The Shape of the Gospel

New Testament Essays

Tannehill

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270489
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Most of the following essays reveal my interest in the significance of literary forms--both the short literary forms in the Gospels, such as pronouncement stories, and an entire Gospel as a formed narrative. I am interested in the significance of these forms, not just in literary classification systems.... I am interested in literary form as a clue to how the text may engage hearers and readers--impact their thought and life--if they are sensitive respondents. The Gospel stories have been shaped in ways that give them particular potentials for significant engagement. Study of literary form can help us recognize these potentials. --from the IntroductionContentsPart I: Gospel Sayings and Stories1 Tension in Synoptic Sayings and Stories2 The Pronouncement Story and Its Types3 Varieties of Synoptic Pronouncement Stories4 Types and Functions of Apophthegms in the Synoptic Gospels5 The Gospels and Narrative Literature6 You Shall Be Complete--If Your Love Includes All (Matthew 5:48)Part II: The Gospel of Mark7 The Disciples in Mark: The Function of a Narrative Role8 The Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology9 Reading It Whole: The Function of Mark 8:34-35 in Mark's StoryPart III: Paul's Gospel10 Paul as Liberator and Oppressor: Evaluating Diverse Views of 1 Corinthians11 Participation in Christ: A Central Theme in Pauline Soteriology

part i

Gospel Sayings and Stories

1

Tension in Synoptic Sayings and Stories

The following short essay provides a useful introduction to essays that follow because it suggests some of the reasons why I am interested in studying the literary and rhetorical features of synoptic sayings and stories. The study of formal features is not an end in itself. Literary observations can provide clues to understanding the appropriate functions of the texts as human communication. In particular, the tensive language of the texts enables them to do more than inform. This feature of synoptic texts helps them to move their hearers through the impact of forceful and imaginative language, inviting a change in fundamental values and commitments.

The introductory section of this essay summarizes a longer argument in The Sword of His Mouth (1975; reprinted, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2003; 1–31), and the following section on synoptic sayings receives further support and illustration in that book. The last two sections of this essay draw on more extensive work on pronouncement stories (or apophthegms) and on the Gospel of Mark. Further essays on these topics in the present volume develop and support my brief comments here.

Text as Message

Scholarship should protect the independence of the biblical text. Historical scholarship has helped to do this by showing us that biblical texts are not the mirror image of the modern reader’s theology, piety, and social world, for they speak from and to a world that in many ways is strange to us. Nevertheless, modern scholarship often muffles the independent voice of the text. We insert the text into our own pre-established world in a way that will cause the least disturbance. Where the church’s influence is strong, this may mean domes­ticating the text to a conventional Christian piety and morality. Where the academy’s interests are dominant, another kind of domestication may take place. We cease listening to the text as a message in which someone writes to readers (including, finally, to us) about matters of human seriousness and treat the text as evidence for the production and defense of a theory of our own devising. The production and testing of theories need not be an idle pastime. At their best, theories can be new ways of seeing that open up new dimensions of under­standing of texts and human life. But treating the text as evidence rather than as message allows us to subordinate it to our interests. The text is domesticated to the academic enterprise. The interests and concerns of the original speaker or writer are forgotten so that the text may serve our interests, the production and defense of a theory, which may be useful for professional advancement and may even dis­close some truth but may also lack the ultimate concern of the original speaker.

There is a kind of scholarship that can help us to focus on the text as message. It is still young and, contrary to my hopes, it may not prove to be the wave of the future. It can be placed among the “literary” approaches to the Bible. However, interest in the Bible as literature conceals a variety of com­peting purposes. Not all of these new approaches will help us to read the text as message. If, however, we focus on the text as an act of communication between writer and reader, a communication that may not only convey information but also seek to influence, to challenge, to change, we are recognizing the text as a message. Literary analysis can help us explore the nature and dimensions of this message. This analysis should be guided by awareness that, in literary art and wherever the personal impact of language is important, content cannot be sepa­rated from form. The contrary assumption leads to abstracting an idea or in­formation from the text, ignoring the fact that the text may be intended to fascinate, entice, or present a personal challenge.

