The New Testament and The Church: Essays in Honour of John Muddiman 9780567665454, 9780567660374, 9780567660381

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Contributors
Chapter 1. Dickensian Theology and Trinitarian Priesthood: Sermon for Trinity Sunday 2013, the Fortieth Anniversary of John Muddiman’s Ordination to the Priesthood
Chapter 2. Old and New Endings for Mark
Chapter 3. Signs and Syncriseis in John and the Wisdom of Solomon
Chapter 4. Prophecy Historicized or Tradition Scripturalized? Reflections on the Origins of the Passion Narrative
Chapter 5. Apart from God: Hebrews 2.9 and the Soteriological Journey of the Son in the Ecclesiology of Hebrews
Chapter 6. To Err Is Human, to Correct Divine: A Recessive Gene in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religiosity?
Chapter 7. The Future of Biblical Studies in Higher Education
Chapter 8. ‘Before this they had been enemies’: Studying the Bible and Preaching the Scriptures
Chapter 9. What Happens When Catholics Read the Bible? A Dialogue with John Muddiman
Chapter 10. Church Scholarship, Ecumenism and Politics: Archbishop Harry McAdoo and the Work of ARCIC-I
Chapter 11. ‘Saying the same thing by saying something different’: Ephesians, the Church and Vatican II
Chapter 12. Austin Farrer: Anglican Genius
Chapter 13. Austin Farrer’s Sermons
Bibliography
Index of References
Index of Authors

Citation preview

LIBRARY OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES

532 Formerly Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series

Editor Chris Keith

Editorial Board Dale C. Allison, John M.G. Barclay, Lynn H. Cohick, R. Alan Culpepper, Craig A. Evans, Robert Fowler, Simon J. Gathercole, John S. Kloppenborg, Michael Labahn, Love L. Sechrest, Robert Wall, Steve Walton, Catrin H. Williams

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND THE CHURCH

Essays in Honour of John Muddiman

Edited by

John Barton and Peter Groves

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © John Barton and Peter Groves, 2016 John Barton and Peter Groves have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors 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. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New Testament and the church : essays in honour of John Muddiman / edited by John Barton and Peter Groves. pages cm. – (Library of New Testament studies; volume 532) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-0-567-66037-4 (hardback) 1. Bible. New Testament–Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Muddiman, John, honouree. II. Barton, John, 1948- editor. BS2361.3.N475 2015 225.6–dc23 2015024324 ISBN: HB: 978-0-56766-037-4 PB: 978-0-56768-453-0 ePDF: 978-0-56766-038-1 Series: Library of New Testament Studies, volume 532 Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com) To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS Preface Abbreviations Contributors

vii ix xi

Chapter 1 DICKENSIAN THEOLOGY AND TRINITARIAN PRIESTHOOD: SERMON FOR TRINITY SUNDAY 2013, THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF JOHN MUDDIMAN’S ORDINATION TO THE PRIESTHOOD Rowan Williams

1

Chapter 2 OLD AND NEW ENDINGS FOR MARK Robert Morgan

5

Chapter 3 SIGNS AND SYNCRISEIS IN JOHN AND THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON Eric Eve

24

Chapter 4 PROPHECY HISTORICIZED OR TRADITION SCRIPTURALIZED? REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF THE PASSION NARRATIVE Mark Goodacre

37

Chapter 5 APART FROM GOD: HEBREWS 2.9 AND THE SOTERIOLOGICAL JOURNEY OF THE SON IN THE ECCLESIOLOGY OF HEBREWS Richard J. Ounsworth OP

52

Chapter 6 TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO CORRECT DIVINE: A RECESSIVE GENE IN ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN AND NEAR EASTERN RELIGIOSITY? Teresa Morgan

64

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Contents

Chapter 7 THE FUTURE OF BIBLICAL STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION Christopher Rowland

78

Chapter 8 ‘BEFORE THIS THEY HAD BEEN ENEMIES’: STUDYING THE BIBLE AND PREACHING THE SCRIPTURES Peter Groves

93

Chapter 9 WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CATHOLICS READ THE BIBLE? A DIALOGUE WITH JOHN MUDDIMAN Nicholas King SJ

105

Chapter 10 CHURCH SCHOLARSHIP, ECUMENISM AND POLITICS: ARCHBISHOP HARRY MCADOO AND THE WORK OF ARCIC-I Christopher Hill

120

Chapter 11 ‘SAYING THE SAME THING BY SAYING SOMETHING DIFFERENT’: EPHESIANS, THE CHURCH AND VATICAN II Philip Kennedy

132

Chapter 12 AUSTIN FARRER: ANGLICAN GENIUS Mark Edwards

146

Chapter 13 AUSTIN FARRER’S SERMONS John Barton

160

Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

171 182 187

1

PREFACE John Barton and Peter Groves

John Muddiman (born 1947) has taught New Testament in Oxford and Nottingham, in the context of both the study of theology in the university, and of clergy training at an Anglican theological college. His particular genius lies in having a foot in both worlds, and mediating one to the other. He stands in the great tradition of Anglican scholar-priests, as concerned for rigorous study of the Bible and Christian Theology as for the way scholarship can nurture, challenge, and help to form the church and its ministry. He has contributed strongly to New Testament scholarship through books and articles, and to the Church through ecumenical work on ARCIC, a great deal of preaching – for which he has a wide and well-deserved reputation – and involvement in the formation of ordinands. He has been concerned not just with the promotion of the Catholic tradition in Anglicanism but also with its restatement for the modern Church, ‘saying the same thing by saying something different’, as he puts it in his commentary on Ephesians. The title of his ¿rst book sums up his attitude to Scripture and its place in the Church: The Bible, Fountain and Well of Truth. John’s vision of the Bible in the Church is a ‘canonical’ one. His approach manifests four marks of traditional Anglican learning and teaching: it is catholic, reformed, devotional, and scholarly. His own background lies in the Classics as well as Theology, giving him an intuitive understanding of the world of the New Testament and an ability to convey it to others. John studied Classics and Theology at Keble College, Oxford, where his New Testament tutor was Austin Farrer, then Warden of the College and an enduring inÀuence. After graduation he spent a year in Leuven under the auspices of the World Council of Churches; then two years in Cambridge, training for the priesthood at Westcott House while also completing the ‘Part III’ in Theology (what would now be an M.Phil.) at Selwyn College. He returned to Oxford as Assistant Chaplain of

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Preface

New College, where he began research that would lead to a doctorate under George Caird, and thereafter moved to be a tutor, and eventually Vice-Principal at St Stephen’s House (1976–83). There followed nine years as a Lecturer at Nottingham University, before a ¿nal return to Oxford in 1990 as G. B. Caird Fellow in Theology at Mans¿eld College. Throughout his career he never failed to serve the Church as well as the Academy: while at Mans¿eld he preached and presided regularly in the parish of Littlemore and at St Mary Magdalen’s in central Oxford, as well as teaching a host of undergraduate and postgraduate students and delivering highly popular lectures. The Church of England into which John was ordained was a markedly different institution from that which exists today. In particular, in recent years the distance between the academic study of theology, and the teaching ministry of the Church, has become alarmingly wide, a development much lamented by the scholars represented in this volume. Whilst few today can match John Muddiman’s combination of extraordinary learning and natural didactic enthusiasm, nevertheless his contribution constitutes evidence that biblical studies and critical theology need not exist apart from the ecclesial communities which claim to be the guardians and the celebrants of the Christian tradition. John’s gifts as a teacher have manifested themselves not simply in higher education, but also in his remarkable abilities as a preacher, and in the generosity of his ecumenical concerns. These two facets of his ministry within the church – homiletic and ecumenical – stem, for him, from unending engagement with the text of the New Testament, an engagement to which the Church is called afresh in every generation. As friends and colleagues of John we have here put together a collection of essays reÀecting both sides of his life’s work, the twin foci of New Testament study and commitment to the Church. We hope that John’s example may continue to teach any and all who ¿nd their inspiration and identity in the fountain and well of truth which is the Holy Bible.

1

ABBREVIATIONS AB AnBib CBQ ETL HTR ICC JAH JBL JSNT JSNTS JTS JTSA LNTS NCB NovT NovTSup SBL SBT WUNT ZThK

Anchor Bible Analecta Biblica Catholic Biblical Quarterly Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Harvard Theological Review International Critical Commentary on the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments Journal of Ancient History Journal of Biblical Literature Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplements Journal of Theological Studies Journal of Theology for Southern Africa Library of New Testament Studies New Century Bible Novum Testamentum Novum Testamentum Supplements Society of Biblical Literature Studies in Biblical Theology Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

1

CONTRIBUTORS John Barton was Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford until 2014. Mark Edwards is Professor of Early Christian Studies at the University of Oxford and Tutor in Theology at Christ Church, Oxford. Eric Eve is Fellow and Tutor in Theology at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. Mark Goodacre is Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. Peter Groves is Vicar of St Mary Magdalen, Oxford, and Lecturer in Theology at Worcester College, Oxford. Christopher Hill, formerly Bishop of Guildford, is President of the Conference of European Churches and a member of ARCIC-III. Philip Kennedy is a Senior Research Fellow of Mans¿eld College, Oxford. Nicholas King SJ is Visiting Professor at Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. Robert Morgan is priest-in-charge of Sandford-on-Thames and Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. Teresa Morgan is Professor Graeco-Roman history and Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College, Oxford. She is a self-supporting priest in the parish of Littlemore.

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Contributors

Richard Ounsworth OP is Lector and Tutor in Scripture at Blackfriars, Oxford. Christopher Rowland was Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford until 2014. Rowan Williams is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

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Chapter 1

DICKENSIAN THEOLOGY AND TRINITARIAN PRIESTHOOD: SERMON FOR TRINITY SUNDAY 2013, THE FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF JOHN MUDDIMAN’S ORDINATION TO THE PRIESTHOOD Rowan Williams

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Somewhere near the end of most of Charles Dickens’ novels comes the passage we’ve all been waiting for where the plot is explained, or, if not explained, at least dealt with in a summary fashion which allows Dickens to complete his text before the deadline. We emerge from these chapters thinking ‘Ah yes, so she’s his half-sister’. ‘So what the lawyers were looking for was the deeds of the house. Or was it?’ We’ve coped pretty well with the story so far actually without the explanation, but it helps to have that last chapter, those loose threads tied up. And Trinity Sunday is Charles Dickens Sunday. We look back on the story of the Christian year. We look back on the very nature of the Church in its ministry. We look back on the shape of Christian practice and teaching as it has come alive and we think ‘Ah yes, so that’s it. It’s because God is this kind of God.’ We look back and say ‘God does that sort of thing’. And more, ‘We are growing to be that sort of person’. We look back to Christmas and think, ‘Yes of course, this is a God who from all eternity to all eternity, lives by giving life, a God who for all eternity is joyful in giving joy’. And so, when this life comes alive in the world, we think, ‘Yes, this is eternal life. This is the life, the everlasting gift, everlasting joy coming alive in the life of the earth.’ And we look back perhaps on Holy Week and Easter, and think, ‘Yes of course, this is a life whose bonds of generosity and intimacy are so strong that nothing our sin and betrayal does can actually fracture it.

2

The New Testament and the Church

Jesus and the one to whom he prays, the one to whom he gives his life in love, are so bound together, that the cross cannot breach that unity. It is that unity of love and communion that blazes forth on Easter Morning.’ And we look back at Pentecost and we think ‘Yes, of course, because that love gives and receives and overÀows eternally, when its unity blazes forth on Easter Morning what is breathed into us is God’s everlasting life as Spirit. Yes, of course, faith makes sense because God is this kind of God, our story is this kind of story, our hope is this kind of hope, our community is this kind of community, because God is a God who lives in giving life, who is joyful in giving joy, whose unity is unbreakable, whose faithfulness unshakeable; this kind of God.’ And so also, this kind of humanity into which we’re introduced, a humanity that has somehow been drawn into an everlasting faithfulness, a pledge of love to God and to one another that can’t be broken by sin and betrayal. This is the life that must live in us, by giving life, by giving joy. A life grounded in a sense of our belonging together as human children of God, that nothing can fracture, a life, therefore, passionate for justice, passionate for the joy of all. Why is it that in our understanding of the Christian life and Christian morality, what we identify as sin and betrayal is injustice, inequality of resource, the wilful hoarding of what will give joy and life to the other, the sense that my interest and my future can be divorced from those of everyone else? We identify that sin and that betrayal equally in terms of the suspicion and hatred that we are tempted to show towards the stranger. We realise that because our God is this kind of God, justice and hospitality are the heart of the humanity that’s come to birth through the mysteries of God’s action in us. And of course, we broaden it out and we think, ‘Yes, that’s why it’s this kind of Church, this kind of community’. The Church is not a Jesus of Nazareth Appreciation Society with monthly talks and perhaps a yearly excursion to Nazareth. It’s not a community that looks back on a great hero and a great teacher, but a community that is here and now constituted in sharing. That’s why the sacraments of the Church are what they are; you don’t simply ¿ll in a registration form when somebody becomes a part of the Church, we don’t have an annual general meeting (well, we do, but it’s not of enormous theological signi¿cance…). People come into the church by being brought into the place where Jesus stands, the place where the waterfall of God’s love descends upon us, drowning us and forcing up from our lungs the cry ‘Abba’, the cry of intimacy towards the source of all things, prompted, generated by the Holy Spirit. 1

1. Dickensian Theology and Trinitarian Priesthood

3

We’re baptised, we’re not just registered, we’re brought to be where Jesus is, and day by day and week by week we treat Jesus as the nourishment of our very life, the food and the drink of our bodies, our hearts, our souls; we come and we share with one another and with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. And, greatly daring, we make his prayer our prayer and once again allow the Holy Spirit to push out of our lungs that cry ‘Abba, father’. And of course if God were a different kind of God, we’d have a different kind of ministry in the Church. If God were a lawgiver, sitting on high, an individual with very strong opinions of what the world ought to be like, what we would need in the Church would be people who exercised what is sometimes called ‘strong moral leadership’ and who could tell us exactly what God thought about everything day by day. Or if God were just a general principle of cosmic wisdom, we’d need sages in the Church to sit there and stroke their beards and impart to us the mystery of God’s everlasting harmony and wisdom. But God isn’t quite that kind of God: God is Holy Trinity, God is Father, Son and Spirit, the giving and the receiving of overÀowing love, the life that makes life, the joy that makes joyful, and so the ministry we need in the Church and that, by the Grace of God, we do from time to time get from Church, is a ministry that embodies that hospitality and that hope, that tells us quite simply what kind of God it is we believe in. A ministry that helps to bring life, and to bring joy, a ministry whose focus is in that great act of hospitality at the Holy Eucharist which tells us ‘Yes’ clearer day by day, God’s life continuing to make alive, God’s glory continuing to make glory. In giving thanks for John’s years in priestly ministry, we gives thanks for God’s gifts in priestly ministry, we give thanks for John’s capacity to show us the kind of God we celebrate, we give thanks for a hospitality of intellect and heart, a generosity of thought and presence, a passion of fairness and inclusion. We give thanks for someone who shows us what we’re about, not someone who is seeking to be a second Moses and lay down the laws from Sinai, not someone who is seeking to be a sage: someone who quite simply holds the door into the mystery by a life of generous prayer – heartfelt, faithful, and vigilant. Today we look back at the Christian year and on a faithful ministry wonderfully exercised to the great pro¿t of so many of us, and on the shape of our doctrine and our ethics. We discover, just as when we read those last chapters of the novels, this is what it was about, and this is what it will be about. Yes, we have been enjoying ourselves so far 1

