How Not to Undertake the Search for the Historical Jesus — an Example (Part 8)

There is a right and fair way to look for the historical truth about Jesus: I have attempted to outline that process in the first seven articles in this series. But there also many wrong ways to go about it, and sadly, the field of New Testament historical scholarship is littered with examples.

In his book Jesus: The Life, Teachings and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (2006), Marcus Borg summed up a lifetime of research on the subject. The tragedy is that the whole enterprise seems to have been conducted on the basis of relatively indefensible presuppositions. It is no wonder, then, that at the end of the day Borg’s version of Jesus is that he was merely (as the back cover of the book states) “an ancient healer, sage, and prophet,” but certainly not the divine Son of God who had come to dwell among us under all the conditions and limitations of a human life, to save the world from the guilt and power of sin. Where you start in historical research — and the spectacles you put on at the start — often dictates or distorts where you will end up.

Borg’s work manifests a couple of dubious underlying presuppositions.

1) An Underlying Demand for a Jesus who is Unconventional and “Relevant”

A theme that runs through Borg’s book from beginning to end is that Jesus taught a “narrow way” of living the ethics of the Kingdom that stands in sharp contrast to all “conventional” ways of living, which Jesus called “the broad way.” Borg’s book, as he says on page two, is especially for “those curious about a way of seeing Jesus that breaks out of conventional ways of perceiving his life and activity.” In fact, according to Borg Jesus is the ultimate counter-cultural figure:

All of Jesus’s teaching was directed to his contemporaries living in a first- century Jewish world. He had no other audience in mind [NB: note the bold claim here. Jesus said that “heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away,” Mt 24:35; Lk 21:33]. In this sense, there is no such thing as the “timeless” teaching of Jesus. Yet there is a timeless quality to much of what he said, and therefore also a timeliness, simply because his counterwisdom stood in tension not only with his social world, but also with the conventional wisdom of any time. (p. 167)

Of course, there is an element of truth here. The teachings of Jesus are indeed a challenge to any and all societies, and, surely, no society has ever fully embodied the guidance of the Sermon on the Mount! Nevertheless, some societies have done better in this regard than others, and it would be unfair to paint a picture of Jesus as primarily a social iconoclast. After all, some features of the “conventional wisdom” in the world in which he lived he actually endorsed, such as the celebration of marriage (at the marriage feast in Cana, Jn 2:1-11), adherence to the Ten Commandments (Mk 10:19, Lk 18:20) and to his two great commandments (love of God, and one’s neighbor as oneself), commandments which were lifted right out of the Old Testament (Mt 22:36-40; Mk 12:28-31). He revered the Temple as “a house of prayer,” worshipped in the synagogue, and as long as the Law was being lived in the spirit of these two great commandments, he believed that it should be followed, until the whole purpose of the law had been fulfilled in God’s plan (“Do not think I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them,” Mt 5:17; and “on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets,’ Mt 22:40). In short, Jesus intended to be neither conventional nor unconventional; it all depended on the nature of the social conventions that he confronted — and the same would hold true of his relationship to the social norms of any community, in any time and place, including our own.

Unfortunately, Borg tries very hard to build up a picture of Jesus that ultimately makes him into a left-wing critic of the Bush administration of 2000-2008, and “the Christian Right” (p. 293-304). There does not seem to be any attention given as to how Jesus also might critique the “conventional wisdom” of liberal North American academia. For example, Borg tells us that Jesus was quite a “radical” for his day in calling into question each person’s loyalty to their family and their family’s patriarch. For Jews of his day, “family was the primary in-group to which one gave one’s allegiance. Like all in-groups, it also constrained one’s allegiance” (p. 205). Jesus called his disciples if need be to break with their families and with family duties in order to follow him and serve the kingdom (Mt 10: 34-37; Mk 9:61-62; Lk 12:51-53; 14:26):

In this social context, Jesus’ sayings about family and kinship were strikingly radical. In our time, a common form of Christianity emphasizes “family values” as central to the Bible and Jesus. But Jesus frequently called for a break from family and the obligations and security that went with it. (p. 205)

It does not follow, however, that just because Jesus was a “radical” in aspects of his own social context, he would necessarily be seen as a radical in every respect in our own. The family values of western civilization have been built primarily upon the New Testament (e.g., the importance of the marriage bond, the dignity of every human life, and the truth that men and women are both made in the image of God) — although they have often been admired rather than observed. These are values that Jesus would want to uphold; he might even be considered a “conservative” on many family issues today, in contrast with our society’s acceptance of easy divorce and abortion on-demand, sex before marriage and gay marriage (e.g., Mt 19:3-9; Mk 7:21-23).

