Bob Dylan told us that you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. These days you don’t have to be a biblical scholar to know that the historical Jesus enterprise is prospering. Cover stories in Time and Newsweek, articles in local newspapers, and a flood of hot-selling books tell us "He’s b-a-a-a-ack." Not Freddie Krueger and not the Jesus worshipped and adored by the church, but the scholars’ Jesus, the Jesus who is reconstructed by New Testament experts and ancient historians. These scholars claim their Jesus is the historical Jesus, the real Jesus, to be distinguished from the Jesus of myth or dogma who is the product of the church.
This is the third such "quest for the historical Jesus" in the span of roughly 150 years. The nineteenth century gave us the original quest, a project widely believed today to tell us more about the questers than about the actual Jesus. This original quest was finished off at the turn of the century by Albert Schweitzer’s devastating The Quest of the Historical Jesuss, which argued that the actual Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who was utterly different from the ethical teacher beloved by liberal theology.
For several decades, the project of reconstructing the "historical Jesus" lay dormant as a result of a strange alliance of liberals and some conservatives, who agreed on the necessity for a distinction between "the Christ of faith" and the "Jesus of history." These conservatives thought it was the church’s task to proclaim the former; the work of Bultmann had shown liberals that the latter was beyond recovery.
However, it is hardly surprising that work on the historical Jesus eventually resumed as the "new quest" among Bultmann’s former students and others. After all, the Christ of faith the church proclaims was a historical figure who "suffered under Pontius Pilate." And skepticism about the possibility of knowing the historical Jesus could hardly endure among scholars trained to investigate such things; otherwise, what would such people do?
As far as I can tell, this second quest for the historical Jesus — unlike the first quest — came to no dramatic conclusion. Rather, like so many academic debates, it just petered out, suffering from the law of diminishing returns. Once more the ugly face of skepticism and potential unemployment loomed, since one only needs a certain number of scholars to point out that knowledge of a particular kind cannot be had.
At some point, a third quest for the historical Jesus was inevitable. What is surprising about the newest quest is partly the sheer number of publications it has generated; a project that not many years ago seemed moribund is suddenly pulsing with life. Even more surprising is the public character of the new enterprise. The pilgrims on this new journey are not solitary travelers, nor are they content to form modest little groups who recite tales to one another. Rather, they seem determined to drag a large section of the population with them.
The Jesus Seminar
The Jesus Seminar clearly has played a central role in taking this display of scholarly energy into the public arena. In 1985, a group of around 30 scholars formed this group "to renew the quest of the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to more than a handful of biblical scholars." The last clause seems a masterpiece of understatement. Now numbering around 200 members, the Jesus Seminar has been spectacularly successful in hitting the front page of newspapers and the covers of magazines with its unorthodox conclusions — not to mention the provocatively titled best-seller The Five Gospels, where the seminar’s methods and results are presented in detail.
Leaving aside for a moment the question of content, how
did the seminar arrive at its picture of Jesus? In true
democratic fashion, the members of the seminar voted,
determining the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus by
dropping colored beads in a box. (Though the seminar is now
working on events in Jesus’ life, the original work dealt
only with the alleged sayings of Jesus.) Different colors of
beads represented various grades of authenticity, ranging
from red ("Jesus said this or something very like it") to
black ("This saying was created by later tradition").
Such a procedure was bound to generate media coverage, and
this result seems to have been foreseen and intended by the
seminar. However, the more fundamental question concerns the
basis for voting. How did the members of the seminar
determine the authenticity of various sayings?
A quick answer seems to be "skeptically." Only about 18 percent of the sayings traditionally attributed to Jesus were accepted by the seminar as authentic. The seminar came down on the skeptical end of the teeter-totter because its members adopted the judicial assumption of "guilty until proven innocent." (The scholars assumed the Gospels "to be narratives in which the memory of Jesus is embellished by mythic elements that express the church’s faith in him, and by plausible fictions that enhance the telling of the gospel story for first-century listeners who knew about divine men and miracle workers firsthand." This procedure partly reflects a widespread — though, in my view, mistaken — idea that such a skeptical view of sources is a necessary characteristic of a tough-minded, critical historian. However, it also reflects a suspicious view of the communities that created the writings we know as the New Testament.)