4

The New Testament and the Church

without quite knowing the explanation, but then when we turn the pages again, depths begin to open and we understand that there’s more and more to discover; and next Trinity Sunday, it will still be surprising and dif¿cult, amazing and enriching, and the year after, and the year after that, and by the time we’ve stopped counting the years, when and if we get to heaven, it will still go on unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. Unlike Charles Dickens, God does not have a deadline to meet, and God always has more to say, more to show, more to be, in our lives, here on earth, and eternally. In fact, the ‘more’ that God constantly seeks to show in us and for us is what drives us on in our prayer, in our search for justice in the world, our search for one another, our longing to see one another’s true faces, our exploration of ourselves and God’s world. God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has shown us what kind of God God is, what is going on at the heart of every act throughout the history of cosmos, what goes on at every baptism and Eucharist, what goes on in the life of every one of us – ministers, baptised persons, ordained persons of the Church. We say yes, that’s it. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

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Chapter 2

OLD AND NEW ENDINGS FOR MARK Robert Morgan

We do not have to be such a good textual critic as John Muddiman to know of four spurious endings to Mark’s gospel in the manuscript tradition. These were added to Mark 16.1-8 which is generally accepted as all we have from the evangelist’s ending unless traces of a hypothetical lost ending can be detected in Matt. 28.9-10 or 16-17, or in the longer ending, or in the Gospel of Peter, or elsewhere. Whether or not the evangelist intended to end at v. 8 is still disputed, but as they stand neither the shorter nor the longer endings (with or without the Freer logion between 16.14 and 15), nor a combination of both, are part of Mark’s gospel, and they are rightly omitted from most modern lectionaries,1 despite their inclusion with minimal explanation in NEB, REB, NRSV (contrast RSV), GNB, NIV, Youth Bible etc. Some will think ¿ve endings are four too many, and will not welcome my suggestion of two or three more. Mark 16.14-20 is still read on Ascension Day by those who use the Book of Common Prayer and in Easter week (Year B) by those who use the Roman lectionary, but it is not evidence for Mark’s theology, or purpose, or historical context. If any agree with Eta Linnemann that vv. 15-20 may contain part of Mark’s lost original ending2 they do not risk making her ‘rediscovery’ a 1. Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (London: SCM Press, 1984), includes vv. 9-20 in his ‘canonical Mark’ because it was probably added ‘during the process of forming a fourfold Gospel collection’ (p. 94), a dubious argument. W. R. Farmer, The Last Twelve Verses of Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), thinks ‘on balance’ that the longer ending was part of Mark’s autograph but admits he cannot claim ‘high probability’ until some relevant papyri are discovered. His attempt to keep the issue open is unlikely to persuade the consensus which rejects his (related) Griesbach hypothesis that Mark used Matthew and Luke. 2. E. Linnemann, ‘Der (wiedergefundene) Markusschluß’, ZThK 66 (1969), pp. 255–87. See also below, n. 14.

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The New Testament and the Church

plank in their scholarly reconstructions of Mark’s intentions. Even without the manuscript and patristic evidence, the longer, the shorter, and the supplement to v. 14 could all have been deleted on stylistic (including vocabulary) grounds, and on account of their Matthean, Johannine, and Lukan (and therefore, contrary to Farmer’s view,3 secondary) content. However, despite very strong text-critical and other reasons for excluding them (such as exist for excising Mark 7.16) editors are reluctant to let them go. They also include Rom. 16.25-27 where the manuscript and patristic evidence for exclusion is weak (codices F and G, and apparently Marcion), and even (within double brackets or subscript) John 7.53–8.11 where the text-critical case for excluding it is extremely strong and supported by other arguments. Even without empirical manuscript support some scholars might still have trusted their literary critical judgment about Mark 16.9-20, and even John 7.53–8.11 and Rom. 16.25-27, but all are reluctant to interfere with an intelligible text without good text-critical reasons. Excisions, like other conjectural emendations, are a last resort. Few have admitted as many (if any) glosses in Romans as Bultmann.4 Some scholars doubt whether Paul wrote 2 Cor. 6.14–7.1 and therefore do not use it in their accounts of Paul’s thought, but they do not therefore propose cutting it from editions or even from lectionaries.5 In short, my alternative endings for Mark, acquired not by additions but by excisions, will be dismissed by some as illegitimate in principle. Many still ¿nd 16.8b dif¿cult, both in the abruptness of ending the book with gar, and as an anti-climax. Some think it might have been added to explain the late emergence of the empty tomb tradition, but few suggest that it may be a gloss.6 However,

3. Farmer (Last Twelve Verses) cherry-picks vv. 9, 11, 13, 15, 20 as more Markan than not. From textual critics he quotes K. Clark as wanting to keep the issue open, and R. S. Caspar that vv. 9-20 ‘positively do not belong to this Gospel, positively have no right to be in the New Testament’ (p. 109). See also J. K. Elliott, ‘The Text and Language to the Endings of Mark’s Gospel’, Theologische Zeitschrift 27 (1971), pp. 258–62, on their non-Markan vocabulary. 4. R. Bultmann, ‘Glossen im Römerbrief’ (1947), in Exegetica (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967). He ¿nds eight. Of these only 7.25b ¿nds much support. 5. The Common Worship Sunday lectionary does omit it (along with most of 2 Corinthians), but not for being possibly non-Pauline. John 8.2-11 is every year an alternative on Ash Wednesday. 6. David Catchpole, ‘The Fearful Silence of the Women at the Tomb’, JTSA 18 (1977), pp. 3–10 (3) writes of ‘the probability that Mark has added’ (16.8b, like 16.7) ‘to the tradition of the women’s visit to Jesus’ tomb’ – but not that it is a postMarkan gloss. 1

2. Old and New Endings for Mark

7

seeing a problem commits exegetes to addressing it, and proposing that something is a gloss is sometimes a legitimate option. Such solutions have to remain hypothetical, but Muddiman’s comment that ‘if we have no reliable textual evidence in favour of an ending at 16.8, the case falls, regardless of any literary arguments that may be framed in its defence’,7 cannot be a general principle. The history of New Testament scholarship contains plenty of speculations which raise the eyebrows of sober historians, and eccentric suggestions are rightly discouraged. Austin Farrer (no stranger to the use of imagination in biblical scholarship) commented that ‘history would become a ¿eld for uncontrolled fantasy, if historians allowed themselves the free use of such suppositions’.8 He mocks the suggestion that Mark’s gospel once continued beyond 16.8 by his joke about a Sunday in ¿rstcentury Rome ‘when the reader turned to the congregation in confusion, and said, “I am sorry, brethren (sic), but the mice have eaten this morning’s lesson” ’.9 The mice are improbable, but historians and exegetes who think an original ending was lost, or an intended ending unwritten, surely need to suggest a believable possibility about how this could have happened so quickly (prior to Matthew and Luke reading Mark), even while insisting that we do not know.10 Whether my own mouse-free historical suggestion is believable or not is of no more than passing interest. Historical critics are not the only people who reÀect on scripture,

7. In a chapter on the ending of Mark in his Mark’s Gospel and Mission (forthcoming). I am grateful to John for the opportunity to read this chapter prior to publication. 8. Austin Farrer, St Matthew and St Mark (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1954), p. 144. His reference is to the then common practice of invoking physical or personal accident to account for the supposed loss of Mark’s ending, or the evangelist’s supposed failure to complete. Farrer calls such speculations ‘immoral’ and makes an ‘axiom’ of his rejection of such hypotheses. 9. Austin Farrer, A Study in Mark (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1951), p. 173. 10. As B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels (London: Macmillan & Co., 1924), p. 358, and W. L. Knox, ‘The Ending of St Mark’s Gospel’, HTR 35 (1942), pp. 13– 23, do, unlike C. E. B. Cran¿eld, The Gospel according to St Mark, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 471, who says only that Mark ‘for some reason never ¿nished his work’, and dismisses by mere assertion the now majority view that Mark intended to end at 16.8. Vincent Taylor’s commentary recycled the astonishing view of W. L. Knox that crediting Mark with great originality would invalidate the ‘whole method of form criticism’ (Vincent Taylor, The Gospel according to St. Mark [London: Macmillan & Co., 1952], p. 609, citing Knox, ‘The Ending of St Mark’s Gospel’, p. 23). In 1942 and later some Cambridge scholars underestimated R. H. Lightfoot. 1

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The New Testament and the Church

and their conventions need not veto everything else. They do, however, provide a rough guide as to what is sensible or worth discussing, and therefore a criterion by which any suggestion can be judged. The excellent discussions in the commentaries of Morna Hooker, Adela Yarbro Collins, and Joel Marcus (in the A. & C. Black, Hermeneia, and Anchor-Yale series) to name only the best of British and American works of reference, and in more detailed monographs and articles,11 do not leave much room for further suggestions, and my liturgical or lectionary proposal (less original than I once thought12) about what to read and preach on in church contributes nothing to con¿rm the historical hypothesis. Even if that is partly religiously motivated it can be evaluated in its own terms as historically (im)plausible and perhaps throw light on the larger issue of the contribution of biblical scholarship to the church’s readings of scripture. Historical speculations about the prehistory of Mark 16.1-8 cannot be con¿rmed or falsi¿ed, but the dif¿culty of reading aloud and preaching on these eight verses as the (alternative) gospel for Easter Sunday in Year B, and the general failure to notice the dif¿culty, illustrates the gap between even religiously interested biblical scholarship and ecclesial practice, a gap which John Muddiman has done more than most to reduce, not least as a member of the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission. Not everyone will admit the problem. Like their congregations many preachers accept these verses as a historical record of what happened, and as evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. They receive strong support from serious scholars who are also Christian apologists.13 But historical evidence for Christian truth is surely not what Mark intended by his elusive and profound testimony to divine action. If Mark’s testimony is not a historical record, or contains at most a faint echo of historical 11. Since redaction criticism took a more literary turn around 1970 some brilliant and some questionable discussions of Mark’s treatment of the disciples have enlivened the discussion of these verses. The works of Tyson, Tannehill, Kelber, Crossan, Keck, Juel, Quesnell, Donahue, Perrin, Rhoads and Michie, Myers, Magness, Boomershine, Beavis, Tolbert, Lincoln, Best, Telford, Stock, Van Iersel, Dewey, Catchpole, Malbon, Fowler, among others on this theme represent a welcome sea-change. 12. Canon Michael Gudgeon instructed me on the Roman lectionary for the Easter vigil (Year B) specifying only vv. 1-7. Common Worship is more traditional (vv. 1-8). 13. Most powerfully from Bishop Tom (N. T.) Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003), pp. 616–31. On this typically English apologetic see R. Morgan and P. Moule (eds.), Christ Alive and at Large: Unpublished Writings of C. F. D. Moule (London: Canterbury Press, 2010), pp. 55–88. 1

2. Old and New Endings for Mark

9

realities, it is still possible that he thought he was reporting what happened, and that this was evidence for the truth of resurrection faith (cf. Acts 2.29-31; 13.35-37). But that apologetic does not convince critical historians and is bought at a high price in losing the richness and theological potential of the Markan literary text. The following was penned to honour John Muddiman’s several writings on Mark’s gospel and the resurrection narratives, but is rooted more deeply in an experience of mismatch between some illuminating biblical scholarship on this passage and the Church’s Easter preaching. John’s teaching, preaching, pastoral, and priestly ministry has been so largely dedicated to ministerial education that an attempt to stimulate further reÀection on the mismatch, and therefore missed opportunities, seems appropriate in a volume in his honour. His New Testament tutor at Keble had already written on Mark and its original ending,14 and John also shares Farrer’s deep knowledge of Christian doctrine, church history, ecumenical theology, liturgy, and spirituality. Within that wide and deep theological culture which has borne fruit in both scholars’ countless sermons he has the edge on his teacher as a historian and as an exegete, as the master perhaps has the edge on the pupil as a philosophical theologian and in poetic sensibility, but their shared commitment to the ministry of the word and sacrament led to the reÀections on the relationship between New Testament scholarship and the church which John has shared with a wider public in The Bible: Fount and Well of Truth (1983), and in several articles.15 14. See above, nn. 8 and 9. St Matthew and St Mark, p. 145, reverted to what was then the majority view that Mark wrote more than 16.1-8. Rather than a full resurrection appearance, Farrer proposed ‘But Jesus sent forth his disciples to preach the gospel among all nations’ (cf. v. 15b) ‘as a tolerable alternative to the dif¿cult but still attractive supposition that the Gospel ended with the words “for they were afraid” ’. With Linnemann, n. 2 above, Kurt Aland, and others such as V. H. Stanton (who in 1909 thought Matt. 28.9-20 might contain part of the lost Markan ending) and Harnack (who in 1898 thought the Gospel of Peter, which echoes Mark 16.1-8 might also contain the lost ending), these are all possible endings achieved by additions to Mark 16.8. The following proposals, by contrast, involve subtractions, excisions. 15. John Muddiman, ‘Like an Owl in the Desert’, Theology 89 (1986), pp. 349– 55; ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’, in R. Morgan (ed.), The Religion of the Incarnation (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), pp. 119–35; ‘I Believe in the Resurrection of the Body’, in S. Barton and G. Stanton (eds.), Resurrection (FS J. L. Houlden; London: SPCK, 1994), pp. 128–38; ‘The New Testament: The Tradition of Interpretation’, in P. Byrne and J. L. Houlden (eds.), Companion Encyclopedia of Theology (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 102–21; ‘Truth in Biblical Criticism’, in 1

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*** The order of those two metaphors – ¿rst the fountain, then the well – gives to the springs of living water which may be released by theological interpretation (God willing – ubi et quando Deus vult) priority over the text treated ‘objectively’, i.e. as an object, a reservoir of wisdom from the human past, which of course it also is. Christians also claim it is a reservoir of God-given religious truth, even if most theologians reserve the concept of revelation, in contrast to tradition, for the Christ-event in its past, present, and future dimensions. Even ‘objective’ may also be given the more German sense of sachlich, i.e. in accord with Christian accounts of its Sache or religious subject-matter. The Bible as well or reservoir consists of traditions which provide data both for theological interpreters to interpret according to its theological subject-matter, and for historians and other scholars to interpret in accord with their interest in the human past or in great literature or whatever. Scholarly work contributes to new theological interpretations as well as to new historical reconstructions. Much of it is routine, training a new generation of students to think historically and/or theologically by repeating what is already known. Either way the prior given ‘well’ of tradition is for Christians secondary to the viva vox evangelii which depends on theological interpretations of that tradition. These in turn depend on the interpreter’s grasp of contemporary realities as well as their responsible reading of the texts. Christians still interpret scripture theologically mainly through preaching and teaching, as in the New Testament itself, and in patristic and monastic theology. Since the thirteenth century, scripture interpreted theologically has also sourced and normed dogmatics, and the Reformers made it key to all their theology. Since the late eighteenth century, theological interpretation of scripture has remained explicit in preaching and in dogmatics and Christian ethics, but has also gone underground, becoming implicit theological interpretation when articulated in and through a modern biblical scholarship which speaks only descriptively, not normatively, of God. Christian scholars have combined their modern critical methods with their unchanged religious aim to express, encourage, and clarify Christian belief and practice, and have done so through their Old and New Testament theology. Some of them found their own Lutheran theology in Paul’s epistles interpreted by modern critical Katherine J. Dell and Paul M. Joyce (eds.), Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 52– 62. 1

