Jesus and the Scriptures: Problems, Passages and Patterns 9780567665041, 9780567665027, 9780567665034

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LIBRARY OF HISTORICAL JESUS STUDIES

9 Edited by Robert L. Webb

Published under

LIBRARY OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES

552 Formerly Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series

Editor Chris Keith

Editorial Board Dale C. Allison, John M.G. Barclay, Lynn H. Cohick, R. Alan Culpepper, Craig A. Evans, Robert Fowler, Simon J. Gathercole, John S. Kloppenborg, Michael Labahn, Love L. Sechrest, Robert Wall, Steve Walton, Robert L. Webb, Catrin H. Williams

ii

JESUS AND THE SCRIPTURES

Problems, Passages and Patterns

Edited by

Tobias Hägerland

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury T&T Clark An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as T&T Clark 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Tobias Hägerland and Contributors, 2016 Tobias Hägerland has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi¿ed as Editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: ePDF:

978-0-56766-502-7 978-0-56766-503-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Library of New Testament Studies, volume 552 Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com) Printed and bound in Great Britain

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Contributors INTRODUCTION

vii ix xiii xv

Part A PROBLEMS OF METHOD FOR STUDYING JESUS AND THE SCRIPTURES JESUS AND THE SCRIPTURES: PROBLEMS OF AUTHENTICATION AND INTERPRETATION Tobias Hägerland

3

Part B PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE IN THE JESUS TRADITION GENESIS 2:24 AND THE JESUS TRADITION William Loader

33

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA AND THE JESUS TRADITIONS Kim Huat Tan

48

JESUS’ EXORCISTIC IDENTITY RECONSIDERED: THE DEMISE OF A SOLOMONIC TYPOLOGY Jennifer Nyström

69

BEING “GOD-TAUGHT”: ISAIAH 54:13 AS PROLEGOMENA TO THE TEACHING MINISTRY OF JESUS Jonathan A. Blanke

93

vi

Contents

THE DAY OF THE LORD IS COMING: JESUS AND THE BOOK OF ZECHARIAH Fernando Bermejo-Rubio

111

JESUS AND THE DEVOUT PSALMIST OF PSALM 22 Ville Auvinen

132

Part C PATTERNS IN JESUS’ USE OF SCRIPTURE A SERVANT LIKE THE MASTER: A JEWISH CHRISTIAN HERMENEUTIC FOR THE PRACTICE OF THE TORAH Edwin K. Broadhead

151

JESUS THE SAGE AND HIS PROVOCATIVE PARABLES Ben Witherington III

162

A SIGN FROM HEAVEN AND THE WORD OF SCRIPTURE: JESUS’ MIRACLES AT STAKE Jan Roskovec

175

RE-EXAMINING THE LAST SUPPER SAYINGS IN LIGHT OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES Mary J. Marshall Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

1

193 215 233 243

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Dr Tom Holmén appointed me to succeed him as coordinator of The Study of the Historical Jesus research group at the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS) annual conference. I was honored to accept this task, beginning with the conference in Thessaloniki 2011 and then continuing with Amsterdam 2012, Leipzig 2013 and Vienna 2014. The success of the meetings has been entirely due to those who contributed lectures and attended the sessions. My heartfelt thanks go to the international group of colleagues who not only presented their papers at the conferences but also agreed to have them published and who cooperated in the production of the present volume. I would also like to thank Professor Chris Keith, who accepted the volume for publication in the Library of New Testament Studies series, the staff of Bloomsbury T&T Clark, and Dr Duncan Burns, who copy-edited and indexed the book with splendid pro¿ciency. It would have been impossible for me to arrange the sessions without generous travel grants from Oscar och Signe Krooks stiftelse. The former Head of Department at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies (CTR), Lund University, Professor Anders Jarlert ensured that I had the time to engage in research activities beside my duties as a teacher and administrator at CTR. Thank you! Finally, I am grateful for the fact that Professor James Crossley and Dr Fernando Bermejo-Rubio are taking responsibility for continuing the EABS research group. Their competence and dedication make certain that Jesus research will live long and prosper, in Europe and beyond. Tobias Hägerland

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ABBREVIATIONS Texts, editions and translations Abr. Adv. omn. haer. A.J. Apol. Barn. b. B. Bat. b. ‫ۉ‬ag. B.J. b. Pesa‫ۊ‬. b. Šabb. b. Sanh. C. Ap. Cels. Cher. 1 Clem. Comm. Matt. Comm. ser. Matt. Contempl. Did. DSS DSSSE 1 En. 1 Esdr. Gen. Rab. Gig. Gos. Pet. Gos. Thom. Haer. Her. Hist. eccl. Hypoth. Indic. haer. Ios. Jos. Asen. Jub. LAB Leg. LXX m. Pesa‫ۊ‬. MT

Philo, De Abrahamo Pseudo-Tertullian, Adversus omnes haereses Josephus, Antiquitates judaicae (Jewish Antiquities) Justin, Apologia Barnabas Babylonian Talmud tractate Baba Batra Babylonian Talmud tractate ‫ۉ‬agigah Josephus, Bellum judaicum (Jewish War) Babylonian Talmud tractate Pesa‫ۊ‬im Babylonian Talmud tractate Šabbat Babylonian Talmud tractate Sanhedrin Josephus, Contra Apionem Origen, Contra Celsum Philo, De cherubim 1 Clement Origen, Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei Origen, Commentarium series in evangelium Matthaei Philo, De vita contemplativa Didache Dead Sea Scrolls Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition. Edited by F. García Martínez and E. J. C. Tigchelaar. New York, 1997–98 1 Enoch 1 Esdras Genesis Rabbah Philo, De gigantibus Gospel of Peter Gospel of Thomas Irenaeus, Adversus haereses Philo, Quis rerum divinarum heres sit Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica Philo, Hypothetica Pseudo-Hieronymus Indiculus de haeresibus Philo, De Iosepho Joseph and Aseneth Jubilees Liber antiquitatum biblicarum Philo, Legum allegoriae Septuagint Mishnah tractate Pesa‫ۊ‬im Masoretic Text

x NIV NRSV NT NTApoc Opif. OT OTP Pan. Pelag. PGM Pirqe R. El. PL Princ. Prob. Ps. Sol. QG Sib. Or. Spec. Tg. Tg. J. T. Iss. T. Reu. t. Šabb. t. Sanh. T. Sol. Vit. Apoll. y. Pesa‫ۊ‬.

