Quotations
"Miracles, for me, are changes in
the social world, not the physical world ... I don't believe God entered
daily life in the 1st Century and turned physics upside down, and then
stopped. In fact, I'd find it incredible and obscene to say that now and
then God does intervene to do this or that little thing."
J. D. Crossan, Chicago Tribune Magazine, July 17, 1994
"While Jesus may have been a carpenter ... [h]e
did not preach salvation from sin ... he probably never delivered the Sermon
on the Mount ... [a]nd he never cured any diseases. As for the other miracles?
No loaves and fishes, no water into wine, no raising of Lazarus. And certainly no resurrection."
TIME, January 10, 1994
The Quest for a "Merely Human" Jesus
The various radical views of Jesus
now being advocated by certain scholars and propagated through the press
are buttressed by a number of different historical arguments. Some argue,
for example, that the evidence from the first century suggests that Jesus
was not unique in his healing ministry. Or, it is frequently argued, evidence
from a number of extra-canonical sources such as "Q," the "Gospel of Thomas,"
or "Secret Mark," proves the real historical Jesus was simply a wise sage.
But behind all such particular historical
arguments there lies an all important assumption that we need to critically
investigate -- for its not the kind of thing your newspaper is likely to
tell you. At the very foundation of what is called "historical critical
scholarship" is the assumption of naturalism.
"Naturalism" is the belief that everything
in the world, including history, operates strictly by natural laws. As
Crossan says in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, " ... I think the laws of physics,
whether in the 1st Century or today, have always been the same." [ 1 ] And
he means by this, they are never violated! Every event in history, therefore,
is to be explained by referring to natural causes and effects. In other
words, the supernatural is ruled out of court as a possible "historical
explanation" from the start.
This naturalistic presupposition
permeates liberal New Testament scholarship, and, while liberal scholars
may differ somewhat in the degree to which they hold to it (depending on
how broadly or narrowly they define the "natural" world), its importance
in determining the conclusions more radical scholars arrive at can hardly
be overstated. If a person begins his or her research with the assumption
that supernatural events never occur, then obviously the only Jesus he
or she can possibly "discover" through their research is a non-supernatural
Jesus, a Jesus, in other words, that is radically different than the Jesus
portrayed in the Bible. Thus, the conclusion that the Bible's portrait
of a supernatural savior is inaccurate is assumed at the start!
Starting at the Conclusion
What these liberal scholars in the
media today are about, then, is not so much deciding on the basis of the
evidence whether or not Jesus was who the Bible says he was. This, as I
said, was decided at the outset. What they are rather about is figuring
out how the (assumed) mythological portrait of Jesus in the Bible came
into being. They need to somehow explain how an ordinary human being was
transformed in the minds of his followers into a divine Son of God who
supposedly made divine claims and did miracles and even rose from the dead.
This is not at all easy to explain,
as we shall see. Indeed, I shall argue that it is virtually impossible.
But the point that needs to be presently made is that the only reason these
scholars need to work so hard to come up with an explanation in the first
place is because they assume at the outset that the Gospel story cannot
be true! Since they assume that such things as virgin births, divine healings,
and people rising from the dead cannot happen, they have to explain why
the early followers of Jesus thought they happened. The simple and straight
forward explanation that the followers of Jesus thought these things happened
because they in fact happened is not allowed to count as a valid "explanation."
This is what these liberal New Testament
scholars are all about. They seek to find a merely human Jesus behind the
New Testament records, and then try to explain how this ordinary human
got "supernaturalized" in the mind of his followers. But the all important
question of whether or not the Gospel story is mythological in the first
place is rarely seriously discussed. That matter was settled before the
research ever got off the ground, and before their conclusions ever reached
the newspaper.
The 'Quest' Is Really a 'Guess'
The assumption that divinely inspired
miracles never occur, and thus that the supernatural Jesus of the Bible
is not historical, creates an interesting dilemma for liberal New Testament
scholars. They want their view of Jesus to be rooted in concrete historical
evidence, on the one hand, and yet their naturalistic assumption leads
them to distrust most of the evidence in the New Testament, on the other.
And since we have very little other evidence to go on, this means that
whatever view of Jesus these scholars arrive at, it's necessarily going
to be arrived at more in spite of what the New Testament says than because
of what the New Testament says. And this means that whatever view of Jesus
these scholars take, its going to have to be based more on guess work than
it is on concrete data.
In some respects, this liberal scholarship
has created a problem for itself that it cannot solve, except by guessing.
In undermining so much of the only concrete data we have on Jesus with
their naturalistic starting point, these scholars have shrouded the historical
Jesus in a veil of impenetrable darkness. All of our earliest records of
Jesus found in the Bible portray him as the miracle working Son of God,
but this these scholars will not allow. So, the only business left to do
is to guess at who is behind this veil of myth and guess at how this veil
of myth got there in the first place. In other words, they create a problem
for themselves and then guess at how to solve it.