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exegesis, or their modern anthropologically oriented theology anticipated by the Fourth Evangelist. Early form critics rightly emphasized the kerygmatic character of the synoptic tradition, and so found correspondences with their own commitment to preaching. When now the evangelist Mark is claimed for non-traditional and anti-hierarchical understandings of Christianity, similar links are being forged. Until fairly recently most historical-critical study of the New Testament has been implicit theological interpretation, i.e. New Testament theology properly called ‘theology’,16 because many scholars have shared the religious aims of the evangelists, however different their methods. Even where the phrase ‘biblical theology’ is suspect for having allowed apologetic interests to weaken academic rigour, religious and cultural motivations propel the study of these texts and can welcome the critical appraisal provided by rational methods. Implicit theological interpretations of the New Testament by modern biblical theologians involve critical exegesis and historical argument. Some of their precarious historical hypotheses cannot be decisively con¿rmed or refuted. They are only as good as the evidence for them. Preachers are not bound by these explanatory hypotheses by which historians and literary critics seek to elucidate the texts, but most would claim to respect the text itself. How far anyone can be bound by a text open to such diverse interpretations is debateable, but one way for theologians to forge connections between scripture and their own contemporary understandings of their Christian faith and life is to write historical-critical New Testament theology. This usually now sees itself as in some sense theology, not merely linguistic and literary scholarship, or the history of religions. Here authorial intention con¿rms the strong connections between (some) modern Christianity and, as part of the same faith-community, the New Testament writers. Historical suggestions can support or challenge theologians’ understandings of scripture, and so perhaps their understandings of Christianity, but it is the texts, and therefore persuasive interpretations, which guide attempts to communicate Christianity, and for protestants shape and check its identity, not the hypothetical reconstructions of the historical contexts legitimately advanced to explain the texts or justify a particular interpretation. 16. That is, a discipline and practice that dares to think of God even if the conventions of its historical methods prevent it from speaking God’s name. As far back as 1897 William Wrede recognized that his ‘history of early Christian religion and theology’ is ‘so-called’, i.e. not properly called, New Testament theology. ET in Robert Morgan, The Nature of New Testament Theology (London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 116 (my italics). 1

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Mark’s gospel is more open to different interpretations than the other synoptic gospels which almost certainly used it as their main source. Seeing how a later evangelist has altered a source in order to communicate his message both strengthens and limits interpretations. Scholars make educated guesses about the sources or the traditions available to Mark and his alterations to them, but these are always highly contestable. The focus of interest has also changed. In the late nineteenth century, liberal theologians’ main interest in Mark was in reliable historical information about Jesus. That discouraged multiple interpretations. The claim of Papias that the evangelist was Peter’s secretary is still accepted by some who retain that historical optimism,17 but many students of Mark now ask different questions. The gulf between most Christian reading of the gospels and the historical scepticism of Wrede, Wellhausen, and Bultmann was partly bridged by Bultmann’s kerygmatic theology, but it has become much deeper with the ‘literary turn’ in gospel criticism. Congregations would be surprised to hear that some excellent scholars now think Mark 16.1-8 is a composition of the evangelist with few if any historical memories behind it. A common scholarly hypothesis originating in the history of traditions view of the gospels is that the evangelist added v. 7 (and the corresponding 14.28) to an existing source or tradition. Both passages are smoother narratives without these verses, and the possible additions correspond to Mark’s evident interest in Galilee. This hypothesis about Markan redaction offers all those who seek for sure relief some explanation of the major dif¿culty of Mark 16.6-8 that is no less acute when 16.8 is accepted as the original and intended ending. This is neither the abrupt ending nor a sense that v. 6 would be better followed by v. 8 than by v. 7, but the disobedience of the women to the angelic command.18 How blameworthy the women are (in Mark’s view), and whether he thought they ever delivered the message, are now more disputed than whether he intended to end at v. 8 or to continue and perhaps report them delivering the message, or receiving a Christophany, as Matthew assumes.19

17. E.g. Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark (London: SCM Press, 1985). 18. It is generally agreed that the ‘young man’ in white was intended by Mark to be an angel, as Matthew thought. The language has early Jewish parallels. On the disobedience, see below n. 27. 19. The suggestion of Lohmeyer followed by Marxsen, that v. 7 refers not to a resurrection appearance but to the parousia (cf. ‘you shall see’ at 14.62), ¿nds little support.

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Whereas scholarly debate about the conÀicting accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb once focussed on the historical question of what happened on the third day, now the prior historical question of what Mark was trying to communicate is set in its literary and theological frame of reference. We look for clues to Mark’s intentions in the gospel as a whole, and sometimes try to clarify Mark’s literary and theological aims with the help of hypothetical constructions of his historical context. We are heirs not only of Wrede who discussed the disciples’ lack of understanding before the resurrection as a theological motif of the evangelist rather than a historical fact,20 but also of F. C. Baur who between 1831 and 1853 tried to place every New Testament and other relevant writing in its context within his critical reconstruction of early Christian history. Wrede explained Mark’s motif in terms of the difference between the disciples’ pre-resurrection understanding of Jesus, which he thought was non-messianic, and their post-resurrection messianic interpretation. There are problems with Wrede’s construction of Christian origins, and Mark’s emphasis on the disciples’ not yet understanding (6.52; 8.21) and the glory of Jesus being proclaimed only after the resurrection (9.9) are better understood in terms of his own theology. A group of mainly American scholars who do not accept all of Wrede’s theory have moved closer to Baur’s account of early Christianity as driven by the conÀict between that part of the movement open to Gentiles, and Peter’s (or James’) Jewish Christianity. They see the disciples, and subsequently the women at the tomb, as representing a Jerusalem-based Jewish Christianity which 40 years later Mark opposes.21 This polemical reading of Mark has merit in explaining his apparently negative attitude to the family of Jesus (3.21, 31-35; 6.2-3)22 but involves a one-sided account of his presentation of the disciples, and at 16.8 of the women. At 15.40-41 and 47 the women (who overlap with the list at 16.1) are presented in a positive light. Their terror and amazement seem not inappropriate in face of an angel, whatever Mark thought happened next. He was interested in the risen Jesus in Galilee (v. 7), even though he did not need to narrate what he had already guaranteed by a promise of Jesus (14.28) and was presumably well-known. He also had good reason to stop where apparently he did. For him ‘the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Messiah (Son of God)’, his title line, probably consisted 20. W. Wrede, The Messianic Secret in the Gospels (1901) (ET Cambridge: Clarke, 1971), pp. 231–36. 21. This kind of Baurian correction of Wrede was brilliantly developed by J. B. Tyson, ‘The Blindness of the Disciples in Mark’, JBL 80 (1961), pp. 261–68. 22. J. D. Crossan, ‘Mark and the Relatives of Jesus’, NovT 15 (1973), pp. 81–113. 1

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The New Testament and the Church

in the ministry, passion, and resurrection of Jesus introduced by the activity of John the Baptist. The good news which Jesus had expressed in his preaching the Kingdom, in his battle with evil and in his sacri¿cial giving of his life (10.45) had been con¿rmed by God ‘after three days’, as he had prophesied. That was the beginning of the gospel which Mark saw now being proclaimed into all the nations (13.10) or into the whole world (14.9), and that beginning is what he narrated. For him the resurrection appearances presumably belong to the post-resurrection story of the disciples’ ministry and mission, enabling their proclamation of the gospel, not to its ‘beginning’.23 The climax of Mark’s story is thus (arguably) 16.7. The problem of the text as it stands is v. 8.24 However speculative the new American conÀict hypothesis about Mark’s aims, it offers some kind of solution to these ¿nal near-contradictory verses: v. 7 represents Mark’s Galilean and Gentile position, and v. 8 the family and Jerusalem party that Mark supposedly opposed.25 Others have recognized the scale of the problem without needing either the redactional insertion hypothesis to account for the tension between v. 7 and v. 8, or a theory of historical conÀict to explain Mark’s view of the disciples or the women.26 For Boomershine the women’s silence is ‘the exact opposite of the angel’s command and dashes the expectations of joyful reunion which Mark has established. It is the most blatant form of disobedience to a divine commission. Therefore, since the norms associated with the command of an angel are positive, the women’s silence is unequivocally and unambiguously wrong. It is a shocking reversal of expectations.’27 However, Boomershine recognizes that the presentation of the women is positive at 15.40-41, 47. He explains what the theory about Mark’s historical context explains but does so in terms of Mark’s use of narrative technique, i.e. in literary terms. A similar modi¿cation to Werner Kelber’s important monograph 23. I owe this suggestion to conversations with Professor Michael Wolter. 24. Historical questions about the women’s decision to anoint after some 36 hours, and their rather late worry about the stone, seem not to have disturbed Mark (or modern congregations) as much as his commentators. His interest lay elsewhere. The meaning of ‘go before’ or lead in a procession at 14.28 and 16.7 likewise. Cf. C. F. Evans, ‘I Will Go before You into Galilee’, JTS 5 (1954), pp. 3–18. 25. ‘The Gospel ends in juxtaposition of Markan faith in 16.6-7, and of Jerusalem failure in 16.7-8’ (Crossan, ‘Relatives’, p. 149). 26. E.g. Michael Wolter’s unpublished analysis of these verses, Catchpole ‘Fearful Silence’, and below n. 33. 27. Thomas E. Boomershine, ‘Mark 16.8 and the Apostolic Commission’, JBL 100 (1981), pp. 225–39 (229). 1

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The Kingdom of Mark28 would rescue some ¿ne literary analysis of the gospel from some dubious historical speculations whose support it does not need. It is now quite common to explain the tension, nearcontradiction, and suspended ending of Mark entirely in terms of Mark’s literary and theological skills.29 The dif¿culty of Mark’s ending on a note of disobedience, disappointment, and failure arises only when one accepts 16.8 as the intended ending. The resolution supplied by the second-century additions is also achieved in most readers’ imaginations by their supplying a continuation from the later gospels. Older scholars endorsed this supposition by their theory that Mark’s original ending was immediately lost or never quite written. The ¿rst leading English scholar to accept (in print) the claim of Wellhausen and E. Meyer that the evangelist intended to end at v. 8, and the explanation of the tension between v. 7 and v. 8 by the hypothesis that v. 7 was inserted into an earlier tradition by the evangelist, was J. M. Creed. He noted that critics have long been aware of the ‘strange incoherence’ in Mark 16.7-8, and insisted that ‘this juxtaposition of the angel’s message and the women’s silence is a very startling phenomenon’.30 As a historical critic he is thinking ¿rst about the text and the author, rather than about what actually happened,31 but as a New Testament theologian he is also interested in modern Christian readers. Creed explains why ‘it is possible to read the story again and again without remarking’ on the strange incoherence. The reason, he argues, ‘is that in v. 7 our whole attention is concentrated upon the message and the promise which the angel brings: Jesus is risen; the disciples are to see him in Galilee. In v. 8 our whole attention is occupied by the awe-struck women.’32 28. Werner Kelber, The Kingdom of Mark (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974). See also Kelber, Mark’s Story of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979); Kelber (ed.), The Passion in Mark (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). 29. E.g. Norman Petersen, Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978); J. Lee Magness, Sense and Absence: Structure and Suspension in the Ending of Mark’s Gospel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986); and best of all, Robert M. Fowler, Let the Reader Understand (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), p. 250. See also below, n. 37. 30. J. M. Creed, ‘The Conclusion of the Gospel according to St Mark’, JTS 31 (1930), pp. 175–80 (177). 31. The point that historical criticism evaluates the sources critically before making historical judgments was made in 1847 and earlier by F. C. Baur against The Life of Jesus (1835) of his former pupil D. F. Strauss. It was hardly ‘novel’ in 1930, as John Fenton, in S. Barton and G. Stanton, Resurrection (London: SPCK, 1994), pp. 1–7 (5), claimed in summarizing Creed’s article. 32. Creed, ‘Ending’, p. 177. 1

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The argument that Mark intended v. 8 as his ending is widely accepted, thanks partly to R. H. Lightfoot’s nailing the linguistic argument.33 Even if John Muddiman’s arguments challenging the consensus about Mark’s intention (above, n. 7) are thought persuasive, preachers are surely restricted to what we have from Mark, however interesting the minority view would be in undermining many current literary interpretations of Mark. Creed’s, Bultmann’s, and Catchpole’s acceptance of Meyer’s conjecture that v. 7 is an interpolation by the evangelist into his source endorsed the still popular history of traditions approach to the dif¿culties of the passage, and this attention to the text presaged later developments from R. H. Lightfoot through redaction criticism to narrative criticism. Creed saw that this addition of v. 7 by Mark was to prove momentous, because ‘as Wellhausen observes, it represents the beginning of the literary connexion of the story of the empty tomb with the stories of the appearances. When the connexion was fully carried out by the later evangelists, a new link was necessary: the report of the women to the disciples…’34 Recent scholars have preferred their own constructions to that of Matthew, making Mark’s far from naïve addition momentous in a new way. It offers a possible key to understanding Mark’s aims. *** This dip into the twentieth-century discussion of Mark 16.7-8 has underlined the main problem and identi¿ed different responses: (1) Most Christians happily read or hear it as a reliable historical record of what happened. After their initial shock the women must have passed on the message. This is at odds with most scholarly opinion (vincible ignorance, not sin) which is sceptical about the details or even this whole story and thinks more about what Mark intended to achieve with his hearers or readers than about what happened on the ¿rst Easter Sunday morning. Perhaps Mark intended to inform his hearers about what he thought happened, but his religious belief about what God had done could at best be signalled or illuminated by any historical information at this point. (2) Some scholars explain the problem, and so alleviate it, by arguing that v. 7 was inserted by the evangelist into the earlier tradition, 16.1-6 and 8 (cf. 14.28), and this gives it added weight in judging the evangelist’s intentions and raises again the question whether it has a possible 33. See also P. W. van der Horst, ‘Can a Book End with ? A Note on Mark XVI, 8’, JTS 23 (1972), pp. 121–24, with a good bibliography. 34. Creed, ‘Ending’, p. 180. He was surely wrong, however, to call the addition ‘naïve’.