Abbreviations New International Version New Revised Standard Version New Testament New Testament Apocrypha. Edited by W. Schneemelcher. Translated by R. McL. Wilson. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1992 Philo, De opi¿cio mundi Old Testament Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Edited by J. H. Charlesworth. 2 vols. New York, 1983, 1985 Epiphanius Panarion (Adversus haereses) Jerome, Adversus Pelagianos dialogi III Papyri graecae magicae: Die griechische Zauberpapyri. Edited by K. Preisendanz. Berlin, 1928 Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer Patrologia latina [=Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina]. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 217 vols. Paris, 1844–64 Origen, De principiis Philo, Quod omnis probus liber sit Psalm of Solomon Philo, Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesin Sibylline Oracles Philo, De specialibus legibus Targum Targum Jonathan Testament of Issachar Testament of Reuben Tosefta tractate Šabbat Tosefta tractate Sanhedrin Testament of Solomon Philostratus, Vita Apollonii Jerusalem Talmud tractate Pesa‫ۊ‬im

Books, Series and Journals AB ABD ABRL ACC ArBib AYB AYBRL BAR BDAG BETL BHT BibSem BIS 1

Anchor Bible Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D. N. Freedman. 6 vols. New York, 1992 Anchor Bible Reference Library Alcuin Club Collections The Aramaic Bible Anchor Yale Bible Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library Biblical Archaeology Review Danker, F. W., W. Bauer, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich. Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3d ed. Chicago, 2000 Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium Beiträge zur historischen Theologie Biblical Seminar Biblical Interpretation Series

Abbreviations BJRL BK BNTC BTB BTS BU BWANT CBC CBQ ConBNT DiAl EBib EKKNT EncJud ExpTim FOTL FRLANT HNT HTR HTS IBS ICC Int JBL JCPS JSHJ JSJ JSJSup JSNT JSNTSup JSOTSup LNTS LSJ MoBi(G) Neot NICNT NIGTC NTL NTS NTTS NovT NovTSup OtSt PKNT PTMS RB RBL

Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester Bibel und Kirche Black’s New Testament Commentary Biblical Theology Bulletin Biblical Tools and Studies Biblische Untersuchungen Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Cambridge Bible Commentary Catholic Biblical Quarterly Coniectanea biblica: New Testament Series Dialogue and Alliance Études bibliques Evangelisch-katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament Encyclopaedia Judaica. 16 vols. Jerusalem, 1971–72 Expository Times Forms of the Old Testament Literature Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Handbuch zum Neuen Testament Harvard Theological Review Harvard Theological Studies Irish Biblical Studies International Critical Commentary Interpretation Journal of Biblical Literature Jewish and Christian Perspectives Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Periods Supplement to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament: Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series Library of New Testament Studies Liddell, H. G., R. Scott, H. S. Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon. 9th ed. with revised supplement. Oxford, 1996 Le Monde de la Bible Neotestamentica New International Commentary on the New Testament New International Greek Testament Commentary New Testament Library New Testament Studies New Testament Tools and Studies Novum Testamentum Supplements to Novum Testamentum Oudtestamentische Studiën Papyrologische Kommentare zum Neuen Testament Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series Revue biblique Review of Biblical Literature

xi

xii RelStTh RevQ SBLECL SBLEJL SBLStBL SBT SbWGF SEÅ SNT SNTSMS SNTW STK SubBi SUNT TDNT TSAJ TUGAL TWNT VT VTSup WBC WdF WMANT WUNT ZNW

1

Abbreviations Religious Studies and Theology (formerly Religious Studies Bulletin) Revue de Qumran Society of Biblical Literature Early Christianity and Its Literature Society of Biblical Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature Society of Biblical Literature Studies in Biblical Literature Studies in Biblical Theology Sitzungsberichte der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main Svensk exegetisk årsbok Studien zum Neuen Testament Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series Studies of the New Testament and Its World Svensk teologisk kvartalskrift Subsidia Biblica Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Edited by G. Kittel and G. Friedrich. Translated by G. W. Bromiley. 10 vols. Grand Rapids, 1964–76 Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament. Edited by G. Kittel and G. Friedrich. 10 vols. Stuttgart, 1932–79 Vetus Testamentum Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Word Biblical Commentary Wege der Forschung Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche

CONTRIBUTORS Ville Auvinen, Theological Institute of Finland Fernando Bermejo-Rubio, UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Madrid Jonathan A. Blanke, Trinity Lutheran Church, Lexington Park, Maryland Edwin K. Broadhead, Berea College Tobias Hägerland, Lund University William Loader, Murdoch University, Australia, and North-West University, South Africa Mary J. Marshall, Murdoch University Jennifer Nyström, Lund University Jan Roskovec, Charles University in Prague Kim Huat Tan, Trinity Theological College, Singapore Ben Witherington III, Asbury Theological Seminary and St Andrews University

xiii

1

INTRODUCTION The four canonical gospels unanimously present Jesus as someone who quoted from, commented on, and engaged with the Scriptures of Israel. Whether this portrayal goes back to the historical Jesus has been a hotly debated issue among scholars. At the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS) meetings in 2012–2014, an international group of scholars continued this conversation by focusing each year on a speci¿c portion of the Scriptures and the impact it had on the historical Jesus. In Amsterdam (2012) the topic was Jesus and the Historical Books, including the Pentateuch; in Leipzig (2013) it was Jesus and the Prophets; and in Vienna (2014) it was Jesus and the Psalms and Wisdom Literature. In addition, papers dealing with the broader questions of how Jesus interacted with the Scriptures were presented at these conferences. A selection of the papers have been collected and edited for inclusion in this volume. Part A deals with the methodological problems involved in the study of Jesus and the Scriptures. In my article, I (Tobias Hägerland) claim that any method for studying the historical Jesus must take into account the two major tasks of Jesus research, that is, “authentication” and “interpretation.” Employing Jesus’ use of Daniel 7 as an exemplary case, the article then discusses how extant methods for these two tasks can be adapted in order to function properly when applied to the complex question of Jesus’ engagement with the Scriptures. In Part B, the topic is tackled from the vantage point of speci¿c passages and motifs in the Scriptures and Jesus’ use of them. William Loader begins with how Gen 2:24 stands in support of Jesus’ response to his fellow Jewish interlocutors about divorce, according to the anecdote preserved in Mark and Matthew, and discusses what might have been the interpretative stance of the historical Jesus. Kim Huat Tan then considers how the story of the Queen of Sheba’s visit in 1 Kings 10 and 2 Chronicles has been appropriated by the Jesus tradition, and compares it with other Jewish writings in order to highlight the distinctiveness of the saying in Q, which can be traced back to Jesus. On a more skeptical note, Jennifer Nyström argues against the prevalent notion of Jesus as formed by a Solomonic typology in his activity as an exorcist. She argues that