I have been impressed with the large amount of forceful and imaginative language in the synoptic Gospels. The shapers of these words evidently wished to speak with strong personal impact. They wished not merely to inform but to challenge. They called for change in basic commitments, values, and attitudes. We as persons are defined not only by what we assume to be true but also by what in­terests and concerns us. The forceful and imaginative language of the Gospels seeks to change those assumptions, interests, and concerns.

If the speakers and writers of the Gospels, through their use of forceful and imaginative language, are calling for change in the lives of their hearers and readers, it is the task of the interpreter to clarify the dimensions of this change by careful study of the language of the call. The movement sought is often reflected in the language used. We encounter “tensive language,”1 language that em­bodies a tension and expresses a conflict with ordinary ways of thinking and acting. Careful study of the language can help the interpreter to locate the primary point of tension and explore the linguistic strategies used to encourage change. Not only the explicit commands are a call and challenge, for statements and stories may also contain hidden imperatives and invitations to change.

This concern with the literary form of the text as message does not mean ignoring its social and historical setting. Communication is seldom fully explicit. It rests upon assumptions shared by a social group at a particular time in history. The interpreter may aid our understanding by clarifying the implicit background of what is expressed. Furthermore, study of the literary and rhetorical features of the Gospels, leading to clarification of the points of tension mentioned above, can help us to be precise about speakers’ and writers’ perceptions of value conflicts in their historical settings, thus contributing to historical and sociological study of the Gospels.

The following reflections may suggest what is at stake for us as human beings in this approach to the Gospels:2 Our ordinary language fits and serves us like a house in which we have long lived. Everything is in place for our use. Our lan­guage reflects our daily interests and activities; the words run along paths as clearly marked as the threadbare trails in an old carpet. But, just as the walls of our house limit our sight, so our ordinary language limits our perception of truth and value. Primarily it allows us to speak of our work and household duties. Beyond this house of routine language is the un-remark-able (what cannot be said and therefore escapes our notice).

This house of routine language defines our routine world. It implies an inter­pretation of ourselves as part of meaningful space. Because the house is small, we are also small. There are potential dimensions of our being unrealized in this little world. If these are essential to our full humanness, our humanness is distorted or lost. To speak theologically, our little world becomes the world of sin and death in which God’s purpose for humanity is negated since our house has no windows to what transcends it.

The house in which we live is the product of imaginative interpretation. We (guided by our families and culture) have created it by our interpretive percep­tion, memory, and intention.3 Our perception is selective; it is determined by what we care to see, by what is important to us according to some interpretation of the world. Our memory is also selective. Furthermore, the past is always present to us in some interpretation and can change its meaning by new inter­pretation. Our intentions are also imaginative products; we set up images of what is good for us to be and do. But our memory, our intentions, our special way of perceiving are aspects of our very being. To a large extent they determine who we are. We are cripples if they reveal an interpretation of self and world that is false and crippling.

We can only escape such “evil imaginations of the heart” when the imagina­tion is reawakened to new interpretive work. While routine language provides the walls and fixtures of our house, locking us into its cramped space, language can also be the key to freedom. Language that breaks with the routine world, speaking from and to the imagination, can change the routine ways in which we interpret and can mediate a new vision of self and world. Language escapes its ordinary limits by meaningful distortions of ordinary speech. Since ordinary language directs our attention to the superficial, blinding us to the unique, the beautiful, and the mysterious, poets do strange things with language. For instance, metaphor is important in poetry. Metaphor is a strange way of speaking in which the poet uses a word in a context foreign to it. There is deliberate tension with the ordinary use of the word, and this meaningful distortion can deepen our per­ception. Such distortion is necessary because of the medium in which the poet works. The poet is less like a sculptor who begins with an amorphous block of stone than like a sculptor who begins with auto bumpers from a junkyard. The material has already been shaped to another purpose, and the artist must twist it away from its original shape and meaning, challenging the routine of language and our routine world. A similar challenge may come through the creation of alternative worlds in story.

