One Last Example of the “Hermeneutic of Suspicion”: Did Jesus Really Know Who He was and What He was Doing? (Part 20)

To close this web series, we want to do our best to figure out why it is that so many reputable and well-intentioned Christian scholars involved in the search for the historical Jesus end up casting doubt on so many essential aspects of the Jesus story. And please note: we are not talking here about radical scholars such as Borg or Aslan, who (as we have seen) are almost complete prisoners of an unjust “hermeneutic of suspicion.” Rather, I am referring to scholars who are more open to the possibility that Jesus performed miracles (at least, miracles of healing), fulfilled prophecies, and might very well have been God’s Messiah. Two scholars in particular that we have discussed in this web series in this regard have been James Charlesworth and Dale Allison. We have already noted several pits into which they have fallen along the way (for example, for Charlesworth, being locked into the Two-Source theory of the Synoptic Gospels, and failing to take seriously the combined testimony of the early Fathers of the Church; for Allison, succumbing to the ghost of the philosopher Troeltsch — his view that only events that in occur in recognizable, recurring patterns that link with common human experience should be taken seriously by historians, thus ruling out reports of irreducibly new or supernaturally unique events from being taken seriously, e.g., the nature miracles of Jesus — and also for Allison, failing to appreciate the early composition of the gospels, and their roots in eyewitness testimony). As we come to the end of this web series, we find that these shortcomings lead them into some very dangerous waters — and reveal others that have hampered their work, and the work of those like them.

1) Did Jesus Really Know What He Was Doing by Dying on the Cross?

Charlesworth says surprisingly little about this important topic in his book The Historical Jesus: an Essential Guide (2008), but he quotes with approval the following opinion that he attributes to “many New Testament theologians”:

The claim that Jesus died according to God’s will and to fulfill the scripture sounds like the shaping of Jesus traditions by post-30 confessions and the experience of the risen Lord in the Palestinian Jesus movement. These scholars point out that in Gethsemane Jesus asked for the “cup” to be removed from him. Historians stress that Jesus’ last words were a cry of dereliction: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk. 15:34). If these events are historical, they undermine the claim that Jesus wanted to suffer in order to fulfill scripture. (p. 105)

But this argument is clearly a non-sequitur.

First, like too many of Charlesworth’s historical arguments, it is based almost solely on Mark and the “Q” source, and does not take sufficiently into account the testimony of the other gospels, and the testimony of the early Fathers of the Church.

Second, the argument in itself is a non-sequitur. Jesus could have intended to let himself be taken and killed according to the Scriptures, but in the garden, as the full horror of his crucifixion grew near, he could have asked for the “cup” to be removed in the desperate hope that, at the last moment, his heavenly Father might reveal some alternative way for his Kingdom-mission to be accomplished. The degree to which Jesus could foresee the future in his human consciousness is an open question even among the most “orthodox” Christian theologians.

Third, his cry of dereliction from the cross need not be interpreted as a cry of despair: it may have been an expression of a feeling of being forsaken by God (in the midst of excruciating physical pain) that contradicted his abiding conviction that he was doing his Father’s scriptural will. This is surely an entirely plausible psychological and spiritual state for him to be in, given the circumstances. Moreover, it was common in ancient Israel to quote the first line of a psalm in order to refer to the entire text, and this cry of dereliction is actually the first line of Psalm 22, a psalm which ends on a note of trust in God’s ultimate triumph. By quoting the first line, Jesus is expressing simultaneously both utter physical and emotional misery under affliction, and underlying trust in God’s sovereign plan.

In any case, there is significant evidence from the gospel accounts (including Mark) that Jesus did indeed interpret his impending martyrdom as a redemptive act: the Son of Man had come “to give his life as a ransom for many,” he said (Mt. 20:28, Mk. 10:45), and at the Last Supper he spoke of the cup as the “new covenant” in his blood being shed “for many” (Mt. 26:11, Mk. 14:34). The expression “for many” is almost certainly an allusion to the prophecy of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53:12. So is his saying: “For I tell you that this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘and he was reckoned with transgressors;’ for what is written about me has its fulfilment” (Lk 22: 37; cf. Is 53:12). In short, the weight of the evidence suggests that Jesus expected that his death was in accordance with his Father’s permissive will, and in that sense essential to God’s plan for the salvation of the world as foretold in Scripture, especially in Isaiah 53.

