The Meaning of Jesus..some thoughts

I finished reading The Meaning of Jesus; Two Visions, by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright.

Readers will remember that this was one of four books that I added to an impressive reading list. I have yet to finish, or even start, the other three, though I did renew them. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions is a point/counterpoint book compiled of essays from Borg and Wright addressing Jesus' view of himself, his birth, his death and resurrection, the Second Coming and what it means to live a Christian life.

They mostly disagree, except when they don't. ;-)

I should end the review thusly.

Except, I won't because although the point/counterpoint did get a little tedious and bogged down sometimes, the book provoked several reactions in me.

I will admit that I am generally sympathetic to Borg's views and I anticipated that I would read his thoughts and find what I was looking for, a way to keep Jesus even as more and more of what I used to think of as literal truth seems to be slipping through my fingers. For the most part, I liked what he had to say, though there were times when even I couldn't take the vague, wishy-washy stances that would pop up. Even as I drift toward Progressive(?) or Liberal(?) Christianity, I still get irritated at the lack of conviction and certainty that I encounter. It's part of my make-up. I want to know what THE TRUTH is and plant my flag there. However, everyone has a different map and idea about where that location is, so I just wander around hoping that I am at least in the general vicinity.

It bugs me to no end.

I had previously tried to read N.T Wright's Surprised by Hope, but could never get past the first few chapters. He simply couldn't hold my interest in that book. I think that was partly due to the fact that I was very busy during the time that I was trying to read it. One other reason was that I couldn't read Wright without hearing C.S. Lewis. I've already read much of Lewis' work, so the unmistakeable voice echoing in Wright was quite familiar. The points about "chronological snobbery", the criticism of Enlightenment thinking, the reliance on Lewis' apologetic moves, they all seemed to be Lewis simply refitted and fine-tuned. I guess that's fine, but if I wanted to hear Lewis' point of view, I would read Lewis.

Curious if I was spot-on in my estimation of Wright, I decided to see if I could find out more about whether Wright credits Lewis as an influence and came across this article in which Wright both praises and criticizes Lewis. (I'm always surprised when I am right about something that I guessed intuitively.)

After finishing the book, I pondered an idea that has occurred to me before but I have had difficulty formulating into words.

Wright works mightily to put Jesus in a historical, literal, very Jewish context. He attempts to situate Jesus as a faithful Jew going against a corrupted form of Israel and Jewish religion. His interpretation is that Israel's desire for a national redemption, not unlike previous ones they had experienced through exile and return, was the wrong desire. Then, he claims that Jesus' teachings about the Kingdom of God were meant to portray a new way for Israel to "be Israel".

As Wright goes through his argument, I feel this version of Jesus who is concerned about "Israel" and who is trying to get Israel to become the light of the world by supplanting the current Temple and its administration with subversive truths, to be lacking appeal and cohesion for me, personally.

Why?

A Jesus who is trying to get Israel to "be Israel" in a new way, or what I think Wright implies, in the real way it was always intended to "be Israel", is a Jesus who ultimately failed. After the first wave of Jewish conversions, Judaism and Christianity split apart and Israel, as a historical, physical people, does not decide to take Jesus up on his offer.

Wright's literal, historical, mostly orthodox view of Jesus completely undermines any sense that Jesus accomplished what he wanted to accomplish.

In addressing the divinity of Jesus, Wright writes:

I do not think Jesus "knew he was God" in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself,"Well, I never! I'm the second person of the Trinity!" Rather, as part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.

This ties in with my previous thought. Does presenting a Jesus who doesn't "know" that he is God help or hurt Wright's orthodoxy? I mean, he's presenting a Jesus who seems to be interested in getting Israel to behave and act in a certain "true" way, one which is quite different than the way Israel had seen itself throughout Scripture and history, and yet he seems to not "know" that he is God in the trinitarian sense with which many orthodox Christians are familiar.

It's unsettling.

Borg, on the other hand, presents Jesus as a Jewish mystic who was more connected with God than the average person, while simultaneously denying the literal resurrection, as it is normally understood and presented. Borg's Jesus seems bigger than Wright's Jesus even though Wright represents traditional Christian doctrine far more closely than Borg.