This is the primary reason why there
are so many differing opinions about who Jesus was among contemporary liberal
New Testament scholars. Since there is so little concrete data left for
these scholars to go on, the veritable smorgasbord of scholarly opinions
about who Jesus was that now bombard us through the media is to be expected.
Indeed, this lack of unanimity has always characterized liberal New Testament
scholarship, for just this reason.
An Overview of the Guessy Quest
One of the first scholars to embark
upon "the quest for the historical Jesus" was Hermann Remeirus (1694-1768).
Starting from a naturalistic presupposition, and therefore believing that
the New Testament portrait of Jesus was largely unreliable, he conjectured
that the person who lay behind the New Testament records was a political
revolutionary. Shortly thereafter, a large number of "Jesus biographers,"
starting from this same naturalistic starting point, would conjecture in
various ways that the historical Jesus was a teacher of high morals and
lofty ideals. His followers, however, perhaps got over-enthusiastic in
piling accolades on him.
Others, such as Venturini, would
speculate that Jesus was an Essene involved in a complex messianic conspiracy.
David Strauss, however, argued that the Gospels are too thoroughly mythological
to ever penetrate behind them with certainty. Weiss and Schweitzer would
not be deterred, though, and penetrated through these myths to find a wild-eyed
apocalyptic visionary whose outlook was to foreign to be understood by
modern people.
More recently, various scholars have
tried to portray the "real" Jesus as preacher calling for authentic living
(R. Bultmann), a Jewish zealot (S. Brandon), a fairly orthodox Jew (J.
Klausner), a political radical (R. Eisler, J. Carmichael), an ingenious
messianic pretender (H. Schofield), or as a total figment of peoples' imagination
(J. M. Robinson). And the guesses are by no means becoming less diverse
at the present time. Indeed, it is worsening to the point where even Crossan
confesses that "[h]istorical Jesus research is becoming something of a
scholarly bad joke." [ 2 ]
So, for example, there are an increasing
number of scholars, such as John Dominic Crossan and Burton Mack, who are
now arguing that the historical Jesus was a Cynic philosopher. Others,
such as John Kloppenborg and James Robinson, agree that Jesus was a wise
sage, but not necessary that he was of a Cynic orientation. Ben Meyer and
John Meier, however, argue that the historical Jesus was more of a Jewish
reformer. But Susan Haskins thinks he was a feminist. Anthony Harvey, on
the other hand, argues that he was a prophet-teacher, Richard Horsley that
he was a radical social prophet, while E. P. Sanders sees him as an eschatological
prophet (a prophet who preached the coming judgment of God). The list could
easily go on.
All of these scholars have their
own particular reasons for postulating the particular view of Jesus they
postulate. And each has their own explanation for how the "merely human"
Jesus they find got mythologically transformed into the Son of God we find
in the Gospels. But the sheer variety of opinions we find throughout the
quest for the historical Jesus is enough to tell us that their views are
based more on guesswork than they are on concrete historical facts. Given
the fact that they begin with the assumption that the supernatural Jesus
that all the evidence points to cannot be the historical Jesus, this diversity
is just what we should expect.
What is more, while each of these
various theories have their particular strong points as well as their weak
points, it is this naturalistic assumption that lies behind each them that
constitutes their main "selling point." That is, the only reason their
particular ways of explaining how the "merely human" Jesus got transformed
into the supernatural Son of God are plausible is because they assume at
the start that Jesus was not the supernatural Son of God that the Gospels
say he was. For people who need to explain away the Gospels portrait of
Jesus, these various theories are appealing. But for a person who does
not share this presupposition, they are seen as extremely conjectural and
quite unnecessary.
The Problem of Circularity
This overview of the smorgasbord
of scholarly guesses also reveals just how circular the business of liberal
New Testament scholarship can be. As we said in the previous chapter, scholars
tend to find what they expect to find in their quest to "get behind" the
New Testament data. In their attempts to "get behind" the New Testament
view of Jesus, scholars must set up criteria for what will and will not
"count" as evidence for the historical Jesus. But no one agrees what these
criteria are! It is largely a subjective matter.
And so it is not surprising that
these scholars end up with such a wide variety of views on Jesus. What
they find is built into how they find him! Scholars today who think that
Jesus was simply a wise sage, for example, argue that all of the apocalyptic
sayings of Jesus (e.g. sayings that speak of the second coming) are "inauthentic":
they do not go back to the historical Jesus. Others, however, think such
sayings do go back to the historical Jesus, and for this reason conclude
that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, not a wise sage. How can an issue
like this be settled?
It can't! Everything depends on what
one at the start thinks Jesus is going to look like when they "discover"
him "behind" the New Testament. Their expectations drive their criteria,
and their criteria determine what they discover. And so, as we noted in
the previous chapter, it is hardly surprising that some scholars "discover"
a radical feminist, others a prophet, others a rabbi, others a magician,
others a Cynic, and still others a political revolutionary. And all of
this is ultimately the result of assuming at the start that the Gospel
portrait of the Son of God who died and rose again cannot be true. If this
isn't true, its anyone's guess as to what is.
