Christian Thought in the Twenty-First Century

Agenda for the Future

Shantz, Ruparell

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621891857
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this volume some of the outstanding Christian scholars of our day reflect on how their minds have changed, how their academic fields have changed over the course of their careers, and the pressing issues that Christian scholars will need to address in the twenty-first century. This volume offers an accessible portrait of key trends in the world of Christian scholarship today.Christian Thought in the Twenty-First Century features scholars from Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and Switzerland. The contributors represent a wide variety of academic backgrounds--from biblical studies to theology, to religious studies, to history, English literature, philosophy, law, and ethics.This book offers a personal glimpse of Christian scholars in a self-reflective mode, capturing their honest reflections on the changing state of the academy and on changes in their own minds and outlooks. The breadth and depth of insight afforded by these contributions provide rich soil for a reader's own reflections, and an agenda that will occupy Christian thinkers well into the twenty-first century.

Part 1

Historical Perspectives on the Christian Tradition

1

Jesus and the Gospels

Craig A. Evans

The last twenty-five years have seen a revolution in the study of the Jesus of history and new ways of understanding the Gospels. Most of the developments have been positive, but there have also been some unfortunate ones as well. What lies ahead will probably include more of the same. My own thinking has evolved, resulting in changes with respect to specific historical and critical issues and with respect to theological and religious implications.

Last Twenty-Five Years

Perhaps the single most important development in study of the historical Jesus has been the rediscovery of his Jewish life and setting. For too long Christian interpreters have lifted Jesus out of his Jewish world and, in effect, made him into a “Christian,” and often a champion of whatever theological and ecclesiastical emphases happened to be in vogue. The Gospels are now seen as capable of yielding significant information about Jesus, his teaching, and activities. The Gospels also reveal the factors that led to his execution and why his followers continued to regard him as Israel’s Messiah and Savior.

In the mid-1980s it became clear to New Testament scholars that a new phase of Jesus research had dawned. As the “New Quest” of the 1950s and 1960s faded from view, its theological preoccupations seemed strangely dated and irrelevant. The skepticism of German form criticism and redaction criticism, along with its preference for an almost non-Jewish Jesus, was subjected to much deserved criticism and loss of its position at the center of the discussion. The newer phase of Jesus research eventually came to be dubbed the “Third Quest.”

Among a host of insightful studies are hefty tombs by John Meier (a Roman Catholic), E. P. Sanders (a liberal Protestant), N. T. Wright (former Bishop of Durham and an evangelical Anglican), and Dale Allison Jr. (moderate evangelical). These are among the best and most influential works of Jesus scholarship and demonstrate the ecumenical reality of this field of research. This new phase of Jesus research is not just a Protestant concern, or some conservative reaction; it is broadly ecumenical and remarkably interdisciplinary, including scholars not only in biblical studies and history, as one might expect, but in cognate fields of study. In my view, this is one of the most refreshing aspects of current study of the historical Jesus.

The fruits of these studies are seen in several important areas of Jesus research. One concerns Jesus’ aims and mission. His appointment of the twelve, his healings and exorcisms, and his proclamation of God’s rule (or, in literal but often misunderstood language, “the kingdom of God”) point unmistakably to the redemption and restoration of Israel, God’s covenant people. Jesus’ mission spoke directly to the hopes of his Jewish contemporaries.

A second important area of critical advance is the new appreciation of Jesus’ self-understanding. He almost certainly understood himself in messianic terms (though not in terms of the messianism of later rabbinic eschatology or later Christian Christology). Jesus understood himself as the “son of man,” a human figure described in Daniel 7, to whom power, authority, and kingdom were given. In heaven Jesus received from God this authority, which on earth Jesus began to exercise: “That you may know that the son of man has authority on earth [to forgive sins]” (Mark 2:10).

As the “son of man,” invested by God with authority on earth to proclaim God’s rule, to forgive sin, and to make pronouncements relating to what can be done on the Sabbath (Mark 2:27–28) and what is clean (Mark 7:1–23), Jesus naturally thought of himself as a prophet, speaking forth the word of God. The strongest evidence for this is seen in a passage that cannot easily be explained as a Christian invention: “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (Mark 6:4). Because the saying is set in a context of rejection and opposition to his ministry, it is almost certainly not the product of Christian apologetic or piety but derives from Jesus himself. Evidently the public too thought of Jesus as a prophet (cf. Mark 8:27–28). When Jesus was arrested and mocked, he was asked to prophesy (cf. Mark 14:65), in all probability alluding to his reputation as a prophet. In context, this insult does not advance or reflect Christian beliefs about Jesus. For Christians, Jesus is the Messiah and Son of God, not a mere prophet.