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historical basis. The evangelist’s aims might have been literary or apologetic (linking the tomb tradition to the appearances), catechetical (teaching about discipleship), or polemical (discrediting opposing groups in the early church). Whether v. 7 was composed by the evangelist or drawn by him from an earlier tradition, and if so what it originally meant, will not affect our argument because even if it was not composed by Mark, or at an earlier stage in the tradition possibly referred to the parousia, most exegetes (including Matthew) agree that Mark himself understood it to refer to a resurrection appearance. Granted the dif¿culties in reading Mark 16.1-8 straightforwardly as history, and that the v. 7 insertion hypothesis is compatible with both literary-theological and Markan community solutions, the main choice lies between (or in a combination of) those two types: (1) literarytheological interpretations of Mark’s aims based on the gospel as a whole; and (2) attempting to make that case more credible, or introducing new possible aims, by means of hypothetical historical reconstructions of Mark’s Gentile or Galilean community and its supposed opponents, the residue of Paul’s opponents in Jerusalem. Mark’s religious beliefs about Gentile mission, discipleship, perseverance, and hope ¿t into both these types, but the latter type may be thought valuable in also adding to our historical knowledge of early Christianity. Or it may seem so speculative as not to add to our historical knowledge, but nevertheless be religiously suggestive today. The constructions of Weeden,35 Crossan (n. 22 above) and Kelber (n. 28 above), for example, are arguably religiously edifying even if no more than possibilities at the historical level. One can substitute Rome or Canterbury for Crossan’s and Kelber’s Jerusalem and ¿nd their anti-traditional, anti-hierarchical, anti-Jacobite or anti-Petrine, Gentile or ‘Galilean’ Christianity more attractive than what emerged victorious in the second century. This preference cannot claim scriptural authority. In its readings of Mark the crucial hypotheses about Mark’s community owe more to the interpreter than to the text. However successful, interpreters can only show that their historical constructions ¿t the fragmentary textual evidence better than other constructions. They cannot compel acceptance as history or as theology but they can sponsor a suggestion about ancient and modern Christianity which others might ¿nd attractive. People can be religiously moved by a historical construction, but ambiguous

35. T. J. Weeden, Mark – Traditions in ConÀict (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), ¿nds deep christological divisions accounting for Mark’s literary and theological strategy.

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historical evidence can never compel anyone to accept its possible theological implications. That is not how scripture works. A preacher might ¿nd a radical theory about Mark persuasive, and build it into some teaching and preaching, admitting its speculative character and the differences from other New Testament witnesses, but churches are rarely persuaded to modify their beliefs or structures by historical and exegetical arguments alone, however signi¿cantly these may inspire individual Christians and also contribute to the necessary theological arguments. Granted the shortage of historical evidence to support radical theological proposals based on Mark and his community, one can only leave them on the table as interesting and suggestive possibilities. In any case, a purely literary argument is suf¿cient to advance a radical religious proposal about discipleship even without any historical hypothesis about Mark’s community. It may be (slightly) reinforced by hypotheses and constructions, but the religious value of these is about as limited as their historical cogency. One of W. L. Knox’s arguments against the literary and historical suggestion, that Mark intended to end his gospel at v. 8 with a ‘dramatic aposiopesis’ that cries out for continuation and so leaves something to the reader’s imagination (which he admits for John 21.25), was that it implies that ‘by a pure accident (Mark) happened to hit on a conclusion which suits the technique of a highly sophisticated type of modern literature’.36 But perhaps it was not an accident, and perhaps the objection that this makes Mark too sophisticated is misplaced. Mark may have been as intelligent and sensitive (if not as ingenious) as Farrer thought, even if he did not use words like aposiopesis. The various literary interpretations of Mark are admittedly attractive rather than compelling, but this is enough for preaching. It is not enough for the use of scripture as contributing to a scriptural norm, de¿ning the identity of Christianity, but scripture as a source of faith does not usually depend on hard historical evidence. Whether much of the exegetical discussion is communicable in a 10-minute sermon on Easter Sunday in Year B may be doubted – and not attempted – but Don Juel’s comparison and contrast of the Markan ending with Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’ in Chapter 9 of The Trial is easily grasped. The latter ends with a

36. Knox, ‘The Ending of St Mark’s Gospel’, p. 23. At that time the dominant Cambridge (and form-critical) view was that Mark was a not very clever collector of traditions. In Oxford he was a literary genius. Norman Perrin became an enthusiastic supporter of the Oxford Lightfoot. See What Is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970). 1

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door slammed in the face of the person seeking meaning. Mark (like Rev. 3.7-8) ends with an open door, and hope despite disappointment, or as Andrew Lincoln sees it, promise alongside failure.37 These brilliant interpretations of Mark can surely enrich preaching on 16.1-8, but since the lectionary of the Roman Catholic Church prescribes Mark 16.1-7 rather than 16.1-8 for liturgical use, it may also be worth trying to justify that liturgical good sense by some historical and exegetical suggestions in support of new endings reached by shortening the gospel instead of lengthening it. One suggestion is that Mark 16.8b is possibly a gloss and better not read when 16.1-8 is prescribed.38 A motive for the supposed gloss is available in Wellhausen’s suggestion that v. 8 was intended to explain the late emergence of the tradition of the empty tomb. That explanation can be applied to v. 8b alone and credited to the glossolator. Mark’s women then Àee in ‘terror and amazement’ from the tomb, as one might expect in face of the numinous, but in an original vv. 1-8a they are not disobedient failures or cowards, as the men are (14.50). Those who accept the story as history can assume that they delivered the message (otherwise it would not be known) without contradicting the text or making the women keep quiet for 30 or more years, like the Bletchley code-breakers, but remaining at the literary level of Mark’s intentions, the same word (they Àed) being used in v. 8a as at 14.50 (cf. v. 52) does not imply that Mark thought the women as cowardly and culpable, as some think he presents the male disciples. He gives a reasonable and non-defamatory explanation of the women’s Àight (their tromos and ecstasis) in v. 8a. The explanation of their silence in v. 8b is also understandable but all six words here are surely superÀuous, unless to reinforce the irony which some literary critics see in them (the secrecy command in the ministry was often transgressed; now that the time for talking has come [9.9] the witnesses are silent). For a critic unpersuaded by both that literary suggestion and the historical theory of polemic against Jerusalem, v. 8a is a better Markan ending and avoids the disobedience to the angel which is serious, even if not wilful. In the 37. D. Juel, A Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994); A. Lincoln, ‘The Promise and the Failure: Mark 16.7-8’, JBL 108 (1989), pp. 283–300. 38. David Catchpole’s ‘probability’ (n. 6 above) that Mark added v. 8b as well as v. 7 to the tradition of the women’s visit to Jesus’ tomb’ is different, but supports loosening v. 8b from v. 8a, despite the lack of text-critical support. It removes the biggest problem while preserving awe in the face of mystery as the ending of Mark’s ‘beginning of the gospel’.

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absence of textual support the gloss hypothesis is not strong, but it would support a sensible liturgical proposal to read vv. 1-8a on Easter Sunday, which represents a compromise between the Roman lection, vv. 1-7, and Common Worship’s vv. 1-8. A second and third shortened Markan endings build on the widely accepted Wellhausen–Meyer conjecture that v. 7 was inserted into an older tradition. The second possibility, cutting that verse out, cannot be recommended. It avoids the implication that the women were disobedient failures, but loses what was most important to the evangelist, whom preachers, like exegetes, want to understand. Brevard Childs’s emphasis on ‘the ¿nal form of the text’ can be criticized,39 but where it is what an author is thought to have written it demands respect. Hence the following attempt to justify the omission of v. 8, like the previous omission of v. 8b, by a historical hypothesis rather than allowing liturgists to do what they like, or justify their excisions here (as often in the Old Testament) on non-exegetical grounds. The third (preferable) suggestion cuts out v. 8. That corresponds to the Roman Catholic lectionary, but some might think it arbitrary without some historical critical justi¿cation. To justify it at this exegetical level (cf. n. 10 above) it is necessary to suggest how the present tension between vv. 7 and 8 may have arisen, if not from the theological brilliance of the evangelist who has only now been properly understood. My guess about this builds on the v. 7 insertion hypothesis to suggest that both v. 7 without 8 and v. 8 without 7, like vv. 7 + 8a and the existing 7 + 8, are possible endings which once brieÀy existed in re, not only in (anyone’s) intellectu. The knife has yielded (so far) three alternative ways of relaxing the tension between v. 7 and v. 8. If we can suggest how the unhappy collocation of v. 7 and v. 8 may have arisen, a historical hypothesis will support the Roman lectionary, whether the Church appreciates such help or not. Accepting (with many since Wellhausen) that Mark had an earlier tradition or source, consisting of 16.1-6 and 8, one may speculate that he did not, however, insert v. 7, but replaced v. 8 with v. 7. This resulted in a strong (and highly preachable) climactic ending. The hearers and readers are in their imaginations to follow Jesus back to Galilee. They are to share his ministry in their own lives. The kingdom was present or near back then in the preaching and activity of Jesus, and it is present or near now in the preaching and discipleship of his followers. They must now speak directly of Jesus himself, as Jesus himself did not need to, 39. See David Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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2. Old and New Endings for Mark

21

and as they had understood too little to do when the bridegroom was present. But they remain his followers, committed to his gospel of God in the present ful¿lment of time (1.15), the dawn of a new age. It will involve persecution and suffering for them as for him, but those who endure to the end will be saved. Mark’s (suggested) substitution of v. 7 for v. 8 (or perhaps only for 8b) was, however, unfortunately subverted by a colleague who was accustomed to reciting 16.1-6 and 8ab and did not think it his place to cut anything out, or let part of the story be lost. He therefore put the discarded v. 8 (or 8b) back, only now after the evangelist’s v. 7. It may be hard to believe that anyone could be so insensitive, but few are as creative as Mark. My ¿rst new ending (vv. 1-7 + 8a) can be reached in this way, or in the way suggested above which avoided much imagination. Neither new ending requires Matthew’s contradiction of v. 8b, while admitting he made Mark’s v. 8a more positive. Mark 16.1-8a preserves the awe¿lled ending (v. 8a) and is perhaps a more satisfying ending than v. 7. Also in its favour, the combination by Mark of vv. 7 and 8a being less of a problem than the usual view that he combined v. 7 and 8, it is less in need of the novel explanation provided here. Saying that Mark himself added the dif¿cult v. 8b (n. 6 above), however, contradicts the frequent recognition of his literary sensitivity and theological intelligence in the interest of his supposed concealment of the ¿ctional character or late emergence of his Easter story, or of his supposed opposition to the Jerusalem disciples. A fourth new ending for Mark is, like the second, not a serious proposal, but a thought experiment intended to test the limits to making tempting excisions. Having wielded the knife three times it might be tempting to cut a little more, viz. both vv. 7 and 8, and the rather banal last part of v. 6. The gospel then ends abruptly with the essential one word statement of good news: he was raised, he is risen. The statement is even balder than 8.31, 9.31, and 10.33, where the promise of Jesus’ resurrection includes ‘after three days’, but that dating is unnecessary at 16.6ab, on the morning of the third day, ‘after three days’ counting inclusively. This more radical excision would dispense with futile disputes about the physicality of the resurrection, or redirect them to Luke’s apologetic. No doubt Mark assumed that the body had disappeared, but he may have had no clear ideas about the mystery, and by ending at v. 6ab (before ‘he is not here’) would have avoided encouraging later discussions of where the body is. But as Matthew and especially Luke recognized, he was only saying they were looking in the wrong place. On the physicality, Paul is 1

22

The New Testament and the Church

a better guide than Luke, and John ¿ts the Easter traditions into his own conceptual scheme. The original disciples were surely convinced by visions or apparitions of Jesus that he had become a heavenly being, perhaps the heavenly son of man, an angel or archangel – though angelchristologies were soon rejected as inadequate. The risen Lord, heavenly man, sits at God’s right hand, all authority given to him. A suggestion that Mark’s angelic ‘young man’ in white (as Jesus’ garments were white at 9.3) was (in Mark’s mind) the angel of Jesus, his heavenly counterpart rather than merely an angelus interpres, is also intriguing – the trans¿guration may possibly provide a clue to Mark’s understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. This fourth (unacceptable) excision would bring Mark into closer alignment with Matthew’s belief in the presence of the risen Christ with his disciples.40 That is what historical critics resist and preachers regularly do. The latter is justi¿able when scripture is being used as a source eliciting faith but when it is being used as a norm regulating Christian identity the integrity of each witness must be respected. The historian’s recognition of diversity in the New Testament witness is itself theologically signi¿cant. Harmonizing Mark with Matthew in this way might be contrary to Mark’s understanding, but crediting him with a positive theological emphasis on the absence of Jesus after his death, as Crossan, Robbins, and Weeden do,41 is more theologically suggestive than exegetically persuasive. Luke’s theological history does suggest an absent Jesus replaced by his Spirit, but Mark 13.11 says less than that and even Luke expects Jesus after the resurrection to give his disciples a mouth and wisdom (21.15). Neither his thinking of Jesus as absent, nor Matthew’s down-playing the Spirit, are Markan motifs. One ¿nal question is how far theologians and preachers need to speculate on the historical origins of the resurrection faith that lies behind the multiplicity of gospel endings and possible Markan endings too. Christians have made assumptions about this, usually accepting the approximate historicity of the gospel stories and a traditional supernaturalist explanation, and many theologians would rather agree than risk appearing reductionist. If supernaturalism is abandoned they may rest content with the mystery – or they may entertain alternative possible 40. Matt. 18.20; 28.20; cf. 26.29. Mark 2.19-20 contrasts the times of Jesus’ presence and absence. Matt. 12.15 abbreviates but retains this. Cf. J. B. Muddiman, ‘The Fasting Controversy in Mark: A Historical and Exegetical Study of Mark ii, 18-22’ (unpublished doctoral diss., University of Oxford, 1976). 41. Kelber (ed.), The Passion in Mark. See also J. D. Crossan, ‘A Form for Absence: The Markan Creation of Gospel’, Semeia 12 (1978), pp. 41–55. 1

2. Old and New Endings for Mark

23

ways of understanding the disciples’ presumed experiences. Since these historical possibilities can be neither con¿rmed nor falsi¿ed they are not theologically weight-bearing, but may nevertheless satisfy a natural desire to imagine how it all began, and signify a willingness to understand Christian origins from the human side while trusting the gospel is something more. Whether or not one agrees with Crossan (whose view is shared by no less a theologian than Schillebeeckx42) that the ‘apparitions, or apparition-stories are the effects of Easter faith and not its cause or even its occasion’, it is hard for a Christian to disagree with him that ‘the cause was God’.43 Crossan’s Mark ‘offers us an absent Jesus in his newly created antitradition of the empty tomb’.44 Crossan himself offers us an implicit theological interpretation which may be adopted as a form of Christianity today. ‘On earth there are no apparitions but only the harsh negative of the empty tomb and the Lord who “is not here”. And there is the stern challenge of the Markan community in Galilee that calls in vain to the Jerusalem community to obey its Lord by preparing for his return in suffering, in service, and in mission to the world.’45 Paul, John, Matthew and Luke do not share this bleak and perhaps joyless vision, and it is uncertain whether Mark did either, but like all implicit theological interpretations constructed by exegesis of the New Testament texts, and sometimes reinforced by possible reconstructions of the history behind them (i.e. New Testament theology), it is worth pondering as a voice which the Western churches today may be encouraged by hearing. Many will want to say more, as they have wanted Mark to say more. If he did not, it may be possible to communicate his positive message better by reading from his gospel a few words less. That might even correspond to his original intention.

42. Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (London: SCM Press, 1973). 43. Crossan, ‘Empty Tomb and Absent Lord’, in Kelber (ed.), The Passion in Mark, p. 152. He adds that ‘the occasion (was) the cruci¿xion of Jesus’ and that ‘Easter faith, the belief that Jesus is with God and that the cruci¿xion was not divine rejection but divine acceptance, arose in a manner no more and no less inexplicable than all faith before and after it’. 44. Crossan, ‘Empty Tomb and Absent Lord’, p. 152. 45. Crossan, ‘Empty Tomb and Absent Lord’, p. 152. 1

Chapter 3

SIGNS AND SYNCRISEIS IN JOHN AND THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON Eric Eve

Shortly before his death in 1968, Austin Farrer sent his then student John Muddiman a letter containing some ideas he had about John’s Gospel. The ¿rst part of the letter argued for John’s dependence on Matthew, and John Muddiman published an article about it in ETL.1 John Muddiman subsequently showed me the second part in a tutorial. This indicated that Farrer perceived signi¿cant parallels between John and the Wisdom of Solomon in the selection and ordering of signs. Farrer was clearly thinking of Wis. 11.1-14; 16.1–19.22, which contain a series of syncriseis, or comparisons, between the plagues that befell the Egyptians at the time of the exodus and the blessings that God provided the Israelites in the wilderness.2 Since this section of Farrer’s letter has never previously been published, this seems a good opportunity to discuss it; it will be helpful to start by quoting it:3 Pseudo-Solomon gives only ¿ve antitypes to the plagues, for he gives no distinct treatment of the Plague of Boils – very naturally, since he spreads himself on the effect of the vermin on the hides of the Egyptians – and the Johannine Apocalypse (ch. ix) runs locusts-mosquitoes into one with the boils. So we have the scheme:

1. John Muddiman, ‘John’s Use of Matthew: A British Exponent of the Theory’, ETL 59 (1983), pp. 333–37. 2. See James M. Reese, Hellenistic InÀuence on the Wisdom of Solomon and its Consequences (AnBib, 41; Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1970), pp. 91–102. 3. I should here like to acknowledge my debt to John Muddiman for a copy of the relevant part of the letter, permission to use it, and his personal recollections of what Farrer probably meant.

3. Signs and Syncriseis Plagues

Mercies

Gospel

Blood

Water

I Cana (and Jacob’s Well)

Lice Flies Murrain Boils

(Quails &) Brazen Serpent

II Cana

Hail (Locusts)

Manna

Miracle of Bread

Darkness

Pillar of Fire

Healing of Blind

Death

Propitiation of Aaron

Lazarus

25

Frogs

These facts do not help us decide whether the sign added by St John (Pool of Bethzatha) should be third or ¿fth: certainly it has nothing to do with the plague of locusts, but then neither has it with that of boils (after all, Gospel tradition offered the leper, if one wanted him). But, there is no mystery about the justi¿cation of the episode from Mosaic legend. St John (though ordering them by the plagues according to Pseudo-Solomon) is using the list of mercies; and in some way the supreme mercy was the clearing off of the Great Sin, when after 38 years’ paralysis Israel was commanded to ‘Arise and Walk’ over the Brook Zered, into the ¿rst part of his inheritance (Deut 2.13-18): which squares perfectly with the Gospel episode coupling forgiveness of sin with cure of paralysis (Mark 2).

Of course this letter contains only the sketch of an idea, written from a tutor to his student; it is not a fully worked out theory, and one can only speculate how Farrer might have Àeshed it out. The second sentence of the last paragraph quoted indicates that Farrer thought that John used the Wisdom of Solomon in the selection and ordering of at least some of his signs. Whether this sentence indicates that Farrer believed John to have been basing his signs solely on the mercies, or in some cases on the corresponding plague as well, is less clear. It may well be that Farrer’s table is intended to suggest the latter. Essentially the same correspondences between John’s Gospel and the Wisdom of Solomon had already been noticed by Georg Ziener a decade before, and would be (independently) noticed again more than a decade later by Douglas Clark.4 4. Georg Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch und Johannesevangelium (I)’, Biblica 38 (1957), pp. 396–418; Douglas K. Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, CBQ 45 (1983), pp. 201–209.

1

26

The New Testament and the Church

Ziener starts from two pertinent observations about the Johannine signs: ¿rst, that the selection and treatment of them is quite distinct from that of the Synoptics, and second, that at John 20.30-31 the Evangelist states that his purpose in writing about those signs he has chosen, out of the many he could have, is to promote faith in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God.5 Ziener then observes that none of the individual signs seems aimed at arousing faith in Jesus as Messiah, so that it must be the series of signs as a totality that achieves this goal: This view can be detected within Judaism. According to Old Testament and Jewish belief the deliverance from Egypt is the model for the messianic deliverance. Proof of Jesus’ messiahship could thus be offered in the way that it is shown that the miracles performed by Jesus correspond to those of the Exodus.6

Ziener goes on to argue that the signs in John’s Gospel correspond in type to the wilderness blessings as depicted in the Wisdom of Solomon, where they may be compared under four broad categories: quenching of thirst (Wis. 11.4-14 and John 2.1-11), quenching of hunger (Wis. 16.2026 and John 6.1-13), deliverance from darkness (Wis. 18.1, 3 and John 9.1-41), and deliverance from death (Wis. 16.5-13; 18.22 and John 4.4354; 5.1-9; 11.1-44). The comparison shows that Jesus’ miracles correspond to Yahweh’s blessings on his people at the Exodus. As Yahweh does for his people, so Jesus also gives people food and drink, light and life. Through the miracles the deeds of Jesus become an image [Abbild] of the liberation from Egypt.7

This may not suf¿ce to show that John’s Gospel is related particularly to the Wisdom of Solomon, but in a further table, similar to that in Farrer’s letter (except that it omits Wisdom’s corresponding plagues), Ziener attempts to demonstrate a correspondence between the order of the blessings in the Wisdom of Solomon and the signs in John’s Gospel. Unlike Farrer, Ziener’s table makes no mention of Jacob’s well as a further parallel to the giving of water in the wilderness, but suggests that the healing at the pool of Bethesda (Ziener’s preferred spelling) can be paired with the healing miracle at Cana as a parallel to ‘Healing through the sign of deliverance’ at Wis. 16.5-13.8 5. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, pp. 400–401. 6. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, pp. 401 (my translation, here and subsequently). 7. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 404. 8. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 405. Curiously, however, Ziener immediately goes on to say, ‘in the Wisdom of Solomon there is nothing corresponding to the second healing of the sick (5.1-9a)’. 1

3. Signs and Syncriseis

27

Ziener next argues that the Wisdom of Solomon and John’s Gospel agree not only on the order of these signs, but also on their scheme of interpretation. According to Ziener, both books begin from a ‘historical’ miracle that meets earthly human need, then progress from the natural to the spiritual plane by suggesting that the earthly miracle is a ‘sign and pledge of what God does for the righteous (believers) at any time in the spiritual sphere’,9 and ¿nally ascribe the source of blessing to God’s Wisdom or Word (or, in John, to Jesus, the Word made Àesh). While this threefold pattern is not fully evident in every case, it is nevertheless broadly similar in both works. Ziener tries to show how this works out in each of the Johannine miracle stories and their counterparts in the Wisdom of Solomon. Not all the alleged correspondences are equally convincing, however. One major dif¿culty is that the Johannine account of the walking on the sea, which would most naturally correspond to the crossing of the Red Sea (Wis. 19.1-19), ought to come last if John were strictly following the sequence of syncriseis in the Wisdom of Solomon. Ziener addresses the issue in a brief footnote to the effect that the Johannine account of the walking on the sea is adjoined to the multiplication of bread as in Mark and Matthew and is probably not meant to refer to an exodus miracle, although some features of the account suggest that it may be.10 Douglas Clark’s version of the theory offers a better solution here. Clark’s starting point is that both John and the Wisdom of Solomon display a pattern of 6+1 signs.11 In Wisdom the ¿nal sign, the crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of the Egyptians, is the decisive one for both Israelites and Egyptians. Together these ‘constitute the seventh, surpassing sign, which the author describes as a new creation’ (Wis. 19.6).12 The special nature of this sign is shown in the way that Wisdom’s description of it alludes back to the previous six syncriseis, which in turn anticipate this culmination.13 In John’s Gospel the walking on the water is to be regarded, not as an independent sign, but as part of the sign of the multiplication of bread. John’s Gospel then contains a similar pattern of 6+1 signs in which the ¿nal sign is ‘the lifting up of Jesus in death and resurrection (chaps. 18–20)’.14 As in Wisdom this ¿nal sign effects what the six preceding signs only point to. In support of this Clark might also

1

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 406. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 404 n. 2. Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, pp. 202–5. Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, p. 204. Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, p. 204. Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, p. 205.

28

The New Testament and the Church

have mentioned the placement of John 20.30-31 with its reference to a selection of Jesus’ signs, not at the end of the ‘book of signs’ in John 12, but precisely after his death and resurrection, as well as Jesus’ response to the Jews’ request for a sign at John 2.18-22, which seems rather clearly to denote Jesus’ death and resurrection as a sign. The merit of Clark’s proposal is, then, not only that there turns out to be a Johannine correlate to the last Wisdom syncrisis after all, but that the overall structural similarity between the ordering of Johannine signs and Wisdom syncriseis is strongly preserved. That two Jewish texts should both contain series of seven items is not particularly surprising; that they should both contain series of 6+1 miracles climaxing in one of major salvi¿c import is perhaps more so. It would be even more so if all the other alleged correspondences between the Johannine signs and Wisdom syncriseis stood up to close scrutiny, but unfortunately many of them appear strained. For example, there is no obvious correlate in the Wisdom of Solomon to the healing of the man at the Pool of Bethesda/Bethzatha. Farrer attempts to account for it by a complex theory involving John’s dependence on Matthew,15 the ordering of the ‘works of the Father’ in the six days of creation,16 exodus typology on the basis of Deut. 2.13-18,17 and borrowings from Mark.18 Ziener oscillates between simply allowing that the sign at Bethesda has no Wisdom correlate and suggesting that the healing at the pool should be taken together with the healing at Cana as the correlate to the healing from snake-bite described in Wis. 16.5-13. Ziener’s detailed treatment of the correspondences of Johannine signs with Wisdom blessings suggests 15. Muddiman, ‘John’s Use of Matthew’, p. 335, quoting another part of Farrer’s letter. 16. This is stated in part of Farrer’s letter I have not reproduced. 17. According to John 5.5, the man had been ill for 38 years, just as Israel had been wandering in the wilderness for 38 years (Deut. 2.14). Just as Jesus commands the sick man, ‘Rise, take up your pallet, and walk’ (John 5.8), so God, through Moses, commands Israel, ‘Now rise up, and go over the brook Zered’ (Deut. 2.13). This suggestion is developed a little further by Farrer’s student, Aileen Guilding, The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship: A Study of the Relation of St. John’s Gospel to the Ancient Jewish Lectionary System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 82; Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, p. 207, suggests a similar allusion; but contrast Lindars’s sharp remarks about numerological ‘Àights of fancy’ in this connection: Barnabas Lindars, The Gospel of John (NCB; repr. 1992, London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, softback edn, 1981), p. 214. 18. On the possible derivation of John 5 from Mark 2.1–3.6 see also Thomas L. Brodie, The Quest for the Origin of John’s Gospel: A Source-Oriented Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 78–79. 1

3. Signs and Syncriseis

29

that the latter is closer to his real opinion.19 One reason why Ziener’s solution may not have occurred to Farrer is that, unlike Ziener, Farrer wants to argue that the order of John chs. 5 and 6 has been reversed.20 Since Farrer appears to suggest the encounter at the well of Samaria (John 4.4-42) as an additional parallel to the giving of water (Wis. 11.114) along with the wedding at Cana (John 2.1-11) he might otherwise have been more open to this kind of bifurcation of parallels. If one takes the signs in John’s order, then the ¿rst correlation should be between the giving of water in the wilderness (Wis. 11.4-7) and the giving of wine at Cana (John 2.1-11). Here Ziener struggles to make the parallel seem plausible. Amongst other things, he suggests that both gifts of drink are ample in quantity (Wis. 11.7; John 2.6),21 that both result in some kind of recognition of the giver (Wis. 11.13; John 2.11), and that the notice that the water was contained in stone jars (John 2.6) was perhaps meant to recall the gift of water from hard stone (Wis. 11.4).22 Ziener proceeds to draw attention to other passages in John’s Gospel where Jesus claims to be able to give water in a transferred, spiritual sense (John 4.10, 14; 6.35; 7.37-38), which may also recall this wilderness gift, and calls attention to 1 Cor. 10.4 where Paul equates Christ with the water-giving rock of the wilderness wanderings.23 Of themselves, these other passages may well show how John is working with an exodus typology, but they do not immediately indicate how the transformation of water into wine at Cana matches the giving of water in the Wilderness. One might try to strengthen the parallel by matching the ¿rst Johannine sign, not only with the blessing, but also with its corresponding plague, the transformation of water into blood.24 There is some resemblance between turning water into blood (Wis. 11.1-14) and turning it into wine (John 2.1-11). Moreover, the fact that the water in the Johannine story is stored in stone jars at the moment of its transformation (John 2.6) perhaps echoes Exod. 7.19b, ‘and there shall be blood throughout all the

19. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, pp. 409–11. 20. See Muddiman, ‘John’s Use of Matthew’, p. 334; cf. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 405 n. 2. 21. Cf. Martin Scott, Sophia and the Johannine Jesus (JSNTSup, 71; Shef¿eld: JSOT Press, 1992), p. 183. 22. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 414. 23. See also T. F. Glasson, Moses in the Fourth Gospel (SBT, 40; London: SCM Press, 1963), pp. 48–59. 24. So also Robert Houston Smith, ‘Exodus Typology in the Fourth Gospel’, JBL 81 (1962), pp. 329–42 (334–35). 1

30

The New Testament and the Church

land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone’.25 But the fact remains that the turning of water into wine at Cana was a blessing, while its transformation into blood in Egypt was a punishment. The correspondence between the ¿rst Johannine sign and the ¿rst Wisdom syncrisis thus ends up being reasonably plausible if one has other grounds for supposing that John was following the order of Wisdom’s syncriseis, but hardly convincing enough to establish that thesis. The resemblance between the healing of the Capernaum of¿cial’s son (John 4.46-54) and the deliverance of the Israelites from serpent-bites (Wis. 16.5-14) is even less apparent (and, as Farrer’s scheme notes, it also passes over the blessing of the quails at Wis. 16.1-4).26 In the Johannine story, the of¿cial’s son, suffering from fever, is healed by Jesus’ word from a distance; Wisdom recalls an incident where the Israelites suffered from the fatal bites of ¿ery serpents until Moses made a bronze serpent for the afÀicted to look at (Num. 21.6-9). In the ¿rst instance, a single sufferer is saved from death; in the second, a large number of sufferers are saved from death. At the pool of Bethzatha the sick man is once again healed by Jesus’ word (John 5.8) rather than by any other means (cf. Wis. 16.12). If John meant it to be paired with the healing of the Capernaum of¿cial’s son as a second correlate to the wilderness healing of Wis. 16.5-14, then by having two healings John at least begins to reÀect the multiple healings in the Wisdom text.27 But it would seem far-fetched to press the exodus typology of submersion in a pool of water.28 Rather more relevant is the 25. But John’s Gospel may mention stone jars here simply because they were intended to hold water for puri¿cation, and stone, unlike earthenware, is not susceptible to impurity; see C. K. Barrett, The Gospel according to St John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text (London: SPCK, 1955), pp. 159–60. 26. Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, p. 206, tries to make the provision of quails correspond to John chs. 3–4 as a whole (including the healing of the Capernaum of¿cial’s son but also Jesus’ claim to have his own source of food at John 4.31-38), but here as Scott, Sophia, p. 168, rightly remarks, Clark’s comparison is ‘rather strained’. 27. One might observe that water ¿gures substantially both in the incident at the pool (John 5.1-9) and in Wisdom’s description of the plague of hail (Wis. 16.15-19), which does come between the bronze serpent and the manna, but such a link is surely too tenuous to bear any real weight. See Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, pp. 206–7, for other attempts to ¿nd linguistic and thematic links between John and Wisdom here. 28. Brodie, Origin of John’s Gospel, pp. 164–65, suggests that the man at the pool of Bethzatha is the Johannine antitype to the Red Sea crossing, on the grounds that ‘the dividing of the water and troubling of the Egyptian camp (Exod 14:21, 25)’ correspond to ‘the troubling of the water (John 5:7)’ and ‘[t]he casting of the horse 1