The key thing is not to be determined from the outset to line Jesus up in support of a pre-conceived political or social ideology, in order to try to make him more “relevant” to us today. “How does what we can discern about Jesus then matter for now?” Borg asks at the beginning of his book. But that is almost certainly the wrong question to ask at the start. For it implies that we already know well enough what “matters for now,” and we are just trying to find out whether Jesus shares and endorses our priorities. The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich once described this as his “method of correlation”: the gospel is given to us to answer the questions put to it by each and every generation. But as another Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, pointed out: that assumes that today we are asking the right questions. Perhaps our sin and our brokenness has blinded us so much that we are not even asking the right questions anymore. We may want to know how to fight poverty, or live in peace, or create wealth, or preserve our constitutional liberties. Without denying the importance of any these questions and concerns, Jesus may have others for us that are even more important, and that we are failing to address: such as “Am I treating my family members, friends and neighbors with respect, and compassionate love?” or “For guidance in my life, am I leaning on God in prayer, and on what God has revealed to the world through Jesus, his apostles, and his Church (Mt 10:40, 28: 18-20; Lk 10:5-13)? — or only on my own reason, and my own personal experience?” We have to let God be God, Barth pleaded, and let him say to us what he wants to say, in the forms (and with the emphases) he chooses.

2) Reading the Gospels with the Spectacles of the Fact-Meaning Dichotomy of Kantian Philosophy, and a Partial Prejudice against the Miraculous

In this summary book of his life’s work, Borg shows almost no sign at all that he is aware of the philosophical spectacles he is wearing — and manifesting too on almost every page of his historical hypotheses and reconstructions. He starts out fair enough:

“the gospels,” he says, are “a combination of metaphorical narrative and historical memory” (p. 54). But for him, the metaphor alone is what matters: “[M]y purpose is threefold: to illustrate (1) that much of the language in the gospels is metaphorical; (2) that what matters is the more-than-literal meaning; and (3) that the more-than-literal meaning does not depend upon the historical factuality of the language” (p.54).

Points 2 and 3 here, however, are manifestly false. Sometimes the literal meaning of a gospel story matters too, and sometimes the more than factual meaning depends upon the facts. For example, how do we know that the ethics of the Kingdom that Jesus preached are really possible to live in this world unless we have good historical grounds for believing that Jesus himself, a fully historical human being, really lived them? Another example: St. Paul was adamant that the entire Christian faith stands or falls on the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (I Cor 15:14). This does not mean that St. Paul was unaware of the mysterious aspects of the resurrection of Christ: for him it was in some respects inexpressible in normal human language (I Cor 15:35-57), but for him it was also a mystery worth wondering at, and believing in, because it was founded on irrefutable eyewitness testimony (I Cor 15:3-8). And unless it really happened, then most of its theological and spiritual ramifications fall to the ground as unsubstantiated (e.g., the assurance that we shall be raised with Jesus to a glorious heavenly life like his, Phil 3:20-21; the vindication of his death as in accord with the saving plan of God, Rom 1:3-4; and the assurance of his ultimate triumph over the forces of evil, Acts 2: 32-36 and Col 2:13-15). How different from this life-changing “good news” is Borg’s milquetoast approach to the truth of the resurrection:

Seeing the Easter stories as parables need not involve a denial of their factuality. The factual question is left open. A parabolic reading affirms: believe whatever you want about whether the story happened this way— now let’s talk about what the story means. … In any case, asking about the parabolic meaning of biblical stories, including Easter stories, is always the most important question. (p. 280-281)

Always the most important question? Surely not for evangelism: potential converts often want to know why we believe that Jesus really rose from the dead, and if he did, what the significance of that fact would be to their lives, and to the whole world. And as we said before, theology too asks not only what gospels stories mean, but also why their meaning should be held as true.