Today scholars are more open to thinking that the Christian opinion, following the resurrection, that Jesus was the Messiah was due to what Jesus himself taught and encouraged his disciples to believe. There is evidence for this in Jesus’ appeal to Isaiah 61:1–2 (“the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach . . .”), explicitly in his Nazareth sermon (Luke 4:16–30) and implicitly in his reply to the imprisoned and discouraged John the Baptist (Matt 11:2–5 // Luke 7:18–22). The messianic import of these allusions to words and phrases from Isaiah 61 and other passages in Isaiah has been clarified and confirmed by a fragmentary text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. According to 4Q521, when God’s Messiah appears, the sick will be healed, the dead will be raised, and the poor will have good news preached to them. According to 11QMelchizedek, the herald of Isaiah 61 was expected to proclaim the eschatological jubilee, which also appears to agree with Jesus’ declarations that sinners (or debtors) are forgiven (e.g., Mark 2:5–10; Luke 7:47–49).

There is now among scholars a greater openness to the idea that Jesus in all probability anticipated his own death and attached significance to it. In my opinion it is almost a certainty that at some point in his ministry Jesus anticipated his death, either shortly before entering Jerusalem (as in the Synoptic Gospels) or perhaps shortly after entering Jerusalem in the final Passover week. The death of John the Baptist would have pressed itself on Jesus’ thinking (cf. Mark 9:9–13), and, because Jesus was a realist, he would have known that the ruling priests were set on destroying him. The clearest evidence that Jesus anticipated his death is seen in his prayers in Gethsemane (Mark 14:32–40). The portrait of the frightened, grieving Jesus is hardly the stuff of pious imagination. One should compare the Johannine portrait of the composed, serene Jesus, who calmly discusses the glory that he and his heavenly Father share (John 17). The Synoptic portrait of the frightened Jesus who falls on his face and begs God to remove from him the cup of suffering (Mark 14:36) is surely historical.

If Jesus did indeed anticipate suffering and death, it is likely that he sought to find meaning in it. After all, the deaths of the righteous, especially in the time of the Antiochid persecution and the Maccabean revolt, were understood to be of benefit to the nation of Israel. Would Jesus think any less of his own death? I think it most probable that Jesus pondered the meaning of his death and sought to explain it to his frightened, discouraged disciples. Jesus saw the shedding of his own blood as a Passover-like sacrifice that would benefit Israel. At the same time Jesus remained confident that God would raise him up and that someday he would drink the Passover cup in the kingdom of God (Mark 14:25).

The words of institution, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:25), appear to be a conflation of Old Testament texts that speak of the blood of sacrifice, covenant, and renewal (Exod 24:8; Jer 31:31; Zech 9:11). The tradition is ancient (1 Cor 11:23–25) and thoroughly Jewish (cf. 1 Cor 5:7 “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed”). To the end, Jesus remains as Jewish as ever. Even the meaning of his death is seen in Jewish terms.

A third area of advance is a better understanding of the political factors involved in Jesus’ death. Collaboration between local authorities and their Roman overlords was standard administrative procedure in the Roman Empire. In Judea in the time of Jesus’ ministry, this meant collaboration between the high priest Caiaphas and his priestly colleagues, on the one hand, and Pontius Pilate and his retainers, on the other. The evidence indicates that the Jewish high priest and the Roman governor were able to work together. Caiaphas was appointed about one year before Pilate took office and the latter allowed the former to remain as high priest the duration of his administration (in contrast to Gratus his predecessor, who appointed a new high priest almost annually). Indeed, the nearly simultaneous removal, from office, of the high priest and the governor in early AD 37 suggests that they were implicated together in the violent Samaritan affair, an affair into which Caiaphas may well have dragged Pilate (Josephus, Ant. 18.4.2–3 §88–95). In any event, the evidence that we have—and it is rich thanks to the New Testament evangelists and Josephus, all of whom wrote within one generation of Pilate’s administration—documents how Jewish and Roman authorities shared the responsibilities of government and allows us now to understand better the role each played in Jesus’ death.

The Next Twenty-Five Years

It is difficult to forecast what lies ahead in this ever-changing field of study. It is certain that ongoing study of the large numbers of texts discovered in the last century and ongoing discoveries in archaeology will impact research into the life and teaching of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls, especially those published in 1991 and in the years following, have not been fully digested. Some of these scrolls, such as 1QSa, 1QSb, 4Q246, 4Q521, and 4Q525, have already made major contributions to our understanding of the teachings and activities of the historical Jesus. Ongoing study of these scrolls may lead to further insights.

Not all of the papyri, especially the vast quantities excavated from the sands of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, have been published. Nor have all the documents that make up the vast collection of retired books and documents discovered in the genizah of the old Cairo synagogue. It was in this collection that the first Dead Sea Scroll—the Damascus Covenant—was discovered. What else from Israel in the New Testa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Historical Perspectives on the Christian Tradition
• Part 2: Philosophical and Theological Issues
• Part 3: Encounters with Religious Pluralism and the Frontiers of Science
• Part 4: The Academy and the City
• Part 5: Approaches to English Literature and Film