These communities, as well as the writers of the four canonical Gospels, are seen as having no qualms about attributing common lore to Jesus or even about putting their own words into the lips of Jesus. Seminar leaders contend that even when authentic historical materials are present, they are often "Christianized" to such a degree that they require wholesale recasting in order to restore them to their "original" form.
It seems likely that the seminar put a fair amount of weight on what is called the "criterion of dissimilarity," though it is hard to know this without the ability to read the minds of "voters". Since the policy was to accept as authentic only what can be proven to stem from Jesus, sayings of Jesus that could have been created by the early church or that could be general rabbinic teachings of the time must first be rejected. The idea is that we can only be sure of those sayings of Jesus that would fit with neither the early church nor first-century Judaism. (By the same reasoning, future historians would judge as authentic words of Newt Gingrich only those statements that are dissimilar from those of other Republicans.)
The members of the seminar relied on the other "criteria of authenticity" as well. Some, such as the principle of regarding material that is attested by multiple sources as more likely to be authentic, seem close to common sense (though the question of what counts as an independent source is rather controversial). Others, such as the principle that more complex versions of stories are later than simpler versions, depend upon debatable theories about how oral and literary traditions are transmitted.
The methodology of the Jesus Seminar described thus
far does not seem too far out of line with the working
assumptions of most New Testament scholars. It is true
that many scholars take a less skeptical attitude toward
the texts, and a great many have pointed out the
limitations of the criterion of dissimilarity, which
would at best appear to capture what might be called the
idiosyncratic elements of Jesus — those elements that
fit with neither his predecessors nor his followers.
What seems most unusual about the Jesus Seminar is the
high reliance its members place on extra-canonical
gospels, especially the Gospel of Thomas.
Thomas,
discovered among other documents at Nag Hammadi in Egypt
in 1945, is a gospel that consists largely of "sayings".
Thought the actual document dates from several centuries
after the time of Jesus and is a Coptic translation of
the original, some scholars theorize that Thomas is a
very early source composed independently of the synoptic
Gospels. Its existence gave added importance to a
document called Q, never actually found, that had
already been theoretically postulated to help explain
similarities between Matthew and Luke that could not be
traced to dependence on Mark. Q, like Thomas, is
presumed to be largely a collection of sayings of Jesus.
Since Q is supposed to be a source for Matthew
and Luke, it is regarded as a document significantly
older than those Gospels, and perhaps older than Mark.
Thomas, Q, and noncanonical writings of a similar
character suddenly took on new significance as scholars
pondered the purposes of such collections. Since these
"sayings" gospels contained no accounts of the birth,
death, and resurrection of Jesus, could it be that there
were early communities of "Jesus-followers" for whom
these events were unimportant?
Some of the more
prominent members of the seminar think this speculative
question can be confidently answered. Burton Mack, in
his work The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian
Origins, writes with breezy chutzpah about the
hypothetical community that employed the hypothetical
book Q. According to Mack, these people were not
Christians; they were "Jesus-people" who cannot be seen
as the early foundation of what later became known as
the church. "The people of Q did not think of
Jesus as a messiah, did not recognize a special group of
trained disciples as their leaders ... did not regard
his death as an unusual divine event, and did not follow
his teachings in order to be ‘saved’ or transformed
people." (Interestingly, the Resurrection is not
important enough to Mack for him to include it in this
list as an item to be denied!)
What, then, was
Jesus like, and why did such people follow him? The
suggestion is that Jesus was a Jewish — though
not-so-very Jewish — version of a wandering Cynic
philosopher, a sage whose wisdom was presented in an
aphoristic, unconventional style and whose content
challenged the prevailing cultural and social
assumptions. A portrait somewhat like Mack’s is
presented in John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical
Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant,
though Crossan does not go so far as Mack in seeing
discontinuity between the early followers of Jesus and
the church. Crossan’s picture of Jesus puts special
emphasis on table fellowship — Jesus’ practice of eating
with people of dubious moral and social standing. This
"open commensality" was a proclamation of an "unbrokered
kingdom of God," a new social order that meant an end to
mediators and hierarchies.