xvi

Introduction

neither is the understanding of Solomon as the exorcist par excellence suf¿ciently attested before the time of Jesus, nor do the gospel episodes about Jesus as an exorcist warrant the conclusion that he was likened to Solomon. Moving on to the prophetic books, Jonathan Blanke considers in depth the quotation from Isa 54:13 in the Gospel of John. He seeks to demonstrate not only the likelihood that Jesus was inÀuenced by this text in his interpretation of the prophetic tradition, but that he would have probably used the text himself in instructing his own disciples. Fernando BermejoRubio locates Jesus’ use of the book of Zechariah within the evidence concerning Jesus’ self-understanding and his ¿nal days in Jerusalem, including the traces of violent activities that Jesus seems to have been preparing for. Finally in this part of the volume, Ville Auvinen asks whether Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22 on the cross was an expression of profound anguish or one of hope, arguing that his use of the Psalm ought to be interpreted through Jesus’ teaching on prayer. Part C includes articles that seek to detect larger patterns in Jesus’ use of the Scriptures. Edwin Broadhead investigates how the literary traditions of Jewish Christianity show something of a Jewish-Christian hermeneutic for interpretation and practice of Torah. He suggests that part of this hermeneutic has its roots in, and accordingly can tell us something about, the historical Jesus’ interaction with the Scriptures. Next, Ben Witherington discusses Jesus as a sage, whose parables made use of wisdom speech to describe God’s current in-breaking eschatological work of salvation, and whose self-understanding was primarily based on the book of Daniel. Jan Roskovec considers different instances where Jesus is challenged to provide some sort of evidence that would authenticate his actions, showing that in most of these cases Jesus defends himself by pointing to a scriptural passage rather than by offering to perform an authenticating sign. Mary Marshall concludes the volume by exploring the Last Supper sayings concerning the bread, cup, and kingdom, and their scriptural background. While based in Europe, EABS is an international society by all means. This is shown in the present volume by the fact that the contributors’ af¿liations are with academic institutions in ¿ve continents—Africa, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe and North America. The contributors are at different stages of their careers and, one may infer from some of the articles, of various theological or non-theological persuasions. In the midst of this diversity, it is all the more interesting to notice that there seems to exist a common understanding of Jesus’ use of the Scriptures. Not only did Jesus engage with the Scriptures, according to the scholars 1

Introduction

xvii

who contributed to the volume, but his mode of engagement has to be placed within the early Jewish interpretative framework within which he lived. Moreover, Jesus’ use of the Scriptures was not restricted to prooftexting or to being a source of teaching. Quite the contrary: Jesus above all used the Scriptures for shaping and interpreting his actions. In this way, we are in fact on ¿rm historical ground to claim that whatever his purposes and his modes of interpreting the biblical texts were, Jesus indeed “lived” the Scriptures of Israel.

xviii

Part A

PROBLEMS OF METHOD FOR STUDYING JESUS AND THE SCRIPTURES

2

JESUS AND THE SCRIPTURES: PROBLEMS OF AUTHENTICATION AND INTERPRETATION Tobias Hägerland

Methodological discussions hold a prominent place in historical Jesus research. While methodology in this sub-discipline of New Testament studies was for a long time reduced to the question of authenticity criteria, recent years have seen increased scholarly awareness of the necessary task to broaden the topic in order to include wider hermeneutical issues. In the present contribution, I will discuss some of the methodological problems involved in assessing questions pertaining to the historical Jesus’ engagement with the Scriptures of Israel.1 It is my point of departure that any method for studying the historical Jesus must take into account the two major tasks of Jesus research, viz. “authentication” and “interpretation.” I will not propose any radically new methods or come to stunning conclusions. Rather, my aim is to discuss how extant methods for these two tasks can be adapted in order to function properly when applied to the complex question of Jesus and the Scriptures. I will begin by addressing the complex relationship between the two tasks (section I), and then discuss in detail the methodological tools that can be used for authenticating (section II) and interpreting (section III) the gospel traditions according to which Jesus made use of the Scriptures. In the second and third sections, for the sake of illustrating how the method can be put into practice, I will offer an authentication and interpretation of the gospel traditions that record Jesus’ use of Daniel 7. Finally, I will summarize my conclusions (section IV). 1. In this article, as in the title of the volume, “the Scriptures (of Israel)” is used as a deliberately loose designation for the collection of written texts that Jesus and his coreligionists would have regarded as sacred and authoritative. This is to avoid the anachronistic implications of later non-interchangeable terms such as “Old Testament” and “Hebrew Bible,” which involve notions of ¿xed canonical and linguistic boundaries. For discussion of the terminological problem, see David Conners, “A ‘Mind-Boggling’ Implication: The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and the De¿nition of a Work,” Judaica Librarianship 15 (2009): 1–12.

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Jesus and the Scriptures

I. The Relationship between Authentication and Interpretation a. Two Major Tasks of Jesus Research The topic of method in historical Jesus research has often been reduced to the question of how to assess the authenticity (historicity) of data in the source material. Most notably, the ¿rst part of John Meier’s introductory volume in the A Marginal Jew series is almost entirely taken up with discussion of the sources and the criteria for evaluating them, and the tendency to focus sharply on this analytical task is also prevalent in other standard works.2 No doubt the process of “authentication”—the term here being used in an unbiased way to denote arguments that deny the authenticity of a given item as well as those that support it—is essential to the enterprise of historical scholarship, but it is certainly not enough. As remarked in a widely used textbook, it is crucial to maintain “a distinction between the source critic, who analyses source material in great detail, and the historian, who does this too but puts the sources in the context of a wider knowledge of the period to which they relate.”3 Meier’s work is typical of much historical Jesus research in that it naturally does interpret the authenticated material by placing in within such wider knowledge, yet does not develop a suf¿cient methodological basis for the interpretative task. As a consequence, the resulting reconstruction is sometimes less than convincing.4 This is not to say that careful reÀection on what I here call the process of “interpretation”—making use of the critically sifted source material for producing a synthetic reconstruction of (a) given aspect(s) of the historical Jesus—has been entirely absent from methodological discussions. Ben Meyer, while accepting the use of authenticity criteria under the term “indices to historicity,” lays out a fuller methodology that includes and concentrates on the tasks of interpretation and explanation.5 2. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (4 vols.; ABRL/AYBRL; New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1:41–121. See also Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus: Ein Lehrbuch (3d ed.; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 116–20; James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 330–35. 3. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (5th ed.; Harlow: Pearson, 2010), 119. 4. See Tobias Hägerland, “A Prophet like Elijah or according to Isaiah? Rethinking the Identity of Jesus,” in The Identity of Jesus: Nordic Voices (ed. Samuel Byrskog, Tom Holmén and Matti Kankaanniemi; WUNT II/373; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 70–86, for critique of one important aspect of Meier’s reconstruction. 5. Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979), 76–94.

1

HÄGERLAND Jesus and the Scriptures

5

John Dominic Crossan states that authenticity criteria alone cannot do the work of a proper methodology and suggests a process in which the authentication of the source material (“text”) takes place only after a framework drawn from anthropology, archaeology, history and literature (“context”) has been established.6 Most comprehensively, Robert Webb has proposed that the use of historical method in historical Jesus research, just as in any ¿eld of historiography, should be considered “to consist of two main phases, preceded by a preliminary stage and followed by a concluding phase.”7 In addition to being exceptionally well grounded in theoretical reasoning, Webb’s methodology deserves praise for the fact that it, on the one hand, avoids the pitfall of reducing method in historical Jesus research to a simple question of authenticity criteria while it, on the other hand, integrates the use of such criteria as part of the method. It will therefore be described in some detail here.8 The preliminary phase of Webb’s scheme involves “the historian being self-aware of his / her horizon, and in particular being aware of how the preunderstanding and biases of that horizon might shape the questions brought to the historical endeavor as well as inÀuence the evaluations and judgments made, and the hypotheses preferred.”9 Upon this self-examination follows the ¿rst main phase, in which the scholar collects and evaluates the data available for historical reconstruction; in historical Jesus research, the data are the items of Jesus traditions drawn from extant ¿rst-century sources, and the evaluation of the data’s usefulness for historical reconstruction equates the application of authenticity criteria to the material. What Webb envisions as the ¿rst main phase of historical method is accordingly equivalent to what I termed the process of authentication above. To be sure, Webb also mentions “interpretation” in this context, but he is clear that interpretation here is limited precisely to the evaluation of the data’s evidentiary value. Although this phase necessarily involves both a “top-down” and a “bottom-up” approach to the material and its context, its primary preoccupation is the analytical

6. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), xxvii–xxxiv, and The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 139–49. 7. Robert L. Webb, “The Historical Enterprise and Historical Jesus Research,” in Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence (ed. Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb; WUNT 247; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 9–93 (32). 8. See Webb, “The Historical Enterprise,” 32–38, 78–82, for the following. 9. Webb, “The Historical Enterprise,” 78.