3. Signs and Syncriseis

31

fact that, unlike the previous healing in John, the account of the healing at Bethzatha is followed by an explanatory discourse, in which Jesus declares the power of the Son to give life, just as the Father ‘raises the dead and gives them life’ (John 5.19-29), with which one might compare the declaration at Wis. 16.13 that God has ‘power over life and death’. Given that the theme of life is already apparent in the healing of the Capernaum of¿cial’s son (John 4.50-51) and that the Bethzatha miracle follows almost directly on from this, one might try to argue that the discourse of John 5.19-29 is a commentary on both signs, and thus to see John employing both signs together as a parallel to the wilderness healing, as Ziener suggests.29 But again, this feels uncomfortably like forcing the evidence to ¿t the pattern. The connection between the miracle of bread (John 6.1-14) and the manna (Wis. 16.20-21) is much more secure, since a comparison with the manna is made explicitly at John 6.31-33. The repeated phrase ‘bread from heaven’ in the succeeding Johannine discourse (John 6.31, 32) resembles Wisdom’s description, ‘thou didst supply them from heaven with bread ready to eat’ (Wis. 16.20),30 and the people’s exclamation, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!’ (John 6.14) presumably means that they saw him as the prophet like Moses promised at Deut. 18.15-19.31 One might also see a parallel between the Johannine contrast of perishable and eternal food (John 6.27) and fact that the manna fed the Israelites whereas the Egyptian crops perished in the hail and ¿re (Wis. 16.16, 19-23). Closer to Johannine thought is the lesson expressed at Wis. 16.26b, ‘that it is not the production of crops that feeds man, but that thy word preserves those who trust (ÈÀÊ̼įÇÅ̸Ë) in thee’ (cf. John 6.27, 29, 33).32 and rider into the sea (Exod 15:1, 21)’ corresponds to the casting ‘of someone sick into the pool (John 5:7)’. This somewhat far-fetched suggestion is part of a scheme intended to show how John follows the Pentateuch (as well as Mark) as a whole. But even if it were accepted, it would still leave the pool of Bethzatha in the wrong place to correspond to the Red Sea crossing in Wisdom. 29. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, pp. 409–11. 30. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John (AB, 29–29A; 2 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1966–70), vol. 1, p. 262, lists Wis. 16.20 as one of four possible sources of the supposed scriptural citation at John 6.31, although Lindars, John, pp. 234, 252, 256–57, argues that Ps. 78.24 is the most likely source here. 31. So, Lindars, John, p. 244, and Brown, John, vol. 1, p. 234. On the following page Brown suggests that the popular expectation may have reÀected an amalgam of Moses and Elijah. 32. So also Brown, John, vol. 1, p. 266, and Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, pp. 407–9. 1

32

The New Testament and the Church

It is also reasonable to connect the contrast between the plague of darkness and the blessing of light (Wis. 17.1–18.4) with the healing of the blind man and its aftermath (John 9). Even if darkness and light were not obviously related to blindness and sight, John 9.4-5 makes the link explicit. Jesus’ claim at John 9.5 to be the light of the world extends far beyond his ability to cure physical blindness, but a metaphorical/spiritual use of light is also found at Wis. 18.4c, which speaks of ‘the imperishable light of the law’ (while for John, Jesus as Logos has taken over the role of the law in the scheme of salvation).33 Moreover, the contrast in John 9 between the blind man who comes to both physical and spiritual sight and the Pharisees who show themselves to be blind resembles that between the Israelites who walk in light and the deluded Egyptians who stumble in darkness (Wis. 17.1–18.4).34 As Ziener observes, the Wisdom of Solomon also ‘spiritualizes’ the interpretation of the darkness by making it ‘an image of the darkness that was destined to receive them’ (Wis. 17.21) – presumably in post-mortem judgment.35 More questionable is the pairing of the raising of Lazarus (John 11.144) and Aaron’s propitiation of the plague (Wis. 18.20-25). Both involve deliverance from death, but there the resemblance ends. In Wisdom, a plague is halted before it afÀicts others who are still living: in John, a dead man is brought back to life. One might argue that in both cases the deliverance is accompanied by prayer (Wis. 18.21; John 11.41-42), though in contrast to the Wisdom text John makes it very clear that the prayer contributes nothing to bringing the miracle about. If one accepts Clark’s 6+1 scheme, then there is a good ¿nal correspondence between the climactic sign of Jesus’ death and resurrection in John 19–20 and the climactic syncrisis in Wis. 19.1-9 contrasting the death of the Egyptian ¿rstborn and pursuing army with the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea. Of the remaining six signs and syncriseis, the fourth pair (manna and multiplication of loaves) lines up well, and the ¿fth (light and darkness, the man born blind), reasonably well; the ¿rst, third and sixth can just about to be made to correspond with a bit of exegetical shoe-horning, and the second (the quails in Wis. 16.2 and the healing at a distance in John 4.46-54) do not correspond at all. Overall, then, while there seems to be some sort of correspondence between the order of signs in John and the order of syncriseis in the Wisdom of Solomon, the ¿t is far from perfect.

1

33. So Scott, Sophia, pp. 127, 159–62. 34. As Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, p. 208, also observes. 35. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 412.

3. Signs and Syncriseis

33

The correspondence arguably works better at a thematic level. There does seem to be some kind of Moses typology operating in John,36 and as Ziener argues, John takes over the fundamental needs for human life supplied in the wilderness blessings (water, healing, bread, deliverance from death) and makes them images, in both sign and discourse, for the true means of eternal life offered through Jesus Christ, of whom claims are made that are similar in many respects to the claims made about God’s word and wisdom in the Wisdom of Solomon. Farrer appears to have gone a step further than Ziener in proposing that John’s Gospel actually made use of the Wisdom of Solomon in selecting and ordering its signs and that the plagues as well as the blessings sometimes parallel the Johannine signs. Clark agrees with Farrer in these respects, while differing from both Farrer and Ziener in the correlation of some of the Johannine signs and Wisdom syncriseis. In particular, Clark’s identi¿cation of a 6+1 pattern in both the signs and the syncriseis both strengthens the structural similarity between the two texts and offers a solution to the problem of the missing parallel to the Red Sea crossing. By combining the insights of all three scholars a reasonably good case can be made for the inÀuence of the Wisdom of Solomon on the signs and their interpretation in John’s Gospel.37 In a succeeding article, Ziener proceeds to suggest how the treatments of the themes of Life and Death and of Belief in the Wisdom of Solomon shed light on corresponding ideas in John’s Gospel.38 He nevertheless ends up denying any direct dependence of John’s Gospel on the Wisdom of Solomon. His main reason is the absence of signi¿cant verbal parallels between the two writings, and in particular the absence from John of ‘philosophical terms characteristic of the Book of Wisdom’.39 Ziener accordingly prefers to postulate that the Wisdom of Solomon and John’s Gospel are both dependent on a common wisdom tradition. 36. E.g. Glasson, Moses; Houston Smith, ‘Exodus Typology’; and Wayne A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology (NovTSup, 14; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), pp. 286–319. 37. Scott, Sophia, p. 168, sees Clark as having strengthened the case for John’s use of the Wisdom of Solomon. Unconsciously concurring with Ziener, Clark, ‘Signs in Wisdom and John’, p. 209, concludes, ‘John’s portrayal of Jesus in these sƝmeia consistently attributes to him what Wisdom attributes to God’s logos. Seen in this light, the logos-christology of John’s prologue appears more congruent with the rest of the Fourth Gospel than might otherwise be the case.’ The ¿nal sentence expresses what Scott, Sophia, pp. 83–173, argues in some detail on the basis of the wisdom tradition. 38. Georg Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch und Johannesevangelium (II)’, Biblica 39 (1958), pp. 37–60. 39. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (II)’, p. 59. 1

34

The New Testament and the Church

Given the drift of Ziener’s argument up to this point, this is a surprising conclusion. On Ziener’s own reckoning, close verbal parallels between John’s Gospel and the Wisdom of Solomon should not necessarily be expected even if John did make direct use of the Wisdom of Solomon.40 Moreover, the alleged wisdom tradition appears to have had no inÀuence on other broadly contemporary writings, such as the narration of the exodus story in Philo, Josephus, or Pseudo-Philo.41 None of these texts pairs exodus plagues and blessings in the same manner as the Wisdom of Solomon, and none follow Wisdom’s ordering of the blessings. Moreover, even the imperfect agreement in order lends some support for Farrer’s apparent view that John’s Gospel is directly dependent on the Wisdom of Solomon.42 At this point it is worth stopping to ask what might be meant by suggesting that John was dependent on Wisdom.43 It is unlikely to mean that John consulted a scroll of Wisdom to check on its precise treatment of exodus punishments and blessings when penning or dictating his own text. It is more likely to mean that his treatment of the signs in his Gospel was partially inÀuenced by his memory of the Wisdom of Solomon. One also needs to ask what purpose such a recollection of Wisdom in the Fourth Gospel could be expected to serve. Given the low literacy rates in antiquity, John presumably intended his Gospel primarily for the ear, not 40. Ziener, ‘Weisheitsbuch (I)’, p. 399. 41. Admittedly Philo, Vit. Mos. 1.143, does say of the plagues, ‘And the strangest thing of all was that the same elements in the same place and at the same time brought destruction to one people and safety to the other’, and goes on to contrast, for example, the water turning to blood for the Egyptians but not for the Hebrews, and the Hebrews enjoying the light while the Egyptians were in darkness. But though there is some similarity to the Wisdom of Solomon here, Philo’s point is that the Hebrews enjoyed immunity from the plagues that afÀicted the Egyptians. He does not go on to link plagues and wilderness blessings, nor does he narrate the wilderness blessings in the same order as the Wisdom of Solomon. Indeed, neither Philo nor Josephus nor Pseudo-Philo makes anything of the miracles of deliverance from death in their accounts of the wilderness wanderings; unlike the Wisdom of Solomon they thus provide no potential parallels to the healing miracles in John. 42. Cf. Muddiman’s comment on the strength of Farrer’s argument from order in ‘John’s Use of Matthew’, p. 335. To be sure, Wisdom more or less follows the biblical ordering of the plagues; it is the ordering of the corresponding blessings that makes the comparison with John signi¿cant. Compare, for example, the rather different orders of blessings and plagues in Pss. 78 and 105. 43. Cf. the discussion in relation to the Synoptic Gospels in Andrew Gregory, ‘What Is Literary Dependence?’, in P. Foster, A. Gregory, J. S. Kloppenborg and J. Verherden (eds.), New Studies in the Synoptic Problem (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 87–114.

1

3. Signs and Syncriseis

35

the eye, and most of his audience would not have been in any position to compare two texts by sight and draw up tables of correspondences. In other words, an audience listening to John would be unlikely to detect the presence or absence of exact correspondences between John’s signs and Wisdom’s syncriseis in any case. We should instead think in terms of an oral performance (or reading aloud) of John’s Gospel to an audience familiar with Israelite traditions in general and perhaps also with the ways in which the Wisdom of Solomon con¿gures those traditions. What such an audience would most likely hear is not a set of speci¿c literary allusions to another written text, but rather more general allusions to the traditions with which they were familiar. In terms of social memory theory one might think of this in terms of keying and framing, that is, making sense of a more recent salient event, in this case the life of Jesus, through the lens of an older and more established salient event, in this case the exodus. One could also bring in John Miles Foley’s view of tradition as the enabling referent of an oral performance, meaning that in a situation of oral performance the audience may attend not only to the literal sense of the words being spoken but to the web of allusions evoked through resonances in the tradition.44 The point of the partial parallels between the signs in John and the syncriseis in the Wisdom of Solomon would then be not to remind John’s readers of another text, but to evoke a particular kind of response from the audience, namely to see Jesus’ ministry as both paralleling and surpassing the great saving acts of the exodus. Some general familiarity of the syncriseis in Wisdom (as indeed with the wider wisdom tradition) would then provide the lens through which John wishes his audience to perceive the deeds of the incarnate Logos. This would imply that John was using Wisdom not as a source but as a resource, an element in the tradition that he hopes will resonate with his audience.

44. See, e.g. Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition (London: SPCK, 2013), pp. 86–134; James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (New Perspectives on the Past; Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 32–36, 50– 51, 72; Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (ed. Larry Ray; Theorizing Society; Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), pp. 15–16, 82–83, 95–97; Barry Schwartz, ‘Jesus in First Century Memory – A Response’, in Kirk and Thatcher (eds.), Memory, Tradition and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (SBL Semeia Studies, 52; Atlanta: SBL, 2005), pp. 249–61 (250–51); John Miles Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 2–7, 53–54. 1

36

The New Testament and the Church

If this is correct, then the lack of a complete ¿t between the sequence of signs in John and the sequence of syncriseis in the Wisdom of Solomon ceases to be a problem, provided there is enough (and there does indeed seem to be enough) to evoke Wisdom’s treatment of the role of Sophia in the exodus story, which John’s audience is being invited to see as illuminating the life-giving role of the incarnate Logos in his Gospel. While Ziener appears to treat the equation of Messiah and New Moses as self-evident, it is far from clear how apparent it would actually have been in ¿rst-century Judaism.45 John’s use of the Wisdom of Solomon as a lens through which to view Jesus’ signs may have been aimed in part at strengthening such an association. The sceptic may well still argue that no link between John and the Wisdom of Solomon has been proved, but the nature of the case means that strict proof is impossible, since we are dealing not with veri¿able quotations of one text by another, but with more subtle allusions designed to work in the context of oral performance. Nonetheless, the combination of the common 6+1 pattern suggested by Clark, the similar thematic treatments observed by Ziener, and the partial correspondences between the signs and syncriseis, noted by all three writers, suggests that Austin Farrer could well have been onto something signi¿cant when he sent his letter to John Muddiman half a century ago.

