Witherington: What Have They Done with Jesus?

I have two books on my “to be read” shelf that I also intend to blog through. Since I just completed Random Designer, by Dr. Richard Colling, and I have Francis Collins, The Language of God which also deals with evolution, I decided to take Ben Witherington III, What Have They Done with Jesus? next. I’ll get to Collins’ book next.

In addition to giving me a change of subject, its topic is also closer to areas in which I have some expertise. The word “some” should be noted here–I’m not a New Testament scholar. I’m largely a popularizer, and my academic training emphasized Hebrew scriptures. But working in a church, rather than an academic environment, I have been forced to spend a great deal of time on the New Testament just because that’s what most church members want to study.

My procedure for blogging through a book is to read a chapter or block of chapters and then write my reaction on the blog immediately, rather than read the whole book and then write a more comprehensive review. This can result in some need to correct my impressions later, and in the case of Random Designer, that did happen. It is perhaps a slightly post-modern way to read a book, but I don’t think I’m very post-modern, so maybe I do it just for fun.

I’m writing this introduction to my series immediately after reading the introduction. It’s a little hard to nail down an author’s position just based on their introduction, but Dr. Witherington stakes out his position fairly carefully and clearly. I may regret putting it like that if I find that my initial impressions are not borne out by the rest of the book. But here goes in any case.

1. He favors the canonical gospels over any set of non-canonical gospels.
2. He regards the canonical gospels as either eyewitness testimony or the testimony of those who had heard eyewitnesses.
3. He believes there have been numerous theories about Jesus, presented with little or no evidence, and received with far too little skepticism.
4. He finds a certain bias against the supernatural in some historical scholarship, which he does not believe is justified.
5. The church was essentially put together by people who encountered the risen Christ.
6. He is not a fundamentalist, and understands a tendency to go overboard in a reaction against the assertions of many TV preachers and their dogmatism.

I find it easy to place myself in relation to Dr. Witherington’s general position based on four books/topics he brings up as an illustration. I would echo his comments almost exactly on Michael Baigent’s work (The Jesus Papers and others), though I haven’t done any serious study of it. I would also agree with his assessment of the Gospel of Judas and the hype surrounding it. I think he is a bit too hard on Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, and you can read my comments on it on this blog. I have not read James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty, which he believes deserves more rebuttal than any of those. From those elements it would appear that I am a bit to the liberal side of Dr. Witherington, though not extremely far off. It seems to me that this should be a book with which I can engage quite profitably.

Let me give a final note on my own qualifications to comment. Unlike Dr. Witherington I have not done serious original scholarship on the historical Jesus, and I’m unlikely ever to do so. On the other hand, I have consider practice with the critical methodologies used in this process, and can read most of these source documents in their original languages. There is a substantial weakness in historical Jesus materials published for a popular audience. They generally skip over the dirty details of how their conclusions are produced from a technical point of view.

Now obviously one can’t get too technical with an audience that lacks the appropriate background, but there is a need for some more foundation. So many popular debates on the historical Jesus simply involve throwing out theories by various experts along with the credentials of those experts, but with no understanding of how those theories were formed, or how they might be supported. Some of the popular material (The DaVinci Code, some of the more bizarre theories on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so forth) don’t really require such analysis–they have no theoretical basis.

Other materials, such as Burton Mack’s work on Q, would benefit from a little more explanation if only to cause the reader to pause in awe and wonder and the detail of Mack’s analysis based on the extreme paucity of evidence on which it is based. Some readers (I’m included) are fuzzy enough about the boundaries of Q without dividing it into three layers, and then analyzing the communities served by each of those layers. On the other hand, even though it might be viewed as radical by many, folks like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg do a substantially better job, though still leaving the lay reader without any real foundation.

On the other hand, I’m not satisfied from the historical point of view with an assumption that the canonical gospels must be historically accurate. I don’t believe Witherington makes such an assumption–I believe he has as his conclusion that the gospels are the best sources and are largely reliable. That is based on my previous reading of his work.

I hope you’ll follow along with me on this journey. I will likely take many side trips through the fascinating material that is available.

(I have written two pamphlets that I use as handouts, Understanding the Search for the Historical Jesus and What is Biblical Criticism. These are incredibly brief, and the resources need updating with the last couple of years of materials, but they can be of some help.)