Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Historical Jesus

  • Link: Did Jesus Perform Miracles?

    I’d like to call attention to a discussion on the blog Across the Atlantic regarding whether Jesus actually performed miracles. This blog features point/counterpoint between Antonio Piñero and Thomas Hudgins. We have thus far Part 1a, Part 1b, and Part 2a. I’ll leave it to you to follow if you wish.

  • Some Thoughts on the Christ of Faith after Reading Hebrews

    As most of my readers know, I’ve been working on revising my study guide to Hebrews. At least I keep mentioning it. I’m only about two years overdue on the project. When one deadline or another must be missed I tend to miss mine and work on other people’s stuff.

    So today I was reading in Hebrews, especially the first four verses, and I got to thinking about the distinction between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith.” There are various words used to make the distinction, and it is not a distinction that is uncontroversial. On the one hand there are those who don’t think the Jesus of history is really accessible in a meaningful way, so if we, as Christians, are going to discuss Jesus at all, it will be as the Christ of faith. There are others who think that the Jesus of history is so well established that there is no need of any distinction at all. There are, of course, many variations on these views.

    I am not one to deny the importance of history, but at the same time I doubt our ability to access it in any absolute fashion. If one studies history, I believe one studies probability, so I would describe the Jesus of history not as a necessarily accurate portrayal of who Jesus was, but rather Jesus as he can be accessed by purely historical methodology. Just how accurate you believe that picture is will depend on how you evaluate the documents we have, not to mention the methodology we use. But for me the Jesus who can be established historically, while important, is not critical in any sort of detail.

    There is, for me, definitely a “Christ of faith.” That is the Jesus in whom I placed my own faith as a nine year old at a church in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. I made that confession when I knew little of a Jesus of history or a Christ of faith. I proceeded to encounter Christ personally through washing one another’s feet and through participating in the act of communion. The person whose feet I washed had walked for three days over muddy trails to be at that place at that time. He was laughing the entire time I washed his feet and then he washed mine. It was a friendly laugh. In it, I encountered a Jesus who definitely transcended history. He is one reason why I cannot conceive of an amount of historical reasoning that would actually change my faith at the core. The details of the stuff I believe might change, and indeed they have over the years. But at the core, that is my Christ of faith.

    As I read from Hebrews it occurred to me that while the author of Hebrews builds on history, the Christ he preaches could never be established by historical means. We might make factual statements of all that can be construed as an historical claim, and we would have an extraordinary person by biblical standards (assuming Hebrew scriptures at that point), but that person would not be God, would not be exalted, and would not be the foundation of our faith. All of that is founded on a person, and have no doubt that I believe fully that Jesus came in the flesh, i.e. that God has walked among us and has experienced what we must experience and died. But even a person rising from the dead does not make that person God. There is no set of criteria which a historian could use to say, “This person is God because they meet the criteria.”

    Rather, that is a matter of faith. I don’t believe it merely because I have the witness of the New Testament writers, or their witness to witnesses, as is expressed in the early verses of Hebrews 2. Rather, I can believe Hebrews 2 because of what happened when I was nine years old. That experience matches mine, and the two together, through the power of the Holy Spirit, become my faith.

    I think it is very easy to change one’s views about history. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to change that experience, even if one is distant from it for a time, as I was.

    (Though I formed my view of faith before I read these books, they do elucidate my views, and are both by Edward W. H. Vick: History and Christian Faith, Philosophy for Believers.)

     

  • In Which I Discover that I Am Not a Thinking Person

    I just made this discovery this morning.

    I mentioned Jerry Coyne’s site in an earlier post Five Sites I read Because I Disagree, and I still read it. I get some good information about evolutionary science and great cat pictures and videos. But Jerry Coyne is not particularly friendly to believers.

    Now I want to be clear. I’m not one to be terribly upset by vigorously expressed viewpoints, so I’m not offended by the new atheists. I’m more concerned with Christians who use excessive rhetoric. After all, we’re supposed to be on the same team. So the new atheists are proud and open about their atheism and their objections to religion, and I have no objection.

    So today I read Coyne’s latest on Bart Ehrman’s new book in which he presents evidence that Jesus existed. Now one has to be careful in stating Ehrman’s thesis. Ehrman doesn’t mean that the divine savior of the world of Christian doctrine existed. He means that there was a man Jesus who existed in history and about which certain things can be said with reasonable historical validity. (I haven’t yet read the book, but I think this much is clear from the reviews. Further, it’s an unsurprising thesis.)

    Coyne is concerned that people will misunderstand Ehrman, and that Christian believers will take comfort from the book. Coyne says, “I’m hoping he isn’t being deliberately ambiguous to cater to believers.” Probably not. Ehrman hasn’t really been known to cater to believers, though his book jackets seem to be designed to annoy them. Compared to the relatively tame content, the jackets manage to stand out as shocking. (I previously blogged through Misquoting Jesus [link to the summary and conclusion with links to the parts].)