Other Third
Questers
This Jesus who is a Cynic sage — a
"talking head," as one waggish critic has put it — is by
no means the whole story of the third quest. Many
members of the Jesus Seminar reject the idea that Jesus
was a kind of wandering Greek philosopher. And many
other scholars, including liberal ones, take very
different views from those of the Jesus Seminar.
For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other discoveries
have shed new light on first-century Judaism, and such
scholars as E. P. Sanders have taken the quest down a
completely different path. On this view, the key to an
accurate reconstruction of the historical Jesus lies in
highlighting the Jewishness of Jesus, rather than
understanding him in the supposedly Hellenistic
environment of Galilee. Though such an approach can be
used to drive a wedge between the historical Jesus and
the church, it does not have to do so, as is shown by N.
T. Wright’s significant work, The New Testament and
the People of God. Wright argues that there was a
spirited debate among first-century Jews as to how to
tell the story of Israel as the people of God. In
particular, how is the story to be completed? As Wright
sees it, the early Christians told the story as
culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus,
which constituted the "great divine act for which Israel
had been waiting." Such a view makes sense of both the
Jewishness of the early church and its eventual
distinctiveness as a rift with other versions as the
Jewish story developed.
A number of important
Roman Catholic scholars have joined in this third quest.
Many of them, while professing allegiance to the same
critical-historical method practiced by the member of
the Jesus Seminar, come up with results which, though
far from pleasing to naīve fundamentalists, are much
more congruent with the Jesus of Christian theology.
Raymond Brown, for example, in The Death of the
Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on
the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels, sees the
gospel accounts of Jesus’ trials and executions as
containing much that may reasonably be taken as
historically authentic, a far cry from Burton Mack’s
sweeping dismissal of Mark’s gospel as "a fiction."
The work of John P. Meier is particularly
interesting as a test case of how critical-historical
studies comport with orthodoxy. In his massive study,
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (two
volumes have been published, and a concluding volume is
promised), Meier illustrates his commitment to such a
method with an imaginary description of an "unpapal
conclave." The scholarly reconstruction of the
historical Jesus should proceed, Meier suggests, as if
it were conducted by a committee consisting of a
Christian, a Jew, and an agnostic who are locked in the
basement of the Harvard Divinity School Library and fed
bread and water until they produce a consensus document.
On Meier’s view, such a method cannot possibly arrive at
many of the conclusions the Christian will want to
affirm about Jesus by faith. It cannot, for example,
assert that Jesus actually performed miracles (nor deny
that he did). However, Meier himself thinks such an
objective historical study will overlap with the
church’s teachings to a great extent; for example,
though a good number of the miracle stories are judged
to be later creations, in some cases we have good
historical grounds for saying that in Jesus’ own day he
was believed to have performed miracles, whether
or not he actually did.
What Does It All Mean
For The Layperson?
The works mentioned above
constitute only a small sampling of the newest quest for
the historical Jesus. My purpose, however, is not to
give a comprehensive scholarly overview but rather to
ask, What does it all mean to me? What stance should the
intelligent layperson take toward this quest? As a
Christian believer, who holds that salvation depends on
the life, death, and resurrection in the history of
Jesus, I can hardly suspend judgment about such issues.
We have here what William James called a "momentous
option." My very life is at stake, and practically
I cannot suspend judgment, since I must continue to live
either as one who believes in this Jesus or as one who
does not.
Should I simply ignore the whole
business? Given the very public nature of the
enterprise, this may not be possible. I recently had a
conversation with a pastor planting a church in a
suburban community. He told me that when he talks with
his new parishioners, many of whom are previously
unchurched professionals, they often inquire about such
issues. They seem surprised that these scholarly claims
have not been discussed in church, and they tend to
think that the pastor is probably ignorant of such
matters. A debate that is carried out in magazines and
newspapers is no longer restricted to the ivory tower.
In any case, to ignore such intellectual challenges
would appear to be a dishonest attempt to evade genuine
intellectual problems. But there is a still better
reason for avoiding ostrichlike maneuvers, and that is
the possibility that historical-critical studies of the
Bible might have genuine value for the Christian church.
