luke 11:31–2 (= Matt 12:41–2) and Luke 16:16 are adduced to determine a ‘fixed point’ from which an understanding of Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom should begin. Realized eschatology is about ‘the impact upon this world of the “powers of the world to come” in a series of events, unprecedented and unrepeatable, now in actual process’ (Dodd, 1961, p. 41). It thus encapsulated a persuasive argument for attending to the present, this-worldly dimension of Jesus’ ministry. For Dodd, however, eschatology also remained firmly in the picture. He knew he could not sidestep eschatology, it being for him the cradle within which Christianity was born, and without reference to which early Christian preaching cannot be understood. Nor did he exclude the possibility that Jesus himself offered predictions about the future. But he suggested that early Christians had evidently stressed the eschatological context and content of Jesus’ mission in a particular way, adding some rather unhelpful apocalyptic trimmings in the process. Interpreters of the Gospels therefore need carefully to pick up the more insightful readings of eschatology which, though they are themselves a form of theological interpretation, nevertheless more accurately get to the heart of what Jesus was about. Dodd is, therefore, very positive about the fourth Gospel. He draws the reader’s attention to it on two fronts. First, he asks whether there

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may be elements within it that provide independent historical tradition about Jesus (Dodd, 1963). Secondly, he suggests that passages such as John 5:25–9 are of the profoundest significance for the way that early Christianity reworked eschatology. For Dodd, such interpretations are more true to Jesus’ intent than the apocalyptic speculations which were also part of Christianity’s early history. With Jesus the end had indeed come, but not in the way that customary understandings of ‘the end’ might have expected. At this point we have come full circle. The eschatological emphasis of the previous chapter has been well and truly undercut. Dodd is shaking hands with Crossan. And even though the Crossan–Borg– Wrede–Dodd approach is in no way as neat as the interpretation of Jesus as an eschatological prophet, nevertheless we have found enough points of contact to suggest that it is an identifiable tradition. Let us summarize some of its main points: ●

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The focus is upon Jesus’ relationship to this world. His ministry and mission, summed up in words and actions about the kingdom of God, are primarily about the present. The sources are ambiguous as to whether Jesus actually claimed to be the Messiah. This might be because he did not think of himself in these terms, even if the issue was very significant for the early church. Radical suspicion of the historical reliability of the Gospels is therefore quite appropriate, alongside a proper respect for their content, given the many things which are going on in them (including the incorporation of elements which might not have happened exactly as the text says). All four Gospels are a blend of history and theology and can be used in determining who Jesus was. Mark’s suffering Jesus may be closer to the ‘historical Jesus’ or may result from Mark’s own particular emphases. Each incident and saying must be considered on its own merits. The more we attend to Jesus’ relation to his own present world, the more we have to deal with the social, economic and political aspects of his world. Jesus’ Jewishness is crucial for understanding him, as is the way in which he evidently critiqued his Jewish faith from within, together with challenging the Greco-Roman cultural customs of his time.

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One further observation should conclude this section. Although it is a generalization to say that chapter 8 relates more to the Jesus of Matthew and Mark, and this chapter to Luke and John, nevertheless it is worth noting. It is surely not coincidental that the Jesus Seminar, of which two of the scholars considered in this chapter were members (Crossan and Borg), should have concluded that there is proportionately more historically reliable material in Luke’s Gospel than in the other Gospels. Luke’s Gospel emphasizes Jesus’ crossing of customary social boundaries through his contact with children, women, government officials, Roman soldiers, Gentiles and the demon-possessed. Though by no means exclusive to Luke, these features are drawn out more in his Gospel. Nor can it be coincidental that John’s Gospel is effectively reinstated in the quest for the historical Jesus by some of those who argue that he was a non-eschatological figure. There may, of course, be all sorts of factors at work here, not merely to do with the supposedly disinterested quest for the Jesus of history. In chapter 11, we shall take up the material from our opening chapter and press the question as to what those factors might be.

A provisional assessment What are we to make of this loose affiliation of supporters of the noneschatological Jesus? Inevitably, the material from the previous chapter could be seen as counter-evidence against this chapter’s thinking. There seems to be so much eschatological urgency in the synoptic Gospels to modify the material which presents Jesus as primarily interested in social subversion. And isn’t this form of the ‘this-worldly’ Jesus just a little too modern (even postmodern)? Have Dodd and Crossan, in their own different ways, tried to turn Jesus into a figure who speaks to the present age as a radical cultural critic? Does not Borg want to have his cake and eat it, trying to confine all aspects of Jesus to a single interpretation which ultimately bursts the bounds of possibility? And doesn’t the line of thinking deriving from Wrede, which has proved so influential throughout the twentieth century, simply run out of steam when faced with the question: why, then, does Christianity exist? The readiness with which Crossan and others ascribe an early date to the Gospel of Thomas (or at least the sayings preserved within it) cannot

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go unchallenged. This does not relate, of course, to the dating of manuscripts, as only scraps of text for any of the Gospels come from the late first century; the first full available texts date from much later. However, the reliability of Thomas as a historical record is questionable. It may contain some early forms of parables and sayings but its overall picture of Jesus is suspect. Consider, for example, his attitude to women, which differs markedly from that presented by the synoptics: Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look, I shall lead her so that I will make her male in order that she also may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’ (Gospel of Thomas 114)

It is one thing to include Gospel of Thomas in the available data for constructing a historical account of Jesus’ life. It is another to promote it above the canonical Gospels. Furthermore, the alliance between Gospel of Thomas and Q depends not only on the hypothesis that Q was an actual document but also on a theory about its composition. Q, as reconstructed, contains both wisdom and eschatological sayings, and does not in itself help Crossan’s cause. It is only the theory that the eschatological sayings are a later addition that supports his case. But is this simply saying that when the eschatological sayings are removed from the Gospels, we are left with a non-eschatological Jesus? A second critical point concerns the location of the wisdom-oriented Jesus within first-century Judaism. Some object to Crossan’s Jesus on the grounds that not only is he not Jewish enough, but he is also akin to some of the anti-Semitic pictures of Jesus which were offered in the first half of the twentieth century. But such criticisms are misplaced. Crossan’s point is that you have to be clear into which part of Judaism Jesus fits best. In that respect he is no different from the scholars considered in the previous chapter. But the lack of plausibility of Crossan’s Jesus at all points, in particular his tendency to over-emphasize wisdom, is perhaps explained by Borg’s need to do greater justice to the prophetic element in the Gospel tradition. One might have expected much wider evidence of support for a ‘sapiential kingdom’ in firstcentury Judaism than appears to be the case. Although Dodd subverts readings of Jesus which emphasize the future aspect of the kingdom of

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God, he also acknowledges that eschatology is the matrix of early Christianity. In other words, more wrestling with the Gospel materials is required than Crossan’s account implies. It is not surprising, in the development of New Testament study in the twentieth century, that even while Dodd’s corrective of Schweitzer was favourably received, it resulted in an understanding of the kingdom of God as both present and future (Chilton, 1984, pp. 1–26). Thirdly, what Wrede perceived (that early Christian theology profoundly affected the Gospels’ description of Jesus), is surely true of contemporary scholars too. This happens with most scholars, of course, but with Dodd and perhaps also with Borg, insights from Christian theology may well be influencing their reading of the historical evidence. Both these scholars are interested in the relationship between the historical Jesus and the development and present content of Christian theology. This does not immediately make the history ‘wrong’, nor is the practice illegitimate. In chapter 12 we shall demonstrate more fully how facts and interpretation interweave. But a tendency to stress the present, this-worldly character of the message and ministry of Jesus is more likely to be evident when someone is looking specifically for the present relevance of Jesus. And this will be significant for Christian faith. It highlights the extent to which tackling ‘Jesus and the Gospels’ is never just a matter of trying to locate the Jesus of history. It emphasizes, too, how hard it is to find the ‘Jesus of history’ at all.

Two traditions are not enough The work of Wright has featured in both this and the previous chapter. This itself provides evidence that a ‘two-track’ approach to understanding Jesus within the Gospels is ultimately not enough. It is useful, but problematic. There are always scholars who do not fit into either track, either because they seem to be in, or outside, both. Wright himself has seen this, noting that Dodd’s work is not easy to place (though even Wright still speaks of two roads, a Schweitzer Street and a Wrede Highway, and he places himself on the former). We have placed him here, while respecting that he wants to be located closer to scholars in the previous chapter.

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The neatness of such a structure belies the complexity of what the Gospels actually present to us. A structure erected largely on historical grounds will not do justice to what the Gospels are, and what they are trying to do. Historical research should rightly get us looking critically at the Gospels. But it is unable to offer the last word on what the Evangelists were up to, and what their texts can still achieve in the present. In the next chapter, we shall explore other interpretations of Jesus which fit even less neatly into these two basic categories.

Further reading Before tackling the longer work of J.D. Crossan (1991), his Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) offers a good introduction to his thought. M. Borg’s Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus has now been reissued with a foreword by Tom Wright (1998). His Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (1994) also offers a good introduction to the work of the Jesus Seminar, and the joint work of Borg and Wright (1998) shows the two scholars in debate. The results of the Jesus Seminar are available in two colour-coded volumes, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (eds R.W. Funk and R.W. Hoover, 1997) and The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? (ed. R.W. Funk, 1998).

Questions 1. What are the implications of concluding that Jesus did not think the world was going to end soon? 2. What material in the Gospel traditions presents Jesus as deeply concerned with present living conditions? What makes you think this does/does not go back to Jesus? 3. What is your understanding of Matt 12:28/Luke 11:20?

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Political and Ethical Interpretations of Jesus

As we have already noted, not all studies of Jesus fit neatly into the two main categories that we have been considering. This is true even if our goal is purely historical, for there are always going to be many ways of viewing the evidence. And this is even more true if we remember what was said in the first chapter concerning the nature of the Gospels. They are not aiming simply to transmit historical data. They are aiming to transmit a picture of Jesus that will evoke belief and will stir readers and hearers to particular actions. In this chapter, therefore, we will look at other writings about Jesus which emphasize the function of the Gospel stories.

Jesus as political liberator The study of Jesus in the social, economic and political context of firstcentury Palestine does not necessarily turn Jesus himself into an explicitly political figure. Politics and religion are usually said to have been more closely intertwined in the first century than they often are today. Jesus was undoubtedly a political figure, simply because of the impact of his religious views and actions. But there is clearly a difference between Jesus and Pilate or between Jesus and Judas of Galilee (often called ‘the founder of the Zealots’), and even between Jesus and Judas Iscariot, whatever the precise reasons for Judas’ betrayal. Of the scholars we examined in the last chapter, Crossan, while declaring that Jesus had a ‘social program’, holds back from saying that Jesus was a politician, even if an itinerant Cynic with an ideal vision and a social programme was as close to being a politician as a rural peasant in Galilee ever could be. Borg pressed the political implications of Jesus’ words and actions most strongly. But he did not push his conclusions as far as Jon Sobrino. 121

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Jon Sobrino is a Spanish Roman Catholic theologian who has spent most of his life working in El Salvador. He is one of the leading exponents of liberation theology, a way of doing theology which became prominent in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. This challenged the seemingly abstract forms of theological reflection undertaken in Europe and North America by demanding that more attention be paid to the situations in which most people in the world actually lived. In the case of Latin America, and in Sobrino’s own context in El Salvador, this meant trying to make sense of the Christian faith in the face of poverty and political violence. Sobrino’s interest in the figure of Jesus is thus always historical, for he is concerned to build into his thinking historically accurate details of Jesus’ life and ministry. Sobrino is, however, equally keen to be open about his own context. Sobrino’s most influential book, Christology at the Crossroads, first published in English in 1978 (written in Spanish in 1976), is not only about the Gospels, or about Jesus as a historical figure. As a book about Christology, it discusses the way in which the figure of Jesus has become ‘the Christ of faith’; it also discusses the history of Christological doctrines, and the understanding of Christ in the Ignatian Exercises (Sobrino is a Jesuit). There are also chapters about the resurrection of Jesus, which go well beyond what is warranted by the Gospel accounts alone. But even though it is explicitly about Christology, Sobrino connects it directly with ‘the historical Jesus’. In four historically focused chapters, Sobrino draws attention to four crucial features of the life of Jesus of Nazareth on which his theological reflection centres: the kingdom of God, Jesus’ own faith, Jesus’ attitude to prayer, and the death of Jesus. In each case, Sobrino presents what he deems to be the sure findings of historical-critical study of the Gospels, on the basis of which an extensive study in Christology can be built. He begins his third chapter, for example, by claiming: The most certain historical datum about Jesus’ life is that the concept which dominated his preaching, the reality which gave meaningfulness to all his activity, was ‘the kingdom of God’ . . . in historical terms we can only come to know the historical Jesus in and through the notion of God’s kingdom. (Sobrino, 1978, p. 41)