The Gospel stories offer us worlds in which we may share imaginatively. At key points these worlds are structured in ways that differ sharply from the as­sumptions that control our lives. This difference appears both in the turn of events and in the forceful words of Jesus within the story. But the points of tension of which the original speakers and writers were sharply aware have been lost to us, for we have learned to incorporate the Gospels into a familiar and comfortable world. This is facilitated by interpreting the forceful and imaginative language of the Gospels as if it were language of another kind. We assume that we should distill a clear religious idea or doctrine from this language, an idea stripped of imaginative power and of the tensive expression that challenges the routine world. Then it may be accepted as true, but it does not stir the imagination nor disturb the old assumptions shaping our lives, and life does not change. Or it may be accepted as a rule of behavior, but it does not affect our basic goals and values. Thus the words of religion promote a hidden hypocrisy, an intellec­tual acceptance and a legalistic obedience that do not transform. Jesus and the Evangelists were seeking something more, as careful study of their language shows.

What I have said will, I hope, suggest the significance of my previous probing of the synoptic Gospels. This has taken place at three levels: (1) the sayings at­tributed to Jesus, (2) the pronouncement stories, (3) the Gospel of Mark as a unitary narrative. The remainder of this essay will illustrate and summarize some of the results of this probing.

Tensive Language in Sayings

First let us consider the tensive language in the sayings at­tributed to Jesus.4 At this point we will study these sayings apart from their narrative setting. This can be done with least loss when the saying is part of a larger sayings collection like the major blocks of teaching found in Matthew. When presented in this way, the narrative setting of the teaching fades, the teaching appears to be teaching for all times, and the Evangelist is suggesting that the “you” addressed by Jesus includes the readers, not just a limited group gathered on a particular occasion of Jesus’ past ministry.

Many of the sayings attributed to Jesus contain commands. We are tempted to interpret these as rules of behavior, instructions on how we are to act. Such an interpretation reveals a fateful short circuit in our response to the text. Those concerned primarily with external behavior attempt to speak with clarity, describ­ing the required behavior in precise and literal language. We would find good rules of behavior in a clear set of instructions for assembling a bicycle or in clearly written legislation. Neither the instructions nor the legislation is likely to resemble poetry. The words about the birds and the lilies in Matt 6:25–33 (par. Luke 12:22–31) are quite different.5 The command “Do not be anxious” could be taken as a rule of behavior. However, anxiety is remarkably difficult to control by the conscious will. It is important that the teaching does not stop with this simple command but continues with language that is similar to poetry. Something pro­foundly meaningful for humanity is discovered in concrete experiences of nature (the simplicity and directness with which birds gather food; the beauty of the field flowers), which thereby become images of something greater, and the power of this perception is reinforced by repetitive pattern ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Part One: Gospel Sayings and Stories
• Chapter 1: Tension in Synoptic Sayings and Stories
• Chapter 2: The Pronouncement Story and Its Types
• Chapter 3: Varieties of Synoptic Pronouncement Stories
• Chapter 4: Types and Functions of Apophthegms in the Synoptic Gospels
• Chapter 5: The Gospels and Narrative Literature
• Chapter 6: “You Shall Be Complete”—If Your Love Includes All
• Part Two: The Gospel of Mark
• Chapter 7: The Disciples in Mark: The Function of a Narrative
• Chapter 8: The Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology
• Chapter 9: Reading It Whole: The Function of Mark 8:34–35 in Mark’s Story
• Part Three: Paul’s Gospel
• Chapter 10: Paul as Liberator and Oppressor: Evaluating Diverse Views of 1 Corinthians
• Chapter 11: Participation in Christ: A Central Theme in Pauline Soteriology