If the Incarnation really did take place in history,
then it stands to reason that an understanding of the
nitty-gritty world of first-century Palestine might
indeed deepen the Christian’s insight into Jesus of
Nazareth.
The predicament of the layperson here
is not unique. The are other cases where academic
experts pronounce on issues about which laypeople must
make up their own minds — in part, because the experts
disagree among themselves. Experts may disagree on
whether the world is in danger of global warming and on
how to avoid it, but laypeople must vote for legislators
committed to carrying out preventive and palliative
actions. Economists may disagree on the impact of tax
cuts, but I must decide for myself how to vote. So, too,
with the quest for the historical Jesus.
Is
Historical Scholarship The Best Way Of Coming To Know
The Historical Jesus?
In the process of
arriving at an independent judgment where experts
disagree, it is often useful to try to isolate the
assumptions the lie behind the experts’ opinions —
including the assumptions that almost all the experts
take for granted as well as the ones that may underlie
the disagreements. One crucial assumption that a great
many biblical scholars seem to take for granted is
the historical-critical method is the best means of
arriving at the truth about the historical Jesus.
It is easy to see why such a belief should be
assumed by historical scholars; after all, the
historical-critical method was devised precisely as a
way to transcend the biases and limitations of
traditions and communities so as to discover historical
truth. Why should it not be the best way to understand
the life of Jesus?
Nevertheless, a little
reflection shows that this principle is far from
obviously correct. After all, the Christian believes
that eternal life can be found in a relationship to
Jesus of Nazareth, and that the path to such a
relationship requires knowing about this Jesus. It is
hard to believe that God could have acted in Jesus to
make salvation possible for the human race and at the
same time believe that knowledge of the story is
possible only for those who have the intelligence and
leisure to fight their way through the thicket of
historical Jesus research. Surely, if knowledge of Jesus
is as vital as Christians believe it to be, God would
have made it possible for ordinary people to gain this
knowledge without learning Aramaic or receiving Ph.D.’s
in historical-critical biblical studies.
The
church has always maintained that it is possible for
ordinary people to gain the knowledge they need about
the Jesus they meet in the gospel narratives. I think
there are two primary accounts as to how this is
supposed to happen, though these stories are by no means
mutually exclusive, rival accounts. Both may be true
and, in fact, can be seen as complementary.
One
story, traditionally emphasized by the Roman Catholic
church, though in principle open to Protestants,
stresses that the knowledge the ordinary person needs to
have about Jesus is grounded in the testimony of the
church. On this account, the witness of the church with
respect to life and teachings of Jesus is a trustworthy
guide to the truth; ordinary people who rely on that
authority are reasonable to do so. Historical scholars
can hardly object to this by claiming that relying on
authority is, in principle, unreasonable for the
overwhelming majority of what all historical-critical
scholars believe is based on their acceptance of the
testimony of others.
The other story, which one
might call the Reformed story because of its prominence
in John Calvin (though it clearly is present in other
Protestants as well as Catholics), lays great stress on
what is termed "the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit."
Calvin regarded the Bible as containing a divinely
inspired account of what people need to know for
salvation, and he argued that the truth of the biblical
account can be grasped by ordinary people on the basis
of the witness of the Spirit of God.
Calvin’s
story is sometimes disparaged as an appeal to an
unverifiable subjective experience, but it does not have
to be construed in such a manner. In talking about the
"witness of the Holy Spirit," Calvin is giving a
theological account of how people actually arrive at a
conviction that Jesus is the divine savior. Suppose I
begin to read the New Testament and, in some sense, I
hear God speak to me through its pages: through the
person of Jesus I hear God question me, make promises to
me, give commands to me. As I think through those
questions, promises, and commands, they begin to make
sense of my life in a way I have never know. I gain a
sense of who I am and who I should become, and I find
myself gripped by a conviction that the story of Jesus I
have encountered is true.