45. Compare, for example, the far more circumspect treatment of this issue by W. Nicol, The Semeia in the Fourth Gospel: Tradition and Redaction (NovTSup, 32; Leiden: Brill, 1972), pp. 83–84 (even though it would suit Nicol’s case to be able to make this identi¿cation). Eric Eve, The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles (JSNTSup, 231; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic Press, 2002) ¿nds plenty of evidence in Second Temple texts of interest in an exodus-type deliverance, but very little if any evidence that this was explicitly linked with the Messiah. Meeks, Prophet-King, p. 319, suggests that too many recent typological treatments of John have erroneously supposed that the Gospel is ‘so constructed that the reader, in order to understand it, would have to perceive that Jesus, the “Son of Man”, is like Moses’. Meeks instead suggests that the Gospel is designed so that readers with high expectations of a Moses-like ¿gure would see that Jesus ful¿lled and surpassed such expectations. 1

Chapter 4

PROPHECY HISTORICIZED OR TRADITION SCRIPTURALIZED? REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF THE PASSION NARRATIVE* Mark Goodacre

It has long been recognized that the Jewish Scriptures played a key role in the origins and development of Gospel Passion Narratives, but the nature of the role is still debated. In 1931, Hoskyns and Davey set up the problem by asking: Did Jesus set his passion in the context of Old Testament scripture? And did an intention of ful¿lment condition his words and actions? If this be so, the evangelists are merely drawing out the implications of his passion and emphasizing them clearly in their narratives. Or does the initiative lie rather with the church, in which case it must be supposed that the evangelists…attached a peculiar signi¿cance to the death of the Lord, and placed in his mouth words that sanctioned their procedure?1 * It is a pleasure to offer this essay for John Muddiman’s Festschrift as a token of my gratitude and affection. I studied with John for my Oxford DPhil and I could not have wanted for a more ideal supervisor. He was incisive and critical while always being kind and encouraging, and he is second to none in providing intellectual stimulation on just about any topic in Christian origins, including the topic of the present essay on the use of the Old Testament in the Passion Narratives. The present essay revises and expands elements in my earlier article ‘Scripturalization in Mark’s Cruci¿xion Narrative’, in Geert van Oyen and Tom Shepherd (eds.), The Trial and Death of Jesus: Essays on the Passion Narrative in Mark (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 33–47. 1. Edwyn Hoskyns and Francis Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament (London: Faber & Faber, 1931), pp. 62–63. Hoskyns and Davey do not directly answer their own conundrum though an answer is implied in the statement that the evangelists wrote ‘to declare that the life and death of Jesus were the ful¿lment of the promises made by the living God through the prophets and psalmists of Israel. They were written in order to bear witness to the superseding and ful¿lment of the Mosaic law by the gospel, and to the emergence of the new Israel by faith in Jesus’ (p. 74).

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The New Testament and the Church

This conundrum has been at the heart of discussions of the Passion Narrative for some time, not least because of Martin Dibelius’s stress on the formative role played by the Old Testament.2 There is consensus that the Passion Narratives in the Gospels are full of echoes, allusions and direct quotations of Old Testament passages. And there is consensus that the narrative has some historical core. The consensus breaks down over the size of the historical core, and the disagreement is focused on the extent to which the Old Testament determined the details in the narrative. Many scholars take it for granted that the Old Testament3 had become a kind of historical source-book for the earliest Christians. As R. H. Lightfoot put it in his Bampton Lectures of 1934, its predictions ‘would be, on the one side, of much greater value than the fragmentary stories of escaping young men or fearful women; for those Old Testament Passion narratives were divinely granted and attested: it stood so written’.4 Several scholars have recently pressed this position still further. They claim that the Passion Narrative contains only the most minimal historical core, and that the great bulk of it was derived from the Old Testament. Werner Kelber,5 Burton Mack6 and Helmut Koester7 have all made claims like this, but one version of the thesis has made a particularly marked impact, that of John Dominic Crossan, ¿rst in The Cross that Spoke,8 subsequently in Who Killed Jesus?9 and then at greatest length in The Birth of Christianity.10 2. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel (ET, London: Nicholson & Watson, 1934; German original, 1919 and 1935); see pp. 178–217 on the Passion. 3. The use of the term ‘Old Testament’ rather than ‘Hebrew Bible’ is defensible in a context where the Jewish Scriptures are being appropriated by authors who were attempting to illustrate their ful¿lment in works that became part of the New Testament. Moreover, the term ‘Hebrew Bible’ is problematic in a context where it is the Septuagint that is usually in view. 4. R. H. Lightfoot, History and Interpretation in the Gospels (The Bampton Lectures, 1934; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935), p. 156. 5. Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul and Q (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), pp. 196–97. 6. Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 249–312. 7. Helmut Koester, ‘Apocryphal and Canonical Gospels’, HTR 73 (1980), pp. 105–30, especially 127; more fully Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), pp. 216–40. 8. John Dominic Crossan, The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). 1

4. Prophecy Historicized or Tradition Scripturalized?

39

The term Crossan prefers for pinpointing the origins and development of the Passion Narrative is ‘prophecy historicized’, a term that in The Birth of Christianity he explains like this: The individual units, general sequences, and overall frames of the passion-resurrection stories are so linked to prophetic ful¿llment that the removal of such ful¿llment leaves nothing but the barest facts, almost as in Josephus, Tacitus or the Apostles’ Creed. By individual units I mean such items as these: the lots cast and garments divided from Psalm 22.18; the darkness at noon from Amos 8.9; the gall and vinegar drink from Psalm 69.21. By general sequences I mean such items as these: the Mount of Olives situation from 2 Samuel 15–17; the trial collaboration from Psalm 2; the abuse description from the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. By overall frames I mean the narrative genre of innocence vindicated, righteousness redeemed and virtue rewarded. In other words, on all three narrative levels – surface, intermediate and deep – biblical models and scriptural precedents have controlled the story to the point that without them nothing is left but the brutal fact of cruci¿xion itself.11

Several important elements in Crossan’s approach make it worthy of special attention. It is a mark of Crossan’s skill as a communicator that he is able to encapsulate his thesis in one aptly chosen term and that his use of this term, ‘prophecy historicized’, has generated fresh interest in the origins of the Passion Narrative.12 Further, in ¿ne pedagogical style, Crossan makes his point by means of contrast, placing his own view at one pole and Raymond Brown’s view at the other.13 Crossan is reacting 9. John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995). 10. John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998). The thesis is mentioned but discussed at less length in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991). See especially pp. 385–86. 11. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 521. 12. See, for example, Daryl D. Schmidt’s endorsement of the thesis in ‘Septuagintal InÀuence in the Passion Narratives’, Forum NS 1.1 (1998), pp. 95–118, especially 107. Cf. Marcus Borg’s use of Crossan’s terms in N. T. Wright and Marcus Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (London: SPCK, 1999), pp. 84– 85. The Jesus Seminar overall ¿nds the thesis persuasive. The proposition ‘Detailed information about the cruci¿xion of Jesus is derived from prophecy historicized’ receives a ‘red’ rating, ‘The Jesus Seminar: Voting Records: The Passion Narrative’, Forum NS 1.1 (1998), pp. 227–33 (230). 13. Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels (2 vols.; Anchor Bible Reference Library; New York: Doubleday, 1994). 1

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to Raymond Brown’s massive, two-volume commentary on the Passion Narrative, published in 1994. He characterizes Brown’s view as history remembered and he explains it like this: Jesus’ companions knew or found out what happened to him, and such historical information formed the basic passion story from the very beginning. Allusions to biblical precedents were illustrative or probative for that story, but not determinative or constitutive of its content. Maybe, from all the details known to them, they chose those that ¿tted best with such biblical precedents, but in general it was history and not prophecy that determined narrative sequence and structure.14

On one occasion Crossan puts percentages on the relative degrees of prophecy historicized and history remembered contained in the Passion Narrative: Basically the issue is whether the passion accounts are prophecy historicized or history remembered… Ray Brown is 80 percent in the direction of history remembered. I’m 80 percent in the opposite direction.15

In Who Killed Jesus?, Crossan uses the Darkness at High Noon (Matt. 27.45 // Mark 15.33 // Luke 23.44 // Peter 5.15; 6.22) as his primary illustration of how the phenomenon works: To explain those accounts as ‘history remembered’ means that Jesus’ companions observed the darkness, recorded it in memory, passed it on in tradition, and recalled it when writing their accounts of the cruci¿xion. It happened in history, and that is why it is mentioned in gospel.16

In contrast, Crossan’s explanation of ‘prophecy historicized’ involves reading the Gospel accounts alongside Amos 8.9-10: On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight …I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.

With reference to these verses, Crossan explains: By ‘prophecy historicized’ I mean that no such historical three-hour-long midnight at noon accompanied the death of Jesus, but that learned Christians searching their Scriptures found this ancient description of

1

14. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 520. 15. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 1, quoting a New York Times article. 16. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 2.

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future divine punishment, maybe facilitated by its mention of ‘an only son’ in the second-to-last line, and so created that ¿ctional story about darkness at noon to assert that Jesus died in ful¿llment of prophecy.17

The model is an attractive one. The earliest Christians were, of course, immersed in Old Testament language and imagery and it is straightforward to imagine elements from the Psalms and Isaiah ¿nding their way into their narratives. It would be dif¿cult to doubt, for example, that ‘prophecy’ has been historicized in a case like Luke 23.46, where Jesus serenely prays in Lucan fashion, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’, following Ps. 31.6, in contrast with the starker cry of dereliction found in the parallel place in Mark and Matthew.18 But while Crossan is surely right to criticize any naïve and simplistic appeal to ‘history remembered’ as the fundamental answer to the origins of the Passion Narrative, there are several important dif¿culties with Crossan’s thesis. I will attempt to draw attention to these while explaining why ‘prophecy historicized’ is not adequate in itself to explain the origins of the Passion Narrative. The Stark Contrast One of the dif¿culties with Crossan’s discussion is the way in which he characterizes Raymond Brown’s views. Brown does not use the term ‘history remembered’. This is Crossan’s means of describing Brown’s approach and it is far from ideal.19 While Brown does see the ‘basic incidents’ of the Passion Narrative as derived from ‘early Christian memory’,20 he also sees the whole process, from eye witness and ‘ear witness’ through to the evangelists, as involving embellishment from the Christian imagination.21 Indeed, he is keen to point out that scriptural 17. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 4 (emphasis original). 18. For those who think that Luke had access to Matthew as well as to Mark, Matthew’s redactional addition in 27.50, ÒÎýÁ¼Å Ìġ Èżıĸ, could have provided the stimulus for Luke’s use of the Psalm. Cf. Michael Goulder, Luke: A New Paradigm (JSNTSup, 20; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic Press, 1989), p. 708. If this is the case, Luke’s activity might better be characterized here as ‘scripturalizing’ the Matthean tradition (see further below). 19. Crossan speaks of ‘prophecy historicized’ and ‘history remembered’ as ‘my terms’, Birth of Christianity, p. 478. 20. Brown, Death of the Messiah, vol. 1, p. 16. 21. See, for example, Brown’s comment, ‘I do not think of the evangelists themselves as eyewitnesses of the passion; nor do I think that eyewitness memories of Jesus came down to the evangelists without considerable reshaping and development’, Death of the Messiah, vol. 1, p. 14. 1

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reÀection played an important role in the selection and interpretation of features of the Passion Narrative. It is worth noting, for example, that in the very example prioritized by Crossan, the darkness at midday (see above), Brown himself attributes a key role to the Bible. Amos 8.9, he says, ‘may have given rise to the symbolism in Mark’.22 A further dif¿culty with Crossan’s presentation of alternatives is the degree of polarization. While it is sometimes useful to have academic theories set up in opposition to one another, Crossan’s framing of the debate characterizes the alternatives in too stark a manner. The reader is presented with a choice between scripture and event, between prophecy and history. But ‘history remembered’ and ‘prophecy historicized’ are not the only options.23 A more nuanced model is available. It might be explained like this. The multiple echoes of biblical themes and the varied allusions to scriptural precedent are plausibly explained on the hypothesis that from the beginning there was an intimate interaction between historical event and scriptural reÀection, so that the tradition developed in the light of Old Testament languages and models. Events generated scriptural reÀection, which in turn inÀuenced the way the events were remembered and retold. The process of casting the narrative in this language might be described, to utilize an illuminating term from Hebrew Bible scholarship, as scripturalization. Scripturalization Judith Newman uses this term in relation to Jewish prayers in the Second Temple Period, which increasingly used scriptural models, precedents 22. Brown, Death of the Messiah, vol. 2, p. 1037. He argues that the wording in the Gospel of Peter is closer to Amos 8.9 than is Mark, and comments: ‘Characteristically GPet makes scriptural motifs found in the canonical Gospels more explicit’. This is the reverse of the process imagined by Crossan, who agrees that the scriptural motif is explicit in Peter but attributes it to the greater primitivity of the Cross Gospel on which it is dependent. The three hour darkness in Mark in fact requires further explanation; see my ‘Scripturalization in Mark’s Cruci¿xion Narrative’, pp. 42–45, for the possible liturgical origins of the Passion Narrative. 23. Some effectively accept the terms in which the debate is set up and then argue against Crossan from the opposing side, e.g. Ben Witherington III, The New Testament Story (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 42–43. Contrast Arthur J. Dewey, ‘The Locus for Death: Social Memory and the Passion Narratives’, in Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher (eds.), Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), pp. 119–28: ‘Of course, the critical response has not been so stark. Most scholars would conclude that there is a mixture of report and editorial revision. Yet the battle lines are very much formed…’ (p. 120). 1

4. Prophecy Historicized or Tradition Scripturalized?

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and language.24 The thesis of Newman’s book is that increasing devotion to developing Jewish Scriptures, in a liturgical context in which such Scriptures were getting used more and more, led inexorably to the intermingling of those Scriptures with Jewish prayers. It is a view that could shed light on the Passion Narratives in the Gospels. Again following Crossan, the best form of explanation is illustration. To see the phenomenon of scripturalizing at work, ideally we require an element in the Passion Narrative that is generally regarded as history, one that is clearly not derived from the Old Testament, so that there will be no danger of begging the question. One of the very few details in the Passion Narrative that Crossan regards as historical is the note in Mark 15.40-41, that certain named women were watching the cruci¿xion from a distance.25 Crossan attempts to disentangle tradition from Marcan redaction and writes: Their existence and names in 15.40-41 are pre-Markan tradition, but their criticism in 15.47–16.8 is Markan redaction. In other words, the inclusion of women observing the burial and visiting the tomb is no earlier than Mark, but the inclusion of women watching the cruci¿xion is received tradition. But is the latter historical fact? My best answer is yes, because

24. Judith H. Newman, Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999). Newman herself derives the term from her teacher James L. Kugel, but Kugel uses it differently, with reference to the increasing perception of the Psalms as Scripture. See his ‘Topics in the History of the Spirituality of the Psalms’, in Jewish Spirituality from the Bible through the Middle Ages (New York: Crossroad, 1986), pp. 113–44. In earlier versions of this paper given at the SBL Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado in 2001, and subsequently at the New Testament Seminar in Oxford in 2003, I used the term ‘scripturize’, which was my own (cf. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 778–79n. 83). I came across Newman’s use of the term ‘scripturalize’ subsequently. Since she is describing the same essential phenomenon occurring in the Hebrew Bible that I am describing here, I decided to adopt her term, ¿rst in my ‘Scripturalization in Mark’s Cruci¿xion Narrative’ and now here. A similar term, ‘passoverize’ is used by Enrico Mazza, The Celebration of the Eucharist: The Origin of the Rite and the Development of its Interpretation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), pp. 24–26. 25. In favour of the historicity of this detail, Gerd Theissen points out that the names given here appear to presume the reader’s knowledge of their identity, The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition (ET, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), pp. 177–78. See Chapter 4 of this book for Theissen’s seminal discussion of the origins of the Passion Narrative. For Crossan’s discussion of Theissen, see Birth of Christianity, pp. 504–5. 1