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Few would dispute this. But what is striking is the extent to which Sobrino develops a political understanding of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is ‘a restructuring of the visible, tangible relationships existing between human beings’ (1978, p. 44). It entails overcoming a negative situation. Only thus understood can the kingdom be seen as liberation. In order to understand Jesus in the Gospels, then, we must pay special attention to the way in which the Gospel writers ‘place Jesus in the midst of situations embodying divisiveness and oppression, where the good news and salvation can only be understood as being in total discontinuity with them’ (1978, p.  47). Such situations include Jesus’ relationships with leprosy sufferers, Samaritans and other non-Jews, women and the demon-possessed. Sobrino also emphasizes that Jesus’ expressions of opposition (e.g. Matt 23:13–39) are nearly always collective, that is, against groups. And they are always to do with the abuse of power. Sobrino’s attention to Jesus’ own faith and his life of prayer are especially interesting. Sobrino’s concern is always to examine Jesus’ practice in very concrete terms. He sees two distinct phases in Jesus’ life, with Mark 8 (Matt 13; Luke 8; John 6) as the turning point. In the first phase, Jesus lived as a good Jew in Galilee. But in the second, he moved around more, accepting that his earlier practice had been something of a failure and that more concerted action was needed. Sobrino thus claims to discern ‘some rupture in his [i.e. Jesus’] inner consciousness and his outer activity, suggesting a rupture in his faith’ (Sobrino, 1978, p. 94). There is not space here to examine how Sobrino develops his reflections on the death of Jesus into a bold statement of the centrality of the cross for Christian faith and theology. But we must consider his attention to the death of Jesus in relation to his reading of the Gospels. For Sobrino, the death of Jesus is to be understood as the inevitable consequence of the second half of Jesus’ life. Crucifixion and resurrection belong inextricably together, as indeed they are found in the Gospel traditions, and only make sense when seen in relation to the concrete, ‘kingdom-of-God’-oriented activity of Jesus. Sobrino’s understanding of Jesus and the Gospels is difficult to assess. Its urgency and practical intent are obvious. He presents Jesus to elicit a response, not so that his readers merely accept his findings as an interesting academic argument before moving on to another book.

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Ultimately, his Jesus was a religious reformer, through whose death his followers’ perceptions of God changed irrevocably. In his own views and spirituality, Jesus was not all that novel. He radicalized the Judaism of which he was a part. But in so doing, more became evident about the God he called ‘Father’. It was God, the Father of Jesus, who acted in and beyond Jesus’ life in a decisive way. To put this picture together, Sobrino effectively cuts across the findings of scholars mentioned in our two previous chapters. He shares the concrete concern of Crossan, mixed with urgency created by an apocalyptic framework for understanding the kingdom of God. Throughout, he has historical confidence in what the Gospels (even John) say, though he acknowledges the Evangelists’ own theological interests. There are even points where it is clear that Sobrino assumes that the Gospels’ chronological account of Jesus’ life is essentially historical. This is, after all, implicit within his attempt to speak of phases of Jesus’ life. Sobrino thus mixes a clear attention to the Jesus of history with a declared intention to be theological in a practical way. This makes his Jesus hard to evaluate on the same terms as most of the work we examined in chapters 8 and 9. His conclusions are, however, crucial because they pose the question: what are we meant to do, having heard or read the Gospels? Sobrino reminds all readers that seeking to understand the Gospels is not just a matter of extracting data about the Jesus of history from them. Nor is it even about getting the right ‘ideas’ about Jesus, even in an orthodox theological sense. It is about following their central character.

Jesus and His movement: a feminist portrait From Sobrino we turn to the feminist theologian and historian of early Christianity, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Within her ‘feminist theological reconstruction of Christian origins’ (In Memory of Her, 1983), Fiorenza includes an important exposition not just of Jesus, but of the movement that gathered round him. Her account is based on a telling critique of ‘androcentric’ ways of thinking (approaches which always prioritize men’s actions). These ways of thinking also tend to be rather individualistic. So Fiorenza re-reads the Gospels, in search of a

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Jesus who makes the best sense of the basileia (androcentrically called a ‘kingdom’), that corporate entity around which his whole activity seemed to revolve. Fiorenza’s conclusions seem, at different points, very close to those of Crossan and Sobrino. She does, however, make a major contribution to the task of understanding Jesus which takes us beyond those we have considered so far. Fiorenza stresses that the central concept of Jesus’ preaching and practice, the basileia, is a social concept. Therefore, it is a mistake for interpreters of Jesus to focus too closely on the individual figure of Jesus, in isolation from those around him. The basileia message is clearly directed towards the destitute, the sick and the crippled, the tax-collectors, the sinners and the prostitutes. Out of Jesus’ socially subversive activity, a community of people results which enables people who had been ostracized to be ‘reconnected’ socially. This is nothing other than a ‘discipleship of equals’, where customary social divisions no longer matter. This activity, as far as Jesus was concerned, was a clear sign that the end had come (Luke 10:18). Jesus had parted company with John the Baptist (Luke 17:21 challenges Matt 3:10). It is not just in Jesus’ own ministry, but in the movement which begins with that ministry, that the basileia is present. What kind of images are best used for this? ‘It is the festive tablesharing at a wedding feast’ (1983, p. 119), rather than the religiosity of a holy man, that best describes the movement. Indeed, the contrast between the eating habits of John and Jesus was a point of public discussion (Mark 2:18). The basileia was for all, not merely a select few. Matt 22:1–14 and Mark 10:31 confirm the subversive content of Jesus’ preaching and practice. Fiorenza acknowledges that it is important to locate the earliest layers of the Gospel traditions, and she therefore finds in some Marcan material and in the material common to Matthew and Luke (Q) the most historically reliable data about Jesus. In her view, ‘the oldest traditions elaborate concretely Jesus’ reply to John that “the poor have good news preached to them” ’ (1983, p. 122). Because of her feminist insights, Fiorenza is aware that historical work is always ideologically informed. In other words, we can and must try, as historians, to do our best to see ‘what actually happened’. But as we cannot avoid making assumptions as we try to tease out ‘what actually happened’, we must actually use such assumptions to help us in

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our task. And ultimately, as interpreters of the Gospels, we should not be content with determining ‘what actually happened’. We shall also want to know how the results of our enquiries enable us to believe in and think about God, and what we should do as a consequence. By combining the search for the earliest evidence with the awareness of what we, as readers, bring and do when we read texts, Fiorenza reaches a telling conclusion: While the earliest Jesus traditions eschew any understanding of the ministry and death of Jesus in cultic terms as atonement for sins, it was precisely this interpretation which soon took root in some segments of the early Christian movement. Yet such an interpretation of Jesus’ death as atonement for sins is much later than is generally assumed in New Testament scholarship. The notion of atoning sacrifice does not express the Jesus movement’s understanding and experience of God but is a later interpretation of the violent death of Jesus in cultic terms. (1983, p. 130)

Fiorenza is here making a historical judgement which cuts through the New Testament material. Being informed by feminist insights, however, her search for the earliest material has led her to re-read the early history of Christianity. Fiorenza’s reading may seem to add little to what we have touched on already. Yet the profundity of her critique of so much Jesus research (still more evident in her Jesus. Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, 1995, pp. 73–88) and her insight that we should look at the movement around Jesus and not just at an isolated male individual, make her an important scholar to consider. In stressing the communal above the individual, feminist scholarship invites interpreters of Jesus to consider that the Gospels and their central character may be best received by communities of followers rather than individual readers. Ultimately, then, Fiorenza’s work raises the question of which communities (including churches) we, as Gospel readers, are located within when we try to interpret Jesus. The combination of ideological awareness with the search for the earliest layers in the Gospels creates a tension in Fiorenza’s work. For at the same time as stressing (rightly) the extent to which all historical studies reflect the ideologies and contexts of those who offer them, and criticizing scholars who overlook such factors, she is nevertheless

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holding up the Jesus of the earliest strata as the most important in her own reading. But we have already seen (in chapter 7) that the ‘oldest is best’ argument should not necessarily always win the day. Simply because you uncover an early layer does not necessarily mean you have offered the most accurate reading of Jesus. Fiorenza’s emphasis on other factors which are inevitably entailed in reading the Gospels is, however, a point to which we shall need to return.

Jesus as spiritual and ethical example The third contemporary portrait is in one sense not Christian. That is to say, it would not be regarded as sufficient by most Christians (it does not say enough about Jesus as the Christ, the redeemer sent by God). Nevertheless, there are many people who are influenced by it, both consciously and unconsciously. They ‘believe’ in the sermon on the mount or the Good Samaritan or the command to love one’s neighbour as oneself. This type of reading is less concerned with historical scholarship as such. Whether Jesus was exactly as the Gospels present him is not of great importance. This approach is, in practice, more interested in how the Gospels as texts inspire people to ethical action or spiritual insight, even if it is always assumed that Jesus the historical figure had inspired their writing. After all, Jesus told his hearers to ‘go and do likewise’ (Luke 10:37; Matt 7:24), not ‘use my words to construct a doctrinal system’. Our first example is taken from the German novelist Heinrich Böll (1978). As with many such volumes which ask famous people to choose meaningful texts from the Bible, Böll has selected his favourite passages. But this is no off-the-cuff selection. The title of the chapter in which Böll has drawn this material together refers to ‘True Righteousness’. Thus he ‘connects’ primarily with the ethical imperatives contained in the words, actions and stories of Jesus. His main passages are: Matt 5:1–12

The beatitudes

Matt 5:13–16

The salt of the earth and the light of the world

Matt 18:23–35

The parable of the unmerciful believer

Matt 25:14–30

The parable of the entrusted money

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Mark 7:24–30

The Syrophoenician woman’s request

Luke 7:36–50

Jesus’ encounter with the sinful woman

Luke 8:1–3

Women among the followers of Jesus

Luke 15:11–32

The parable of the lost son

Luke 16:1–8

The parable of the clever manager

Luke 16:9–13

The correct use of wealth

John 4:7–18

Conversation with a Samaritan woman

John 7:53–8:11

Jesus and the adulteress

Böll’s selection focuses upon the impact and continuing significance of the ethical teaching of Jesus. These cut across the Gospels, and reflect Böll’s concern to work out, in the present, how human beings are to act. This is not all that Böll says about Jesus. We are simply using his selection of material here as an example of what goes on when people actually use the Gospels. An image of Jesus (moral teacher and exemplar) is ‘constructed’ by the reader, in relation to their own concerns. A second example comes from the introduction to Mark’s Gospel by the musician Nick Cave in the pocket canons series. Cave writes: The Gospel According to Mark has continued to inform my life as the root source of my spirituality, my religiousness. The Christ that the Church offers us, the bloodless, placid ‘saviour’—the man smiling benignly at a group of children, or calmly, serenely hanging from the cross—denies Christ His potent, creative sorrow or His boiling anger that confronts us so forcefully in Mark. Thus the Church denies Christ His humanity, offering up a figure that we can perhaps ‘praise’, but never relate to. The essential humanness of Mark’s Christ provides us with a blueprint for our own lives, so that we have something that we can aspire to, rather than revere, that can lift us free of the mundanity of our existences, rather than affirming the notion that we are lowly and unworthy. Merely to praise Christ in His Perfectness, keeps us on our knees, with our heads pitifully bent. Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator. Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity—our ordinariness, our mediocrity—and it was through His example that

