Jesus and the Historians (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament) 9783161507083, 9783161515583, 3161507088

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Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Herausgeber/Editor Jörg Frey (Zürich) Mitherausgeber/Associate Editors Friedrich Avemarie (Marburg) Markus Bockmuehl (Oxford) Hans-Josef Klauck (Chicago, IL)

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Alexander J. M. Wedderburn

Jesus and the Historians

Mohr Siebeck

IV Alexander J. M. Wedderburn, born 1942; Graduate of Oxford University (BA, MA), Edinburgh University (BD) and Cambridge University (PhD); 1990–1994 Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer Durham University; 1994–2006 Professor of New Testament, EvangelischTheologische Fakultät, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Retired since October 2006.

e-ISBN PDF 978-3-16-151558-3

ISBN 978-3-16-150708-3 ISSN 0512-1604 (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2010 by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproduction, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset by Computersatz Staiger in Rottenburg/N., printed by Gulde-Druck in Tübingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Spinner in Ottersweier. Printed in Germany.

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Foreword The initial impetus for this book came from two sources: one was the observation that certain colleagues, particularly some German-speaking ones, seemed to have ideas about historical research and writing that seemed to me strange and unfamiliar and that did not correspond to what I thought that I was doing when attempting to write history – nor, for that matter, did it seem to lead to those colleagues writing history in a way noticeably different from mine, whether they were writing about Jesus, Paul or early Christianity. That led me into a necessarily somewhat selective investigation of some of the things being written, both by English-speaking and by German-speaking historians and philosophers of history, about the nature of the study and writing of history and its epistemology. (It may be remarked that, for all the talk of an odium theologicum, it was quite a revelation to read what some historians said about their colleagues and quite entertaining at times, too. If it does not seem too complacent to say so, the discussions among New Testament exegetes seem relatively staid and genteel. But perhaps I should not speak too soon, before I have read what critics have to say about this work.) At any rate, it is my hope that confronting historical theories and epistemologies with the concrete requirements and problems of this particular historical study of the life of Jesus may help to shed light on their strengths and weaknesses, particularly if one bears in mind the repeated lament that the theorists and philosophers are out of touch with the practice of historians. The theorists and philosophers, of course, reply by accusing the historians of a lack of reflection on what they are doing. Whether I have reflected sufficiently or not, it seems to me that many of the old questions involved in the historical study of Jesus are still valid, even if they should be posed in a more nuanced and at the same time more tentative and self-critical way, and that they must be posed even if the answers that they yield may cause considerable discomfort for theologians. And it is this possible discomfort that arouses in me the suspicion that one of the attractions of newer historiographical theorizing for some may be the possibility of evading such unwelcome implications of historical criticism. I do not believe that one could or should do that and must confess that, on hearing a lecture given by Francis Watson on the historical-critical treatment of the resurrection of Jesus by a number of scholars, including myself, I was somewhat puzzled at the series of theses which supposedly summarized my position (the inverted commas used by this scholar running the risk of giv-

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ing the impression that these were quotations) and were then contrasted with a series of counter-theses: over against ‘A “purely historical” approach is one that allows itself to be determined solely by its historical object’ was set ‘History-writing is an interpretative practice, and its account of its object is always open to question’; against ‘Historical research is distorted by the intrusion of nonhistorical concerns’ there was ‘Historical research may be practised in conjunction with a range of nonhistorical disciplines’; and ‘The quest for the original historical datum necessitates a sceptical attitude towards tradition’ was contrasted with ‘In historical research, it is not always necessary or appropriate to differentiate an object from its representations’. In the first two cases I could quite happily assent to the counter-theses, more happily, indeed, than in the case of the theses, and, I believe, still come to the uncomfortable conclusions of my Beyond Resurrection. The third counter-thesis, I must confess, leaves me a little puzzled, for the lecture in question ended with the statement that ‘A focus on represented objects will tend to show that the relationship between object and representation is closer and more complex than [the scholarly tradition deriving from Reimarus and Strauss] can imagine’; the relationship may be close, but if it is complex and not a matter of simple identity is some differentiation, or at least some attempt at differentiation, not still called for?1 Whether all that makes me a ‘modernist’ or a ‘postmodernist’ or a ‘postpostmodernist’ (if there are such creatures) or just confused I am not quite sure (and if the verdict is ‘confused’, then perhaps some of those with whose work I have been engaged may share some of the blame for being confusing); perhaps the reviewers of this book will sort me out into the appropriate pigeonhole. The other impetus for the book came from a my own discomfort with some of the foundations and implications of the work of my former Durham colleague, James Dunn, in his monumental and justly highly influential work, Jesus Remembered. It was not so much that I thought them wrong, but that I had on the one hand reservations about the implications for historical enquiry of his stress on orality and memory as well as the feeling, on the other hand, that, if he was correct, we might conceivably have to look at the nature of the sources for Jesus’ life and the way that we handle those sources in a different light. But once embarked on the topic of the writing of history, particularly in connection with historical research into the life and teaching of Jesus, more and more points relating to the methods used and the principles of this historical work sprang to mind. And if there is a thread running through this work and holding it together, it should perhaps be seen in the uneasy feeling mentioned above, that we run the risk, with ‘postmodern’ epistemology and historical theory or with the use made of such factors as orality or memory, of blunting the challenges that