Such an account
of faith does not necessarily divorce faith from
knowledge. Some contemporary philosophers have theorized
that knowledge is best understood as a true belief that
is produced in a reliable manner. Thus I now know there
is a computer screen in front of me, not because I can
give a philosophical proof of this that would satisfy a
skeptic, but because the belief is true, it is produced
in a reliable manner, employing my sensory faculties. If
the story of Jesus is true, and if the work of the Holy
Spirit is similarly reliable, it would appear that the
outcome is also knowledge. (On this point, see my book
The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The
Incarnational Narrative as History, 1996 Oxford
University Press.)
One can see, therefore, that
the assumption that the historical-critical method
provides the best way of getting at the historical truth
about Jesus of Nazareth is open to question. What I have
called the Catholic and Reformed stories may be false,
but their truth of falsity cannot be established by
historical scholarship alone; it requires theological
and philosophical argument.
How Objective Are
Historical Biblical Scholars?
Some of the
more orthodox biblical scholars recognize the above
point. Catholics such as John Meier, for example, stress
that faith convictions are not limited to the
conclusions of historical scholarship. However, the way
Meier makes this point highlights another pervasive, yet
dubious, assumption on the part of many New Testament
scholars. This is the idea that historical scholars, in
contrast to members of religious communities rooted in
faith, are committed to an ideal of objectivity. This is
nicely symbolized by Meier’s idea of the "unpapal
conclave" and expressed in E. P. Sander’s portrayal of
the biblical scholar who roots his conclusions in
"evidence on which everyone can agree."
A dilemma
arises at this point for someone like Meier who wishes
to separate the conclusions of historical inquiry from
the convictions of faith. Are the convictions of faith
reliable or not? If they are, why should I the historian
who is interested in truth employ them? If they are not,
then why should the believer who cares about truth rely
on faith?
They way out of this dilemma lies in
questioning the dubious picture of the completely
objective historian that lies behind it. The critical
historian is not, after all, a person devoid of faith.
Historical critics understand that their scholarly
activity came into being at a particular time and place
and therefore presupposes a cultural framework. Jon
Levenson, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible who is himself a
historical critic, has argued that even while
recognizing this cultural framework, the members of this
community, like every other, have tended to absolutize
their cultural assumptions, their "faith." In practice,
this has often meant that, among historical critics, the
assumptions of the Enlightenment provide the lens for
looking at the world.
It would be arrogant and
foolish for the layperson to ignore or dismiss the work
of the historical scholar. However, it is by no means
too much for the layperson to ask the historical
scholar, who is so keen on understanding human life in
its cultural context, to have a sense of the relativity
of historical scholarship itself. Once the "relativizer
has been relativized," it will no longer be possible for
the tribe of historical scholars to take a superior and
arrogant attitude toward the members of religious
communities, as if such communities were the only ones
with biases.
There are good reasons why Christian
scholars may wish to participate in academic "games"
where the rules prevent them from appealing to some of
what they know as Christians. Apologetic argument may
require that one employ only assumptions that the
intended audience will accept, and it is certainly
interesting to see what may be known about Jesus without
the testimony of the church of the saving work of the
Spirit. Christian scholars must not, however, allow
themselves to be hoodwinked into believing that this
type of conversation is the only avenue to the truth, or
that the results of such a game are the only convictions
that deserve the honorific title "knowledge."
Where Do The Scholars Disagree?
What I am
calling the relativity of historical criticism can be
clearly seen when one examines the assumptions that are
disputed among the scholars themselves. It hardly seems
an accident that the conclusions of biblical scholars
who are fairly orthodox in their theology tend to be
historically conservative-to-moderate in tone. (I have
in mind here scholars such as Howard Marshall, F. F.
Bruce, Robert Stein, James D. G. Dunn, N. T. Wright, and
Catholics such as Raymond Brown and John Meier.)
Scholars who are less committed to orthodoxy or
positively opposed to historic Christian faith, such as
Mack and Crossan, often produce portraits of Jesus that
are quite remote from church teachings. The latter type
of scholar often speaks disparagingly of the former,
implying that the more traditional scholar is less than
fully committed to "calling them as they see them" and
"letting the chips falls where they may." From my
layperson’s perspective, it seems evident that the prior
commitments of the people like Mack may be pervasive in
shaping the way they interpret the evidence.