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He gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and to fly. In short, to be Christ-like. (Cave, 1998, pp. 11–12)

The word ‘blueprint’, and the fact that Cave was and is looking for an example to follow, shows how the Jesus of Mark functions for him. Unlike Böll, who drew his ethical insights from Jesus by ranging across the canonical Gospels, Cave focuses on the Jesus of Mark (not Matthew, Luke, John or Gospel of Thomas). The urgency of the narrative, the humanness of the Jesus portrayed, both prove compelling for him. Two things are worth noting here. First, Cave clearly believes that he has got hold of, or is close to, what Jesus of Nazareth himself was actually like (‘Clearly, this is not what Christ had in mind. Christ came as a liberator’). It matters, then, what Jesus was like, even if historical enquiry has not been his main concern. This leads to a second point: Cave is using Mark, in a way that many people (even in churches!) would support, to be critical of what the churches themselves have made of Jesus Christ. Cave wants Jesus to critique the church. In doing so, Cave observes something which has been long seen, but not often taken into account, that there is a conversation beginning already in the New Testament about who Jesus the Christ was and is. And perhaps even the New Testament accounts, let alone the interpretations of Jesus which have been offered in Christian history since, are not fully reconcilable with each other. We have presented, then, just two examples of what happens when people inside and outside churches read the Gospels, and become influenced by the figure of Jesus. Clearly, this is what Christian believers do all the time, in their own devotional and spiritual life: they read the Gospels selectively, can ‘relate’ more easily to some parts than others, and are influenced by some aspects but not others. This is inevitable, but creates problems. Individual readers can dodge bits which are uncomfortable, and overlook aspects which don’t connect with their experience. Even if they do not simply ‘create Jesus in their own image’, they can at least construct a Jesus for their own purposes. The practice, while inevitable, therefore invites us to consider what provisos might be needed. The bulk of chapters 8 and 9 of this book concentrated on one main way in which a check on possible readings of the Gospels can be made. If Jesus is being talked about, then it is essential that we do our best to

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find out what Jesus was actually like. That in itself then limits how much we are able to say. This ‘quest of the historical Jesus’ is, and will remain, a key component in the task of interpreting the Gospels. But because the Gospels themselves already offer their own interpretations of Jesus, we must look beyond the historical data. What the Evangelists themselves want us to hear and do about Jesus, is clearly not confined to logging historical data. That is why Cave’s comments are especially interesting. They move beyond history, because Cave wants to see the figure of Jesus not just in a historical light, but also as a contemporary influence.

The ‘canonical Jesus’ as the Christ of faith A final contemporary way of reading the Jesus of the Gospels starts at the opposite end from Cave. It acknowledges that some kind of harmony across the canonical Gospels must be possible. For Christian faith is belief in the presence and action of God in the one Jesus Christ. Across the whole New Testament canon, then, it must be possible to speak of ‘the biblical Christ’, or, as we are suggesting, ‘the canonical Jesus’. Martin Kähler, towards the end of the nineteenth century, suggested that it was misguided to try and find ‘the historical Jesus’ by stripping away all theological interpretation from the Gospel accounts. The result would simply be a lot of non-theological Jesuses, which would (a) get Jesus wrong; and (b) deny the actual function of the New Testament to present a single Christ. On this approach, then, a view of Jesus must be found which takes account of a faith perspective, yet which does not deny the differences between the Gospels. Such a view will have a harmonizing and unifying function, and will therefore not be welcomed by all. However, historical readings also have a harmonizing, unifying function. They simply unify the material of the Gospels in a different way. One of the strengths of separating out the different Gospels and not reading them ‘synoptically’, is to let them have their own say, on their own terms. But the great strength of looking for a ‘canonical Jesus’ is that it permits the theological interpretations of Jesus, which the Evangelists begin to present, to play a significant role. This is not constructing a ‘Christmas-card Christology’ by laying the material from all the Gospels alongside each other, as if all

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were of equal value. There will still need to be judicious sifting of the material. Decisions will still need to be made as to which Evangelist seems to give us a more profound insight at particular points. But we are not now only speaking of historical accuracy. Nor are we simply looking for what fits neatly into later Christian doctrine (otherwise how could Bible and doctrine ever stand in their essential creative tension?). We are concerned, though, with theology. We want to let the Gospels speak about God, as they speak about Jesus (and this, in their different ways, is what they seem to want to do). This approach can look forward, as well as back, from the text of the Gospels. It can acknowledge that the Gospels stimulated a whole history of interpretation of Jesus within the Christian church. That history, doctrinal and creedal, is relevant to how we read the Gospels themselves. A ‘canonical Jesus’ would be compatible with any of the interpretations of Jesus offered so far. What would be different, though, would be the material which other accounts could not so easily take in. For example, an account of the Jesus of history would not usually include reference to the birth narratives of Matthew or Luke (Bockmuehl, 1994, p. 41). Such texts are usually examined for what they tell us about their writers (as in chapters 3–4). Here, though, we can take up some of their material as insight into Jesus himself, even while acknowledging that it may be myth or legend as it stands. Thus one of the main points in Luke’s account of the shepherds appears to be that Jesus Christ has come for the poor, the outsiders, who are not only among the primary witnesses to the lowly nature of the presence of God in the world, but also play an active part in spreading the message (Luke 2:17). This may not be strictly historical (in the sense that it might not have happened like this, or even at all). But it may be true theologically. Other examples of stories of this kind, which may not be historical in the sense that they probably did not happen in the way described, include: ● ● ● ● ● ●

Jesus’ presence in the temple as a boy (Luke 2:41–52) The temptation narratives (Matt 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13) Jesus preaching in the synagogue (Luke 4:16–21) Jesus walking on water (Mark 6:45–52) The transfiguration (Mark 9:2–8) Jesus and the woman at the well (John 4:1–42)

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The death and raising of Lazarus (John 11:1–44) The resurrection appearances (Matt 28:1–20; Luke 24:1–49; John 20–1) The ascension (Luke 24:50–3)

To a greater or lesser degree, all these stories have proved difficult to support as ‘definitely having happened’ as they are reported. To remain content with such questioning about them, however, is to miss a crucial point: they are told by the Evangelists not simply to give us historical information. The interpreter of Jesus and the Gospels who is interested not just in history, and not just in the theology of the Evangelists, but also in the theological significance of these texts for today, must therefore wrestle with them. For much of this material will be part of anyone’s attempt to offer a reading of the canonical Jesus. This does not mean that such material can simply be adopted uncritically. What matters is that it is not the historians who decide whether this material is any use for theology. Nor does it mean that there are no grounds for preferring one Evangelist over another at significant points. In the same way that historians may gravitate towards one Evangelist rather than another as a more reliable guide in their quest for the historical Jesus, so a theological interpreter may feel that Matthew (or Mark, or Luke, or John) may have got Jesus theologically ‘more right’ than the rest. But good reasons for any preference will always need to be provided. It is not, of course, only the texts above which are open to the charge of not having happened. The same kind of argument could be applied to many Gospel narratives. However, parable-telling, meals out with a wide range of people, and even healings and exorcisms, are simply more ‘history-like’ than most of the texts just listed. But with any material in the Gospels, it is perfectly possible to argue that it simply ‘didn’t happen like this’. Whether something did or did not happen in the way reported (if we could even know) is not itself sufficient reason for establishing that such a passage has little or no theological value. At root, the Gospels are about God. They are simply texts which tell the story of Jesus in order to speak about God, and, in theological perspective, that is how they are to be received and used. On this basis, even John’s more baffling material, including that which bears no relation to the other canonical Gospels (e.g. its prologue,

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the revelation discourses, the farewell prayer), is usable. Indeed, it is not surprising that such material has frequently been the controlling factor in the church’s use of the Gospels. For John seems to be the high point of New Testament Christology. The question which has to be asked about John, bearing in mind that it has been used in a distinct way within Christian doctrine, is whether its material genuinely draws out the theological significance of what we find in the other Gospels. It is not a case of Matthew, Mark and Luke being historical, and John theological. They are all theological and all historical in different ways. But how much of any particular Gospel is included within a version of ‘the canonical Jesus’ will depend on whether one thinks, for example, that the synoptics should be read through John, or the Gospel of Luke used to control one’s reading of the others. And that decision will be based on a wide range of factors. Selectivity, then, will play a role in the construction of a ‘canonical Jesus’. But here, it will be due in large part to theological influences. The moment someone is prepared to say, ‘when I have to do with Jesus, I believe that I have to do with God’, then they are expressing a theological interest. If they are Christians, then they will also be wanting to take account of how the Christian church has read the Gospels and built doctrine around them. If they are authorized preachers or ministers in any Christian church, they will, to some extent at least, be bound by those later interpretations. But even doctrine changes.

Summary In this chapter we have looked at four further pictures of Jesus which relate directly to the Gospels. The first two, those of Sobrino and Fiorenza, seem to be similar in kind to those considered in the previous two chapters. They are views of the Jesus of history as he was. Their respective authors, however, are quite explicit about other interests in their work which they know to be present. This does not of itself devalue what they have come up with. Indeed, it may merely make us a bit more suspicious of those who profess to have come up with a more neutral picture. The third image, of which we gave two concrete examples, related Jesus directly to ethical conduct. One of the examples was a composite

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image based on material from across the four canonical Gospels. The other was focused on Mark. Uppermost here were Jesus’ ethical teaching and a particular Evangelist’s Gospel. Yet even here, it seemed to be important that the text related back to the person of Jesus ‘as he was’. In considering the fourth image, we acknowledged that Christian believers are quite explicitly seeking to offer a theological reading of Jesus. Aspects of the Gospels which may therefore not be of great interest to historians become significant. Through this brief survey of a number of images of Jesus beyond the two main historically focused tracks we considered earlier, it has become clear that we must do much more with the Gospels than apply to them the methods of historical scholarship. If it was wrong to try to prevent subjecting the Gospels to historical critique (as the Christian church has sometimes sought to do), it is equally wrong to prevent the Gospels being read in a wide range of ways, so that their central character has a chance to be more fully understood. In this chapter we have seen some of the many interests at work when people read the Gospels. In the final two chapters we will cast the net more widely still, to see what people make of Jesus in art, media and culture (chapter 11), before showing (in chapter 12) how the many different factors at work are best handled.

Further reading A useful survey of interpretations of Jesus can be found in Clinton Bennett, In Search of Jesus: Insider and Outsider Images (2001). See also the relevant articles in J.L. Houlden (ed.), Jesus in History, Thought and Culture: An Encyclopedia (2003) and R. Horsley, Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder (2003), who not only considers Jesus in his first-century context but also explores the ethical and political significance of Jesus and his message in the present. For a theoretical discussion of the quest from a feminist perspective, see E.S. Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation (2000). Two recent books of differing length and depth by Dale Allison which reflect helpfully on the interplay between theological interests, religious commitment and historical enquiry into the life of Jesus are the short work The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (2009) and a

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longer study Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination and History (2010).

Questions 1. In what ways do you think your own ethical and political standpoints influence your understanding of Jesus and your reading of the Gospels? 2. Was Jesus a feminist? 3. How do you understand Mark 6:45–52? How important is it for understanding Jesus as a historical figure, and for Christian faith, whether or not this event actually happened?