It has a strange effect upon me, this idea that tying Jesus into a very specific, historical mode, complete with a representative, 1st century mindset, somehow makes him less "real" to me than Borg's ethereal, metaphorical understanding of Jesus.

I'll post more on this later because I'm not quite done thinking it through.

Starting From Square One

continuing from yesterday's post....

It became very clear to me that most of what I thought I knew about the gospels was very different from what most scholars thought they knew about the gospels.

I had encountered scholarly ideas about the Historical Jesus before, but only in passing. My immediate reaction to these ideas was to reject them as corruptions of the faith. When I first heard of the Jesus Seminar and its quest to figure out what Jesus really said, I scoffed at what seemed like a foolish and heretical undertaking. How could one use the gospels as a source to discredit large parts of the gospels? How could a group of people imagine that they could scan through Jesus' words and pick out what they liked, or approved of, and reject the rest?

It didn't make sense to me. It couldn't make sense to me. I didn't know enough of the whys and hows that drove such an enterprise.

The tables have turned for me. I do understand, now, why scholars would even attempt such a thing. I don't necessarily endorse all of the conclusions, but I have learned enough to realize that the issue of pinning down the gospels is much more complex than I had previously thought.

When I, a simple, amateur, 21st century person with no ability to read Greek/Aramaic, can piece together that the gospel writers are tinkering with things in order to encourage the early Christian community, then we have a serious issue that needs to be addressed. At least, it needs to be addressed if you are coming from an evangelical, inerrancy-based faith, because all of a sudden the texts are not foolproof and the basis for your faith has disappeared from right under your feet.

Because we are taught to trust the texts implicitly, discovering that the texts contradict themselves, not in insignificant ways, but in ways that change the spiritual message of the text, is quite disorienting. The fundamental difference between earthly rewards in the present age versus future rewards in a completely new age is vast. The general theme is the same; sacrificial acts for God will bring future rewards. However, the mode of operation and expectation for a particular believer is extremely different.

It isn't hard to see the dilemma. A believer reads the passage in Mark and places their faith in seeing a tangible reward from God in this current life. We have prosperity teachers, or even faith healers, who have no difficulty finding passages to back them up. Conservative Christians are quick to label them heretics and point out how wrong a theology of wealth and prosperity, or procuring healing by simply believing for it is, but all prosperity teachers are doing is taking real passages from the actual texts that we have and trying to work up a path that gets them through life.

That grates against an evangelical sense of certainty and the concept that we can figure out God, Life and the Meaning of the Universe if we just study the texts a little harder. The feeling is that it's all in there if we just look hard enough.

Back to the Gospel of John and my love for it.

I realize, now, why I have always liked it so much. It addresses all the things that the other gospels don't deal with, or leave hanging. It brings together all of the theological developments and thrusts of the early Christians and formulates them into a grand story line with theological explanations of key issues for the early church. It fleshes out the nature of Christ's human and divine natures, the Eucharist, and salvation by faith. It is a polished narrative instead of a collection of miscellaneous teachings and parables.

However, I've been left with a thorn in my side. How to take the Gospel of John? Because most of it is original material unto itself, it presents a problem. Because it is attempting to address theological questions that have arisen after Jesus is no longer around, how much of it is historical?

Coincidentally, NT Scholar Larry Hurtado has just posted an essay that explains the Gospel of John in terms of "remembrance and revelation" . He writes:

I propose that the author consciously used what he regarded as the greater insight into Jesus’ significance that he ascribed to the Holy Spirit (or in GJohn’s terms “Paraclete”) after Jesus’ death/departure. I also propose that the author tells readers that he’s doing this, that he expected his readers to see it and appreciate it.

For simple historical-Jesus inquiry (a sort of, “just the facts, Jack” assumption), this will be judged anachronism, of course. If we were to explain to the author of GJohn modern historical-Jesus interests, he’d probably be puzzled or maybe amused, and might quickly agree that this isn’t his agenda. Instead, he wants to say that the historical figure was all along the embodiment of divine glory, but it wasn’t really till after Jesus’ death and resurrection that this became fully apparent.