That Mack does have an ideological ax to grind
becomes evident in The Lost Gospel. He there
explains that it is crucial to cultural progress to
undermine the historical claims of traditional Christian
faith: "The Christian gospel, focusing as it does on
crucifixion as the guarantee for apocalyptic salvation,
has somehow given its blessing to patterns of personal
and political behavior that often have had disastrous
consequences." Christianity is at least partly
responsible for such evils as colonial imperialism, the
slave trade, and the Indian wars. It is only when we
recognize that the founding Christian narrative is a
mythical creation that we will be free to criticize it
and perhaps to devise better, more socially progressive
myths. There is much that could be said about Mack’s
claims; my point here is that he should not pretend that
he and other members of the Jesus Seminar approach the
historical evidence with no ideological commitments.
Goulder, in his recent work St. Paul versus St.
Peter: A Tale of Two Missions, reads the New
Testament as containing the records of a war between the
Petrine and Pauline missions in the early church. These
two camps warred long and hard over the proper attitude
of a follower of Jesus toward the Jewish law, with the
looser Pauline camp eventually winning and freeing
Christians from circumcision and Jewish dietary laws.
From Goulder’s point of view, the Petrine camp was
certainly closer to the perspective of the historical
Jesus.
Now in the Gospels Jesus is represented as
saying rather different things about the law. Sometimes,
as in Matthew 5, he appears to stress the validity of
the Law: "Think not that I have come to abolish the law
and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them, but
to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, till heaven and
earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from
the law, until all is accomplished." At other times,
Jesus seems to take a looser line on such issues as
Sabbath keeping and food regulations, claiming "the
Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath"
and that it is not the food that comes into a person
that makes him impure but the words that come out of his
mouth (Mark 2:27; 7:15).
How do Goulder and Mack
treat such passages? Both are committed to
"historical-critical" investigation; both are determined
to throw off the "shackles of church dogma."
Nevertheless, they reach completely contradictory
judgments in this case. For Mack, passages that manifest
a cavalier attitude to the Law probably stem from that
wandering Cynic sage who loved to thumb his nose at
convention. Passages that represent Jesus as affirming
the Law are a creation of the later church, intent on
domesticating the hippielike free spirit of Jesus. For
Goulder, the Matthean passage where Jesus upholds the
Law certainly represents the kind of attitude a pious
Jew such as Jesus would have held. The Markan passages
where Jesus takes a freer line are the creations of a
Pauline partisan anxious to justify a laxer attitude.
Whatever else one may want to say about this dispute, it
seems apparent that neither party can argue that the
historical-critical approach has led to objective
certainty about the matter.
Although critical
scholars often stress the uncertain character of
historical scholarship, I do not think it is easy for
the unwary reader to keep in mind how uncertain
and speculative their conclusions often are. Burton Mack
again provides an excellent example. His claim that the
most reliable historical portrait of Jesus comes from
the hypothetical document Q depends on the
following chain of probabilities (and doubtless more
than these):
The probability that Mark was the first of the synoptic Gospels. If those who argue for the primacy of Matthew are correct, then there is no need to postulate Q at all.
The probability that Matthew and Luke both drew on a common written source. Even if Matthew and Luke drew on Mark and other sources, it is possible the other sources were oral traditions.
The probability that this written source can be accurately reconstructed. Since we know Q only from what Luke and Matthew supposedly took from it, it is difficult to know what the actual document, if it existed, contained.
The probability that this source was an important document for a community. Even if Q existed and can be reconstructed, it is not certain that this document actually functioned as a gospel for a religious community.
The probability that this hypothetical community, if it existed, regarded Q as containing all that is religiously important about Jesus. The claim that Q does not contain any information about the death and resurrection of Jesus, even if true, does not imply that the community may not have known about and valued this knowledge.
Such probabilities as the above are "chained" or "linked" probabilities. The final probability of the whole is obtained by multiplying the probability of each link in the chain, each of which obviously must be less than 1.0 percent (following the usual convention of assigning probabilities on a scale from 0 to 1). Multiplied fractions get small very quickly; for example, .7 times .7 times .7 is only .343. My mathematical skills are not formidable, but it is clear that even if the probability of each link in the chain is estimated to be relatively high (and in some cases, such an estimate can only be described as dubious), the probability of the whole theory is low indeed.