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Jesus in Art, Media and Culture

Millions of greetings cards are sent across the world at Christmas every year. Many of these have some sort of visual portrayal of Jesus on them, usually either as a baby, in a manger or in his mother’s arms (Madonna and Child), though sometimes from some later point in his life. In either case, ‘classics’ from the history of art are often used: a Caravaggio Adoration of the Shepherds (1609) or a Rembrandt Christ from the 1650s, for example. Increasingly, the breadth of imagery on Christmas cards has taken on a global dimension. The scope of Western art to portray the Jesus story has been shown to be limited. A blue-eyed white Jesus is neither historically accurate, nor does it do justice to what religious believers claim to be the meaning of the figure of Jesus for them. This is why so many images of Jesus exist. The fact that Jesus is claimed to relate to, and influence, those who believe in God in and through Jesus Christ means that believers create images of Jesus like themselves. Jesus has usually been portrayed as a white, Western man throughout the history of European art precisely because he was meant to stand as a representative human being for people who were mostly white Europeans. Developing diversity in the imagery of Christmas cards, however, shows us three things. It reminds us of how all-pervasive Jesus-imagery is across human cultures, despite evidence—in the West at least—of declining support for organized Christianity. Secondly, it suggests we may be influenced by such visual images whether or not we are consciously aware of that influence. Images of Jesus are so prominent in the history of art that evading such influence is impossible. Thirdly, the different interests served by these images (referred to briefly at the end of chapter 1) remind us that the construction of a ‘Jesus image’ is not only about trying to fashion an image of Jesus as a first-century Palestinian figure. 137

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Exploration of the topic of ‘Jesus and the Gospels’ must therefore reckon with the diversity of images, the range of interests being served through them, and the potential influence they exert on Gospel-readers. The endeavour to identify and expound who Jesus was or is cannot ignore the complexity identified by recognizing the cultural contexts in which the task is undertaken. The next two chapters address that cultural complexity in two ways. This chapter looks at different ways in which images of Jesus pervade human cultures. The final chapter provides a framework for understanding the many factors which impinge upon the interpretative task.

Jesus in art Let a few of the visual images of Jesus that you know come to mind. What predominates? Old masters? Icons? Stills from Jesus-films? And what are they of? Jesus’ birth? Jesus on the cross? The chances are that wherever in the world the images which came to mind are from, and from whatever period of history, Jesus’ face, images of the birth and portrayals of the crucifixion will be dominant. This is understandable. The face of Jesus is a human face, a reminder of the Christian claim that God is found in human form. The birth scenes may in part abound because of the Christmas card industry. But they focus on God’s becoming human. Incarnation is emphasized. Crucifixion scenes differ vastly in what they seek to achieve. Grünewald’s famous Isenheim altarpiece, painted for a hospital chapel at the start of the sixteenth century, shows a crucifixion in graphic form. The body of Jesus is diseased as well as punctured by nails. It is harsh realism, reminding viewers both of the awfulness of crucifixion as a form of torture and death, and yet also of the extent of God’s identification in Jesus with human suffering. Strangely, perhaps, it would have comforted those for whom the hospital was the place in which they would await their death. By contrast, Craigie Aitchison, the contemporary Scottish artist, painted crucifixion scenes where the figure of Jesus is sparsely portrayed—sometimes even without arms—and yet nevertheless recognizable. Jesus and the cross are, however, presented against a background of rich, sometimes overwhelming colours. The isolation of the cross becomes a major theme. Very few figures—and sometimes

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only a dog—appear on the scene. Whatever form portrayals of the crucifixion take, however, an interpretation of Jesus ‘dying for’ others is being offered in visual form. Crucifixions are painted, sculpted and filmed because of the doctrine of the atonement. Christianity has never reached a conclusion as to which particular understanding of atonement it favours. Different interpretations have been dominant at different times in Christian history (Den Heyer, 1998). But the conviction that Jesus ‘died for’ others has not been disputed. Faces of Jesus, birth scenes and crucifixions do not, however, tell the whole story of Jesus, not even the full story as presented in their different ways in the Gospels. There are astonishingly few examples in the history of art of Jesus teaching or healing. Resurrection scenes are rare, except when appearances of the risen Jesus can be portrayed in a similar manner to scenes from the life of the earthly Jesus (e.g. the supper at Emmaus). This briefest of glances at the history of art causes us to pose a number of questions. To what extent is our understanding of Jesus shaped by the widespread presence of such visual images? In what ways might the predominance of images of Jesus’ birth and death distort the way we read the Gospels? We noted in earlier chapters that of the canonical Gospels only Matthew and Luke have infancy stories. Has the history of Western art therefore done a disservice to Mark? Consideration of Jesus in art suggests interpreters might have a ‘pre-understanding’ of the figure they read about in the Gospels. Visual images also get us thinking about the differences in forms of communication: what might work ‘better’ in words or images. There are perhaps relatively few portrayals of resurrection scenes, or the risen Jesus, simply because painters do not know what to paint. Perhaps words work better here. Crucifixion images often tell us more than we would like to know. The visual power of the cross—with or without Jesus on it—continues to carry deep symbolic significance. As for Jesus’ teaching, the Gospels clearly intend this to be acted upon. Performance is therefore crucial here: the words of and about Jesus are to be read within the liturgy of communities of faith, but then just as importantly acted out in people’s lives. Through art, then, we take a first step in discovering the complex way in which Jesus images are carried and ‘worked with’, consciously and unconsciously, in culture.

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Jesus in music It is not by visual means alone, however, that pre-understandings are brought about. Music, too, shapes people’s images of Jesus. Parallel with the history of Western art is a tradition of church music which has enhanced celebration of the church’s liturgy. Musical settings of the Eucharist, oratorios and hymnody give shape to the way in which images of Jesus are formed, or reinforced, in people’s minds. Many who have sung in, or been moved by, a performance of Handel’s Messiah (first performed in 1741) summon up a memory of the words ‘Surely, surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows’ when reflecting on any powerful visual image of the crucified Jesus. Though the words are from Isa 53:4 (echoed in Matt 8:17), the use of the prophet’s words to explore the meaning of Jesus’ death has been commonplace since earliest Christianity. Through Western culture, visual image and music together shape understanding. Hymns, old and new, have a similar effect. Their impact upon people’s perception of Jesus does not, however, always happen in straightforward ways. Charles Wesley’s ‘Hark the herald angels sing’ (1739), for example, contributes to Christmas-time celebration of the birth of Jesus. But its line ‘Veiled in flesh the Godhead see/Hail the incarnate Deity’, whilst celebrating incarnation, runs the risk of obscuring the full humanity of Jesus (God is only ‘veiled’ in flesh). Likewise, the justly well-used hymn by the contemporary British writer Graham Kendrick, ‘The Servant King’ (1983), is a powerful meditation on the crucified Jesus. But it can mislead those who sing it through its line ‘Hands that flung stars into space/To cruel nails surrendered.’ Poetic licence exceeds its brief in suggesting that Jesus of Nazareth had a hand in creation. Like Wesley’s carol, this hymn slips a Docetic element into a reflection on the person of Jesus. The act of singing such words, carried and made memorable and repeatable outside the context of worship by good melodies (for Wesley in the form of a tune by Felix Mendelssohn, adapted by W.H. Cummings), is, however, hugely significant. Music moves people. It is not simply a vehicle to enable people to remember words, though in the case of hymns it does that too. The images of Jesus sung about have content to them; but the emotional power of singing them reinforces the point that engaging with the figure of Jesus is an existential matter.

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Interestingly, the life of Jesus (his teaching and healing activity, for example) has not been sung about much in hymns until relatively recently. This mirrors what has happened in Western art. It also reflects the fact that church music was written to accompany creeds and liturgies that are light on data about the life of Jesus. It is again worth emphasizing that this is out of kilter with much of the material in the Gospels. Singing about Jesus may therefore always run the risk of focusing on Jesus’ birth, death and ultimate meaning. But by not singing about the details of his life, important aspects of Jesus’ image may be overlooked. Not all music about Jesus derives, however, from the church. Increasingly songs are written which are either satirical about Jesus, or critical of the church in the name of Jesus. An example of the latter is Jackson Browne’s ‘The Rebel Jesus’ (on Next Voice You Hear, 1997). The song finds Browne musing on Christians’ habits at Christmas-time. He notes that the words used about Jesus (‘Prince of Peace’ and ‘Savior’) are not reflected in the way societies behave (‘We guard our world with locks and guns/And we guard our fine possessions’). He is, however, puzzled that radical questioning about why poverty exists, which seems to him Jesus-like, is negatively received. In lines which echo the famous words of the Brazilian bishop Dom Helder Camara (1909–99), Browne writes: ‘. . . if any one of us should interfere/In the business of why there are poor/They get the same as rebel Jesus.’ Such songs need to be placed alongside hymnody, as they are also part of the complex cultural world within which images of Jesus are carried. They do not have the same function that hymns have for religious believers, of course. But from a cultural perspective, images of Jesus vie with each other as they clamour for attention and seek our affirmation. Increasingly, especially for those not introduced to songs about Jesus in the context of worship, this clash of images within any culture must be acknowledged. Negative images of Jesus are scarcely likely to predominate in any culture which is true to the impact of the figure from history, and respects the various religious traditions which offer positive appraisals of his life and meaning. But music is so important in human cultures, and perhaps never more so than in its popular forms in the West at present, that it is right to acknowledge here that diverse Jesus images are carried, and conveyed powerfully, in musical form.

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Jesus-films Art and music offer examples of the carrying of Jesus images within culture which have long histories. Film provides an example of a relatively new medium. It is important to consider film in this book both because Jesus-films exist, and because of the influential nature of film as a medium (Marsh, 2011b). Jesus-films are especially interesting for four reasons. First, they have all been made since the rise of the Quest of the Historical Jesus. They are therefore all offered to the public against a background of over two centuries of historical research into Jesus and his life. Increasingly, then, they are measured against widespread cultural interest in historical knowledge about Jesus. Secondly, because of the demands of the medium of film at its most popular, they usually offer Jesus in narrative form. In this they mirror the Gospels. It means they often deal with more of Jesus’ life than, say, the history of Western art has traditionally done. Thirdly, they have a distinctive way of capturing the attention and affecting the experience of the viewer. They are closest to music to the extent that they actively engage the emotions of the viewer although, as a visual art, they depend in part on the use of sight to do their work. The integration of sight and sound makes film, at its best, a demanding medium, for the enjoyment and appreciation of which the active role of the viewer is needed. Fourthly, that films present Jesus as a moving image presents fresh challenges for the task of his portrayal (how did he move? how did he relate to others? how did he look at people?). The decisions that have to be taken about his physical movement are affected by, and in turn influence, conclusions drawn about his life and personality. Given all of this, the role of films in shaping, positively and negatively, the preunderstandings which people in the present might have in considering the figure of Jesus and reading the Gospels should not be underestimated. That role is best explored through a number of examples. Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) offers an image of a mystical Jesus (played by Robert Powell) which has proved influential on many Christian viewers throughout the world. The intensity of his spirituality and his apparent detachment from the world are seen by some as confirmation of his divinity, or at the very least as empowering to viewers in their own spiritual quests. Intensity of a different kind is evident in Willem Dafoe’s portrayal of Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The

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Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Here, the humanity of Jesus is explored more perhaps than in any other Jesus-film. Jesus is irascible, but also urgent and persuasive. He is subject to temptation not to fulfil his divine calling, though manages to resist. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) stresses the politically charged context within which Jesus lived and worked. The use of untrained actors for most of the cast brings Matthew’s Gospel to life in a striking way. Finally, Denys Arcand’s brilliant Jesus of Montreal (1989) offers the viewer two interlocking narratives—sections of a Passion Play, and a story in modern-day Montreal. This film shows how Jesus-films and Christ-figure films interweave. It confirms the view that interpretation of Jesus (e.g. his being called Christ) affects how you view historical data. It also reminds the viewer that it is difficult to remain unaffected by the story of Jesus, whether you are a religious believer or not. The impact of Jesus-films is not, however, all positive as far as exploration of Jesus and the Gospels is concerned. Zeffirelli’s Jesus is arguably so detached from his surroundings that you lose a full sense of the socio-political world in which he lived, and to which he had to relate. Viewers often forget that Scorsese’s Jesus appears in a film of a novel (by Nikos Kazantzakis), and is not a straightforward rendering of the Gospels. The image of Jesus also clearly reflects Scorsese’s own interpretations both of Jesus and the novel (Baugh, 1997, pp. 51–71). Viewers may therefore be unaware of how many layers of interpretation stand between them and the Gospels. Many of the Jesus-films, furthermore, stand within the genre of ‘biblical epic’ (King of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told, for example, but, in a new form The Passion of the Christ too), and the genre itself has limited what directors have been able to do. As a genre, it has been so splendidly satirized by Monty Python’s Life of Brian that only in the most recent decades has film had much of a chance to fulfil its potential in a different way as a fresh medium for exploring Jesus and the Gospels. The challenges entailed in portraying Jesus in film do, however, demonstrate a particularly contemporary difficulty in offering a visual Christology (Marsh 2007, pp. 157–8). More so than in the world of (static) art, perhaps too much is expected of film as a medium. The promise of Jesus-films to date is, then, somewhat greater than their actual achievement. But from the way that film as a medium works, it is clear that Jesus-films must be understood as more than

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‘literature with pictures’. Jesus-films have undoubtedly fed off the history of art (Apostolos-Cappadona in Plate (ed.) 2004, pp. 97–108). But this has not always been to their advantage. They may yet have a more creative role to play in enabling viewers to explore Jesus as a historical figure, and as a figure within human culture capable of forming and transforming the lives of those who seek to interpret him and the Gospels which tell his story.

On dealing with the many images By paying attention to the existence of the sheer range and number of the images of Jesus which exist we are respecting the difficulty of the task of interpreting him as a historical figure, and as the central character of the Gospel texts. This chapter has highlighted a number of features of that task which it is important to recognize and take account of when the Gospels are being read. Firstly, the image of Jesus is carried within human cultures in many different ways. The notion that there is ‘one Jesus’ (back there in the past) whom it is our task to uncover through a mixture of historical enquiry and critical reading of Gospel texts is a noble aim. But if we do not acknowledge what else is going on when we try to do that, we are in danger of failing to ask necessary questions about ourselves and about the context in which we do our interpreting. As this chapter has shown, Jesus-images are all-pervasive. Particular Jesus-images are likely to have influenced us already, whether we are aware of this or not, even before we open the Gospels. This applies whether or not we are religious believers. Secondly, the range of the Jesus-images that pervade culture reminds us that Jesus is not only the property of Christianity. Christians will always want to claim that there is ultimately no non-theological reading of Jesus: if he was in any sense a decisive form of God’s self-revelation, then this will need to be expressed within any image. But not all interpreters agree with that, and not all images of Jesus have a religious, let alone Christian, origin or purpose. Furthermore, not all religious and theological readings of Jesus are Christian (Bennett 2001). Reading the Gospels with the intention of understanding Jesus is therefore, thirdly, a complex ‘polyphonic’ exercise. There are many

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voices which clamour for attention as the task is undertaken. Jesus of Nazareth’s own voice is hidden. He cannot speak for himself. The Gospels have to be his voice but, as we have seen throughout this book, what he himself said will always remain in dispute. To his voice must be added the voices of the earliest carriers of Jesus-tradition, the Four Evangelists, other Gospel-writers, and the many, many other people who have constructed Jesus-images since then. As we listen and try to reach our own understanding, we add our own voice to the conversation, making decisions as we go about whose voices we think are the most authoritative. Fourthly, however, we are very conscious in a multi-media age of how quickly the number of Jesus-images can expand further and how many of these (verbal, visual and musical) we can access easily. At the touch of a few computer keys it is possible to access biblical text, classics from the history of theology, reproductions of famous paintings from around the world, clips of film, audio tracks, music videos and radio and TV excerpts. This rapid expansion of images is both enriching and bewildering at the same time. It is also increasingly difficult for any one group or tradition—including the church—to suggest how people should find their way through the maze of images. No single body or organization can control all of this. Yet the church will always want to offer to wider society its own interpretation of who and what Jesus was and is, not merely for the church’s own sake, but as a morally responsible act, lest it be implied that it does not matter what interpretations of Jesus are offered. It is not only Christians who realize that you cannot simply make of Jesus what you want. Fifthly, the examples given in this chapter have illustrated the fact that interpreting Jesus and reading the Gospels are not indifferent matters. Considering Jesus in the arts and media shows that the figure of Jesus does not leave people unmoved. Reading the Gospels is not a dispassionate exercise. Interpreting Jesus has an affective, existential dimension to it which is not confined to religious believers. Critical reflection on the tasks of interpreting Jesus and reading the Gospels in the light of these five observations illustrates, then, the care that is needed as these tasks are undertaken. The viewer or hearer of images of Jesus presented in art, film or music is clearly personally involved in the encounter. In the same way, whoever reads the Gospels or tries to construct a picture of the historical Jesus is caught up in the

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task. In closing, then, it would seem wise to try and gain a better understanding in theoretical terms of all that is involved in studying ‘Jesus and the Gospels’. That will be the subject of our final chapter.

Further reading Jaroslav Pelikan’s Jesus Through the Centuries (1985) offers a useful survey of different images of Jesus through the ages. See also the twovolume encyclopedia edited by Houlden (2003), mentioned in the previous chapter. Three studies which look at Jesus-films are Barnes Tatum, Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years (2000); R.C. Stern, C.N. Jefford and G. Debona, O.S.B., Savior on the Silver Screen (1999); and Lloyd Baugh, Imaging the Divine: Jesus and ChristFigures in Film (1997). Richard Walsh’s Reading the Gospels in the Dark: Portrayals of Jesus in Film (2003) chooses five Jesus-films, drawing critical comparisons between them, the four Gospels and Jesus’ teaching in general. Jeffrey Staley and Richard Walsh, Jesus, the Gospels, and Cinematic Imagination: A Handbook to Jesus on DVD (2007) is also very informative. The ‘Jesus in Film’ pages of the invaluable New Testament Gateway website (run by Mark Goodacre) should also be consulted (‘Celluloid Jesus: The Christ Film Web Pages’), and the links followed up (www.ntgateway.com/film).

Questions 1. Which images of Jesus (from art, film, music, TV or wherever) have most influenced you? Are you able to say why? 2. Of the Jesus-films you know, which would you recommend to others: (a) as the closest to the Jesus of history; (b) as the most accurate rendering of a particular Gospel; (c) as closest to the church’s teaching about Jesus? 3. How do you think the Christian church should respond to images of Jesus which are critical of Christian interpretation, or use of the figure of Jesus?

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How Christology Works: The Gospels in Practice

It should be clear by now that the historical way is not the only way to read the Gospels. It is entirely appropriate to apply the methods of historical criticism to the Gospels to discover, as far as possible, the historical figure that gave rise to these accounts. But the Gospels are also narratives, intended to evoke in the reader certain images of Jesus which the writers clearly believed to be true not simply in a historical sense. Redaction criticism and the more recent literary approaches to the Gospels have all tried to clarify what these images are and why the author felt the need to emphasize them. However, even with the help of such studies, not everyone will see the same images of Jesus when they read the Gospels. As already stated, what one sees is influenced by one’s own concerns, background and social location, as well as by some of the many images of Jesus which cultures carry with them. It is the purpose of this final chapter to try and grasp the many factors which are at work and to show how these factors affect both our reading of the Gospels and the search for the historical figure of Jesus.

Twelve factors in Christology There are at least twelve factors which are involved when the figure of Jesus is interpreted. We say ‘at least’ because others may wish to add to them. And we call them ‘factors in Christology’, even though some who interpret Jesus are not undertaking the task of interpreting Jesus for Christology at all (i.e. they may not be interested in supporting the claim that Jesus is the Christ sent by God). Not all factors, in other words, are pertinent to all attempts to interpret Jesus. But when these factors are present, then Christology is being done. And the doing of Christology 147

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inevitably relates to, and sometimes incorporates, the work of those who do not operate in faith and for faith. The twelve factors are: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

historical philosophical (ontological) doctrinal doxological ecclesiastical communal (political) ethical experiential narrative biblical cultural eschatological.

The historical factor is one on which we have spent a lot of time in this book. Historians are obviously concerned to know what Jesus of Nazareth was like. It is their job to find out. But, as we have seen, those who are influenced ethically by Jesus (whether they are Christian or not) seem to need to know that Jesus was actually like the image they have of him. And those who interpret Jesus in theological terms always believe that it is Jesus of Nazareth they are interpreting, even if titles such as Saviour, Son of God and Lord also come into play. So most people will want to consider history when they are reading the Gospels. We often imply, though, that history is somehow neutral, as if those who are ethically or theologically interested in Jesus are adding a further dimension to an otherwise neutral interest in Jesus. This is misleading. Historians are not dis-interested, in the sense of being neutral. They do their best to be as clear as they can be about ‘the Jesus of history’. But though they focus on historical data, they may well be serving lots of other interests too. For example, they might be writing an account of Jesus which by definition excludes the possibility of his undertaking any supernatural act, or showing how Jesus’ words and actions place him in a tradition of thought which leads to Karl Marx, or seeking to discredit Christian interpretations of Jesus. In none of these three cases need the other interest being served make them a bad historian. The philosophical, political and anti-doctrinal interests which we have just

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mentioned merely highlight the fact that history is not value-free. So no account of Jesus, and no reading of the Gospels, even that undertaken by historians, can be value-free. The philosophical factor in Christology is therefore worth considering next. No one is without a philosophy. No one is without some basic assumptions about ‘what we can know’ (epistemology) or about ‘the way things are’ (ontology), even if these are rarely articulated. So when people interpret the figure of Jesus, they cannot but be affected by their most basic assumptions about human life. Examples of such basic assumptions include: how spirit and matter inter-relate; whether spirit can be seen as separate from matter at all; whether ‘minds’ exist; whether a supreme mind (e.g. God) lies within or behind the universe. In the case of Christians interpreting the figure of Jesus, some of these assumptions will be more specific, such as whether Jesus, as Son of the Father, can still be ‘really present’ in people’s lives. This can clearly not mean that a first-century Palestinian figure from history is still with us. It therefore entails ontological assumptions. In Christology this means assumptions about who Jesus ‘really was’, and how the God who was present in the figure of Jesus can continue to be present in the same way today. Without such a philosophical factor at work, talk about any ‘continuing presence of Jesus’ is simply impossible. When we speak of specifically Christian assumptions, though, we are entering the realm of theology, and a range of factors come into play which only Christians would use explicitly. These are the doctrinal, the doxological, and the ecclesiastical. The doctrinal factor refers to the material we touched on in the section on the ‘canonical Jesus’ in chapter 10. This was the idea that Jesus cannot be interpreted by Christians without reference to the history of interpretation to which the canonical Gospels gave rise. Taking doctrinal traditions seriously need not entail misusing or distorting the New Testament to mean something it cannot. Such could only be the conclusion of someone who believed Christianity to be wholly mistaken. It simply means that it is legitimate, even if the case still has to be argued, to see Christian doctrine as an extension of what the Gospels began to do, and to see the Gospels themselves as containing appropriate interpretations of the figure of Jesus. A space is thus preserved between history, biblical text and doctrinal history, so that mutual correction can continue to occur. But the possibility of