John knows he's not writing "history" in the sense that we think of it. He, instead, is writing what he feels the Holy Spirit has revealed to Christians after the resurrection, mainly through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, Jesus didn't say X, Y, Z in a literal sense, but once he was resurrected and believers practiced their faith through the Holy Spirit, things fell into place. Teachings took on new meanings, meanings that John believes were always there but were not cognitively accessible and understandable to the disciples at the immediate moment they were taught.

I'll continue more of what I think this means for me, personally, later on.

Lord or Legend?--an interesting read

I just finished reading Lord Or Legend? Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, by Gregory Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy.

So...my thoughts?

Overall, I really enjoyed the book. It is aimed at the relatively recent theory that Jesus never existed as an historic person, but instead is a compilation of 1st century myths. I first encountered this idea in the past year after reading The Jesus Puzzle ,by Earl Doherty, and responded with a couple of posts about it before abandoning my attempt in the face of daily life; something that happens frequently to me.

Right before Christmas I got into a conversation with Lifewish that meandered its way through about a million different ideas, some of which came to bear on the general reliability of the Gospels and the Bible as a whole. I had asked for this book by that time and was happy to receive it and reexamine some of the things that I had suspended because of a busy schedule.

I enjoyed the book and thought it did a fairly good job in addressing some of the more pertinent issues about the legendary Jesus theory. Very frequently, I wanted more detail than what was offered. There are copious amounts of end notes, which are great if you want to research some of the book's claims yourself. I might be interested in tracking down the more academic version of the book later. Boyd and Eddy had a more general purpose for this version. To quote from the book's intro:

...we have written this book for the interested layperson and have thus attempted to keep it as brief and as readable as possible without overly compromising the quality of the scholarship. If some readers desire to explore certain issues raised here in a more thorough manner, we encourage them to consult our more academic (and much longer!) co-authored book, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition.

I'll have to check the library, or Amazon for that.

Some of the arguments Boyd and Eddy make are more convincing than others, and some would be flatly rejected by true skeptics, but the overall scope of the book would definitely be an encouragement to believers who are questioning the basic historicity of the Gospels. It does require some familiarity with New Testament issues and scholars, so it might not be the perfect read for someone who is just dipping their toe in the waters of scholarly criticism. It would be a 201 level course, instead of a more introductory 101 level.

I hope to write about a few of the more interesting points the authors make over the next few weeks.....she says knowing she may never be able to get to it!

Refuting "The Jesus Puzzle"--Part Two

Part1 is here. Intro is here. This is a work in progress. I will add more to these articles as I have the time.

Throughout Doherty's article, The Jesus Puzzle, he consistently quotes the Pauline Epistles as his source text and the departure point for all his observations regarding a historical Jesus and the development of Christianity from within the New Testament. Within the article itself, he does not seem to question Paul or his writings. That is not the same as saying that he believes them, as far as their theological content, but that he seems willing to accept them as generally intact, historical letters, from a person named Paul, to various churches in the region. Doherty gleans them for supposed meaning and uses them as a measurement for the dichotomy between the physical, human person of Jesus, and the spiritual, divine aspect of Jesus. In his mind the two are vastly different, and Paul's reliance on the Supernatural Jesus is evidence that the historical Jesus never existed.

This reliance on Paul, but the rejection of the gospels and Acts, presents a problem for Doherty's ideas. If he accepts Paul's writings as authentic and trustworthy in most cases--though he always tends to discount sections which most obviously disprove his points--then he has an intellectual dilemma. How do you rely on an author's texts, yet refuse to believe anything historical that he actually says?

For instance, Doherty writes in Piece No. 3 :

How do Paul and other apostles like himself know of their Son and Redeemer? Is
it through the words and deeds of Jesus on earth? Through traditions about him
going back to those who had witnessed his ministry? No, Paul has learned of the
Son through revelation and scripture. "God chose to reveal his Son through me,"
he says in Galatians 1:16.