    Then his penultimate sentence:

    But what is important, and all those Christians who buy the book should know this, is that both Ehrman and atheists see not a scintilla of evidence that Jesus was the son of God or divine in any way, was born of a virgin or resurrected, or is the way to salvation.

    Really? I would have thought that the important issue was whether Ehrman had done his historical work with any accuracy. Not having read the book yet, I can’t comment in detail, but I suspect he has. I can certainly understand his annoyance with the mythicists who use very poor historical methodology. I see the annoyance that Ehrman seems to be expressing as the the annoyance of a scholar at the use of unscholarly methods and approaches. Coyne would doubtless be quite annoyed were the methods of mythicists used in science. (See James McGrath on this issue–for example, Creationists, Mythicists, and Schroedinger’s Scholar Fallacy.)

    But then there’s the last sentence:

    That remains fiction to all thinking people.

    I am, of course, aware that Coyne regards this as fiction. I’m aware that Ehrman does as well. But that wasn’t the point of Ehrman’s book.

    It’s an interesting form of attack. If you think Jesus was divine in any way, then you are not a thinking person. Not You are a person whose thinking is faulty. Not even You are a thinking person who is mistaken on this point. If you disagree, you are just not a thinking person.

    I think Christians should be forthright and open about what they believe. But when I hear a Christian say something like “You have to be stupid to see the universe, and not believe in God,” I will tend to point out that there are definitely very intelligent atheists, those who are able to think clearly on issues about which we agree. Why would one assume they are suddenly stupid because they disagree on one point? My preference would be for one to simply say, “It is not sensible to assume that something came from nothing.” That may simply push the issue back a level, but it is an attack on the idea, and by implication on the person’s thinking in that particular area, but not an attack upon the person.

    But since I confess that I regard Jesus as divine, not to mention savior of the world, something that is not really an historical question as such, I guess I am not a thinking person.

    Oh well!

     

  • It’s Raining Books, Hallelujah!

    I haven’t been blogging much for the last two weeks, as I’ve been pretty busy with other things.

    While I was too busy to get right two them, all four books that I had on interlibrary loan arrived at the same time, one of the unfortunate problems of requesting lists of books. Several of them are pretty big as well. Now I have just under a month for the one I have for the longest period of time.

    Some of these were recommended by readers, particularly Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which was recommended to me by a commenter as a follow-up, hopefully more convincing than What Have They Done with Jesus by Ben Witherington. I owe my readers another post or so on that previous book. Perhaps when I’m done with Bauckham, I’ll compare the two. At the same time, I requested Bauckham’s The Gospel for All Audiences, which looks like interesting reading.

    The same commenter recommended DeSilva’s An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods and Ministry Formation. Besides having some comments on the same topic (gospel eyewitnesses), I feel the urge to read another New Testament introduction. It’s useful to do so every so often–it helps me organize my thoughts.

    Finally, I have Waltke’s An Old Testament Theology: An Exegetical, Canonical, and Thematic Approach, which is also a fairly substantial volume. I wanted to read a clearly evangelical Old Testament theology, and this looks like a good option.

    Considering my other reading, I could have wished that the books would have arrived over a longer period of time, but hopefully I’ll be able to do them justice in the time available. Reading on books that are on my own shelves will have to go on the back burner.

  • Spectrum of Views on Historical Reading of the Gospels

    I often present a standard spectrum of views on reading the gospels as history, one which extends from the conservative, or even fundamentalist side, which claims that all details of any type must be historical, to the opposite radical conclusion which claims that the gospels are entirely fiction. Most discussion goes on somewhere between that, with many conservatives allowing for minor differences in what they regard as eyewitness reports, and few scholars claiming that there is no historical basis in the gospels.

    But there is another spectrum I’d like to point out this Easter season: Just how important is history to our faith? These two spectra may not be completely independent, but in my experience they can be. I have encountered people who believe pretty much whatever the gospels say is historical, but don’t regard that as terribly important. On the other hand there are folks who think that the “Jesus of faith” is the key, no matter how one takes the historical evidence.

    I personally tend to give the gospels the benefit of the doubt, though I have no need to reconcile issues like the number of demoniacs who met Jesus on the other side of the sea, or the numbers of denials and cock crowings, or who precisely showed up when on Easter morning. It is important to me to regard these as unimportant, but I’m not bothered too much if you want to reconcile them. I’m not disturbed, on the other hand, if the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000 is regarded as one event told multiple times with variations, or two distinct events.