6

Jesus and the Scriptures

sifting of data with the aim of establishing a bank of somehow reliable source material. Webb’s second main phase, by difference, is marked by the ambition to provide synthetic explanations of the data by placing them within different hypotheses. For the purpose of providing such explanations, the historian may ¿ll in the gaps in the source material by use of culturalanthropological, sociological or other models. A hypothesis can be deemed preferable, according to Webb, by virtue of its ability to provide “a better explanation of the evidence”10 and to allow for extrapolation that explains the larger historical picture more plausibly. This is what I prefer to call the process of interpretation, and it seems necessary to execute it by means of evaluating different hypotheses, exactly as proposed by Webb. I do think, however, that the principles both for formulating and for evaluating such hypotheses can and should be discussed in far greater detail than has hitherto been done. As will be argued in section III below, Troeltsch’s principles of analogy and correlation can be employed fruitfully in this regard. Moreover, it is imperative to be precise about how one decides which hypothesis provides “a better explanation of the evidence” than the others. This methodological aspect of historical Jesus research has been especially well treated by N. T. Wright, to whose discussion of the evaluation of hypotheses we will also return further below in this study.11 Finally, the concluding phase of Webb’s model is that in which the historian composes a historical narrative based on the evidence, arguments and hypotheses employed. Webb is rightly careful to distinguish this “representation” of some past reality from that reality in itself. He maintains that such a narrative will include (1) descriptions of the data, (2) interpretations of the data, (3) explanations relating the data to each other and (4) evaluations of the events. Although extrinsic to the historical narrative proper, the historian’s work should also include what Webb terms “revelation of the historian,” by which readers are informed

10. Webb, “The Historical Enterprise,” 81. 11. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 98–109. It ought to be pointed out already here that Wright’s methodology, in my opinion, suffers from a serious de¿cit in that it virtually neglects the process of “authentication” (Webb’s ¿rst main phase). Wright seems to think, quite erroneously, that the judgement of some items ascribed to Jesus in the gospels as non-authentic is but one of the “cunning (but costly) ways of disposing of [data]” (531), a strategy for making “data…disappear from the picture of Jesus” (101). What is lacking here is the necessary distinction between such data as hold evidentiary value and such as do not. 1

HÄGERLAND Jesus and the Scriptures

7

about “those preunderstandings and biases that may have affected the judgments and interpretations.”12 Whether one agrees with this scheme in its entirety or not, it is laudable that Webb has secured a place for the constructive narrativizing task of the historian within his description of the method. The rest of this section of the present chapter will discuss the interplay between the two main phases, or major tasks, of historical Jesus research: authentication and interpretation. Further below, in sections II and III, I will contemplate the two tasks separately, with special consideration of the problems involved when the object of study is Jesus’ interaction with the Scriptures of Israel, and with Jesus’ use of Daniel 7 as test case to illustrate how the method works out in practice. b. Authentication without Interpretation? The analytical distinction between the two tasks of authentication and interpretation must not be misinterpreted to mean that authentication is a less hermeneutical task than interpretation or that any gospel material could possibly be authenticated apart from being interpreted. Webb points out that the two main phases…, while conceptually sequential, are not so in practice. For as one considers other contextual alternatives and alternative explanatory hypotheses, the historian is frequently led to re-evaluate the evidentiary value of the data that were considered in the ¿rst main phase: either increasing or decreasing the probability of the authenticity of any one piece of data.13

It is obvious that use of the conventional criteria of authenticity, to which we will return in detail below, presupposes that the material to be authenticated has already undergone careful interpretation. Whether a given tradition is to be considered dissimilar vis-à-vis primitive 12. Webb, “The Historical Enterprise,” 37 (original emphasis removed). I am skeptical about this last point for the following reasons: (1) It is impossible to identify and enumerate all the preunderstandings and biases that may affect a given historian’s work. The assumption that religious orientation is always the most prominent bias in biblical scholarship is naïve; many other factors may be more decisive, and one would never know when all relevant issues had been listed. (2) It is unlikely that the scholar is in the best position to detect his or her own biases. If a work is indeed unduly biased, others can be trusted to point this out. (3) Drawing attention to one’s own non-scholarly preconditions tends to obscure the arguments as such. The risk is that others will judge the work in relation to the author’s selfprofessed preunderstandings rather than by the intersubjective validity of its conclusions. 13. Webb, “The Historical Enterprise,” 36.

8

Jesus and the Scriptures

Christianity, or coherent with a comprehensive picture of the historical Jesus, depends on how that tradition is interpreted. Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter point to the temple incident (Mark 11:15–19) as an example of how every process of authentication is contingent on previous interpretation of the material. The authenticity of this material, they rightly claim, will be judged differently by scholars who hold different views of the historical Jesus’ aims and career as a whole. Interpreters who regard Jesus as a ¿gure intent on instigating political revolt are likely to ¿nd the temple incident historical, while those who think that he was above all a preacher of non-violence will probably come to the conclusion that it is ¿ctional. Scholars in whose mind Jesus was an eschatological prophet of restoration will take the incident as historical if it can be interpreted as a prophetic act symbolizing the imminent destruction of the temple.14 Theissen and Winter sum up: In investigating and making judgment about the words and deeds of Jesus’ life presented by the traditions, we must consider their distinct contents and meanings when regarded as coming from different origins (i.e., Jesus or various post-Easter origins) and within the framework of different hermeneutical perspectives. Then, with the help of the criteria… a decision can be made about the historical plausibility of attributing the material to Jesus.15

Theissen and Winter, then, propose an order of procedure that appears to be the opposite of that suggested by Webb: interpretation ¿rst, then authentication. In reality, however, the two tasks are dependent on each other and will take place in tandem. It is a matter of choice for the scholar at which point to enter the hermeneutical circle. The observation that authentication cannot, in practice, be separated from interpretation is closely related to a proper understanding of what it means for any gospel tradition to be “authentic.” Historical Jesus research has certainly exhibited a strong tendency, reÀected especially in the quest for purported ipsissima verba, to envisage “authentic” traditions as somehow hard facts of the past, free from the contamination of mnemonic and hermeneutical processes. The goal of the task of authentication would then be to lay bare the non-remembered, non-interpreted “historical” core of the tradition. To the extent that such unrealistic notions still exist within the ¿eld, they have to be exchanged for a theory of historiography that takes seriously the fact that the past can be 14. Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria (trans. M. Eugene Boring; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 195–97. 15. Theissen and Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus, 197.