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The lecture was published in Kerygma und Dogma (Watson, ‘Is the Historian?’).

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historical work still presents and, in my view, must present for traditional views of Jesus’ work and nature. Yet dealing with such sources of discomfort led to another, and relates to my forebodings as to what critics might say of this work. For, as any one acquainted with this field will readily appreciate, there are few areas of those touched on in this work, both in the field of the New Testament and outside it, in other disciplines, that have not spawned an enormous literature of their own as well opening up countless avenues of further enquiry and exploration. Trying to steer a course through these many fields reminded me at times of a juggler trying to keep several balls in the air at the same time, and it remains to be seen whether I have succeeded any better with these intellectual balls than my ill-coordinated hands would have with literal balls. And the at times rather selective approach that I have already mentioned in connection with the study of historiography, in which some issues have been tackled and relevant literature used in the present volume, stems from the realization that a full treatment of them would be a programme for eternity. (And in the light of a serious illness and its increasingly unpleasant aftermath I thought it better to limit my horizons and expectations.)2 Thus my further discomfort arises from the corners that have had to be cut and the awareness of the avenues that have been left unexplored, as well as the consciousness that often I have posed questions rather than providing answers. Yet even that may, I hope, be of some service, although this observation in turn prompts me to recall the French historian Marc Bloch’s quotation of a remark of his teacher, Charles Seignobos: ‘It is useful to ask oneself questions, but very dangerous to answer them’.3 Yet it is not only the threat of danger that may stifle the answers, although the dangers should be all too apparent when one ventures on such minefields as those surrounding questions of christology, but also the uncertainty as to what those answers could or should be, particularly when the field of study is so far removed in time, and the all too scanty witnesses to what happened then have such a strong personal interest in certain interpretations of those events. There are a number of persons who have helped in various ways at different stages of this work (sometimes perhaps without their being aware of it!), and to them I express here my heartfelt thanks: Knut Backhaus, Fred Burnett, Alf Christophersen, Carsten Claussen, Jimmy Dunn, Richard Evans, Gerd Häfner, Alan Kirk, Jens-Uwe Krause, Michael Roaf, Wolfgang Stegemann, and Christian Witschel. Also to be mentioned with gratitude are the various participants in the conference of the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Theologie on ‘Text und Geschichte’, organized and led by Christof Landmesser and Ruben Zimmermann 2 It is roughly at this point in her work Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets, xviii, fittingly quotes Quint. 1 prooemium 25: ‘For if I were to attempt to say all that might be said on each subject, the book would never be finished.’ 3 Bloch, Craft, 17 (his italics).

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and held in Hofgeismar in 2009, whose contributions, whether in papers, in the following discussion or informally, provided so many insights and ideas. Thanks are due too to the helpfulness of the staff of the Bavarian Staatsbibliothek and the University Library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and its many branches and also to Gerhard Schön of the IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften of the LMU. Finally, thanks are especially due to another former colleague, Jörg Frey, for accepting this work for publication in the Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament series, and to Henning Ziebritzki and the staff of Mohr Siebeck. Munich, July 2010

A. J. M. Wedderburn

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Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1. A Historical Quest and the Question of ‘History’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1. N. T. Wright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2. J. Schröter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3. E. Schüssler Fiorenza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4. J. D. G. Dunn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5. D. L. Denton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6. S. McKnight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 7 13 32 37 49 53

