The Wisdom of Jesus

Between the Sages of Israel and the Apostles of the Church

Charles W. Hedrick

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625649096
  9781498222570
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877040
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

How would the image of Jesus appear if it were based only on sayings that scholars generally agreed originated with Jesus? And how would the wisdom of Jesus reflected in those few sayings compare to the wisdom of the sages of ancient Israel and the apostles of the early first-century church? To answer such questions historians face serious difficulties. Everything we know about Jesus comes from what later writers thought about him; none of the things they claimed he said came directly from him. "Everything in the early Christian gospels is either derived from historical memory, or is borrowed, or invented," Hedrick claims. Even those few sayings receiving near-universal agreement from historians as sayings of Jesus can only be affirmed as probable rather than certain. The aim of this study is to allow Jesus to speak for himself directly to readers, as nearly as possible in his own words without the theological explanations of his interpreters. The resulting image of Jesus that emerges is a complex picture of a first-century lower-class man who was not religious in a traditional sense. His discourse was the language of the secular world and addressed issues of common life.

1

The Problem of the Historical Study of Jesus

My aim in this book is to allow Jesus to speak for himself, as nearly as possible in his own words. In attempting to achieve that goal every historian faces a serious difficulty, for everything about Jesus is derived from what others wrote about him. Nothing comes directly from him. Everything in the early Christian gospels is either derived from historical memory, or is borrowed, or invented. Even what has a high claim to have originated with Jesus can only be affirmed as “probable,” rather than certain.

For readers unfamiliar with the historical study of Jesus these statements will likely come as something of a shock, for few of the advances in the historical study of Jesus in the past 235 years, and what these advances imply, have dribbled down into the pews of most Christian churches throughout the world. A person interested in the critical study of Jesus, however, can survey the history of scholarship by reading through two volumes on the historical study of Jesus. The first study begins with research in the middle of the eighteenth century, and extends to the beginning of the twentieth century. The second continues with the critical study of Jesus up to the middle of the twentieth century.31 Appropriate sections of competent critical introductions to the study of the New Testament will help to fill out the picture of historical scholarship on the sources and the study of Jesus.

Studying Jesus from a historical perspective is an enterprise laced with numerous difficulties, and while great agreement exists among scholars who make this subject a focus of their work, there is also much disagreement. Scholars are more apt to agree broadly on the recognition of the problems than on the details of specific solutions. For example, scholars have come to realize that a literary relationship exists between Matthew, Mark, and Luke—these three are called the “synoptic gospels” because they take a similar view of the public career and discourse of Jesus (i.e., “syn-optic”). But they are also dissimilar in many ways. Close similarity and striking diversity throughout these three texts demand explanation, to judge from the literature on the gospels aiming to explain them. Scholars refer to this situation as “the synoptic problem,” which simply stated is, how can the similarity and diversity between Matthew, Mark, and Luke be explained?

The relationship between these three ancient writings has not been settled definitively, although, perhaps, it has been settled practically. The current working hypothesis posits Mark as the earliest of the three to be written with Matthew and Luke, each independently, using Mark as a written source for producing their own texts. This particular solution also requires the assumption that Matthew and Luke used another gospel source—a source that has been reconstructed hypothetically from the shared material in Matthew and Luke that does not exist in Mark.32 Other solutions have at times been proposed to explain the diversity and similarity between the gospels that do not require the assumption of a hypothetical gospel; nevertheless, currently, the priority of Mark solution explaining the relative writing sequence of the synoptic gospels is generally preferred. Matthew and Mark drew much of their narratives from Mark and Q, as the hypothetical source has come to be called.33

Sorting out the literary history of these three gospels is essential in determining Jesus’ personal history and the theological character of his earliest followers. Settling the relative sequence of the texts enables scholars to sort out in a rough way earlier material from later material in the gospels, and allows them to describe the theological tendencies of the synoptic tradition—or put more exactly: to sort out an earlier tradition from its later use. The gospel writers are not historians in the technical sense of the word;34 they are first-century evangelists who are more concerned with describing Jesus as the iconic object of their faith than identifying historical aspects of Jesus’ personal history. Their own personal faith is as much involved in their narratives as is traditional memory about Jesus, which antedates the gospels by going back a generation or even earlier, perhaps to the time of Jesus himself. Under these conditions identifying aspects of Jesus’ personal history presents extensive difficulties to the scholar of the Jesus tradition. Although there are always differences of opinion, the resolution of these difficulties generally depends on arguments that can succeed in convincing a majority of scholars about a particular issue—but that resolution of the problem will last only until a better approach or argument for a different solution comes along.

To illustrate the difficulties and how scholars analyze the texts critically, here is an analysis of one segment of material shared between Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Matt 16:1–4 = Matt 12:38–39 = Mark 8:11–13 = Luke 11:16, 29); the shared segment describes a request for a sign from Jesus.35

The literary arrangement (Matt 16:1 = Matt 12:38 = Mark 8:11 = Luke 11:16) for the pronouncement saying in Matt 16:4 = Matt 12:39 = Mark 8:12 = Luke 11:29 is generally similar, and has some striking verbal agreement. Matthew and Luke have additional material, which is generally similar (Matt 16:2–3 = Luke 12:54–56) but this material is not shared by Mark. Part of this shared material has some verbal agreements (Matt 16:3b = Luke 12:56), and the parallel also appears in Gos. Thom. 91.

The verbal agreement and difference in the pronouncement saying of Jesus between Matt16:4 = Matt 12:39 = Mark 8:12 = Luke 11:29, however, is striking. In Mark Jesus says: “no sign shall be given to this generation”—an absolute refusal! Luke and Matthew, however, in the parallel passages appear to take up the wording of the absolute refusal of Jesus to give a sign in Mark 8:12 but change the absolute refusal by simply tagging on to Mark’s refusal to give a sign an exception—“except the sign [of the prophet] Jonah.”36 That is to say, in Mark Jesus refuses to give a sign, but in Mathew and Luke Jesus does give a sign—the sign of Jonah. The critical question is: are Matthew and Luke dependent on Mark’s narrative for this segment, which they edited by simply adding the exception phrase, or have they simply replaced Mark 8:12 with a different saying they found in Q, which read like Mark but ended with the exception phrase? This latter explanation posits a source (i.e., Q) earlier than Matthew, Mark, and Luke as a source knowing the except...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Problem of the Historical Study of Jesus
• Chapter 2: Jesus and the Language of the Gospel
• Chapter 3: Early Christian Wisdom
• Chapter 4: Surveying the Sages of Ancient Israel
• Chapter 5: The Sayings of Jesus
• Chapter 6: Vestiges of a Discourse
• Chapter 7: Parables
• Chapter 8: A Case Study of a Parable
• Chapter 9: Jesus between the Wisdom Canons of Israel and the Church
• Epilogue
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography