New Testament Theology and Ethics

Ben Witherington III

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899838
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

All too often, argues Ben Witherington, the theology of the New Testament has been divorced from its ethics, leaving as isolated abstractions what are fully integrated, dynamic elements within the New Testament itself. As Witherington stresses, "behavior affects and reinforces or undoes belief." Having completed commentaries on all of the New Testament books, a remarkable feat in itself, Witherington now offers the first of a two-volume set on the theological and ethical thought world of the New Testament. The first volume looks at the individual witnesses, while the second examines the collective witness. The New Testament, says Ben Witherington, is "like a smallish choir. All are singing the same cantata, but each has an individual voice and is singing its own parts and notes. If we fail to pay attention to all the voices in the choir, we do not get the entire effect.... If this first volume is about closely analyzing the sheet music left to us by which each musician's part is delineated, the second volume will attempt to re-create what it might have sounded like had they ever gotten together and performed their scores to produce a single masterful cantata." What the New Testament authors have in mind, Witherington contends, is that all believers should be conformed in thought, word and deed to the image of Jesus Christ--the indelible image.

JESUS

The Alpha and Omega of New Testament Thought

The world’s problem with Christianity is Jesus. He is the “stone which causes men to stumble” (1 Pet 2:8; cf. Rom 9:32-33) that separates the monotheism of Christianity from that of Israel and Islam, and the separation is absolute. This affects every aspect of Christian doctrine and gives distinction to its understanding of God, humanity, sin, salvation, and the eschaton. The heart of the problem is Jesus’ own understanding of who he is and of his relationship to God.

DENNIS KINLAW1

And he had a man’s face, a human face. . . . Ecce homo Pilate said—Behold the man—yet whatever our religion or lack of it, we tend to shrink from beholding him and play our game instead with Shakespeare’s face or Helen of Troy’s because with them the chances are we could survive almost anything—Shakespeare’s simper, say, or a cast in Helen’s eye. But with Jesus the risk is too great; the risk that his face would be too much for us if not enough, either a face like any other face to see, pass by, forget, or a face so unlike any other that we would have no choice but to remember it always and follow or flee it to the end of our days and beyond. . . . Like the faces of people we love, it has become so familiar that unless we take pains we hardly see it at all. See it for what it is and see it whole. . . . [His face] was not a front for him to live his life behind but a frontier, the outermost visible edge of his life itself in all its richness and multiplicity. . . . The faces of Jesus then—all the ways he had of being and of being seen. The writers of the New Testament give no description of any of them because it was his life alive inside of them that was the news he hawked rather than the color of his eyes.

FREDRICK BUECHNER2

The debates about where to begin discussions of the New Testament thought world are endless and not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Some say that we should begin with Old Testament theology and ethics and get a running start on understanding its sequel. Others say that we should work chronologically through the New Testament canonical witnesses, which means necessarily that we will start with Paul. But there is something fundamentally wrong with both of these approaches.

In the case of the first suggested approach, the problem is that the Old Testament speaks seldom of messianism of any kind. Even in the prophetic books of the Old Testament there is little that prepares us for what we find in the New Testament. In fact, it is fair to say that if one had the Old Testament itself and nothing more, one would not likely come up with the image of a virginally conceived, crucified and risen Lord. This is not because there are not intimations of such things in the Old Testament, particularly in Isaiah. It is because most of that material can be reasonably subjected to other interpretations (perhaps with the exception of some of the Servant Songs in Isaiah), and in any case it is a minor theme in the large corpus of literature that we call the “Old Testament.” In other words, there is not a clear and detailed blueprint for what we find in the Christ-event in the Old Testament. Jesus, for example, was an exorcist—a prominent theme in our earliest Gospel, written by John Mark. Yet we find the idea of a messianic exorcist nowhere in the Old Testament, not least because there are no exorcists of any kind in the Old Testament. Jesus also believed in dealing with problems and opposition in a nonviolent and nonresistant way. He was not about to fulfill hopes and expectations for a Davidic warrior-messiah. Jesus was a sage, a teller of parables. Where is there a foreshadowing of a messianic riddler in the Old Testament?

In the case of the second suggested approach—to begin with Paul—we have equal difficulties. Paul was not one of the original disciples of Jesus. He never walked with Jesus or talked with Jesus. As far as we can tell, he never had a close encounter with Jesus until his experience on the road to Damascus, and this was well after Jesus had ascended into heaven. In other words, Paul never personally knew the historical Jesus. In addition to these facts, Paul only seldom quotes Jesus, and he is more concerned to reflect on the salvific meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, particularly the latter two, than to tell us about the ministry of Jesus itself, his words and deeds prior to the crucifixion. And yet the church fathers (rightly, in my judgment) thought it wise to begin the New Testament canon with not one, or two, or three, but four different accounts of the ministerial life of Jesus. If that is not an attempt to tell us where the emphasis ought to lie in analyzing the origins of Christian thought, I do not know what is. So, as much as I love Paul, I suspect that he himself would tell us that Christian thought should begin with and focus on Jesus, his words and deeds, his life and death and resurrection—the whole package, all that we can reasonably know. And there is good hope that we can know a great deal because in fact the Gospels are either ancient biographies or, in the case of Luke-Acts, historical monographs. That is, the Gospels are about a historical figure named “Jesus”; they are not about the communities to which they are written. They seek to present the words, deeds and character of Jesus to their audiences in various ways.3 Of course, they do this in ways that their specific audiences will grasp, and so with particular emphases, omissions, amplifications and the like.

