Guide for the Christian Perplexed

Thomas P. Power, Power

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781610974585
• eBook ISBN: 9781630875497
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Ministère chrétien

Thoughtful Christians are legitimately perplexed by a number of issues relating to the church's belief and practice. They are perplexed partly because they recognize that the issues themselves are thorny, and partly because they are not sure how to test the mutually inconsistent theories and explanations affirmed by diverse voices speaking with equal assurance. Most Christians find relatively little occasion or encouragement to address their perplexities with intellectual candor and integrity. If they dare to acknowledge their theological perplexities at all, they are too often told that these perplexities are unimportant, or that they can be answered very simply, or that they should be left to the experts. Guide for the Christian Perplexed, written by members of the faculty of Wycliffe College, Toronto, aims to explore a diversity of issues and questions to do withoour knowledge of Jesus othe meaning of sufferingothe function of doctrineothe understanding of Scriptureothe place of other religionsothe challenge of atheismothe pleasures and complications of sexualityothe nature of worship othe way to evangelizeounderstanding who our neighbor is locally and globallyodiversities of spirituality Here you will find thoughtful reflections and answers to the questions around these issues. A study guide is included for individual and group use.

1

What Can We Know of Jesus?

Terence L. Donaldson

Introduction

Pronouncements by committees of academic scholars do not usually become media events, but this is precisely what has happened in the past few years with the Jesus Seminar. Its twin volumes, The Five Gospels and The Acts of Jesus,1 have captured public imagination, partly because of a continuing fascination with Jesus in North American society and partly because of the media savvy of the Seminar’s co-chairpersons, Robert Funk and Dominic Crossan. The questions addressed by the Seminar—concerning the reliability of the New Testament gospels and the authenticity of the deeds and sayings attributed to Jesus—while by no means new, have usually been discussed in sober lecture halls and learned academic tomes. But the Seminar’s way of addressing these questions has been more academic street theatre than ivory-tower discourse. Their procedure of voting with different-colored beads—red for things that Jesus undoubtedly did or said, black for actions or sayings that he undoubtedly did not, with shades of pink and grey in between—and their publication of a correspondingly color-coded version of the gospels (a clever takeoff on traditional red-letter editions) have been shrewdly devised to capture the attention of a sound-bite, photo-op culture.

Public interest in the Jesus Seminar has been further heightened, however, by the fact that in its version of the gospels there is precious little red ink to be found at all; in other words, the total number of sayings and deeds considered to be certainly authentic is strikingly small. (There is probably little red ink in the publisher’s balance sheets for these volumes as well, but that is another matter!) The only red (i.e., certainly authentic) segment of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, is the opening “Our Father”; no red appears in the Beatitudes whatsoever!

This brings us to the question posed in the title of this chapter. The question of what we can know of Jesus has been raised by intelligent outsiders at least since the time of the second-century writer Celsus and, since the Enlightenment, increasingly by scholars within the Christian tradition. While the Jesus Seminar tends to occupy the more skeptical end of the scholarly spectrum, what is new about it is not so much the answer it tends to favor as the way in which it has aroused public interest in the question.

Faced with this question, Christians of a traditional sort might want to respond that the answer is obvious—what we can know about Jesus has been reliably preserved for us in the gospels—and might react with some annoyance that the Jesus Seminar has been able to gain such a hearing among a credulous public. But matters are not quite so simple. The gospels are complicated documents; the issues that dominate the modern study of Jesus have been generated not solely by the unwarranted skepticism of publicity-seeking scholars but at least partly by the nature of the gospels themselves. To take one small example, was the last supper a Passover meal, as Mark and the other Synoptic Gospels indicate (see Mark 14:12),2 or did it take place the night before Passover, as John’s gospel has it (John 13:1; 18:28)? Or, within the Synoptics themselves, how exactly did the disciples respond to the incident where Jesus came to them walking on the water—by worshiping him and acclaiming him as Son of God (Matt 14:33) or with lack of comprehension because “their hearts were hardened” (Mark 6:52)? Again, where did the encounters with the risen Jesus take place? Only in and around Jerusalem, as in Luke-Acts (the disciples are actually commanded by the risen Jesus to remain in Jerusalem until Pentecost; Luke 24:49)? Or in Galilee, as in Matthew and Mark? As these examples indicate, the question of what we can know about Jesus is a live one, and the answer cannot simply be read off from the New Testament as if it were an answer sheet at the back of a textbook. Still, scholarly skepticism—unwarranted varieties included—is present in large doses in the Jesus Seminar and its spinoffs, and the answer is not to be read off from its productions either.3

Evidence and Interpretation

There are several dimensions to our question, which we will have to address in due course. One has been highlighted by the Jesus Seminar, and has to do with the evidence at our disposal. To put it in the most general terms: What solid information do we have, from the gospels and elsewhere, about the life, teaching and activity of Jesus? Contained within this general question are some more specific ones: What evidence is there for Jesus outside the New Testament? With respect to the New Testament itself, how reliable is the material in the gospels? Are there indeed sayings or events that should be in black type, to pose the question in terms of the Seminar’s color scheme? To the extent that the answer to this question is yes, what considerations might be put into play in order to differentiate between “red” and “black” material?