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continuity and coherence remains. There is, however, no escaping doctrinal traditions if one seeks to interpret Jesus within Christianity. The doxological factor takes us in two directions. It acknowledges that God was worshipped in and through the figure of Jesus from an astonishingly early phase of Christianity’s history. There is therefore a long history of the praise and worship of Jesus as God which comes into play, even for the historian. For the Christian believer, there is also the fact that the worship of the Son, the second person of the Trinity, continues in the present. Again, the latter aspect here cannot be permitted wholly to control what the interpreter of the Gospels finds in the texts. In the Gospels Jesus is simply not worshipped in the way that much contemporary Christian doxology implies. Equally, however, to ignore the praise of Jesus as emerging within the Gospels would be to fail to do the Gospels justice. At the very least, respect for the doxological factor indicates that some interpreters of Jesus attach ultimate significance to the figure they are interpreting. This means that the task of interpretation is both important and dangerous: it must be done because the figure of Jesus matters so much; but when a figure one is trying to interpret is also a figure to be worshipped, then it is difficult to see how all the other factors can really carry anything like a comparative weight. Thirdly, in this theological group of factors, there is the ecclesiastical factor. Here we are referring to the particular communities of faith to which Christian interpreters of the Gospels will inevitably belong when they interpret Jesus. We may therefore prefer to call this the ‘denominational’ or ‘confessional’ factor. The point here is that no Christian interpreter can fail to be influenced by the particularity of their vision of God, Church and World, as filtered through the concrete body of believers to which they belong. There may be no such thing as a ‘Baptist’, a ‘Roman Catholic’ or a ‘Methodist’ Jesus. Such would be as objectionable as the Corinthians following Apollos or Cephas rather than Christ (1 Cor 1:12). But if we acknowledge that doctrine plays a part in our readings of the Gospels, and in our understandings of the figure of Jesus, then we cannot exclude the role played by the particular communities to which we belong. Interpreters of Jesus do not all belong to churches, however. But we must recognize that all interpretations of Jesus nevertheless locate their interpreters within particular communities of interpreters. In this sense

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there is always a communal (or we may even say political) factor at work. The Marxist historian, for example, who wishes to claim Jesus as a proto-Marxist does so from within ‘the Marxist community’, however disparate and diverse that reading community may be. As we noted at the end of the first chapter of this book, no one reads in total isolation. There are also other factors which exist in forms that need not be explicitly Christian, even while they may well take on Christian forms. These are the ethical, the experiential, the narrative and the biblical. We have dwelt already on the ethical influence of Jesus when considering his role as spiritual and ethical example in chapter 10. Little more needs adding here. The figure of Jesus plays this role for a wide range of people, not just Christians. It is important to note, however, how easily it can be assumed that Jesus supports the way we have already chosen to act. Jesus therefore supports our pacifism, or our righteous anger, our socialism, communism or political conservatism. To say, therefore, that Jesus is an ethical influence is by no means to say enough. The content of that influence has yet to be determined. This is precisely where so many of the other factors come into play. What we actually say about Jesus (and why) will determine the way in which the ethical influence of Jesus takes shape. The experiential factor of Jesus has two forms. For Christians it will in all likelihood carry with it a sense of Jesus’ ‘continuing presence’ (in whatever sense that is understood). Linking with the meaning of the resurrection stories from the Gospels themselves, and the exploration of the doctrine of the Spirit in the New Testament and beyond, Christians are almost certain to speak of an ‘experience of Jesus Christ’ which will inform their reading of the Gospels. As we saw with Nick Cave, however, it is not only in that form that an experiential link is made with the figure of Jesus. Religious faith of a particular kind is not, then, a requirement of an experiential, existential link existing between a Gospel-reader and the figure of Jesus, even if specific forms of that link inevitably take shape within Christianity. A narrative factor also comes into play in Christology. People enjoy hearing and telling stories, and the story of Jesus is endlessly fascinating because it is so rich and so multi-faceted. In the same way as we create a narrative of our own life in the way we ‘tell our own story’, so we do the same with the story of Jesus. For whatever reason we tell his story (i.e. depending on which of the other factors are most dominant for us), we

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add to the fund of stories by, in effect, telling our own version of it, selecting our own extracts from the Gospels (be that on historical, theological, ethical grounds, or whatever). And because a narrative form is clearly the most compelling way to continue telling the story of Jesus, creativity is positively invited here. We are thus likely to be enthralled by creative retellings of the Gospels, and perhaps even to venture some of our own. Crossan’s books on Jesus have sold well, not only because of their historical research, controversial conclusions and a good marketing strategy. He also happens to tell a very good tale. Films, as we saw in the previous chapter, are influential because they are strong on plot and narrative, and tell the Jesus story in a compelling way. The tenth factor to be considered is the biblical. It may seem surprising, in such a book as this, to be taking up this factor so late in the exposition. Yet there are many aspects to the biblical factor which need spelling out in the light of others. The biblical factor could easily be assumed to be the fundamental factor. But in the light of all that has been presented in this book so far, we can see quite clearly that Christology is about a person. We are reminded, then, that the Christian Bible is but a means to an end; the end of encountering a personal God, in and through the person of Jesus Christ. And we have been reminded of the many ways in which the person of Jesus Christ is presented, even in the Gospels, let alone in the New Testament as a whole. What is more, given how little of the New Testament would be comprehensible without the Hebrew Bible, we are reminded also of the importance of both Testaments and the literature surrounding them, to gain a better insight into who Jesus Christ was and is (Moyise, 2001). From a theological perspective, the biblical factor picks up Martin Kähler’s point that Christology has to do with ‘the biblical Christ’ rather than ‘the historical Jesus’. Even if debates will always go on as to how easily, if at all, the various New Testament witnesses can be unified or harmonized, it is theologically inevitable that some attempt be made to see what they have in common. The biblical factor has a different dimension to it, however, for those who do not express an explicit theological interest. Historians, for example, have to make decisions as to what material they select from the available biblical texts. They must also decide whether the biblical or non-biblical sources may lead them to more reliable information about Jesus. This process in turn reminds the theologian that whatever the ecclesiastical significance of the various Christian canons may be,

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and whatever the church-related circumstances of their origin, use and contemporary authority, these canons are not the church’s property. It is, indeed, precisely because the churches do not ‘own’ them that people are free to read them and make of them what they want. The figure of Jesus does indeed have an impact beyond both the printed word and the churches which try to claim him for themselves. A further factor, the cultural, offers this reminder in still starker form. ‘Cultural’ means anything that human beings create which helps them make sense of their world. Given the extent to which we now realize that we are all located within ‘narratives’, ‘traditions’ and ‘cultures’, it is not surprising that the cultural aspect of Christology, which we anticipated with the material in the previous chapter, should prove so important. Our use of the term here falls some way between the general use currently in vogue, and the more specific use of ‘culture’ as art. Acknowledging that there is a cultural factor in Christology is a way of accepting that we do the interpreting of Jesus, and that what we produce is not identical with the one we are seeking to interpret. The cultural factor is thus the narrative factor writ large. We may paint, write poems, compose music or make films about Jesus as a means of offering an interpretation. We are certainly, as we saw, affected by the poems, songs, hymns, oratorios, paintings and films produced by others. This process is unavoidable as part of the task of interpretation, and can prove very fruitful. We are inspired by some images to look afresh at the Gospels, and to see a new angle of interpretation on Jesus. On the other hand, it can also prevent our allowing other factors to influence us. The cultural factor can be so overwhelming that we fail to ask the question of which Jesus images are to be recommended, and on what grounds. Finally, we must mention the eschatological factor. This is not now the question of whether Jesus saw himself as an eschatological prophet. It is more to do with whether we can put up with not knowing; whether we can accept that of the making of many Jesuses there is no end, and that truth ultimately lies in the future. This factor functions methodologically as a summons to reticence and reserve about all our results. We must interpret Jesus Christ, for the figure of Jesus Christ is so important; but we dare not claim too much for our own particular version. That is the tension within which we all work, and the reason why we have to remind ourselves that the future (and hence the ultimate meaning of Jesus the Christ) is God’s alone to give (1 Cor 13:12).

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The twelve factors at work All of these factors, then, interlock when Jesus is being interpreted as the Christ. Historians will explicitly relate to just some of them. Those who are influenced by Jesus, without professing any form of religious faith, will relate to a different selection. Christian believers will probably relate to most of them. Our point, in presenting this framework, has been to demonstrate how rich, diverse and vital the task presented by ‘Jesus and the Gospels’ actually is. The preceding chapters, though, have shown that some of these factors have not been given their due weight. We have sought, therefore, to re-locate the study of ‘Jesus and the Gospels’ within this rich framework so that those who do want to undertake theologically responsible study of the Gospels, in the service of Christology, may do so in an informed way. Drawing the book to an end in this way should not, however, be understood to mean that this is the only way in which we believe the topic of ‘Jesus and the Gospels’ should be handled. We have sought to do justice to a great variety of interests in the figure of Jesus, and the different ways in which those interests influence the task of reading the Gospels. The expository chapters 2–11 identified different ways in which Jesus can be understood and the Gospels interpreted. In this chapter, we have acknowledged more fully that not all factors will be addressed by all readers all of the time. Admittedly, the suspicion can always persist that Christian readers will be unwilling or unable to let some of the other factors at work to carry their full weight. Accounts of Christian origins which emphasize the social and political factors which are in play in interpreting the life and impact of Jesus may suggest that theological factors can be explained (and explained away) in other terms. Recent studies by Shawn Kelley (2002), Halvor Moxnes (2011) and James G. Crossley (2012) are particularly challenging, though beyond the scope of this short introduction. Their work demonstrates the extent to which all attempts to characterize and describe the figure of Jesus are caught up in considerations of the writers’ times and circumstances, be that to do with ethnicity (Kelley), national background (Moxnes) or ideological, cultural and political commitments (Crossley).

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The challenge of Jesus through the Gospels All that said, and as we have seen, the most well-known Gospels, those in the Christian Bible, are not just historical records anyway. They remain influential texts within and well beyond churches. They are interesting literature and are packed with good stories. They carry an authority by virtue of their proven track record. They are political texts which challenge churches too. They speak of a compelling figure whose story and impact are complex and profound both within these texts themselves, and beyond. The challenge still remains, though, to address the question of whether an adequate understanding of the figure of Jesus can only be gained when some form of Christology is undertaken. But that must be for the reader to judge, on the basis of their own Gospel-reading, and via interaction with the twelve factors we have mapped out in this chapter.

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Reflective Postscript

It is sixteen years since the first edition of this short textbook was published. Its value has proved to be the attention it pays to the linking of literary and historical-critical study of the Gospels with a theological interest. To those readers (religious or not) who value the theological interest inherent in the Gospels, our book demonstrates how such commitments take shape in and around the Gospels and their reception. To those readers seeking to identify an ‘objective’ strategy for approaching the Gospels, we have shown how difficult that might be to achieve, whilst respecting the many attempts that have been made, and are still made, to read the Gospels in this way. We are fully aware that to such readers, the many factors which impinge upon the seemingly simple task of ‘reading the Gospels’ (as mapped in chapter 12) can appear to ‘get in the way’. Sixteen years on, much has happened in Gospel study. There has been something of a resurgence of interest in the oral traditions behind the written Gospels. Dunn (2003) reminds us that oral traditions did not come to an end the moment Mark’s Gospel was written and that many of the differences between the Gospels can be explained as ‘performances’ of Jesus’ teaching (e.g. the two versions of the Lord’s prayer). Bauckham (2008) thinks that much of what we have in the Gospels goes back to eyewitness testimony and is more confident than most scholars that we can get close to what Jesus actually said and did. Casey (2010) is an Aramaic specialist and has attempted to translate the Greek of the Gospels back into the Aramaic that Jesus might have spoken. Although sceptical of many of the events and teaching in the Gospels, he believes that some of the sayings can be reconstructed with great accuracy. The title of one of his books (The Solution to the ‘Son of Man’ Problem) is indicative of this confidence. The quest for the best criteria by which to decide on the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus of Nazareth continues too. Beyond and partly 157