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accessed only through the surviving traces of how eyewitnesses and early transmitters of tradition perceived, interpreted and remembered events. In Anthony Le Donne’s blunt but accurate words, “[t]he unremembered and uninterpreted past is not history.”16 Does this insight mean that the concept of “authenticity” is obsolete? In my opinion, that would be a far too radical conclusion. With Le Donne, we can still strive to distinguish between traditions that have “a basis in perception” on the one hand and traditions that have “a basis in invention” on the other. Both categories contain traditions that were remembered and interpreted, but whereas the former originated in the perception of an external event, the latter did not.17 We may then use the conventional nomenclature of “authentic” and “inauthentic” traditions with reference to the two categories of traditions with a basis in perception and invention respectively. II. Authenticating Jesus’ Use of Scripture a. Criteria of Authenticity Granted that it is still meaningful to distinguish between, on the one hand, authentic and historical aspects of the gospel tradition (in the sense of elements that have “a basis in perception”), and on the other hand, inauthentic and unhistorical aspects (in the sense of elements that have “a basis in invention”), what methods or tools should be used in order to make these distinctions within the material? Throughout the various phases of historical Jesus research the primary tools have been criteria that are applied to individual sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Depending on each period’s understanding of the general reliability of the gospel tradition, the sets of criteria have been variously de¿ned in negative or positive terms or as a combination of positive and negative criteria.18 Individual criteria have been reformulated, modi¿ed, or even discarded. For example, the criterion of dissimilarity as applied 16. Anthony Le Donne, Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 77 (original emphasis removed). 17. Anthony Le Donne, “The Criterion of Coherence: Its Development, Inevitability, and Historiographical Limitations,” in Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne; London: T&T Clark International, 2012), 95–114 (96). 18. See, e.g., David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (4th ed.; Tübingen: Osiander, 1840), 99–108 (only negative “Kriterien des Unhistorischen”); Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (London: SCM, 1967), 43–47 (only positive “criteria of authenticity”); Tom Holmén, “Authenticity Criteria,” in Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus (ed. Craig A. Evans; London: Routledge, 2008), 43–54 (both positive and negative criteria).

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by many scholars today differs in many respects from the form in which Ernst Käsemann proposed it in his classic lecture.19 Repeated warnings have been issued against misguided applications of the criteria or overreliance on them.20 It is only fairly recently, however, that more systematic criticism of the criteria-based methodology as such has been voiced by more than one or two individual scholars in the ¿eld. Prompted by the increased awareness of the nature of social memory and its implications for the origins of the gospel tradition, a rapidly growing tendency to dismiss criteria as workable tools for reaching back to the historical Jesus culminated in the publication of the volume Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity and the conference by the same name, both of which took place in 2012.21 Although not every contributor to that project wished to do away completely with criteria, there were some who clearly called for the abolition of “the criteria approach,” essentially on the ground that the criteria as traditionally understood are intrinsically bound up with obsolete notions of brute facts, history as the non-interpreted past, and authenticity. Such a development is not an isolated phenomenon of gospel studies but reÀects broader tendencies in historiography at large. In the words of Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, many historians today are ever more skeptical about the appropriateness of [source-critical] questions, even about our ability to answer them adequately. These questions ignore important epistemological issues concerning the kind of knowledge any source can reveal, about our ability to have unmediated access to the past, about intentionality, outcome, and the relationship between the two. Seriously as we take these criticisms…

19. Tobias Hägerland, “Till dissimilaritetskriteriets försvar,” STK 86 (2010): 52–58, building on the insights of, among others, Meyer, The Aims of Jesus, 86; Tom Holmén, “Doubts about Double Dissimilarity: Restructuring the Main Criterion of Jesus-of-History Research,” in Authenticating the Words of Jesus (ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans; NTTS 28/1; Leiden: Brill, 1999), 47–80. Cf. Ernst Käsemann, “Das Problem des historischen Jesus,” ZTK 51 (1954): 125–53 (144). 20. See, e.g., Morna D. Hooker, “On Using the Wrong Tool,” Theology 75 (1972): 570–81; Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 143–46. 21. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne, eds., Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (London: T&T Clark International, 2012). See also Rafael Rodríguez, “Authenticating Criteria: The Use and Misuse of a Critical Method,” JSHJ 7 (2009): 152–67; Dale C. Allison, “How to Marginalize the Traditional Criteria of Authenticity,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter; 4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1:3–30; Chris Keith, “Memory and Authenticity: Jesus Tradition and What Really Happened,” ZNW 102 (2011): 155–77.

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we do not think that these older tools should be discarded. If used carefully, with full knowledge of their limitations, the tools can help us make good use of sources, make them produce meaning in responsible ways.22

I have argued elsewhere that this approach can and ought to be taken also in historical Jesus research. If the criteria are placed within the right context, they—or, to be more precise, the historiographical principles on which they rest—are not only useful but in some regards indispensable to the enterprise. Rather than expelling the criteria for fear of positivistic contagion, Jesus researchers should be able to integrate a criteria-based methodology within more sophisticated theories of history, memory and tradition. They should also be able to continue to make use of their predecessors’ methods of authentication without neglecting the urgent need for more developed methods of interpretation.23 Special problems pertain, however, to the use of the criteria for the purpose of judging the authenticity of scriptural motifs and quotations in the gospels. If, in general, a saying of Jesus can be judged by virtue of its non-derivability from (that is, dissimilarity to) primitive Christian beliefs, any saying that is a quotation from Scripture may have been derived by primitive Christians directly from its ultimate source and not from Jesus. And if, say, both Mark and Q portray Jesus with Isaianic overtones, this might be due to the fact that both sources were inÀuenced by the book of Isaiah rather than to reminiscences of Jesus’ own use of motifs from that book. Thus, at ¿rst glance, the criteria of dissimilarity and multiple attestation would appear to be non-applicable to the question of Jesus’ interaction with Scripture. I will argue in the following that this is not the case, but that the criteria need to be formulated with a special level of re¿nement in order to be applicable in this context. If the

22. Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 60. 23. Tobias Hägerland, “The Future of Criteria in Historical Jesus Research,” JSHJ 13 (2015): 43–65. The fruitfulness of combining criteria-based method with social memory theory is demonstrated by Anthony Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009), and “Memory, Commemoration and History in John 2.19–22: A Critique and Application of Social Memory,” in The Fourth Gospel in First-Century Media Culture (ed. Anthony Le Donne and Tom Thatcher; LNTS 426; London: T&T Clark International, 2011), 186–204. I have myself made an attempt to apply Le Donne’s theory and method in Tobias Hägerland, “The Role of the Disciples in the Prophetic Mission of Jesus,” in The Mission of Jesus: Second Nordic Symposium on the Historical Jesus, Lund, 7–10 October 2012 (ed. Samuel Byrskog and Tobias Hägerland; WUNT II/391; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 177–201.