To be sure, as Charlesworth explains, Jesus also challenged the Romans and the Temple establishment with provocative, quasi-political acts that were the precipitate cause of his arrest and execution (e.g., the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and the cleansing of the Temple). However, this does not in any way contradict Jesus’ own theological evaluation of what his death would ultimately accomplish for the dawning of God’s Kingdom.

2) The Historical Criterion of “Palestinian Jewish Setting,” while it Illuminates Contemporary Jesus Research, can also become a Methodological “Straightjacket”

Clarifying the six main criteria for making historical judgements about particular gospel passages relating the words and deeds of Jesus is obviously of great benefit to historians; that is why we discussed, listed, and evaluated them in article six of this web series, and utilized them freely thereafter. Charlesworth shows that one of these, the criterion of “Palestinian Jewish setting,” has been refined in recent decades and bolstered by extensive information about ancient Judaism provided by the Dead Sea Scrolls, and new archaeological discoveries. He writes: “This criterion suggests that a tradition of Jesus may be authentic if it reflects his specific culture and time and not the world defined by the loss of the land and the Temple after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 c.e.” (p. 25). The principle is unobjectionable as it stands, but with Charlesworth it seems to become the governing criterion of Jesus Research. Any New Testament account that does not clearly and neatly fit into the pre-70 Palestinian-Jewish religious and cultural setting seems to be treated as historically suspect, and as a “later” (perhaps Gentile) tradition about Jesus. Obviously, a total contradiction of the pre-70 Palestinian cultural and geographical setting would rule out serious consideration of the full historicity of any gospel passage. For example, in St. Luke’s report of the healing of the paralytic, he says that the sick man’s friends removed the “tiles” from the roof in order to open a hole in order to let him down to Jesus (Lk 5:19). But houses in Galilee in those days did not have roofs made of tiles. Saint Luke was probably thinking of the kind of houses commonly found in Greece with which he was familiar (which may be where he originated: he was not a Palestinian Jew). The story as a whole is reported in all three Synoptic Gospels, so in general it has multiple attestation strongly in its favor — but only Luke mentions the tiles, a detail that is unlikely to be accurate because it contradicts the pre-70 Palestinian context.

The criterion of “Palestinian-Jewish Setting,” therefore, clearly has its uses. The danger here, however, is that a central doctrine of the Christian Faith, the Incarnation (that is, God dwelling among us in person as Jesus Christ) obviously does not fit easily within the beliefs and expectations of pre-70 Palestinian Judaism. It was something new on the scene. Thus, any New Testament evidence or claim that supports the Incarnation easily can be dismissed as a necessarily “later” and “Gentile” addition to the Jesus story as told by the early Palestinian Jesus movement.

That seems to be precisely Charlesworth’s method. For example, he tells us, “the [historical] development of Christology is almost always from a lower to a higher adoration of Jesus” (p. 29). The prologue to John’s gospel (which describes Jesus as the divine “Word made flesh”) was a later addition to the book, Charlesworth claims, prefixed to it perhaps about 95 AD; Matthew’s gospel, which calls Jesus “Emmanuel” (God with us) was not written until probably 85 AD, he claims; earlier, “perhaps in the forties, an unknown follower of Jesus stressed that Jesus ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a servant,’ so that after his obedience God exalted him” (p.28).

Every line of the scenario above, however, is contentious.