In general, we need to know if the things that traditional Christianity claims about Jesus — that he is the divine Son of God, sent from the Father to show us the way, teach us the truth, and win for us the new and eternal life of the Holy Spirit by shedding for us his blood on the Cross — are founded in fact, or merely fantasy and wishful thinking. For if they are founded in fact, then they have tremendous implications for how much God loves us, and where our life’s allegiance ultimately must be placed, implications that go beyond any mere “metaphors” for spiritual growth and discipleship that the gospels also contain.

Borg adopts the general strategy that if a gospel story manifests a metaphorical, spiritual, or theological meaning, then most likely the account is not based on historical memory at all, but is a largely fictional story created by the early Christians just to convey that deeper meaning. This, of course, implies that real historical events cannot at the same time have deep layers of symbolic, metaphorical, and theological meaning. The whole biblical story of God’s saving work through the history of Israel, Christ, and the Church, however, is one long testimony to the fact that God does indeed reveal his nature, character, and saving purposes for humanity through real historical events.

Time and time again, Borg’s presupposition here (derived largely from the philosophical school of Immanuel Kant), color’s his judgements about events: in most cases we cannot get at the facts, he says; all we can get to is the meaning that those alleged facts were supposed to convey — and that is all that really matters anyway.

In making decisions about whether particular gospel stories contain historical memory, Borg gives us two guiding principles.

The first is when “the language of the story has obvious, symbolic meaning” (p. 74), then “there is reason to think that it is metaphor and not memory.” On these grounds the feeding of the multitudes is labelled as largely fictional, because it has an obvious metaphorical connection to the Old Testament story of God miraculously feeding his people in the wilderness. But why could it not be the case that God deliberately did something in Christ that echoes his care for his people in the wilderness, and foreshadows the great gift of the Eucharist that he would give them later? In short, why can’t God teach us truth and illustrate his points through historical deeds as well as through words?

A second guideline Borg offers us is to proceed with extreem caution when a gospel story contains elements of the miraculous or “the spectacular”: “all of us have some sense of the limits of the possible, even though we might disagree about what those limits are” (p. 74). True enough: one is not likely to believe that the face of Jesus Christ appeared miraculously last week in a housewife’s pancake batter, because that is not the “kind of thing” Jesus did; it is a trivial, cheap trick, rather than a life-changing healing or exorcism, or powerful and parabolic nature miracle. But then Borg takes this principle even further:

To apply this to the gospels, does it ever happen that somebody can walk on the sea? Does it ever happen that someone can change a large quantity of water into wine? If I could be convinced that things like this happen, I could entertain the possibility that Jesus did things like this. (p. 75).

But this begs the question. The most spectacular miracles of Jesus are not exactly the same as what happens in our world under normal circumstances — not even exactly the same as the kinds of miracles that Moses and the prophets did — but that may be because the life of the Son of God on earth is not an ordinary or common circumstance, but something unique, a special act of God, something that happened just once. As historians, we can ask whether there are certain kinds of miracles that Jesus did, and why he may have done them that way — and we can certainly say that miracle stories in the gospels that match his characteristic “style,” so to speak, are more likely to be historically accurate. But to cast doubt on most of them just because we don’t see that kind of thing happening elsewhere in the world is really to reject the possibility from the outset Jesus is truly a unique, or divine person. And if you are going to negatively prejudge that issue, one wonders why you would bother to make a lifelong search for the truth about Jesus of Nazareth in the first place— except, perhaps, to enlist Jesus as an ally in support of social and political causes one already believes on other grounds. And that is not writing history: it’s just “special pleading” and ideological manipulation of the past.

Next Time: Confusion about our Sources for the Life of Christ

Robert Stackpole, STD
©The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017