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because of the interest in oral traditions the literary puzzle persists as to where the Jesus-sayings were generated (by Jesus himself, or by the communities which associated themselves with him?). If some scholars are less sanguine than they once were both about the possible conclusions and their significance (e.g. Allison 2010), the debate is understandably deemed important. It matters what Jesus said, even if we cannot be sure what that was. Although anyone is free to suggest what Jesus might have said or might have meant, the evaluative task of interpreting and weighing the meaning and impact of all words – invented or authentic – still has to be undertaken. In so many ways, then, that is what this particular book has wanted to show, and why it has proved useful. We have been examining the public responsibilities entailed in interpreting the figure of Jesus, within and beyond both church and academy. As authors we have wanted to be respectful of what the Church has done with Jesus and what the churches need (or think they need) for theological education. However, theological education (in church or academy) does not happen in a vacuum and the study of the figure of Jesus and the Gospels written about him is a public task. Jesus is a religious figure, a founder of a religion (though there is debate as to the extent that Jesus intended this). As such, Jesus is a public figure and no religion ‘owns’ Jesus, neither Judaism nor Christianity. Nor does any religion, nation or people ‘own’ the impact that Jesus makes on people’s lives. The extent to which, sixteen years on, Jesus appears in public life is striking. To the examples from the world of art cited in Chapter 11, we might have been tempted to add cases from the world of comedy and satire, where Jesus appears explicitly or his impact is handled indirectly (e.g. the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s treatment of the Bible, Jerry Springer the Opera, The Book of Mormon). These are not comfortable case-studies and have complex reception histories. They are laughing at religion rather than simply laughing with the religious adherents they mock, yet are not hostile to religion in any straightforward sense. It has been ever thus for satire, and for prophets too, though prophets are usually more explicitly fighting in favour of the traditions out of which they emerge. Contemporary satire is less clear-cut. With respect to the subject-matter of this book, however, it is clear that it will never be a historical argument alone which can assess the adequacy or wisdom of such cultural products. Making judgments

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about the accuracy or legitimacy of images and interpretations of Jesus always needs to take account of his impact too – exactly as the Gospels do. The Gospels are already themselves assessments of the impact of Jesus, even if drawing him towards a particularly Christian world, though not in ways unambiguously conducive for later Christianity: they do not always say what the later Church might have liked them to say! We have noted the Church’s need to try and fashion a ‘canonical’ view of Jesus, a range of images around which a fence can be placed to show the suggested limits of what Christianity deems consistent with how Jesus should be understood and presented. In many ways, public discussion is doing a similar thing as it continues to discuss the figure of Jesus. At its best, this public discussion includes the religious verdicts on Jesus though is not bound by them. Yet in even bothering to represent Jesus and discuss him, such public discussion shows awareness of his continuing significance, contributes to the fostering of his positive impact on society, and yet does so fully aware of the dangers too (including what the churches sometimes do with Jesus). Indifference, though, will not do. It is as irresponsible for public debate to ignore the Church’s contribution, as it has proved for the Church to ignore the academy’s contribution to historical knowledge of Jesus and his time. It would be as irresponsible for the Church to be unaware of and neglect the wider public debate about who Jesus was and is now thought to have been. The figure may or may not be a ‘living figure’ in any of the spiritual senses suggested by Christianity or other forms of spirituality. Interpreters of Jesus will continue to disagree on that. But Jesus remains a figure of public significance whatever the churches and religious traditions make of him. And for public assessment of that figure and the discussion surrounding him, the Gospels, and scrutiny of them, will continue to be needed in the academy, society and church. Our hope is that this little book will go on contributing to that interpretative task.

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Appendix The earliest testimony to the Gospels is preserved in Eusebius’s fourthcentury work, Historia Ecclesiae (H.E.), now available as a Penguin paperback (The History of the Church, 1989). In the early part of this work, Eusebius records his own views about the Gospels. For example, he tells us that when Peter learnt that Mark had recorded his preaching, he was delighted and authorized its reading in the churches (2:15). He also claims that Mark was the first to carry the Christian message to Egypt (2:16). He thinks that Matthew, Mark and Luke all wrote about the final year of Jesus’ life (after the Baptist was imprisoned), whereas John wrote about his early career, which explains (he thinks) the apparent discrepancies. And since Matthew and Luke include a genealogy and present Jesus as a man, John passed over this and began with the ‘proclamation of His divinity since the Holy Spirit had reserved this for him, as the greatest of the four’ (3:24). But the significance of Eusebius’s work is not so much his own conclusions as the fact that he includes quotations from Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis (c. 130 ce), Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (c. 180 ce), Clement of Alexandria (c. 200 ce) and Origen (c. 230 ce). These are our earliest witnesses to the authorship and character of the Gospels (two of Irenaeus’s works are also extant). In the face of competing claims for other Gospels, Irenaeus argues that since there are four zones of the world, four principal winds, four cherubim and four Covenants (Adam, Noah, Moses, Christ), it was fitting that God ‘gave us the gospel under four forms but bound together by one spirit’ (Stevenson, 1957, p. 122). He also draws a parallel between the four living creatures of Revelation 4:6 (man, lion, calf, eagle) and the beginning of each of the Gospels (Burridge, 1994, pp. 1–32). The other important source comes from an eighth-century Latin manuscript known as the Canon Muratori, which is thought to be a translation of a third- or fourth-century Greek work. The fragment begins with the words ‘at which he was present and thus set them down’, and then speaks about the origins of Luke and John. It would appear that these were the concluding words concerning Mark. The following extracts represent our main sources for what the early church thought about the Gospels. 161

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Matthew Matthew compiled the Sayings in the Aramaic language, and everyone translated them as well as he could. (Papias, H.E. 3:39) Matthew published a written gospel for the Hebrews in their own tongue, while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel in Rome and founding the church there. (Irenaeus, H.E. 5:8) [The] third had the face as of a man—an evident description of His advent as a human being . . . Matthew, again, relates His generation as a man . . . This Gospel then is in human form; for which reason . . . the character of a humble and meek man is kept up through the whole Gospel. (Irenaeus, 3:11.11, Stevenson, 1957, p. 122) He [Clement of Alexandria] used to say that the earliest gospels were those containing the genealogies. (H.E. 6:14) First to be written was that of the one-time exciseman who became an apostle of Jesus Christ—Matthew; it was published for believers of Jewish origin, and was composed in Aramaic. (Origen, H.E. 6:25.7)

Mark Mark, who had been Peter’s interpreter, wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered of the Lord’s sayings and doings. For he had not heard the Lord or been one of His followers, but later, as I said, one of Peter’s. Peter used to adapt his teachings to the occasion, without making a systematic arrangement of the Lord’s sayings, so that Mark was quite justified in writing down some things just as he remembered them. For he had one purpose only—to leave out nothing that he had heard, and to make no misstatement about it. (Papias, H.E. 3:39)

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Mark also, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, transmitted to us in writing the things preached by Peter. (Irenaeus, H.E. 5:8) [The] fourth was like a flying eagle, pointing out the gift of the Spirit hovering with His wings over the church . . . Mark . . . commences with the prophetical spirit coming down from on high to men . . . pointing to the winged form of the Gospel; and on this account he made a compendious and cursory narrative, for such is the prophetical character. (Irenaeus, 3:11.11, Stevenson, 1957, p. 122) When, at Rome, Peter had openly preached the word and by the spirit had proclaimed the gospel, the large audience urged Mark, who had followed him for a long time and remembered what had been said, to write it all down. This he did, making his gospel available to all who wanted it. When Peter heard about this, he made no objection and gave no special encouragement. (Clement of Alexandria, H.E. 6:14) Next came that of Mark, who followed Peter’s instructions in writing it, and who in Peter’s general epistle was acknowledged as his son: ‘Greetings to you from the church in Babylon, chosen like yourselves, and from my son Mark’. (Origen, H.E. 6:25.7)

Luke Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the gospel preached by him. (Irenaeus, H.E. 5:8) [The] second was like a calf, signifying His sacrificial and sacerdotal order . . . Luke, taking up His priestly character, commenced with Zacharias the priest offering sacrifice to God. For now was made ready the fatted calf, about to be immolated for the finding again of the younger son. (Irenaeus, 3:11.11, Stevenson, 1957, p. 122)

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Next came that of Luke, who wrote for Gentile converts the gospel praised by Paul. (Origen, H.E. 6:25.7) The third book of the Gospel is that according to Luke. Luke, the physician, when, after the Ascension of Christ, Paul had taken him to himself as One studious of right [or, probably, as travelling companion] wrote in his own name what he had been told [or in order], although he had not himself seen the Lord in the flesh. He set down the events as far as he could ascertain them, and began his story with the birth of John. (Canon Muratori, Bettenson, 1969, p. 28)

John John, the disciple of the Lord, who had leant back on His breast, once more set forth the gospel, while residing at Ephesus in Asia. (Irenaeus, H.E. 5:8) The first living creature was like a lion, symbolizing His effectual working, His supremacy and royal power . . . John relates His supreme, effectual, and glorious generation from the Father . . . For this reason, too, is that Gospel full of all confidence, for such is His person. (Irenaeus, 3:11.11, Stevenson, 1957, p. 122) Last of all, aware that the physical facts had been recorded in the gospels, encouraged by his pupils and irresistibly moved by the Spirit, John wrote a spiritual gospel. (Clement of Alexandria, H.E. 6:14) Need I say anything about the man who leant back on Jesus’ breast, John? He left a single gospel, though he confessed that he could write so many that the whole world would not hold them. He also wrote the Revelation . . . In addition, he left an epistle of a very few lines, and possibly two more, though their authenticity is denied by some. (Origen, H.E. 6:25.7) The fourth gospel is that of John, one of the disciples . . . When his fellow-disciples and bishops exhorted him he said, ‘Fast with me for

Appendix

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three days from today, and then let us relate to each other whatever may be revealed to each of us.’ On the same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the Apostles, that John should narrate all things in his own name as they remembered them. (Canon Muratori, Bettenson, 1969, p. 28)

166

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Index of Biblical References Genesis 2:4 29 5:1 29

Zechariah 9:9 101 13:7 20

Exodus 3:14 62 34:29–35

32

1 Kings 17:17–24

53

Matthew 1:1 29 1:18 27 1:20–1 44 1:22–3 29 1:23 34 1:24–2:1 29 2:5 29 2:13 44 2:14–15 29 2:14 44 2:16–18 30 2:19–20 44 2:22 44 2:23 30, 44 3:3 35 3:10 125 3:13–15 89 4:1–11 131 4:23 39 5:1–12 127 5:3–12 72 5:3 73 5:6 73 5:11 74 5:13–16 127 5:17 38 5:21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43 32 6:9–13 34, 43 6:13 99 7:24 127 7:28 31 7:29 39 8:17 140 8:21–2 102 9:1–8 86

Psalms 118:22–3 20 22:1 20, 50 Proverbs 8 59 Isaiah 7:14 29–30 13:10 16 34:4 16 40:3 35, 54, 60 53 20 53:4 140 61 51 Jeremiah 22:24–30 45 31:15 30 Daniel 7:13–14

24

Hosea 6:6 35 11:1 29 Micah 5:2 29, 30

9:2 87 9:5, 7 87 9:9 31 9:13 35 9:35 39 10:4 31 10:6 38 10:17–42 27 10:17 39 10:34–6 43 11:1 32 11:2–11 115 11:10 35 11:27 38 12:1–8 35 12:27 101 12:28 115 12:41–2 115 13:10–15 35 13:16–17 115 13:24–52 28 13:24–30 54, 72 13:33 43 13:37 72 13:41 72 13:53–8 51–2 13:53 31 13:54 39 13:54–8 36 14:32–3 36 14:33 38 15:24 38 16:16–19 36 16:16 37 16:18 37, 83 16:19 33 18:10–14 37 18:12–14 43 18:12 37 18:15–17 33

177

178 18:17 37, 38 18:18 33 18:20 34 18:23–35 127 19:1 31 19:28 37, 100–1 20:20–8 52–3 20:25–8 52 22:1–14 125 23:3 38 23:13–39 123 23:35–6 49 24:37–8 43 25:14–30 54, 90, 127 25:41, 46 100 26:1 31 26:63 38 27:25 39 27:33–56 50–1 27:43 38 27:46 27 28:1–20 132 28:9 28 28:16–20 28 28:17 28–9 28:18 34 28:19–20 28–9 28:19 83 28:20 34 Mark 1:1 21, 23, 29 1:2 35 1:9–11 11 1:11 21 1:14–20 58 1:14–15 115 1:14 68 1:15 5, 16, 102 1:16–20 68 1:17 60 1:18 15 1:22 15 1:28 14