    In the modern western world, we think first of facts and history, and whether this is all true, in the sense that it happened as described. But that can lead us to try to read the gospel to answer a list of questions that the gospel writers weren’t trying to answer. What I’d recommend, and what I try to do for myself on a regular basis, is to simply read the each gospel on its own and try to see just what the writer was trying to pretend. Then I can turn to history, or whatever other issues are involved. But my faith is profoundly based on their story and their testimony and the way that connects to mine.

    Chronology can be fun, in fact I enjoy it, but it is not the root of my faith.

  • Book: Conflict Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus

    This will not even be an attempt at a full review of this book by Marcus Borg. I just want to present a few notes. Such a review would take more time and more skill that I believe I can bring to bear.

    I generally find myself appreciating the spiritual implications that Borg finds in the teachings of Jesus, but I’m not always on the same wavelength in a historical sense. After reading N. T. Wright and Borg side by side, something they have made easy to do, I often feel more in tune with Borg’s conclusions and at the same time more in agreement with Wright’s arguments. There has to be something wrong with this, and perhaps in time I’ll get more clear on the issue. I have a strong streak of agnosticism regarding the details of any portrayal of the life of Jesus.

    But Conflict is a book that will be of value to you irrespective of your position on the historical details, because in it Borg goes into detail on the background for his conclusions about a considerable number of sayings of Jesus and even a few miracle reports, especially the healings on the Sabbath.

    He contends that the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees is often misunderstood. To put it simplistically, it is often seen as one of hypocrisy vs sincerity or surface vs. heart religion. Borg sees it as two different conceptions of the identify of Israel. In supporting this position he provides some wonderful fodder even for those who may come to different conclusions. I was particularly helped by the material on the temple, the meaning of the cleansing incident, and the predictions of its destruction.

    N. T. Wright provides an excellent introduction (15 pages) to the current edition, which is valuable in pointing out where Wright would disagree. The disagreements are not extensive, however, on this topic, and Wright strongly commends the book overall.

    I am glad I picked this volume up.

    Numerical rating: 4

  • Reacting to Biblical Criticism

    How does Biblical criticism relate to faith? How does one relate this to the work of the Jesus Seminar, for instance? Scot McKnight has an excellent answer in his post A Letter to a Question-full Christian (HT: Pseudo-Polymath). McKnight doesn’t deny the differences in the gospel texts (the main issue at hand), but he also uses some common sense explanations about how such things occur, and how that might relate to historicity.

    I do disagree with one sentence:

    No one dies for a myth, or at least they shouldn’t.

    I believe it is precisely for the myth that people are willing to die. But I am absolutely certain I am using the word “myth” in a different sense. If Jesus was simply a guy who died and was raised, there would be nothing to believe in. Think about his life. There is nothing there that has not at least been claimed of someone else, and except for the virgin birth, you can find similar experiences in scripture–martyr’s deaths, even resurrections. None of that convinced us that Jesus was God.

    We commonly use the term “myth” to as a sort of synonym for “wild fictional tale without historical foundation.” (OK, I exaggerate slightly, but allow me the fun.) I’m referring to the part that “ostensibly relates historical events usu. of such character as to serve to explain some practice, belief, institution, or natural phenomenon, and that is esp. associated with religious rites and beliefs” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary). The point is that we give greater meaning to the story of Jesus than the apparent physical happenings would warrant, even were all of them proven true. In my view nothing in the record would make us decide Jesus was God. We would probably decide he was the most impressive of prophets.

    But the myth that grows around him, that builds in the meaning and relates it to me now. Thus history can be flexible–not absent, but malleable–as Christians understand the mythos that results from Jesus.

    McKnight’s conclusion is great:

    Now, here’s where I have come: I believe in the Gospels and what they say about Jesus not simply because I have learned that they can be trusted on the basis of historical methods and inquiry, but more importantly because God has spoken to me through those records, because I have found Jesus to be utterly saving and wonderful, and because the Spirit who speaks to me is the Spirit who has spoken to others — beginning with the apostles who put down these sayings and events into words in such a way that the Church — the Church that is led by the same Spirit — has constantly told just this story about Jesus. It is the only story of Jesus I know; it is the story of Jesus that tells my story. Faith, my friend, is always involved in everything we confess in our faith, including the truthfulness of the story about Jesus. [emphasis mine]

  • On the Retirement of Marcus Borg

    Marcus Borg has announced his retirement. After completing his current class at Oregon State University, where he has been the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, he will retire, and may even slow down a bit! He does have a few books in the works and other outlines in mind, according to this story in the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

    I have watched a little bit of Christian discussion (CompuServe Christian Fellowship Forum) of this retirement with some interest, though I haven’t gotten involved in any of the debates there. I think it is pretty much pointless for us to debate Borg’s state of grace or to pray for him more, or less for that matter, than anyone else in a similar relationship to us. I can observe that he is a person who diligently seeks, speaks honestly, and doesn’t give up.