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criteria of multiple attestation, dissimilarity, coherence, incoherence and implausibility are used with due caution, and with consideration of the distinctive character of the material to which they are applied, they are tools by which even Jesus’ use of Scripture can be authenticated. Dale Allison has proposed that “recurrent attestation” is the most promising indicator of authenticity in the gospels. On the assumption that the gospel tradition as a whole is a reliable commemoration of Jesus— that is, that the bulk of tradition has a basis in perception—it seems reasonable to argue that the general impressions made by the gospel portraits of Jesus should take precedence over any individual episode or saying as the point of departure for establishing a picture of the historical Jesus. In this way, Allison demonstrates for example that Jesus’ identity as an exorcist must be considered historical by virtue of the various sayings and episodes that express this identity, regardless of whether the authenticity of any of these individual items of tradition can be corroborated or not.24 Whereas I have argued that recurrent attestation alone is not a suf¿cient tool for building up a satisfactory representation of the historical Jesus, but one that needs to be supplemented by conventional criteria, the principle is obviously sound.25 It is indeed applicable to the global question of whether at all Jesus interacted with Scripture and appealed to it as a source of authority. The so-called minimalist view, according to which Scripture at most played a marginal role for Jesus, is possible to maintain only if vast portions of the gospel tradition are discredited. For instance, the Jesus Seminar, while noting that the Parable of the Tenants in the Gospel of Thomas seems to predate the allegorized synoptic version, still had to black-list the appended allusion to Ps 118:22 in order to maintain its ¿rm conviction that “[m]ost references to scripture in the gospels are to be credited to the early phases of the Jesus movement and not to Jesus himself” (cf. Gos. Thom. 65–66).26 Facing such reconstructions, one may ask legitimately with Steve Moyise “whether it is possible to say anything at all about Jesus. It looks as though the tradition has become so distorted that the original Jesus has 24. Dale C. Allison, Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (London: SPCK, 2010), 10–22. 25. Hägerland, “The Future of Criteria,” 11–20. 26. Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Polebridge, 1993), 511; cf. the more elaborate statement on p. 68: “Jesus taught on his own authority and seems not to have invoked scripture to justify his pronouncements. Consequently, most, perhaps all, quotations from the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible put on the lips of Jesus are secondary…”

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been lost forever.”27 Conversely, if the gospel tradition is not entirely worthless as material for historical reconstruction, Jesus’ interaction with Scripture is attested so widely across various sources, forms and contexts that its historical basis can hardly be doubted. This is about as much as we can say about Jesus and Scripture by use of the principle of recurrent attestation: Jesus recognized the authority of Scripture, quoted and alluded to it, debated its interpretation with others, and seemingly made use of it as a matrix for understanding himself and his mission. We may add that the gospels depict Jesus as quoting from Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Psalms with special frequency, which is to say that his use of these biblical books is recurrently attested.28 In order to be more speci¿c, we cannot neglect the question of the authenticity of individual sayings and episodes, and that is why the criteria of authenticity will now be considered. In the following, the historicity of Jesus’ references to Daniel 7 will be assessed. The point is not to provide any new insights on this matter as such—indeed, the conclusions reached will be quite conventional—but rather to clarify how certain common opinions may be anchored more systematically in a carefully formulated methodology. My point of departure here will be Geza Vermes’s identi¿cation of some of the Son of Man sayings in the Synoptic Gospels as “Danielic,” either by “direct” or “indirect reference” to Dan 7:13–14.29 Whereas I do not agree with Vermes’s interpretation of the evidence, I ¿nd useful his principle of categorizing the Son of Man sayings into non-Danielic and Danielic sayings. The most indisputable instances of the latter category are the two quotations (“direct references” in Vermes’s terminology) from 27. Steve Moyise, Jesus and Scripture: Studying the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 84–85, commenting on the more nuanced yet skeptical treatment in Geza Vermes, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 173–215; see also Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 50–70. 28. Emerson B. Powery, Jesus Reads Scripture: The Function of Jesus’ Use of Scripture in the Synoptic Gospels (BIS 63; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 254–57; Gerbern S. Oegema, “Jesus’ Use and Interpretation of Scripture: What Was ‘Scripture’ to Jesus and How Did Such Texts InÀuence Him?” in Jesus Research: New Methodologies and Perceptions: The Second Princeton-Prague Symposium on Jesus Research, Princeton 2007 (ed. James H. Charlesworth; Princeton–Prague Symposia Series on the Historical Jesus 2; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 802–26 (814–16). 29. Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (2d ed.; London: SCM, 1983), 177–86. For the signi¿cance of Vermes’s work on the Son of Man question in subsequent historical Jesus research, see the recent study by Hilde Brekke Møller, “The Vermes Quest: The Signi¿cance of Geza Vermes for Jesus Research” (Ph.D. diss., MF Norwegian School of Theology, Oslo, 2015), 116–23.

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Dan 7:13 in the triple tradition (Mark 13:26 parr.; 14:62 parr.). Beyond this, there are allusions to Dan 7:13 in the triple tradition (Mark 2:10 parr.; 2:28 parr.; 8:38 parr.), the double tradition (Luke 12:40 parr.), in special Matthean material (Matt 10:23; 13:41; 16:28; 25:31) and in special Lukan material (Luke 12:8–9; 18:8).30 In addition, John 5:27 seems to allude to how authority is granted to the one like a son of man in Dan 7:13–14. This is the gospel material that could be employed as evidence for the historical Jesus’ use of the imagery in Daniel 7, the authenticity of which will in the following be assessed by use of criteria. b. Multiple Attestation The criterion of multiple attestation has been formulated thus: “If an individual tradition or a motif appears in two or more independent sources, it can be regarded as having a claim to authenticity.”31 The use of this criterion is inextricably bound up with whatever opinion a scholar holds about the interrelationship of the gospels and in particular about the existence of Q. Here, I will assume that the two-source hypothesis is essentially correct, which is to say that overlaps and agreements between the triple and double traditions are indicative of multiple attestation and consequently as more likely authentic than not.32 Even on this assumption, it is necessary to take special precaution as one appeals to the 30. My inventory differs from that of Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 179, due to the following considerations: (1) I have left out instances where the presence of the Son of Man motif is clearly due to the evangelist’s handling of the received text, such as Matt 16:13. (2) Unlike Vermes, I deem Mark 2:10, 28 to be thoroughly Danielic. See Tobias Hägerland, Jesus and the Forgiveness of Sins: An Aspect of His Prophetic Mission (SNTSMS 150; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 173–74. (3) I have taken a minimalist approach to the reconstruction of the Son of Man motif in Q. The evangelist Matthew may have introduced the Son of Man in Matt 19:28 = Luke 22:30 and added the explicit reference to the ȸÉÇÍÊţ¸ in Matt 24:27, 37 = Luke 17:24, 26. See James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann and John S. Kloppenborg, The Critical Edition of Q: Synopsis including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark and Thomas with English, German, and French Translations of Q and Thomas (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 506, 512, 560. 31. Holmén, “Authenticity Criteria,” 49. 32. Delbert Burkett, Rethinking the Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark (New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 7–42, shows that Matthew and Luke may have used an earlier edition of the Gospel of Mark. Cf. Alan Kirk, “Orality, Writing, and Phantom Sources: Appeals to Ancient Media in Some Recent Challenges to the Two Document Hypothesis,” NTS 58 (2012): 1–22 (12–15). Whereas I, similarly to Kirk, have questioned Burkett’s sharp dichotomizing between compiling and composing (RBL 12 [2010]: 395–98; online: http://www.bookreviews.org/ pdf/7221_7858.pdf), I do not regard the argument in favor of Proto-Mark to be contingent on that false dichotomy. 1

