Posted by:
rt
(
)
Date: August 21, 2016 08:39AM
In another thread, I wrote a little bit about my first impressions of historical Jesus scholarship:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1859507,1859507#msg-1859507To which poster “Bona Dea” replied: “Scholars do not start with a foregone conclusion and find evidence to prove it”. So I figured I’d let whatever Jesus scholar I’m currently reading speak for themselves. Flavour of the day is Helen K. Bond’s “The Historical Jesus. A guide for the perplexed”.
Like I said in the previous thread, there is precious little evidence for an historical Jesus and scholars know this. They start most of their anthologies with this admission, as does Bond. Luckily, this doesn’t really need to bother an aspiring Jesus scholar. German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) is often quoted as having said: “I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus”. Bond explains that he didn’t really mean it like that but rather “stressed that Jesus had been a real person” (p. 13) - even though two pages later, she admits that “studies arguing that Jesus had never existed” are a logical inference from Bultmann’s approach (p. 15). To be fair, she doesn’t say “logical inference” (bit of a pleonasm, I guess) but “extreme inference” which Boyd Packer might have defined as “a logical inference that isn’t very useful”.
Incidentally, no one really cared about this until the dawn of the Enlightenment age some two hundred years ago. Our crime scene is hardly fresh. We’re dealing with 17 centuries of Christian witness tampering and fabricating evidence. Even the gospels, which are really all the Jesus scholars have, are “expressions of the faith of the earliest Christian communities rather than historical accounts of the life of Jesus” (p. 14). In fact, “form critical analysis [i.e. an analysis of sources by type, such as sayings, parables, etc.] of the synoptic Gospels could identify a primitive form of a tradition, but that was not necessarily a guarantee that the tradition went back to Jesus” (p. 17).
Form criticism was all the rage in Bultmann’s days between the two world wars but all it really did was show how thin the sources for an historical Jesus really are. Time for something more sciency! Enter the criteria of dissimilarity, of coherence, and of multiple attestation. I won’t bore you with the details because in the end, all of these criteria proved to be useless. Nevertheless, adding some sciency-sounding vernacular “had restored credibility to Jesus studies, but its findings were rather limited, to say the least” (p. 19). Yes, you read that correctly: it all turned out to be pseudoscientific bunk but nevertheless restored credibility to the field. You really have to want to see it.
And historical Jesus scholars really want to see it. According to Bond, being an historical Jesus scholar means committing oneself “to the fundamental belief that it is both possible and important to reconstruct something of the man of Nazareth” (p. 22). Never mind the facts (or lack thereof), armed with this fundamental belief, modern Jesus scholars can go all out and make up anything they want about Jesus. Bond discusses ten representatives of this proud tradition masquerading as scholarship:
Geza Vermes (Jesus as a charismatic healer and exorcist)
E.P. S a n d e r s (Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet respecting Jewish law)
Richard Horsley (Jesus as a social revolutionary)
The Jesus Seminar (Jesus as an illiterate peasant)
J.D. Crossan (Jesus as an Hellenistic sage)
David Flusser (Jesus as a well-educated Jewish carpenter)
J.P. Meier (Jesus as an apocalytic prophet disrespecting Jewish law)
N.T. Wright (Jesus as the resurrected Saviour)
J.D.G. Dunn (Jesus as he appears in the gospels as reliable oral traditions)
Dale Allison (Jesus as he appears in the gospels as accurate memories of his followers)
So what made this “rather bewildering array of competing portraits of Jesus” (p. 21) among modern Jesus scholars possible? Bond lists three important developments (p. 20-21):
1. The shift of Jesus scholarship from protestant German theologists to mainly Anglo-Saxon scholars with diverse backgrounds including (gasp) “Catholics, Jews and secularists”.
2. A new focus on what made Jesus Jewish, as opposed to the old emphasis on how Jesus pissed off his fellow Jews. This opens up a whole new array of “areas which may well have informed Jesus’ social critique”.
3. Abandoning the need for facts in favour of “a larger picture” for which matching ‘facts’ can then be cherry-picked.
OK, I’m paraphrasing here, but putting ‘facts’ in parentheses is not my idea (see e.g. on p. 23). Coming back to poster “Bona Dea’s” statement at the beginning of this post, historical Jesus scholars today do indeed start with a foregone conclusion – a fundamental belief that Jesus was a real person – and then go about finding evidence to prove it.
Although not even evidence is strictly necessary in the realm of historical Jesus fantasy land. Take J.D. Crossan, for instance. He “imagines a strongly Hellenized Galilee and, even though there is no concrete evidence for the presence of Cynics in the region, he thinks it quite likely”(p. 28).
Dale Allison tosses out “the standard criteria of authenticity” altogether because “they are unlikely to be able to determine with any accuracy whether a saying does, in fact, go back to Jesus; most of the time, we simply cannot tell”. Doesn’t that make the sources for an historical Jesus suspect? Sure, but even so, “the general gist of the tradition may well preserve an accurate memory of what the historical Jesus said or did” (p.35).
So there it is. To become an historical Jesus scholar today, specialize in an area of real historical scholarship somewhat close to first century Galilee, apply your fundamental belief that Jesus was a real person and use your imagination. I hear gay activist Jesus is up for grabs...
Edited 16 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2016 08:57AM by rt.