2. The Historiography of the ‘Old Quest’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1. Schweitzer and Historical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2. Troeltsch and Historical Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 57 66

3. The Historiography of the ‘New Quest’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1. Bultmann and the ‘New Quest’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2. Van Harvey (and Schubert Ogden) and the ‘New Quest’ . . . . . . . . 3.3. A ‘Renewed “New Quest”’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81 81 86 89

4. A New View of History and Historiography? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1. Historical Research in the ‘Third Quest’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2. A New Historiography? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3. A ‘Postmodern’ Historiography? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1. The ‘New Historicism’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2. Various Forms of ‘Postmodern’ Historiography . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3. The Old and the New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.4. Lessons from ‘Postmodern’ Historiography? . . . . . . . . . . . .

93 94 99 110 110 117 122 125

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5. Handling the Jesus Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1. The Nature of the Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2. A Question of Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3. The Ambiguity of Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

145 146 161 183

6. Memory 6.1. Remembering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2. Individual and Collective Remembering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3. Memory – Trustworthy or Not? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4. Remembering as . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5. Memory and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

189 190 195 206 215 219

7. Orality 7.1. An Oral Tradition? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2. Orality and the Nature of ‘Q’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3. Orality and the Markan Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

225 227 237 249

8. Who Did Jesus Think He Was? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1. A Legitimate Question? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2. Did Jesus Know and Reveal the Answer? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3. Jesus’ Claims and Self-Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4. But No Messianic Title? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5. A Representative Figure? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

275 275 283 285 294 308

9. A Christological Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Bibliography of Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Primary sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Reference Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Other works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

331 331 332 333

Index of Primary Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 Index of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381

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Abbreviations Monographs and articles are mostly identified in the text and notes with an abbreviated title, commentaries with the name of the biblical work in question; full details will be found below. For the most part abbreviations listed by the Anchor Bible Dictionary, the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.) or Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (4th ed.) have been used. The following have also been used in addition to those mentioned under § 2 ‘Reference Works’ below: FS Ger. JSHJ LNTS SCBO UTB

Festschrift German version/translation Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Library of New Testament Studies Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis Uni-Taschenbücher

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1. A Historical Quest and the Question of ‘History’ In the long and complex history of the historical search for Jesus it is has been customary to identify various phases, in particular the original nineteenth-century ‘quest’ documented by Albert Schweitzer, the ‘new quest’ which sprang up among the pupils of Rudolf Bultmann, and the ‘third quest’ which N. T. Wright detected in the work of various scholars from the late 1970s on, even if these phases are not so clearly delimited, either in chronology or in method, as this way of speaking might at first sight suggest.1 Although in many cases these scholars proceeded without much discussion of their presuppositions and often with the implicit assumption that the legitimacy of what they were doing and how they were doing it was self-evident, 2 the careful observer could detect that very often the motives, the methods and the expectations of these various ‘quests’ differed, both in relation to the other ‘quests’ and also to some extent within each ‘quest’. That is perhaps hardly surprising, and one reason for these differences lay in the rise of different conceptions of how one should go about historical work and what it could hope to achieve. Yet it is all too rare that scholars engaged in one or other of the ‘quests’ made explicit their relationship to these various schools of historical criticism.3 One notable exception was James M. Robinson who, in coining the name of the ‘new quest’, devoted a short section to the ‘new concept of history and the self’ which he found underlying the work of scholars like Ernst Käsemann and Günther Bornkamm.4 More recently 1

See the discussion in Denton, Historiography, 3–8. This seems to me to be true even of the recent work of Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer, Jesus, for, although they chide the fundamentalist polemic against ‘the historical-critical method’ for its ignorance of the nature of historical knowledge (261), they offer little explanation or analysis of the nature of this knowledge and the epistemological problems inherent therein, despite their reference to Droysen’s warning that one should not imagine that one could deliver an ‘Abbild’ of a past time for it would only be an imaginative ‘Bild’, since the past is no longer at our disposal (260, quoting Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 26). 3 In that they are evidently not alone amongst those engaged in historical work; Fritz Stern quotes the observation of E. L. Woodward that he had steered clear of ‘the fundamental problem of the nature of historical knowledge’, just as ‘nearly all English historians have evaded it’ (Varieties, 14). 4 J. M. Robinson, Quest, 66–72. 2