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The New Testament and the Church the male disciples had Àed; if the women had not been watching, we would not know even the brute fact of cruci¿xion (as distinct, for example, from Jesus being summarily speared or beheaded in prison).26

The verses that Crossan attributes to ‘pre-Markan tradition’ read as follows: GʸŠ»ò Á¸Ė ºÍŸėÁ¼Ë ÒÈġ ĸÁÉŦ¿¼Å ¿¼ÑÉÇıʸÀ, ëÅ ¸đË Á¸Ė ¸Éţ¸ ÷ ¸º»¸Â¾Åü Á¸Ė ¸Éţ¸ ÷ `¸ÁŪ¹ÇÍ ÌÇı ÄÀÁÉÇı Á¸Ė `ÑÊýÌÇË ÄŢÌ¾É Á¸Ė ¸ÂŪľ, ¸Đ Ğ̼ öÅ ëÅ Ìĉ ¸ÂÀ¸ţß óÁÇÂÇŧ¿ÇÍÅ ¸ĤÌŊ Á¸Ė »À¾ÁŦÅÇÍÅ ¸ĤÌŊ, Á¸Ė Ó¸À ÈǸĖ ¸Ď ÊÍŸŸ¹ÜʸÀ ¸ĤÌŊ ¼ĊË d¼ÉÇÊŦÂÍĸ. There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem. (Mark 15.40-41; cf. Matt. 27.55-56 and Luke 23.49)

The detail that they were watching ÒÈġ ĸÁÉŦ¿¼Å27 echoes the wording of Ps. 38.11 LXX, ‘My friends and companions stand aloof from my afÀiction, and my relatives stand afar off’, ÒÈġ ĸÁÉŦ¿¼Å. It is a detail that commentators frequently mention, and critical editions list it as an Old Testament parallel.28 This is an element with a strong claim to be historical getting expressed in language derived from the psalms. It is not as if the women’s witness has been created on the basis of Ps. 38.11,

26. Crossan, Birth of Christianity, p. 559. See also Who Killed Jesus?, pp. 181– 85 for reÀections on the role played by the women in the story. In The Historical Jesus, p. 415, Crossan suggests that the ¿rst version of Mark originally ended just before these verses, at 15.39, the Centurion’s Confession. 27. Contrast John 19.25-27 where the Beloved Disciple and Jesus’ mother are close enough to hold a conversation with Jesus. Joel Marcus, ‘The Role of Scripture in the Gospel Passion Narratives’, in John T. Carroll and Joel B. Green (eds.), The Death of Jesus in Early Christianity (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), pp. 205– 33, speculates that the Johannine account ‘may be more accurate historically than the Synoptics’ in view of the fact that ‘Romans often allowed friends of cruci¿ed criminals to stand by them until they died’ (p. 212). On this point contrast Brown, Death of the Messiah, vol. 2, pp. 1029, 1194, ‘it would be unusual for the Romans to permit family and sympathizers such proximity’. 28. Brown, Death of the Messiah, vol. 2, p. 1158, is one of many who hear an echo of the Psalm. Kathleen E. Corley, ‘Women and the Cruci¿xion and Burial of Jesus’, Forum NS 1.1 (1998), pp. 181–226 (212 n. 211) notes that ‘Luke reinforces this connection with Psalm 38.11 by the addition of ÇĎ ºÅÑÊÌÇţ (Luke 23.49)’. This is a good example of scripturalization – Luke enhances the Scriptural content of the language of the tradition he receives from Mark. Corley’s full discussion of the passage, with some useful bibliography, is on pp. 209–17. 1

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which does not refer solely to women, let alone to those particular named women. Rather, the traditional element is being retold in the light of the passage that they saw it ful¿lling. In other words, in this verse we see the exact opposite of the process of ‘prophecy historicized’. A verse taken to be historical has been expressed using the terminology of the scriptures. Tradition was scripturalized. The example highlights a further dif¿culty with Crossan’s thesis. His basis for af¿rming the presence of the women at the cross is that ‘the male disciples had Àed’,29 but there is no way that Crossan can know this. The Àight of the disciples is narrated in Mark 14.50 but prophesied in Mark 14.27 on the basis of a quotation of Zech. 13.7, ‘Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered’. Crossan’s theory dictates that where a scriptural motif like this appears, it is the motif itself that has provided the story – that is the whole point of ‘prophecy historicized’. If the detail about the Àeeing disciples is something that Mark or his sources inferred on the basis of Zech. 13.7, then there should be no grounds, on Crossan’s model, for regarding it as historical. There is, in another words, a contradiction at the heart of the argument. He presupposes that an explicitly scriptural element in Mark’s story is historical.30 Prophecy Historicized or Tradition Scripturalized? Since, in cases like this, ‘tradition scripturalized’ provides a better explanation for the phenomena than ‘prophecy historicized’, it is worth asking whether there are other places where Crossan’s model falls short as an explanation for the origin of the Passion Narrative. It may be that the kind of uni-directional model, from scripture to history, is overall less effective than a model in which there is an interaction between tradition and scripture. I would like to suggest two further ways in which an interactive model is more plausible than the ‘prophecy historicized’ model. First, elements that have no scriptural precedent are juxtaposed with those that have; and second, the narrative is framed by the names of apparent witnesses about whom we know little else (Mark 15.21 and 15.40-41).

29. Crossan, Birth of Christianity, p. 559. 30. Crossan does not discuss the quotation of Zech. 13.7 in Mark 14.27 in any of his writing on this topic. This is a serious problem for a thesis that takes for granted that the male disciples had Àed.

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1. Events without Scriptural Precedent Are Juxtaposed with Those That Have Scriptural Precedent To read Mark’s account is to read a story in which elements with allusions to the Old Testament are interlaced with elements that fail to remind even the most erudite readers of anything there. Mark 15.21-30 provides a case in point: 21. A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. 22. They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull). 23. Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh [Ps. 69.22] but he did not take it. 24. And they cruci¿ed him. Dividing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get [Ps. 22.19] 25. It was the third hour when they cruci¿ed him. 26. The written notice of the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. 27. They cruci¿ed two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left. [Isa. 53.12] 28. Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads [Pss. 22.8; 109.25] and saying, ‘So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, 30. come down from the cross and save yourself! [Ps. 22.9]’.

Motifs that might reasonably be regarded as echoing the Old Testament are placed in italics. It is consensus that the Passion Narratives were composed with at least the intention to evoke memories of such scriptures, but what is striking here is the number of important elements that clearly cannot have been derived from the Old Testament: the man who carried Jesus’ cross, Simon of Cyrene; the place of Jesus’ cruci¿xion, Golgotha; the time of Jesus’ cruci¿xion, the third hour; the written charge against him, ‘King of the Jews’. This kind of mixture is exactly what we would expect if the earliest Passion Narrative was told with both tradition and the scriptures in mind. Certain events were simply not conducive to getting retold in the light of the Old Testament – there was nothing there about Simon of Cyrene, Golgotha, the third hour or the titulus. This situation is not what we would expect on the ‘prophecy historicized’ model. It is a key point for Crossan that when we remove ‘prophetic ful¿lment’, we are left with ‘nothing but the barest facts, almost as in Josephus or Tacitus’.31 But Josephus and Tacitus do not tell us about the time and place of Jesus’ cruci¿xion, the titulus or the man who carried his cross, and this is, of course, only a small section of the Passion Narrative overall. In other words, the admittedly crude removal

1

31. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 11, but also often elsewhere.

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of what Crossan characterizes as ‘prophetic ful¿lment’ leaves us with much more traditional material in need of explanation. It may be that this material also turns out to be unhistorical but if so, its lack of historicity is clearly not explained by prophecy historicized. Substantial amounts of traditional material are left unaccounted for on Crossan’s model. 2. The Narrative Is Framed By the Names of Apparent Witnesses about Whom We Know Little Else (Mark 15.21 and 15.40-41) If Crossan is wrong about the origin of the Passion Narrative, and if it is possible for the historian to discover a little more than just a handful of brute facts akin to those reported by Josephus and Tacitus, is it worth asking whether the narrative provides any indication of eye witnesses from whom some of the traditions might ultimately have derived?32 It is worth noticing that the story of the cruci¿xion, from Jesus’ being led out to be cruci¿ed (15.20b) to the moments immediately after his death (15.40-41), is framed by references to named witnesses. First, Simon of Cyrene, the man who carried Jesus’ cross, is introduced. In itself, this reference to an otherwise unknown ¿gure might be telling, but the appended detail, only in Mark, that he was ‘the father of Alexander and Rufus’ (15.21) is even more revealing. It is rare in the New Testament, and just as rare in antiquity generally, for characters to be identi¿ed by means of their children. The reverse is the norm. James and John are sons of Zebedee (1.19 and 3.17); Levi (2.14) and James (3.18) are sons of Alphaeus; and Bartimaeus is son of Timaeus (10.46). The mention of a key character’s sons is striking. The implied reader of Mark’s story ¿nds the mention of Alexander and Rufus telling. Perhaps they were known to the readers of Mark’s Gospel. Perhaps certain elements in the story originated in their stories.33 This intriguing possibility is extended by the appearance of the women at the other end of the cruci¿xion narrative. These women are said to have been watching (¿¼ÑÉÇıʸÀ) the events and once again, the speci¿city in naming them is revealing. Among these women are ¸Éţ¸ ÷ ¸º»¸Â¾Åü Á¸Ė ¸Éţ¸ ÷ `¸ÁŪ¹ÇÍ ÌÇı ÄÀÁÉÇı Á¸Ė `ÑÊýÌÇË ÄŢÌ¾É Á¸Ė

32. Cf. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, p. 182, ‘We must take notice of the fact that eyewitnesses of the Passion story appear to be mentioned’ (italics original), citing Mark 14.51 and 15.21. 33. Cf. Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, p. 183, ‘What at ¿rst seems strange is explicable if we suppose that the readers knew both the unnamed young man and the sons of Simon. In this case these remarks would draw the readers’ attention to the actual eyewitness of the events.’

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¸ÂŪľ (Mark 15.40). While Mary Magdalene and to a lesser extent Salome have left their mark on the tradition more generally, the same cannot be said with respect to ¸Éţ¸ ÷ `¸ÁŪ¹ÇÍ ÌÇı ÄÀÁÉÇı Á¸Ė `ÑÊýÌÇË ÄŢ̾É. It is a notorious problem to unravel the identity of this woman or these women. The problem was felt from the earliest times, for the text could be translated in six different ways. Unless Mark is being deliberately vague, we must assume, with Gerd Theissen, that the family relationships of Mary were transparent to the audience.34 Again with Theissen, we might add another crucial observation, the fact that ‘the second Mary mentioned in 15.40 is described in terms of her sons (at least Joses)’.35 As with Simon of Cyrene, the generational element in the identi¿cation of the character draws attention to the possibility that here too we might have one of the sources for the ¿rst traditions about the cruci¿xion. The Lack of Independent Evidence If these suggestions for an approach focusing as much on ‘tradition scripturalized’ as on ‘prophecy historicized’ can attempt to do justice to the evidence, there are still two important questions that need answering. The ¿rst of these relates to Crossan’s comments about the lack of independent evidence of (what he characterizes as) the history-remembered Passion Narrative. One of his key points is that ‘Nobody outside the gospels knows this linked passion-resurrection: if it was there as history remembered from the very beginning, why is it not found all over the various strands of tradition?’36 Crossan Àeshes this out by drawing special attention to the lack of any Passion Narrative in either Q or Thomas. ‘If the passion narrative is history remembered’, he asks, ‘why is there not a trace of it in the extant text of the Q Gospel?’37 He goes on:

34. ‘They must have known which of the six possible relationships was accurate’, Theissen, Gospels in Context, pp. 177–78 (178). 35. Theissen, Gospels in Context, pp. 177–78 (178). 36. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 11. Cf. Birth of Christianity, p. 521, ‘If there were, from the beginning, a detailed passion-resurrection story or even just a passion narrative, I would expect more evidence of it than is currently extant. It is totally absent from the Life Tradition…’ 37. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 26. 1

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My point in mentioning Thomas is that this relatively early text shows, like the Q Gospel, not the faintest knowledge of any passion-resurrection narrative. If the passion narrative was, as alleged, the earliest and best case of history remembered, it was not so remembered in Thomas.38

But there is a dif¿culty with this kind of argument. An argument from silence can only be illuminating if, all things being equal, we have good reason to expect the presence of the feature under discussion. But the Gospel of Thomas is a sayings book, which precludes the possibility that it would have a Passion Narrative. From its incipit onwards, Thomas characterizes itself as ‘the sayings of the living Jesus’; it does not feature deeds. That does not mean that those who framed the book had ‘not the faintest knowledge’ of any deeds. We simply cannot, given the genre they chose, ¿nd out anything about their knowledge of traditions about the Passion.39 In the same way, one would not expect to ¿nd a narrative of the Second World War in Wisden’s Book of Cricket Quotations. The genre precludes it, however familiar with the War the editors might be. The problem is, if anything, even more acute in relation to Q, where it is necessary to pay attention not only to the genre-critical but also to the source-critical question. Notwithstanding Crossan’s frequent appeals to a tangible ‘Sayings Gospel Q’, there is not yet any ‘extant text’ of the hypothetical source.40 According to the Scriptures In conclusion, a key related question needs addressing. Helmut Koester, who shares Crossan’s scepticism of the historicity of the bulk of the Passion Narrative,41 and who is cited with approval by Crossan, objects that the ‘Form, structure, and life situation of such a historical passion report and its transmission have never been clari¿ed’.42 What, then, is the context for the origin and development of the Passion Narrative? If we 38. Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 27. 39. Moreover, the choice of genre is inÀuenced by the author’s theology, and the Gospel of Thomas is written with the kind of disdain for the Old Testament that makes a narrative approach culminating in a Scripture-ful¿lling Passion Narrative quite impossible. See further my Thomas and the Gospels: The Making of An Apocryphal Text (London: SPCK, 2012), pp. 187–91. 40. See further my The Case against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002). 41. See above, n. 7. 42. Koester, ‘Apocryphal and Canonical Gospels’, pp. 127–28. 1

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are right to see it as an interaction between scripture and history, does this shed any light on the question? A hint is found in Koester’s own explanation of the matter: In the beginning there was only the belief that Jesus’ suffering, death, and burial, as well as his resurrection, happened ‘according to the Scriptures’ (1 Cor. 15.3-4). The very ¿rst narratives about Jesus’ suffering and death would not have made the attempt to remember what actually happened.43

Koester is of course right about the importance of the phrase ‘according to the Scriptures’, but is he right that this conviction would have ruled out the ‘attempt to remember what actually happened’? Paul’s discussion of the institution of the eucharist in 1 Cor. 11.23-26 is here helpful. The passage provides us with an obvious context within which the Passion story could have been told and retold, the liturgy. At the same time, it at least hints at an answer to Crossan’s question about independent evidence for an early Passion Narrative, evidence absent from texts whose genre or hypothetical status precludes our ¿nding anything relevant. In 1 Corinthians, one of the earliest extant Christian works, Paul’s ëÅ Ìĉ ÅÍÁÌĖ Ć È¸É¼»ţ»¼ÌÇ (‘on the night that he was handed over’, 11.23) takes for granted knowledge of Passion traditions in a context where tradition (