BEGINNING WITH JESUS

Some decades back, a wonderful German scholar, Joachim Jeremias, set out to write a New Testament theology. To the surprise of most of his German colleagues, he chose to begin with Jesus rather than with Paul, and indeed he took some pretty heavy criticism for this approach.4 He rejected Rudolf Bultmann’s assertion that the historical Jesus, his life and teachings, were only the presupposition of New Testament theology. The withering criticism that Jeremias endured may have contributed to the fact that he never finished his project. We were left only with the first volume. I am convinced, however, that he was on the right track. Thus in this chapter we are going to look at Jesus and his beliefs and behaviors, including his beliefs about himself. We are going to look at Jesus’ messianic self-understanding and at a host of other things as well.

I am well aware of the significant critical problems with this approach. There are no “Jesus Papers” out there. We have not a single document that Jesus himself wrote. Furthermore, all the canonical Gospels are written in Greek, yet it is perfectly clear that Jesus mostly spoke in Aramaic. And, of course, all of these Gospels were written not only with the benefit of hindsight, but also from what can be broadly called “Christian perspectives.” Then too, it does not appear that any of these Gospels were written prior to the second half of the first century A.D., and only the latest of them, the Fourth Gospel, claims to have been written by some sort of eyewitness—the Beloved Disciple. It is for this reason and others that James D. G. Dunn, in his magisterial study aptly titled Jesus Remembered,5 suggests that all we have is a mediated Jesus. We have no direct access to Jesus. This conclusion, however, is based on the assumption that what we have in the Gospels is not eyewitness testimony but rather the literary residue of a long process of oral traditioning. In another volume I have taken issue with this assumption (and it is just an assumption) at great length.6 It is my view that we do indeed have eyewitness testimony, directly in the Fourth Gospel and indirectly in the other three. The chain of tradition between Jesus and the Gospel writers involved not many links, but only two or three—Jesus to the eyewitnesses to the Gospel writers (if they were not eyewitnesses)—and the way we should view their material is from the perspective of oral history, not the old form-critical approach labeled “oral tradition,” which was anachronistically based on analogies with how much more modern Balkan folk literature and other such material developed over time. Rather, the Jewish model of carefully handing down traditions from named sources is the model followed by the eyewitnesses and Gospel writers.7

Without in any way slighting the fact that we do not have the “Jesus Papers” in our Gospels, I am quite confident that the canonical Gospels tell us a great deal about, and offer us materials from, the historical Jesus. I have explained at length the reason for my confidence about this matter in What Have They Done with Jesus?8 Of a similar ilk is a very important monograph written by my colleague Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.9 The upshot of these two monographs is that all these Gospels are written by persons who are in touch with the eyewitnesses, if they themselves are not eyewitnesses. Furthermore, they handled their source material and traditions in conservative ways, which is to be expected because all of these books, except Luke’s Gospel, were written by early Jews, who had a clear sense of how sacred traditions should be handled. And as Luke 1:1-4 demonstrates, Luke, for his part, is trying to follow the strictures of Hellenistic historiography at its best and consult eyewitnesses.10

To this we may add that in Acts 1:1-2 it is at least the claim of Luke that what he presents in Acts is about the same Jesus whom he spoke of in the first volume, relating what he began to do and teach in his Gospel and what he now he continues to do in Acts. So at the very least, literary sensitivity would say that we have to respect the linkage that the text claims was a key part of the Christian reading of Jesus.11 It is for these kinds of reasons that Jeremias long ago rightly said that it is the inauthenticity of the Jesus material we find in the Synoptics, not its authenticity, that needs to be argued for and demonstrated. Having said this, I will be critically sifting all of the evidence as I seek to present Jesus and his beliefs and behaviors as well as the beliefs and behaviors that he taught his disciples. It is good to know at the outset however, that we are beginning this journey at the right place.

In a sense, we are beginning at the fork in the road where Jews were originally asked to choose between following Jesus and moving in other directions. In journeying with Jesus, the Old Testament would in no way be left behind, but now it would be interpreted in the light of Christ, which involved both an eschatological and a messianic reading of certain Old Testament texts. Jesus would have to instruct his followers in this new way of reading old texts, and Luke tells us that he did just that: “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Lk 24:27). As this very text suggests, some of this instruction had to wait until after Easter, until both Jesus and his disciples had experienced Easter. Indeed, a good deal of the understanding would not come until after the Spirit was sent to the disciples. Nevertheless, it was Jesus who began this process of the rereading of the Torah in the light of himself and his ministry of salvation. It is Jesus who was the source, the catalyst, and the basis for the subsequent phenomena that we call “Christianity.” The credit should not be laid at the doorstep of Paul. A new day dawned in early Judaism when Jesus began his ministry, and neither Judaism nor the world would ever be the same thereafter.