Index of Biblical References 1:30–1 14, 85 1:33 14 1:34 13, 21 1:37 14 1:40–1 66 1:40–2 84–5 1:42 15 1:44 21, 89 1:45 14 2:1–12 14, 86, 102 2:3 87 2:8 15 2:9 85, 87 2:10–11 14 2:10 23 2:12 87 2:18–19 84, 125 2:18 125 2:23–8 35 2:27 23 3:1–6 14 3:4 65 3:6 16 3:14–15 12 3:21 19 3:25–7 73 3:27 17 3:31–5 73 4:1–34 27 4:11–12 21, 22 4:12 19, 35 4:34 19 4:39 14 4:40 19 5:37 19 5:42 13 5:43 21 6:1–6 51–2, 83 6:2–4 51 6:3 19, 108 6:4–5 73 6:5 36 6:7–12 12, 27 6:8–9 109

6:30–44 14 6:30–3 99 6:45–52 131 6:48 14 6:50 19 6:52 36 7:1–23 102 7:1–4 90 7:9 90 7:15 90 7:18 19 7:19 90 7:24–30 128 7:32–5 84–5 7:36 21 8:12 17 8:18 19 8:27–30 13 8:29–30 36 8:31–5 13 8:35 100 9:1 5, 16 9:2–8 131 9:2 19 9:7 21, 23 9:9 21 9:12 23 9:30 21 9:33 19 9:39 19 9:43–8 100 10:14 19 10:15 28 10:31 125 10:33 23 10:35–45 52–3 10:42–5 52 10:45 99 11:12–19 12 11:18 17 11:27–33 17 12:6 38 12:12 22 12:13–17 15, 17

Index of Biblical References 12:14–16 73 12:18–27 17 12:28–34 17 13:2 16 13:5–37 28 13:14 19, 82 13:24–7 16 13:24–5 100 13:26 24 13:30 5, 16 13:32 23, 38, 89, 114 14:6 19 14:24 99 14:25 100 14:32–6 18 14:34 13, 97 14:37 19 14:39 18 14:61–2 22 14:62 24 14:65 13, 86 15:1–15 12 15:21–47 12 15:22–41 50–1 15:33–4 18 15:34 13, 64 15:39 21, 23 16:1–8 12 16:6–7 46 16:7 46 16:12–3 12 Luke 1:1 2 1:26–38 44 1:43 55 2:7 44 2:17 131 2:21 44 2:40 44 2:41–52 131 2:46 44 3:1 11 3:6 54

3:23 45 4:1–13 131 4:16–30 51–2 4:16–21 131 4:18 53 4:21 83 4:28 54 4:38–9 52 5:1–11 52 5:17–26 100 5:18 87 5:23, 25 87 5:33–4 84 6:20–3 50, 74 6:20 74 6:21 74 6:22 74 7:6 55 7:16 53 7:18–30 115 7:19 60 7:36–50 128 8:1–3 128 9:22 47 10:1–6 47 10:4 109 10:9–11 115 10:18 125 10:23–4 115 10:25–37 48 10:25–7 47 10:30–5 48 10:37 127 11:2–4 34, 43, 50 11:14–26 48 11:20 115 11:31–2 115 11:37–53 49 11:50–1 49 12:42 55 12:49–53 43 12:54–13:5 48 13:21 43 13:22 47

179 13:33 47, 53 15:4 37 15:7 37 15:11–32 48, 128 15:18–19 49 16:1–8 128 16:9–13 128 16:16 55, 115 17:11 47 17:16 53 17:21 125 17:25 47 17:26–7 43 19:7 110 19:8 55 19:11–27 55 21:20 82 21:24 54 21:26–7 55 22:24–7 52–3 22:37 47 22:63–4 86 23:4 54 23:28 54 23:33–49 50–1 24:1–49 132 24:5–7 46 24:7 47 24:11 54 24:13–35 12 24:19 53 24:30–1 46 24:39–43 46 24:45–7 46 24:50–3 132 24:50–2 47 24:50–1 47 John 1:1–18 59–60 1:8 60 1:19–28 60 1:23 60 1:29 60

180 1:29–42 68 1:32 60 1:34 60 1:35–42 58, 60 1:41 66 1:43 68 1:48–9 66 2:1–11 61 2:12–25 58 2:13 58 2:21 66 2:22 68 3:3, 5 67 3:15, 16 66 3:22–36 68 3:25 60 3:30 60 3:36 66 4:1–42 131 4:1–30 66 4:6 67 4:7–18 128 4:14 66 4:25 66 4:31–3 66 4:36 66 4:43–54 61 5:1–14 61 5:1 58 5:15–47 61 5:17, 18 65 5:19–47 65 5:19 67 5:24 66 5:25–9 116 5:39 66 6:1–14 61 6:16–21 61 6:27 66 6:35 62 6:40, 47, 54, 68 66 7:10 58 7:20 61 7:53–8:11 128 8:12 62

Index of Biblical References 8:48 61 8:56 65 8:57 45 9:1–12 61 10:7 62 10:11 62 10:21 61 10:22–3 58 10:30 65 11:1–44 132 11:1–43 61 11:25–6 62 11:25 62 11:35 67 12:16 68 12:49 67 13:26 62 14:6 62 14:26 63, 68 14:28 67 15:1 62 16:13 63 17:4–21 63 18:6 63 18:8 64 18:34 64 18:37 64 19:26–7 64 19:28 64 19:34 67 20:9 68 20:28 65 20:29 63 20:30–1 1, 58 20:31 66 21:20 58 21:24–5 58

5:31 53 7:58–60 18 8:16 34 10:43 53 10:48 34 13:2 85 13:38 53 17:30 53 18:25 60 19:5 34 26:18 53

Acts 1:1–8 47 2:22–4 20 2:36 55 2:38 34, 53 2:46 46 3:19 53

1Thessalonians 4:13–18 54 4:15 92, 105 4:16–17 101

Romans 1:8–13 31 6:3 34 14:14 90 1 Corinthians 1:12 150 1:24 59 7:25–31 54 7:29–31 105 7:29 92 13:12 153 15:3 2 2 Corinthians 12:8–10 19 Ephesians 5:25 85 Colossians 1:15–20 59 1:19 65 4:14 45

2 Timothy 4:11 45

Index of Biblical References Philemon 24 45

2 Peter 3:3, 4, 8, 9

Hebrews 1:1–3 59 1:3 65

1 John 4:2–3 68

92

181 2 John 7 68 Revelation 19:7 85

182

General Index adoptionism 27 Aichele, G. 24 Allison, D.C. 92, 99, 134, 158 Anderson, P.N. 68 anti-Semitism 39, 88, 118 apocalyptic 67, 96–105 apocryphal gospels 71–80 authorship of the gospels 161–5 Bacon, B.S. 32 baptism of Jesus 11, 27, 60, 72, 99 basileia 5, 124–7 Bauckham, R. 12, 68, 92–3, 157 Baugh, L. 143 Bettenson, H. 164 Bockmuehl, M. 131 Böll, H. 127–8 Borg, M.J. 111–12, 119, 121 Bultmann, R. 62–3, 84–5 Burridge, R. 4, 53, 161 Canon Muratori 161–5 Casey, P.M. 67, 157 Cave, N. 128–30 Charlesworth, J.H. 6 Chilton, B. 119 Clement of Alexandria 83, 161–4 Conzelmann, H. 54 Cranfield, C.E.B. 20 Crossan, J.D. 75, 107–9, 117–19, 121, 151 Crossley, J. 6, 89, 90, 93, 154 crucifixion of Jesus 12, 18, 21, 34, 50, 54, 67, 95, 138–9 Culpepper, R.A. 68 Cynics 107–9, 121 Dead Sea Scrolls 30, 59, 80, 90 Den Heyer, C.J. 139 Dibelius, M. 84

divinity of Christ 65–7, 161 docetism 7, 67 Dodd, C.H. 114–17 Elliott, J.K. 75, 77 empty tomb 11, 12, 21, 28, 54, 75 eschatology 5, 15–17, 66, 90–5, 97–109, 111–18, 153 Eusebius 161–2 Eucharist 46, 60, 140 Evans, C.F. 47–8 exorcisms of Jesus 13, 17, 58, 60, 61, 110, 132 feminist theology 124–7 Fiorenza, E.S. 5, 124–7, 133–4 form criticism 83–8 France, R.T. 31 Freyne, S. 6, 105 Funk, R.W. 74, 120 genealogy of Jesus 27–8, 45 Gethsemane 12, 18–19, 63 Goodacre, M. 87, 146 Gospel of Peter 75–6 Goulder, M.D. 87 Grant, R.M. 71 Green, J.B. 54, 56 Gundry, R. 13, 20–1, 34 Holtzmann, H.J. 11, 100 Horsley, R. 6, 25, 105, 107, 134 Hoover, R.W. 74,120 infancy narratives 27–31, 46–5, 76–80, 87 Irenaeus 4, 31, 161–4 Jeremias, J. 72 Jesus Seminar 117, 120

183

184

General Index

John the Baptist 13, 51, 58–60, 101–4, 108 Jülicher, A. 71 Kähler, M. 130 Käsemann, E. 68 Kelly, S. 154 kingdom of God 15–16, 54, 66, 74, 96–8, 102–5, 109, 119, 122–4 Kingsbury, J.D. 17, 37, 40 Kloppenborg, J.S. 91 Koester, H. 72–3, 91 Lachmann, K. 11, 100 liberator, Jesus as 5, 56, 121–3, 128–9 lord, Jesus as 2, 55, 65 Luz, U. 34–5 Mack, B. 33 Marsh, C. 142–3 Meier, J.P. 6 messiah, Jesus as 1–2, 12, 21–2, 24, 29, 37, 39, 55, 60, 64–6, 83, 110, 114–16 messianic secret 22, 114 Miller, J.W. 112 miracles of Jesus 6, 13–14, 17, 21, 28, 36, 58, 100, 114 Moyise, S. 2, 7, 40, 82, 93, 152 Nolland, J. 45, 56 Oakman, D. 6, 107 Origen 161–4 Papias 161–2 Pelikan, J. 9 Powell, M.A. 37 Prior, M. 56 prophet, Jesus as 4–5, 12, 47, 51–3, 72, 99–104, 107, 111–12, 116, 153 Protoevangelium of James 77–8 Pseudo-Matthew 78 Q 33, 43, 44, 49, 73–4, 82–3, 87, 90, 109, 118, 125

realized eschatology 115–17 redaction criticism 7, 147 resurrection of Jesus 11, 12, 14, 17, 22, 43, 45, 46, 49, 82, 87, 90, 91, 114, 122, 139, 151 Riches, J. 37 Sanders, E.P. 39, 98–105 saviour, Jesus as 2, 54, 75, 128, 148 Schnackenburg, R. 38–9, 40, 68 Schweitzer, A. 95–105 Smith, D.M. 67 Sobrino, J. 6, 122–4, 133 son of God 1–2, 4, 17, 20–1, 22–3, 28, 36–8, 58, 64, 66–7, 74, 100, 148 son of man 13–15,19, 21–4, 35, 55, 72, 74, 90, 100, 114 source criticism 6, 32–3, 43, 73, 81–3 Stendahl, K. 30 Stevenson, J. 161–4 Talbert, C.H. 46, 53, 56 Tatum, W.B. 146 Taylor, V. 20 teacher, Jesus as 5, 6, 14–15, 19, 32, 91–2, 105, 107–12, 128 temptations of Jesus 12, 28, 38 Theissen, G. 6, 14 Thomas, Gospel of 1, 71–4, 91, 108, 111, 118, 129 Thompson, M. 68 Throckmorton, B.H. 9 transfiguration of Jesus 16, 19, 21, 32, 72, 131 Tuckett, C.M. 55, 56 Twelftree, G. 6 Vermes, G. 105 wisdom, Jesus as 5, 14, 17–19, 33, 51, 56, 59, 64, 79, 83, 108–10, 118 Witherington, B. 6, 25 Wrede, W. 22, 114–18 Wright, N.T. 5, 91, 104–5, 113, 119

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186