One is tempted to reply, with the great Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, that the first recorded Christian sermon (by Peter, in Acts 2:36), the oldest account of a Christian martyr (Stephen, in Acts 7:54-60), the oldest pagan report of the Church (by Pliny, ca. 111 AD), and the oldest recorded liturgical prayer (I Cor. 16:22, and probably also Phil. 2:5-11), all refer to Jesus as divine Lord or God. No doubt belief in the divinity of Jesus gained verbal refinement and theological clarity over time, culminating in St. John’s marvellous prologue to his gospel. But there is certainly data that suggests that this belief began to be present at least implicitly in the hearts and minds of Jesus’ disciples from Easter onward (e.g., Mt. 28:18-20; Jn. 20:28). Charles Gore gives us a plausible summary of the earliest form of Christian belief, especially as it is found in the very first public sermons delivered by the apostles, as recorded in the book of Acts:

What then was “the faith in Jesus” or “in His name” of the first Christian community, intellectually considered? It was not, we should judge, an explicit faith in His deity, but faith in Him as Lord [cf. James 2:1]. “Jesus is Christ and Lord” and “He has sent down upon us His Holy Spirit” was their summary creed. But to believe in the universal Lordship of Jesus, and His enthronement at God’s right hand — to believe that He is to judge the quick and the dead — that from Him the Spirit of God is received and in His name sins are forgiven in baptism and wonders done — that His name is the one name of salvation given to all men under heaven — that He is to be called upon in prayer — that He is present in “the breaking of the bread” to be the spiritual food of His disciples — all this taken together certainly means that He had for them “the values of God.” Not indeed all the “values” of God, for they would not yet have thought of Him, as far as we can see, as the Creator or Sustainer of the world. But with regard to all that concerned their spiritual relations to God, Jesus held towards them such a position as a mere man, however highly endowed, could not have held. (The Reconstruction of Belief, p. 374-375)

One suspects that the very late dating of the gospels by Charlesworth, et al, is based in part on the presupposition that all evidence of “higher” Christology, as not strictly in accord with pre-70 Palestinian-Jewish concepts, must therefore be a later development. But Jesus himself made clear, by his life, death and resurrection, that his identity and mission was new and unprecedented, and so his first disciples — and the evangelists too— only brought out and gradually made explicit for the new Christian movement what was implicit in his words and deeds from the beginning.

It is not clear that Charlesworth’s Palestinian-Jewish straightjacket leaves him any room seriously to consider any such scenario. He writes:

Seeking Jesus’ uniqueness is a very tricky task. At the beginning of this task, it is imperative to comprehend that uniqueness does not lie in what is missing from a thinker’s context. Uniqueness resides in what words have been chosen and which words are stressed. A cluster of words or concepts indicates the creativity of thinkers who are always constrained by the images, symbols, concepts, terms, and words used by those in their own time and culture…. To communicate to others Jesus had to use their words, concepts, hopes, and fears. (p.18, italics mine)

Obviously, since the concept of God the Son coming among us as one of us, and sharing with us all the limitations of a true human life (i.e., the Incarnation) was not part of the Palestinian-Jewish worldview at the time, on Charlesworth’s principles it can ruled out-of-court from the start: Jesus and his earliest disciples could not have believed it and taught it, or even have implied it using old words in new ways, or different words. It is no wonder that Charlesworth goes on to write:

Jesus and the Palestinian Jesus Movement belong within Judaism. Among the most important insights we obtain from this observation is that we should avoid the term Christian when describing first-century sociology and history…. Thus, Jesus should not be imagined as the first Christian. He was a very devout Jew…. (pp. 46, 49).

On the contrary, from the earliest days of the Jesus movement on record, a follower of Jesus was someone who had been “baptized into Christ” (Gal. 3:27), someone who confessed at least implicitly that Jesus is the divine Lord (I Cor. 12:3, cf. I Cor 8:6), and someone who worshipped and prayed to him as such (Acts 7:59; I Cor 16:22; Phil 2:6-11; Rev 22:20) — all concepts that shatter the boundaries of pre-70 Palestinian-Judaism. It is no wonder that Charlesworth cannot attribute such beliefs to Jesus or his earliest disciples, because they also shatter the boundaries of his own methodology.