JESUS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT: EARLY JEWISH MESSIANISM

Christians are sometimes guilty of thinking that one can simply turn the page from the end of Malachi to the beginning of Matthew and not miss a beat. A moment’s reflection will show the error in this way of thinking. The Old Testament says nothing about demons and almost nothing about Satan; only a few of its verses mention bodily resurrection or everlasting life, and only a few more mention a human messiah figure. Yet when John the Baptizer walks on the stage of human history, followed in short order by Jesus, they presume that their audiences will understand where these sorts of theological ideas come from and what they mean.

If we take the time to read through the documents, we see that whereas the Old Testament says precious little about such subjects just mentioned, the so-called intertestamental Jewish literature (also known as the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) has a good deal to say about them. Indeed, I would suggest that the person and work and thought world of Jesus cannot properly be understood without an understanding of early Jewish thinking about such subjects, and early Jewish history for that matter. As Amy-Jill Levine says, “Today Jesus’ words are too familiar, too domesticated, too stripped of their initial edginess and urgency. Only when heard through first-century Jewish ears can their original edginess and urgency be recovered. Consequently to understand the man from Nazareth, it is necessary to understand Judaism. More, it is necessary to see Jesus as firmly within Judaism rather than standing apart from it.”12 Amen to that.

It is quite astounding to me how many Christian efforts at discerning or even constructing a New Testament theology or ethics do their best to skirt, marginalize, or just ignore this issue. Here is where I remind the reader that there would never have been a crucified and risen Lord if there had not first been a Jesus of Nazareth, since they are one and the same person. To ignore the historical Jesus in favor of the risen Christ or to fail to relate the two is just another form of the Docetic and later the Gnostic heresy that the church has fought off again and again through the centuries. I would urge that the historical Jesus and his words and deeds are just about as crucial for New Testament theology and ethics as the end of his human life and its sequel, not least because without them we have no proper Jewish context to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection.13 I have taken considerable pains in Jesus the Sage14 and Jesus the Seer15 to show that both the historical Jesus and the Gospels are best illuminated by studying not just the Old Testament, but also early Jewish sapiential and prophetic literature written after the time of the Old Testament literature. Taking the time to do this, one discovers that Jesus has much more in common with the counterorder wisdom of someone such as Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes than he has with the various sages who wrote Proverbs, and he has a good deal in common with the author of Wisdom of Solomon and even more with Jesus ben Sira, who wrote Sirach. It is important to recognize this from the outset, because as Richard Burridge has stressed, wisdom teaching is addressed more to the imagination and mind than to the heart and will (unlike prophetic teaching wanting the audience to “repent and believe”).16 Jesus, of course, did both, but the dominant mode of his teaching was sapiential, attempting to tease the mind into active thought and imagination. This creates problems for those who seek to extract from the teaching of Jesus purely propositional or abstract theological and ethical ideas from the Jesus tradition without due attention to the character of the material, or for that matter the genre of the Gospels.

Jesus’ more prophetic pronouncements are mostly grounded in the material that can be called “apocalyptic prophecy,” such as we find in Daniel, Ezekiel, or Zechariah and further developed in places such as some of the Maccabean literature and in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus does not present himself as being like the classical prophets who used the formula “Thus says Yahweh” and understood themselves to be speaking for Israel’s God. In fact, it is striking that Jesus nowhere uses this oracular formula, and yet in various ways he presents himself as a prophet, one especially indebted to Second Isaiah, Daniel, and Zechariah, and also several of the more royal psalms in his self-understanding, but he reads these texts not like an exilic Jew, or even a postexilic one, but rather like those who lived after the period of the Maccabean disappointments and had come to the conclusion that only direct divine intervention could fix the situation and remedy Israel’s plight. For these reasons and others we need to understand the sort of messianism that we find in the Jewish literature that seems most akin to Jesus’ own words and deeds.

When I use the term messianism, I am talking about Jewish reflections on the Messiah, the anointed one of God who would rescue or deliver God’s people in some manner. When one reads the New Testament, where the term Christ appears on most every page, one might assume that “messiah” was a constant subject of discussion in the Old Testament or in early Judaism. In fact, when one looks up the term māšȋaḥ (Hebrew) or christos (Greek), both referring to an anointed person, one is surprised to learn that the term is never used in the Old Testament of a future Jewish ruler—never. The term is used in Psalm 2:2; 18:50; 89:39; 132:10-17 to refer to past or present Davidic kings,17 but in Isaiah 45:1 it is used of Cyrus, ...