A Presumptuous Assumption
The obvious question that you've
got to be asking yourself through all of this is, why do these scholars
assume that God could not have become incarnate in a human being and that
divinely inspired miracles cannot occur? On what basis can they be so confident
about what can and cannot happen in history? By what means do they come
to know so much about God and the nature of the world that they can confidently
pronounce, prior to any investigation of the evidence, that God has never
intervened into the world!? Wouldn't you have to be God himself to know
this?
The most likely response to this
line of questioning, one that is found in various ways throughout the history
of the quest for the historical Jesus, is that the assumption of naturalism
is simply part of our cultural world view. Since the scientific revolution
of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the response goes, this has
just been the way western intellectuals look at things. Its what lies behind
science. It's what has fueled progress in western society. And, therefore,
its what grounds our investigations into history. We simply assume that
the natural regularity of the world we experience has been true for all
time in all places.
Thus, the response goes, when we
read in some ancient documents (the Gospels) that a man rose from the grave
after being dead for three days, for example, we all naturally assume that
there must be a naturalistic explanation for this. Perhaps the man hadn't
really died. Perhaps those who gave this report were lying. Or perhaps
it's all simply innocent legend. But, we assume, he didn't actually come
back to life, and the records that say he did are simply not historical.
That would violate the laws of nature!
Is Naturalism True?
There are two objections that can
be raised against this response. First, even if we grant for the moment
that our present western world view is naturalistic, this doesn't mean
that naturalism is true. World views are often wrong. Indeed, holding that
naturalism is true itself requires seeing all other world views that allow
for the supernatural as being wrong. So, the naturalistic world view may
be right, or it may be wrong.
Now if, as they claim, scholars are
interested in truth, and not just in reiterating what they already believe,
shouldn't this mean that they should be open to the possibility of discovering
things that actually challenge, and perhaps even overthrow, their own naturalistic
world view? Isn't being open to the possibility of being wrong what academic
scholarship is all about? And, therefore, should we not see the refusal
to entertain the possibility of miracles as a presumptuous, very prejudiced,
and quite unscholarly dogmatism?
The implication of all of this for
historical research into who Jesus was is this: the matter should be settled
on the basis of evidence, not on the basis of one's own world view assumptions.
It means that we should be open to the possibility that the Gospels are
telling us the truth, rather than simply working to come up with explanations
for why they are not telling us the truth. It means that if the evidence
suggests that Jesus actually made the divine claims and performed the divine
feats that the Gospels attribute to him, we should be willing to accept
this, however inconvenient it may be to our own world view.
Is the Western World View Really
Naturalistic?
A second objection to the above reply
that can be raised is that it does not seem that even the assumption that
our western world view is thoroughly naturalistic is correct. While a host
of intellectuals have been insisting on this for more than a century, the
majority of people in western culture have continued to believe that miracles
can occur. Certainly the majority of westerners today, Christians and non-Christians
alike, are having no problem believing in the supernatural.
Indeed, our culture is presently
witnessing a veritable explosion of interest in (if not an obsession with)
such things miracles, angels, channeling, and other supernatural experiences,
as any casual visit to the New Age section of your local book store will
tell you. Whatever we make of this phenomenon, it is enough to prove that
the naturalistic assumption that governs so much of liberal New Testament
scholarship is not simply part of western culture. Indeed, it is increasingly
out of sync with western culture.
Trying To Make a Naturalistic Jesus ‘Relevant’
This observation also exposes the
misguidedness of yet another aspect of the liberal New Testament enterprise.
Since the time of Rudolf Bultmann with his famous attempt to "demythologize"
the New Testament, many liberal scholars have been trying to make Jesus
more "relevant" to modern people by "discovering" a non-supernatural Jesus
behind the myth that modern people could believe in. Much of the present
liberal agenda, we saw in the last chapter, was about just this: finding
a "new" Jesus that could be relevant to modern people. The assumption,
of course, is that modern people can no longer, and should no longer, believe
in a supernatural savior. It is a refrain we hear frequently from modern
liberal scholars in the media.
Beside the point that there is little
left of Jesus worth believing in once you've stripped him of all his supernatural
features, and beside the point that we can only guess at who Jesus might
be after we've stripped away the supernatural features of the New Testament,
the endeavors of these liberal scholars, we now see, are completely unnecessary.
They may have trouble finding relevance in a supernatural savior, but the
majority of people do not. What is truly irrelevant to modern western people
is the conjectural naturalized Jesus that is left over after the liberal
scholars have undermined all of his supernatural features!
Hence, we may conclude that the naturalistic
assumption that has driven the liberal New Testament enterprise for some
two hundred years is as unnecessary as it presumptuous, and leads to views
of Christ that are as circular as they are conjectural.
Endnotes
- J. D. Crossan, Chicago
Tribune Magazine, July 17, 1994, p. 8. [ Go Back ]
- Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean
Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1991), xxvii. [ Go Back ]
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