Doherty's contention is that Paul never learned anything about Jesus from actual eyewitnesses, or through earthly knowledge. He takes Galatians 1:16 out of context, portraying it as an admission from Paul that all his knowledge of Jesus came from a vision and nothing else. Acts recounts the story of Saul/Paul on the Damascus road, but Doherty has removed that avenue of explanation. Further into his paper he claims:

Acts, too, as an historical witness to Jesus or the beginnings of the
Christian movement, cannot be relied upon. The more recent tendency is to see
Acts as a second century product, probably of Roman provenance, highly
tendentious and written for the purpose of creating a picture of Christian
origins traceable to a unified body of apostles in Jerusalem who were followers
of an historical Jesus. Much of it is sheer fabrication, and highly incompatible
with information found in the letters of Paul.[emphasis mine]

So, we have the reason that he rejects Acts; it doesn't line up with Paul's epistles, in his opinion.

Let's take a look at that claim. Acts relates Paul's life and ministry highlights. It presents Saul/Paul as a persecutor of Christians, even being present during Stephen's stoning

Acts 7:58b
Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul.

Acts 8:1 and 3
And Saul was there, giving approval to his death.......

But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house he dragged off men and women and put them in prison

Paul writes in his epistles:

1 Corinthians 15:9
For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

Galatians 1:13
For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it.

He is portrayed as seeing a vision of Jesus, being converted on the road to Damascus, and spending some time there after his conversion teaching that Jesus was the Son of God.(Acts 9:1-30)

Paul relates the same timeline for events in Galatians 1:14-2:10, detailing his interactions with Peter specifically.

Once we begin to see that there is quite a correlation between Acts and Paul's epistles, even if Doherty still views it as a "sheer fabrication," he still must explain what he thinks of Paul. Paul tells us he knew Peter and other apostles. Paul tells us that he was excelling in Judaism, which means he would have been very aware of any controversy within the religion and any events related to it. He might not have believed in Jesus, but he had surely heard about him in his studying and time in Jerusalem. Paul also reiterates throughout his epistles that he is not making up his story, but that it is true and factual

The ultimate question for Doherty is what he believes about Paul.

In order to throw out Acts and the Gospels on Paul's supposed "silence," he would have to cast Paul in the role of manipulative liar. If Paul is a manipulative liar, then you could hardly look to his works as proof that there was no historical Jesus. Instead, throwing out Paul's epistles would eliminate the so-called "problem of silence" that Doherty thinks is so damning to the historical Jesus.

So, which is it? Are Paul's letters authentic and trustworthy? If they are, then how does Doherty reconcile the historical facts within them and Paul's claims of knowing the original apostles of Jesus--eyewitnesses to Jesus' earthly life? Was Paul duped? That hardly seems believable for someone who was so heavily invested in persecuting the church before his conversion. It also seems highly unlikely that Paul would abandon all his striving in Judaism for a legend he heard passed along by, what would have to be, liars and con men if Jesus never existed.

It's late and I'm tired again. I will edit this tomorrow with a little more fleshing out of the Acts/Paul correlation. Feel free to leave a comment if you have something to add! :)

Refuting "The Jesus Puzzle"--Part One

Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle is an attempt to disprove the existence of an historical Jesus. This, of course, presents a serious problem for Christians. If there is no actual human Jesus, the entire thing falls apart. Christianity, at its core, relies upon the facts of Jesus of Nazareth's existence and the belief that he lived, was crucified and was physically resurrected. If there is no
Jesus, there is no Christianity.

Doherty divides his puzzle into twelve pieces and then delves further into his argument after presenting his puzzle pieces. I will respond to his article in several parts in order to break up the posts and deal with things in more detail.

The first pillar of Doherty's argument is built on removing the gospels and the book of Acts as reference material. He does this, not by specifically disproving them, but through a round-about attempt to eliminate them on the basis that the non-gospel writers of the New Testament(Paul, Peter, James) are silent on the specific details of Jesus earthly life.

He writes:

In the first half century of Christian correspondence, including letters attributed to Paul and other epistles under names like Peter, James and
John, the Gospel story cannot be found. [emphasis mine] When these writers speak of their divine Christ, echoes of Jesus of Nazareth are virtually inaudible, including details of a life and ministry, the circumstances of his death, the attribution of any teachings to him.

and later

The one clear placement of Christ in recent times, the accusation in
1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 that Jews in Judea had killed the Lord Jesus, has been
rejected as an interpolation by most of today’s liberal scholars,1 while the one Gospel
episode Paul seems to allude to, Jesus’ words over the bread and wine at what he
calls "the Lord’s Supper" in 1 Corinthians 11:23f, can be interpreted as a
mythical scene Paul has himself developed through perceived revelation.
Otherwise, no non-Gospel writer of the first century makes any statement which
would link the divine spiritual Son and Christ they all worship and look to for
salvation, with a man who had recently walked the sands of Palestine, taught and prophecied and performed miracles, a man executed by Pontius Pilate on Good Friday outside Jerusalem, to rise from a nearby tomb on Easter Sunday morning. This "conspiracy of silence" is as pervasive as it is astonishing.