In fact, Mack’s theory is even more improbable than the
above implies. For when one examines Q, one finds
Jesus to be an apocalyptic pronouncements to a later stage,
created by the community. But there is no independent
evidence for the existence of early and late versions of
Q, nor any objective basis for recognizing some parts as
earlier than others.
It would be interesting to take some actual contemporary
documents that have undergone multiple revisions, perhaps
involving multiple authors with different viewpoints, to see
if it would be possible for a reader with no external
knowledge about the process to determine the "layers" of the
composition. As someone who has been part of such a process,
I think that this would be practically impossible, even for
a reader who had detailed knowledge about the authors
involved. It is hard to see how this could be done at all
for an ancient document where the supposed authors and
communities are known only from the text being studied. When
Mack begins to postulate these layers of composition in
order to save his theory, it should be painfully obvious
that Q is no longer functioning as evidence for his
portrait of Jesus, but rather is itself being interpreted in
light of the portrait.
What do these disagreements and the resulting uncertainties
imply? They do not imply that the scholars involved in the
disputes are never justified in holding their views. Indeed,
if we reject Enlightenment epistemologies, some of the
disputed views may even amount to knowledge. My own
discipline of philosophy provides a close analogy.
Disagreements in philosophy are pervasive, but this does not
imply that no philosopher has good grounds for philosophical
beliefs or even knows any philosophical claim to be true.
What is implied by the disagreements in both cases is that
the views of scholars on disputed questions cannot provide a
strong basis for laypeople to form beliefs. Anyone
acquainted with the history of philosophy knows that little
rational weight adheres to the fact that a large number of
philosophers at a particular time hold a certain view. In
the fifties, the majority of philosophers in England and
America probably thought some positivist form of the
verifiability theory of meaning was correct, but today such
a view is almost abandoned. Similarly, it seems to me that
the views of a group of New Testament scholars, even if they
constitute a majority, carry little authority for outsiders
if respected scholars equally conversant with the facts
continue to disagree with that majority.
If the layperson had to rely solely on historical
scholarship as the means of forming historical beliefs about
Jesus, then agnosticism might be the most reasonable policy,
at least with respect to some important issues. However, I
have already argued that the Christian should not accept the
idea that historical scholarship is the only source of
knowledge about Jesus. Christian believers take themselves
to have good grounds for their beliefs about Jesus. Although
historical evidence will almost certainly be a part of these
grounds, the total story will also include either the
testimony of the church of the testimony of the Spirit (or
both). One might say that the ultimate ground of faith in
Jesus for an individual is the total circumstances of his or
her life in which the truth of the gospel has become
evident.
Thankfully, the work of the Jesus Seminar has stimulated a
flurry of orthodox, critical responses, including such works
as Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the
Historical Jesus, edited by Michael J. Wilkins and J. P.
Moreland; The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew
of Nazareth, by Ben Witherington III; and Cynic Sage
or Son of God? Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of
Revisionist Replies, by George A. Boyd. Such
contributions clearly reveal the dubious assumptions and
shaky reasoning behind much of the current quest. As a
layperson, it is vital for me to know that scholars
conversant with ancient languages and texts see the
historical evidence as consistent with historic Christian
faith.
However, it is equally vital to realize that Christ’s church
does not stand or fall with the changing fashions of a
contemporary academic field. My Christian beliefs are not
primarily grounded in historical scholarship but in the
testimony of Christ’s church and the work of Christ’s
Spirit, as they witness to the truth of God’s revelation. Do
my convictions continue to be reasonable when challenged by
historical scholarship? In this situation, the uncertainties
of critical historical scholarship undermine any pretension
that the field has a sure authority for the layperson. They
leave the original ground for Christian belief undefeated.
Christians can certainly learn from this quest, and they can
be grateful for the believing scholars among the questers.
Christians should not, however, think that their own
pilgrimage from death to life requires a detour down this
particular scholarly trail.