Is This Not The Carpenter?

The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus

Thomas L. Thompson, Thomas S. Verenna, Thomas L. Thompson, Thomas S. Verenna

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134946143
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Ancient History

The historicity of Jesus is now widely accepted and hardly questioned by most scholars. But this assumption disarms biblical texts of much of their power by privileging an historical interpretation which effectively sweeps aside much theological speculation and allusion. Furthermore, the assumption of historicity gathers further assumptions to it, shaping the interpretation of texts, both denying and adding subtext. Scholars are now faced with an endless array of works on the historical Jesus and few question what has been lost through this wide-spread assumption of historicity. Is This Not the Carpenter? presents a very valuable corrective: a literary rereading of the New Testament.

Part III
The Rewritten Bible and the Life of Jesus

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Can John's Gospel Really Be Used to Reconstruct a Life of Jesus? An Assessment of Recent Trends and a Defence of a Traditional View

James G. Crossley

Before the turn of the millennium, critical historical Jesus scholarship was certainly a chaotic world. There were liberal and conservative disagreements over whether Jesus was something like a Cynic philosopher, an eschatological prophet, a teacher of wisdom, a ‘liberal’ rabbi and so on. There were also accompanying disputes over sources: can we use something called ‘Q’? Can we even define ‘Q’? Should we use the Gospel of Thomas and certain other non-canonical Gospels? But in the midst of the chaos one thing seemed certain: John’s Gospel was not to be used as a source for reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus and it certainly was not the earliest Gospel. There were differing dissenting voices, such as J. A. T. Robinson and D. A. Carson, but these could be dismissed (rightly or wrongly) as being either too maverick or too evangelical for mainstream tastes.¹ John, with its high Christology, lengthy discourses and disputes with the generalized ‘the Jews’, was deemed too different from the Synoptic tradition and anachronistic in ways that the Synoptic tradition was not.

Two 1996 publications illustrate this well. Maurice Casey’s book, Is John’s Gospel True?, may have provoked some hostility through its polemical tone but part of its design was simply to make clear what Johannine scholarship had long assumed, namely, that John’s Gospel was of little use for reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus.² A very different book is N. T. Wright’s massive Jesus and the Victory of God. Wright’s book is extremely conservative and in over 700 pages he never, as far as I can see, suggests the possibility that any story about, or words attributed to, Jesus might be the product of the early church. However, despite Wright’s well-known conservatism, he also has relatively little to say on John’s Gospel and effectively works with the Synoptic Gospels in his reconstruction of the life and teaching of Jesus, or, better, his retelling of the Jesus of the Gospels.³ Wright may very well believe that the Gospel of John could tell us a great deal more about the life of the historical Jesus but he does not really address the issue in his book.

After the millennium, things changed and the role of John’s Gospel in reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus has now come right into the heart of the mainstream. Richard Bauckham has been one prominent figure and widely known as one of the most learned contemporary British scholars. His work on the role of eyewitnesses and a follow-up book on John’s Gospel have not only suggested that we can legitimately use John’s Gospel in reconstructing the life and teaching of the historical Jesus but also that John’s Gospel actually is the work of an eyewitness.⁴ For Bauckham, the author of John’s Gospel was also a disciple of Jesus (though not one of the Twelve) called John (but not the son of Zebedee) who used the ‘disciple Jesus loved’ or ‘Beloved Disciple’ as a self-reference and who lived a long life before dying in Ephesus. The Beloved Disciple, Bauckham argues, provided a story of Jesus from his own memories, along with the memories of other close followers of Jesus, and blended this with reflection on Jewish tradition, to give a distinctive take on a known story.

But Bauckham was not a lone voice in the wilderness. On the contrary, at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting, the recently formed John, Jesus, and History Project hammered out issues of historicity and John’s Gospel. The project began life with ‘Consultation’ status for three years (2002–2004) where the Project analysed various methodological issues followed by the publication in 2007 of John, Jesus, and History, Volume 1: Critical Appraisals of Critical Views, edited by Paul Anderson, Felix Just and Tom Thatcher.⁵ ‘Group’ status followed as did three years of studying aspects of historicity in John’s Gospel (2005–2007), culminating in the publication in 2009 of John, Jesus, and History, Volume 2: Aspects of Historicity in the Fourth Gospel with the same editors.⁶ In 2008–2010 further related work is being undertaken with another publication in the pipeline.⁷ This is clearly a popular project. The annual meetings, it is claimed, entertain more than 350 scholars, a broad range of perspectives (theological and methodological), some of the leading scholars from around the world, and include a range of views on the historicity of John (a number of essays actually appear to restate the more traditional view of the historicity of John).⁸ Coupling the project’s work with the high profile work of Bauckham, there should be no doubt: John’s Gospel is now on the agenda for reconstructing the life and teaching of Jesus and no critical work on the historical Jesus can ignore these prominent voices.

Why Is John's Gospel Now Being Used in the Quest for the Historical Jesus?

Before we assess the arguments made by Bauckham and certain participants in the John, Jesus and History Project, it may be helpful to contextualize the emergence of John’s Gospel in mainstream historical Jesus studies in order to show that this emergence is no freak occurrence but very much part of the cultural trends affecting contemporary scholarship.

In broader cultural terms, the past decade has seen the rise of both ‘fundamentalism’ and its antithesis, a hardened secularism or emboldened atheism. Of course, both trends are hardly new but this past decade they have both risen to cultural prominence in ways in which they were not before. A key moment was the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Often at the expense of, or in direct opposition to, socio-economic understandings of the causes underlying violence in the name of religion, much popular rhetoric focussed on ‘religion’ being the root of all the problems. This problematic but ideologically convenient argument was effectively Richard Dawkins’s position four days after the attacks on the Twin Towers. This move to blame the mysterious ‘religion’ as the primary factor underlying the world’s ills has also been argued by other prominent atheists such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.⁹ Since September 11, such figures have become part of a movement popularly labelled ‘New Atheism’ and have published various highly popular and relatively controversial works explaining the apparent wrongness of religion, as well as triggering a mini-industry dedicated to countering New Atheism.¹⁰

Conservative evangelical Christianity has not stood idly by, however. In the USA, such a form of Christianity has been in the ascendency since the 1970s and such Christians were deemed significant enough for Karl Rove and the Republicans to take them very seriously. This past decade has seen the remarkable rise, especially in the USA, of Intelligent Design and some highly polemical disputes over evolution. Significantly, despite evidence overwhelmingly to the contrary, there have been a number of voices claiming that a cold secularism has taken over North America and the UK with (inaccurate) suggestions, for instance, that Christmas and religiously themed Christmas cards have been abandoned by various public figures and local councils in favour of secular themed festivals and greetings.¹¹ The fact that such scaremongering about the role of secularism can be made so prominently at least shows the cultural prominence (and, some of might add, the conveniently distracting nature) of such ‘religious versus secular’ discourse in contemporary culture, and is echoed in various high profile media stories such as wearing religious symbols, the role of faith schools and, of course, the burqa.

Scholarship is hardly immune to broader cultural trends. In addition to a range of analyses of contemporary scholarship in historical and cultural contexts,¹² I would add that the secular versus religious discourse of this past decade has had a major impact on scholarly outputs.

For instance, a number of scholars have now been defined by themselves or others as ‘secular’, ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’ in work which has received a notable degree of scholarly and public attention. We might think of Jacques Berlinerblau’s The Secular Bible, Hector Avalos’s The End of Biblical Studies, Bart Ehrman’s hugely popular Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted, William Arnal’s article on dividing confessional-driven biblical studies and the academic study of religion, my own suggestion that New Testament studies has historically missed out on different scholarly approaches due to the numerical dominance of Christians, SBL/AAR sessions dedicated to ‘secular’ approaches, the debates sparked off by a Michael Fox article on scholarship and faith for the SBL Forum, and Roland Boer’s edited volume on secularism and biblical studies which picks up key debates from the past decade.¹³ The very idea of Jesus not existing was not even entertained seriously on the fringes of academic New Testament study, but now there have been some voices suggesting such a thing, including some of the voices present in the Jesus Project (e.g. Thomas Thompson, Robert Price, Richard Carrier), a scholarly gathering backed by the explicitly secular/atheistic Scientific Examination of Religion and the Center for Inquiry.¹⁴ In fact, all the above views are not necessarily new but collectively this is distinctive and there ought to be little doubt that the ‘secular’ trend is as prominent as it has been for over a century.

An opposite movement of equal prominence has also gathered pace. A number of works from evangelical and conservative scholarship have now entered into the heart of the mainstream in ways which would have been unimaginable in the heyday of Bultmann-influenced scholarship. Indeed, certain extremely conservative books have now found themselves among the most influential and widely discussed books in New Testament studies. In addition to Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), this past decade has seen books such as Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ (2003), arguing for an extremely early date for Christ devotion, and N. T. Wright’s other massive book, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), arguing that a supernatural explanation for the resurrection of Jesus is the only way to explain the evidence for the emergence of the Christian movement. All these books were reviewed at article length in major New Testament journals.¹⁵ Bauckham’s book effectively implies that there were not only eyewitnesses to the Gospel tradition but that there were eyewitnesses to miraculous events.¹⁶ Wright’s book is perhaps most surprising of all and, with its emphasis on apparently proving the role of the divine in history, might be described as being what Intelligent Design is to the academic study of evolution, if it were not for the obvious point that Intelligent Design is not part of the scientific mainstream. Some of Wright’s points on the supernatural push conventional historical reasoning to its extremities. On the story of the dead saints rising from their tombs in Mt. 27:51-53, Wright claimed, ‘Some stories are so odd that they may just have happened. This may be one of them, but in historical terms there is no way of finding out.’¹⁷ I do not think it is going too far to suggest that a very conservative evangelical ...