3) So Who Did Jesus Really Think That He Was?

The real “historical Jesus,” one suspects, cannot be so easily confined either to Greco-Roman or to Palestinian-Jewish categories of thought. There is plenty of data in the gospel accounts that suggests that Jesus of Nazareth made extraordinary claims that fit no one’s clear expectations at the time, and no one’s preconceptions: for example, he claimed the absolute trust, loyalty and devotion of others in a way proper to God alone (Mt 8:22, 11:28-30; Lk 14:26); he claimed to be the true and authoritative interpreter of the Torah (Mt 5:17-48, 19:3-12), and the unsurpassable and unique revealer of God the Father as the only one who truly knows him (even according to “Q”: Mt. 11:27, Lk. 10:22); he claimed to be greater than the Temple (Mt 12:6) and Lord of the Sabbath (Mk 2:28), and that the Kingdom of God was “my Kingdom” (Lk 22:28-30, 23:42; Mt 19:30); he sometimes spoke of Himself in Biblical images and metaphors that in the Old Testament properly belong to God alone (such as the “Bridegroom,” MK 2:19-20; Mk 2:19-20, and the Good Shepherd, Lk 15:3-7); he exhibited a unique intimacy with God, calling Him “Abba,” Father (Mk 14:36), and “My Father in Heaven” (Mt 11:27, 16:17; Lk 2:49), but never “Our Father” in a way that included himself; he exhibited extraordinary, supernatural power, not only in healing the sick, but also in calming a storm at sea and multiplying loaves and fishes to feed multitudes — miracles done not by means of prayer and supplication (as Moses and the prophets had done), but by his own personal authority and command (Mk 5:41; Lk 5:13); he claimed to be the “physician” of sinners (Mt 9:12), the Son of Man sent from heaven with authority on earth to forgive sins (Mk 2:1-12), to die for sinners (Mk 10:45, 14:22-25), and ultimately to be the final Judge of the world (Mt 25:31-46). In all this we leave on one side any consideration of the sayings of Jesus presented in St. John’s Gospel, and focus just on the kinds of things Jesus said or implied about himself in the Synoptic Gospels, and the biblical citations given are just samples: not meant to be a complete (by the way, all this is the very method recommended to us by Dale Allison! — see article five in this web series). The central, explicit message of Jesus in the Synoptic gospels is indeed the proclamation of the dawning of God’s Kingdom, as Charlesworth states, but one could also argue that the implicit message that permeates his words and deeds was that the Kingdom of God is breaking into the world precisely because God Himself has come to dwell among us, sharing our lot in a truly and fully human way, in the person of His Son (Mt 11:27; 22:41-46; Mk 12:6, 13:32; Lk 10:22).

Most of this evidence is not discussed at all by Charlesworth, yet none of it actually contradicts the limited historical portrait of Jesus that, according to Charlesworth, the consensus of contemporary research has established. Thus, good additional books for students to read would be Francois Dreyfus, O.P., from L’Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, Did Jesus Know He Was God? (Franciscan Herald Press, 1984), or go back and read the Catholic scholar Karl Adam’s classic, The Son of God (1934), and see how easily these works fit with the assured results of contemporary scholarship — even as they go well beyond them. From Adam’s day to our own, “orthodox” New Testament scholars do not claim to be able to “prove” the divinity of Jesus Christ, but they do claim that belief in Jesus as God incarnate, crucified and risen from the dead, fits the historical data that we possess better than any alternative explanations on offer. In short, it is the theory that explains and makes sense of most of the facts, rather than explaining them away.

In the end, we are left with the same reactions to the real, historical Jesus that his own contemporaries had, and with the same questions that cry out for an answer: “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works?” (Mt. 13:54), and “Why does this man speak thus? … Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mk. 2:7), and “Who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him?” (Mk. 4:41)

Next Time: Dale Allison’s Historical Jesus as a Foundation for Gospel-Lite

Robert Stackpole, STD
©The Mere Christain Fellowship, 2018