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criterion of multiple attestation as an argument in favor of the authenticity of scriptural quotations and allusions attributed to Jesus. Granted that there is no literary interdependence between Mark and reconstructed Q, non-scriptural sayings of Jesus that occur in the two sources most likely have a common origin in an early tradition with a fairly good claim to authenticity. Scriptural quotations in the gospels, however, may just as well be derived directly from Scripture, with no need to posit the historical Jesus as an intermediate link in the chain of tradition. Indeed, such quotations appear sometimes to have been placed secondarily on the lips of Jesus, as is the case with the combination of Exod 23:20 and Mal 3:1 occurring in Mark 1:2 (as a narratorial remark) and Q 7:27 (as a saying of Jesus). It is easier to envision a development by which a piece of primitive Christian exegesis without attribution to Jesus was transformed into a dominical saying than to imagine the reversed process. There seems to be no way to compensate fully for this weakness of the criterion of multiple attestation as applied to Jesus’ quotations from, or allusions to, the Scriptures. As mentioned above, references to Dan 7:13 can be found in Mark, in Q, and in material peculiar to Matthew, Luke and John respectively. Some of these references are of doubtful value as evidence of independent attestation: John 5:27 may be distantly dependent on Mark 2:10, and the special Matthean references could derive from the evangelist’s distinctive interest in elaborating on the Son of Man motif. Still, the distribution of the motif throughout all these strands of tradition is impressive, and it is noteworthy that both Mark (8:38; 13:26; 14:62) and Q (12:40) independently record sayings of Jesus that use Dan 7:13 in a strikingly consistent manner, that is, as references to the “coming” of “the Son of Man,” with strong overtones of threat and imminent judgment. How can we decide whether this widespread interpretative tradition originated with Jesus’ own use of Dan 7:13 or with primitive Christian exegesis of that passage? In my opinion, this cannot be decided by appeal to the criterion of multiple attestation alone. The observation that a certain interpretation of Dan 7:13 is multiply attested can, however, form signi¿cant part of a cumulative argument in favor of authenticity that also involves the criterion of dissimilarity. c. Dissimilarity As already mentioned, the criterion of dissimilarity has undergone substantial revision in criteria-oriented historical Jesus research since the 1950s, the most signi¿cant development being the abandonment of the notion of “double dissimilarity” in favor of “dissimilarity to Christianity.” In Tom Holmén’s succinct formulation, “[i]f an individual

16

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tradition or a motif can be seen to be dissimilar to early Christian interests, views, practices, and/or theological tendencies, etc., it can be regarded as having a claim to authenticity.”33 This description subsumes under one criterion the two sub-criteria of embarrassment (traditions counter to primitive Christian interests are likely to be authentic) and discontinuity (traditions non-derivable from primitive Christian interests are likely to be authentic). Again a problem of applicability to Jesus’ quotations from Scripture appears to present itself, as no scriptural quotation would by itself create a dif¿culty for primitive Christians, and all such quotations are derivable from primitive Christian knowledge and use of Scripture. In view of this, one should refrain from futile attempts at assessing the authenticity of isolated scriptural quotations and allusions, and instead begin by identifying formal and interpretative aspects of the gospel material’s use of the scriptural texts that seem to distinguish it from how primitive Christians routinely employed the same texts. R. T. France’s adaptation of the criterion to the study of Jesus and the Scriptures is substantially commendable: “If…[the pattern of the use of the Old Testament which emerges from a study of the quotations and allusions attributed to Jesus] is found at any point to be different in content or emphasis from the use of the Old Testament in the preaching and writing of the early church, it will be hard to deny that it reÀects the true teaching of Jesus, rather than that of the early church.”34 In practice, this means that primitive Christians’ employment of the same texts that are placed on the lips of Jesus in the gospels is not an obstacle to the use of the criterion of dissimilarity, but rather a precondition for it. The more we know about how primitive Christian authors made use of a certain text, the more able will we be to identify the nuances by which Jesus’ purported use of that text is dissimilar to the Christian usage. The use of Daniel 7 in primitive Christian literature other than the gospels differs markedly, both in form and in contents, from the use ascribed to Jesus. All sayings of Jesus that quote or allude to Dan 7:13 center on the ¿gure called “the Son of Man” (ĝ ÍĎġË ÌÇı ÒÅ¿ÉŪÈÇÍ). Outside the gospels, 1 Thess 4:13–18 and Did. 16.6–8 seem to allude to Daniel 7.35 Neither of these passages mentions the Son of Man. The 33. Holmén, “Authenticity Criteria,” 47. 34. R. T. France, Jesus and the Old Testament: His Application of Old Testament Passages to Himself and to His Mission (London: Tyndale, 1971), 23–24 (emphasis added). 35. See, e.g., Michael W. Pahl, Discerning the “Word of the Lord”: The “Word of the Lord” in 1 Thessalonians 4:15 (LNTS 389; London: T&T Clark International, 2009), 20–22. 1