But this is only part of what is contained in the question, “What can we know of Jesus?” For the knowledge of Jesus that is being sought here is not simply a catalogue of reliable information. What we are interested in knowing is what the information adds up to, what overall portrait emerges of the person of Jesus, his agenda and his significance, what structure is to be built with the raw evidential material. Here is where matters get confusing. For while modern reconstructions of the life and ministry of Jesus tend to agree in general terms about the most reliable items of information concerning Jesus,4 the resultant portraits are bewildering in their variety. An apocalyptic prophet of the end times, a maverick rabbi, a Galilean holy man, a wandering sage, a politically oriented champion of the underclass, a Zealot revolutionary, an itinerant Cynic gadfly—the recent spate of Jesus books has included all of these “takes” on the story and more. While some of these are incongruent with the traditional portraits found in the gospels, most of them at least bring aspects of the gospel accounts into fresh new light. The question of what we can know of Jesus, then, involves the identification not only of reliable information about him but also of the most appropriate interpretive model within which this information is to be understood and made meaningful.

Jesus of History, Christ of Faith

Before tackling our question directly, it will be helpful to stand back and consider a preliminary question about the question, one having to do with the potential significance of whatever might emerge at the end of the process. Why might it be important to identify what can be known about the person, aims and achievement of Jesus of Nazareth? Who might want to know, and why? The sheer variety of the Jesuses that have been proposed suggests that the personal predispositions brought to the task by interpreters have at least some impact on the profile of Jesus that is produced. This book is addressed generally to those with some interest in how the Christian gospel might be understood in the contemporary context. Thus the question has to do with the ongoing religious significance of the earthly Jesus himself.

As a way of bringing the question into focus, it will be helpful to start where the Jesus Seminar’s The Five Gospels starts—with the Apostles’ Creed. With roots going back to the second century, this creed, traditionally used in the context of baptism, reflects one of the earliest Christian attempts to articulate the core beliefs of the church. It is instructive to come at this creed from the perspective of the question, “What is the ongoing religious significance of Jesus of Nazareth?” The relevant portion of the creed is brief enough to be cited in full:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his [God’s] only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died and was buried;

He descended to the dead.

On the third day he rose again . . .

What is striking about this (and any other traditional) creed is the absence of any article concerning the earthly Jesus himself. The creed jumps over the events of his life, moving straight from his birth to his death and resurrection. The implication seems to be that the events of Jesus’s active ministry—teaching, preaching, gathering disciples, healing, conflict with the religious authorities and so on, are of minor importance in any Christian assessment of Jesus’s significance. The Apostles’ Creed seems to suggest that what we might be able to find out about the earthly Jesus does not really help us to get at his ongoing religious significance at all.

This distinction between the “Jesus of history”—the human person, with his own particular agenda, self-understanding and accomplishments—and the “Christ of faith”—the “only Son of God” who “for us and for our salvation came down from heaven,” as the Nicene Creed puts it—is one of the basic assumptions underlying the activity of the Jesus Seminar and other scholarly quests for the historical Jesus. The distinction can be exaggerated (on which more in a moment), but it is nevertheless real. One cannot read through Luke-Acts, for example, without being struck by the difference between the message proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (centered on the coming reign or kingdom of God and its present implications) and that proclaimed about Jesus by the early Christians in the Acts of the Apostles (centered on the saving significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection as Messiah and Lord). A similar distinction is apparent between Paul’s summary of what he calls the “gospel” in 1 Cor 15:3–8 (“Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures . . .”) and the Lord’s prayer in Matt 6:9–13 (where the focus is on God and God’s reign, with Jesus’s own person and role not mentioned at all).

The Jesus Seminar represents an approach in which the distinction between the earthly Jesus and the gospel Christ tends to be seen as a mutually exclusive either/or. The Five Gospels, for example, describes the Apostles’ Creed as a text in which “Jesus is displaced by the Christ” (my emphasis). Or again: “Once the discrepancy between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith emerged from under the smothering cloud of the historic creeds, it was only a matter of time before scholars sought to disengage the Jesus of history from the Christ of the church’s faith.”5

The assumption appears to be that the real earthly Jesus has been so obscured by a mythical Christ foisted on the Christian movement by the apostle Paul and those of his ilk, that Jesus can be restored to view only by means of heroic reconstructive work carried out by scholars who have been able to free themselves “from the dark ages of theological tyranny.”6

This approach is, I believe, exaggerated. The gospels themselves combine an interest in the earthly Jesus with a commitment to the gospel Christ. As their name suggests, the gospels represent a narrative version of the gospel, an attempt to narrate the events in Jesus’s active ministry according to a plotline discernible in condensed form in such texts as 1 Cor 15:3–8 and the Apostles’ Creed. But while the distinction is not to be exaggerated, it is at the same time not to...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What Can We Know of Jesus?
• Chapter 2: How Can the Wrathful God of the Old Testament Be Reconciled with the Gracious Lord of the New Testament?
• Chapter 3: The Challenge of Suffering
• Chapter 4: Signposts in a Strange Land
• Chapter 5: God Bless the Atheists
• Chapter 6: Does God Condemn Non-Christians?
• Chapter 7: Why Evangelism?
• Chapter 8: Who Is My Neighbor?
• Chapter 9: Let’s Talk about Sex
• Chapter 10: Why Christian Spirituality?
• Chapter 11: Celtic Christianity and the Postmodern Spiritual Quest
• Chapter 12: Is Worship a Waste of a Good Sunday Morning?
• Chapter 13: Pastoral Perplexity
• Chapter 14: Pew Perplexity
• Chapter 15: Study Guide
• Bibliography