    I have long recommended that if you are going to read just a single book on the life of Jesus from the liberal perspective–and Borg is doubtless liberal–then let it be one of Borg’s, preferably Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. I prefer him for this purpose to John Dominic Crossan, though I think Crossan is a bit more thorough in discussing his sources and methodology. Crossan seems to dry his Christianity out, while Borg maintains an active spirituality that is reflected in his works.

    I recall one time as I was preparing for a sermon dealing with historical Jesus studies. I wanted to find readings that would include a short statement from a conservative and a liberal perspective just what the essence of Jesus actually is. I wanted to put on display what, at the core, a good representative from either side of center would see as the right answer to that question. As I often do when looking for words that communicate, I read a couple of selections to my wife to get her reaction. Both were from The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, by Borg and N. T. Wright. Now I have to say that while I have a generous dose of agnosticism regarding our ability to prove historical events, and even question the use of the term “proof” at all, and don’t believe that one can ultimately prove a miracle in any case, since historical study involves some sense of probability, I still would tend more in the direction of Wright than Borg on the historical issues. Wright is a wonderfully thorough–some would say too thorough–scholar. Yet after reading the two passages, my wife’s suggestion was simply to read Borg’s. It caught the essence for her.

    Now I don’t claim the mantle of orthodoxy, less because of massive disagreements with orthodox doctrine. I am a trinitarian Christian. My own answer, theologically, to who Jesus was is that he was both son of man and son of God, fully divine and fully human, and that this simple point is at the core of Christianity. I am a supernatural theist, in the sense that I believe God can and does intervene in the natural world, though I believe he does so rarely and only for very particular purposes. But the claim of orthodoxy, in my view, requires that someone spend more time defending a doctrinal standard than one does being a spiritual person. By “spiritual person” I mean one who is in communion with God and filled with God’s Spirit. Now there is nothing about orthodox that prevents such spiritual living, and in my view much that helps. But an obsession with orthodoxy can and often does prevent us from keeping our focus.

    In the same way, someone who is reading Marcus Borg from the conservative side of the spectrum can spend all of his time determining what is wrong with everything that Borg teaches. If you are conservative, there is no doubt that you will find plenty, and you will doubtless find lots of reasons to object. From your perspective, you should. In fact, from my perspective, I do as well. But nonetheless I have found reading Borg’s books to be an educational experience, and a spiritually challenging experience.

    Though I don’t think any of the three fall on the extreme, which I reserve for folks who deny the existence of a historical Jesus at all, I think it’s instructive to compare Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Bishop John Shelby Spong. All react to an orthodox Christianity that they think is failing. When I look at their works, I ask myself just why it is that people see that orthodoxy as failing, and since I hold more orthodox doctrines than any of the three, I have to ask myself whether those orthodox doctrines are, themselves, problematic. As I said above, I don’t think so. I think an obsession with doctrine can be problematic, but I know people who seem, to me at least (and I must guard against judgment, favorable or not), to be genuinely and truly spiritual in the sense I’ve discussed, who hold many different doctrinal positions including ones with which I have little sympathy. I know conservative, hard-line Calvinists with whom I could join on a broad range of social and spiritual issues, provided we could trust one another sufficiently to do so.

    Spong takes a few root ideas and runs with them, often making massive reconstructions based on very limited evidence. I should, of course, note that pretty much all purely historical reconstructions of the life of Jesus and the early Christian church operate on the basis of very little evidence. I think Spong’s concern is genuine, but I think his reactions are not so well considered. (I make these comments simply to bracket my reaction to Borg. Discussing Spong’s views would require a great deal of time on their own. Crossan is the dry scholar. I truly enjoyed reading his longer works on the historical Jesus and early Christian history, and yet there I find that while I get a good deal of food for my mind, especially in responding to the methology, I find very little food for soul and spirit. Borg manages to do both careful scholarship, avoiding Spong’s flights of fancy and at the same time Crossan’s dryness.

    I do need to note that another favorite of mine, N. T. Wright, is drier than Crossan and so extremely thorough with his details that he can drive you nuts while you’re agreeing with him! A similar book from the conservative perspective is Darrell Bock’s Jesus According to Scripture which sets out with the fairly basic task of presenting a picture of Jesus based purely on the canonical gospels, and winds up as a potential cure for insomnia. Yet Bock’s work is an essential, in my view, precisely because of its thoroughness in dealing with issues in the canonical gospels. I would no longer discuss the historicity, the meaning, or the setting of any saying or event in the life of Jesus without having read Bock’s outline on the subject.

    I welcome Borg’s retirement, not because I have longed to see him out of academic life, but because I hope to have the opportunity to read and be challenged by many more of his books. Perhaps he’ll even give a lecture somewhere near where I am so that I can go and listen. Interacting with his work has been a growing experience for me.