The silence is hardly deafening. References to Jesus abound that refer to his humanity, and occasionally appeal to eyewitness testimony.

2Peter 1:16-18

We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For He received honor and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying,"This is my Son whom I love; with him I am well-pleased." We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were on the sacred mountain. [emphasis mine]

1 Peter 2:23-24

When they hurled their insults at him he did not retaliate; when he suffered he made
no threats. Instead he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness. [emphasis mine]

1 Peter 5:1(a)

To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder, a witness of Christ's sufferings....

Peter mentions his eyewitness testimony about Jesus and we are to believe that this doesn't refer to an historical Jesus? Doherty quotes no refutation of the epistles of Peter on this account.

Paul refers to Pontius Pilate and The Lord's Supper, but then Doherty conveniently
declares that these are later interpolations and intrusions into the text, that were not there originally. Why? Well, because according to Doherty, the gospels are false, so if the epistles reference them, then they must have been tampered with--a nice bit of circular reasoning attested to by liberal scholars. (his own description of said scholars)

The "silence" that seems to fuel Doherty's argument on this point is very easily explained if one considers the purpose of the epistles in the New Testament. They functioned, not as a first communication to people who had never heard about Jesus, but as letters to already established communities of believers. The audience for the epistles had already heard and received the gospel story of Jesus, so why would Paul, or any other writer, devote time to retell the story? Many of the recipients had been visited by Paul previously, receiving his missionary preaching about Jesus.

We see in 1 Corinthians that Paul had previously visited them and preached while he was there. Referring to his previous visit, he writes:

1 Corinthians 2:1-2
When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And in Galatians 1 :8, concerning a previous visit to Galatia, he writes:
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!

And in verse 11 of the same chapter:
I want you to know brothers that the gospel I preached is not something I made up.

It goes on and on throughout Paul's writings that he has either personally visited the locations before these letters were written, or the churches which he has not visited are already flourishing Christian communities. When he had visited them, it had been for the express purpose of evangelizing them for the first time. It would have been during those times that he would have related the historical details about Jesus, not years later as he is writing to correct errors that have popped up, or provide clarification about specific issues.

Doherty asserts that the non-Christian record of the time makes no mention of Jesus. That assertion is debatable and not accepted by the majority of biblical scholars. He goes on to list non-Christian sources, but then refutes them once again by declaring that they were all corrupted by Christians and cannot be trusted, Jospehus being the most important example.

Josephus’ famous passage in Antiquities 18 is acknowledged to be, as it stands, a Christian interpolation, and arguments that an original reference
to Jesus either stood there or can be distilled from the present one,
founder on the universal silence about such a reference on the part of
Christian commentators until the 4th century.2 As for the reference
in Antiquities 20 to James as "brother of Jesus, the one called (the)
Christ", this passage also bears the marks of Christian interference.3

Christopher Price offers another perspective on Josephus, claiming that the majority of scholars agree that there exists at least partial authenticity in the Josephus references. Price writes:

Notably, the consensus for partial authenticity is held by scholars from
diverse perspectives. Liberal commentators such as Robert Funk, J. Dominic Crossan, and A.N. Wilson, accept a substantial part of the TF as originally Josephan. So do Jewish scholars, such as Geza Vermes, Louis H. Feldman, and Paul Winter
and secular scholars such as E.P. Sanders and Paula Fredrikson. Even Jeff Lowder, co-founder of the Secular Web, recognizes the merits of the partial authenticity.

Scholars go back and forth on the small tidbits of non-biblical mentions of Jesus. It is hard to sort out an honest appraisal because many of the scholars come with agendas guiding their conclusions.

I'm tired! I'll write more later.