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composite quotation from Dan 7:13 and other texts in Rev 1:7 likewise leaves out any reference to the Son of Man. In Rev 1:13 and 14:14, by contrast, Jesus is depicted as “a similar son of man” (ĞÄÇÀÇÅ ÍĎġÅ ÒÅ¿ÉŪÈÇÍ). This anarthrous expression, which is closer to the formulation in Dan 7:13, clearly differs from the quasi-titular use in the gospels. Thus, with the exception of Stephen’s confession of the Son of Man in Acts 7:56—which is probably Luke’s invention modelled on the gospel tradition—the interpretation of Daniel 7 with reference to a seemingly well-known ¿gure called “the Son of Man” is restricted to sayings of Jesus in the gospels. Coupled with the observation that this interpretation is multiply attested in independent sources, the dissimilarity between it and primitive Christian interpretations of the same text speaks in favor of its origin with the historical Jesus. One may take one further step and claim not only that Jesus’ interpretation of Daniel 7 is non-derivable from primitive Christianity, but even that it caused embarrassment to some primitive Christians. In Mark 14:62, Jesus af¿rms his identity as the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One, and adds that “you will see (ěмʿ¼) the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven,” apparently with the implication “that those sitting in judgment over Jesus will in fact witness the ‘coming’, i.e. that it will occur within their lifetime.”36 While Matthew retains the reference to the Sanhedrin’s imminent “seeing” of the Son of Man’s “coming” (Matt 26:64), Luke deletes it and replaces it with the statement that “from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the Power of God” (Luke 22:69). This certainly indicates that, for Luke, it is at the resurrection that Jesus is vindicated and seated at God’s right hand.37 Hans Conzelmann’s point, that the deletion of Jesus’ prediction about his opponents seeing his glorious vindication is due to the delay of the Parousia, is still valid.38 Put more starkly, the embarrassing fact that the Sanhedrin did not see the “coming” of the “Son of Man” caused Luke to suppress this failed prediction, thereby making the dependence of Jesus’ saying on Dan 7:13 less evident. In John’s trial narrative, there is no longer any trace of it. By the criterion of dissimilarity, then, we can conclude that Jesus’ multiply attested interpretation of Dan 7:13 in terms of a reference to the imminent and vindicating “coming” of “the Son of Man” cannot be 36. France, Jesus and the Old Testament, 141. 37. Jerome H. Neyrey, The Passion according to Luke: A Redaction Study of Luke’s Soteriology (New York: Paulist, 1985), 74. 38. Hans Conzelmann, Die Mitte der Zeit: Studien zur Theologie des Lukas (7th ed.; BHT 17; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993), 107.

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derived from primitive Christian exegesis of Daniel 7. On the contrary, one aspect of this interpretation—namely, that the “coming” would take place in a publicly visible way soon enough for Jesus’ opponents to see it—was found to be embarrassing and was thus suppressed. The conclusion to be drawn is that the speci¿c interpretation of Dan 7:13 attributed to Jesus in the gospel tradition is indeed “authentic” in the sense of being “based in perception” of the historical Jesus’ teaching. d. Coherence and Incoherence Whereas the criteria of multiple attestation and dissimilarity can only be applied positively, that is, in order to af¿rm the authenticity of a tradition, the positive criterion of coherence can be reversed into the negative criterion of incoherence, which may be used for rejecting the authenticity of a tradition. The application of the criterion, in its positive as well as its negative form, is dependent on an extant body of material previously af¿rmed as authentic. In Holmén’s formulation, “[i]f an individual tradition or a motif is coherent with what has already been deemed as authentic, it can be regarded as having a claim to authenticity”; conversely, “[i]f an individual tradition or a motif is incoherent with what has already been deemed as authentic, inauthenticity of the tradition or motif is suggested.”39 Both the positive and the negative formulations of the criterion are far from unproblematic. They are clearly dependent on the axiom that the historical Jesus spoke and acted with a consistency that can be properly delineated by scholars today. As this can be questioned, coherence and incoherence are relatively weak indicators of authenticity.40 With this quali¿cation in mind, the criterion can be applied positively as well as negatively to traditions about Jesus’ use of the Scriptures. Applying the criterion of coherence to the gospel traditions according to which Jesus quoted or alluded to Dan 7:13 illustrates well the point made by Theissen and Winter, that is, that the outcome depends on the scholar’s overall picture of the historical Jesus. Scholars who dismiss the notion of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher will conclude that references to the “coming” of the “Son of Man” are incoherent with Jesus’ message and therefore inauthentic. For example, Crossan labels every complex of sayings and passages dealing with the apocalyptic coming of the Son of Man as inauthentic.41 This ¿ts well with Crossan’s position that during the public ministry, “John’s vision of awaiting the apocalyptic God, the

1

39. Holmén, “Authenticity Criteria,” 50, 52. 40. See further Hägerland, Jesus and the Forgiveness of Sins, 25–28. 41. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 243–55.

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Coming One, as a repentant sinner, which Jesus had originally accepted and even defended in the crisis of John’s death, was no longer deemed adequate” by Jesus.42 The opposite conclusion is arrived at by Allison, who offers a list of 32 categories of gospel material as evidence that Jesus subscribed to an apocalyptic eschatology, within which the sayings about the coming of the Son of Man ¿t comfortably.43 On the premise that Allison’s overall portrayal of Jesus is closer to the mark than is Crossan’s—for which I see several good reasons—Jesus’ alleged use of Dan 7:13 is coherent with his worldview and message at large, which further corroborates the authenticity of these gospel traditions. Two instances may form an exception. In Mark 2:10, 28, Jesus claims that the authority and lordship of the Son of Man is operative in the present. One might argue that this interpretation of Dan 7:13 is actually incoherent with how Jesus tended to interpret the passage with reference to a future “coming” of that ¿gure. This line of reasoning, however, demonstrates the frailty of the criterion of incoherence, especially as applied to the issue of Jesus and the Scriptures. It is not obvious why Jesus could not have interpreted any given scriptural passage in different, even mutually contradicting, ways. There may be other reasons to consider the sayings in Mark 2:10, 28 inauthentic, one of which will be mentioned below, but it would be unwarranted to do so on the basis of the purported incoherence of Jesus’ hermeneutics in these sayings with previously authenticated material. e. Implausibility Finally, “[i]f an individual tradition or a motif involves features integral to it that are incapable of being plausibly situated in the Palestine of Jesus’ time, inauthenticity of the tradition or motif is suggested.”44 This is the negative criterion of implausibility, of which France’s criterion of “the text-form” is an adaptation to the study of Jesus and the Scriptures: If a saying embodies and depends on a text of the Old Testament which could not have been available to Jesus, it cannot be authentic. Speci¿cally, if a saying is found to depend on the LXX version of an Old Testament passage, and could not have been derived from any known Semitic version of that passage, the presumption is that it is not a saying of Jesus.45

As France is quick to point out, the criterion needs to be applied with caution. Adjustments of an Aramaic original to the LXX wording may 42. 43. 44. 45.

Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 237–38. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 33–43. Holmén, “Authenticity Criteria,” 51. France, Jesus and the Old Testament, 24.

20

Jesus and the Scriptures

have taken place in the process of translation; therefore, it is only if the argument ascribed to Jesus is wholly dependent on a speci¿cally Greek form of the text that one should rule out the quotation or allusion as inauthentic.46 Furthermore, it is advisable not to overplay the evidentiary value of the non-derivability of a quotation or allusion from any known Aramaic or Hebrew version of the passage in question. As the many points of contact between the biblical scrolls from Qumran and the LXX have con¿rmed, the Septuagintal text frequently testi¿es to Vorlagen that antedate the text-form underlying the MT. It often remains a possibility that the LXX, when deviating from the MT and other known Hebrew and Aramaic text-forms, represents a Semitic text that may have inÀuenced Jesus but is now lost. The quotations from Dan 7:13 in Mark 13:26 and 14:62 do not presuppose a Greek textual form. On a comparison between the texts of Dan 7:13 in Aramaic (MT) and Greek (Theodotion), two of the key phrases could equally well be derived from either source. The de¿nite expression “the Son of Man” (ÌġÅ ÍĎġÅ ÌÇı ÒÅ¿ÉŪÈÇÍ) differs from the Aramaic and Greek texts, both of which speak of “(one) like a son of man” (