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representatives of the ‘third quest’ like Wright and J. D. G. Dunn have shown their awareness of such issues, the latter devoting a chapter to ‘History, Hermeneutics and Faith’,5 the former one on ‘History and the First Century’ as well as one each on aspects of epistemology and literary criticism relevant to the study of history.6 More recently still, Scot McKnight, a former doctoral student of Dunn’s, prefaces his work on the death of Jesus with a chapter on ‘The Historical Jesus, the Death of Jesus, Historiography, and Theology’, a chapter that begins with a brief survey of ‘postmodern’ and ‘modern’ historiography and seeks to outline the author’s own approach to the question.7 At any rate these questions need to be raised. I fear that it will not suffice to do what John P. Meier proposed at the start of his ever more learned and erudite and still ongoing study of Jesus, his ‘fantasy of the “unpapal conclave”’. In this he sketches a scenario in which a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic – all honest historians cognisant of 1stcentury religious movements – were locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library, put on a spartan diet, and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a consensus document on who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended in his own time and place. An essential requirement of this document would be that it be based on purely historical sources and arguments. The resulting unreligious ‘formula of concord’ would suffer from all the ills endemic to ecumenical statements drawn up by 5

Dunn, Jesus Remembered, ch. 6. Wright, New Testament, ch. 4. 7 McKnight, Jesus, esp. 4–28. As will be apparent from the addition of the work of Schröter, Schüssler Fiorenza and Denton to the at first sight perhaps rather arbitrary selection of the contributions of Wright, Dunn and McKnight in this chapter, the list could be lengthened almost at will (it will, for instance, become apparent in the course of this work that, at least at certain points, Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses makes a valuable contribution to the debate, even if he reserves a short section on historiographical principles to the very end of his work, as a sort of postscript to his essentially historical work). Denton’s study on Historiography and Hermeneutics concentrates on the work of Crossan and B. F. Meyer; the former, however, despite his widespread use of methods of literary criticism in his earlier work on Jesus’ sayings and despite his emphasis on his methods, seems in his major work on The Historical Jesus simply to assume the appropriateness of historical work (as he conceives it) and proceeds accordingly. (Already in his earlier work, Denton notes, although Crossan had developed a post-structuralist hermeneutic that confined reality to language, his ‘historiography seems impervious to these hermeneutical and ontological moves, and continues to operate on the assumption that what is sought is a real historical, extra-linguistic referent, the authentic words of the real historical Jesus of Nazareth. He embraces a hermeneutic that denies the historical referent, and an ontology that denies extra-linguistic reality, along with a historiography that assumes both such a referent and a reality’: 40–1; cf. 145.) Yet ch. 2 of Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity does in some measure remedy that shortcoming. Meyer’s approach is defended and adopted by Wright, who offers us a more broadly conceived account of Jesus’ life and work from this perspective. See, too, the short section in Riesner, Jesus, 80–7, touching on some issues of historical methods, as well as the opening chapter of Barnett, Jesus, which is, however, very much dependent on the views of G. R. Elton and little else. 6

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committees. At times ambiguous language would be carefully chosen to paper over differences, at times points of divergence on which no agreement could be reached would have to be openly admitted. Probably this white paper on Jesus would reflect fully the opinions of no one member of the famished conclave. Certainly it would not contain affirmations that the Catholic or Protestant member would firmly hold by faith. The basic requirement that the consensus document be open to verification by any and all persons using the means of modern historical research would produce a narrow focus, a fragmentary vision, perhaps even distortions.8

As one comes back to this opening after three further volumes of Meier’s magnum opus, one is initially puzzled at this seemingly programmatic ‘fantasy’. For it could hardly be claimed that Meier’s work suffers from ‘all the ills endemic to ecumenical statements drawn up by committees’ that he goes on to list. It is the fruits of the sustained and systematic work of one critical and extraordinarily well-read Catholic scholar,9 and he at least is not guilty of choosing ‘ambiguous language’. Nor has his work so far shown too much of the ‘narrow focus’ or ‘fragmentary vision’ from which the consensus document is expected to suffer. Fortunately Meier has not attempted to replicate what the four captives in the Harvard Divinity School library might offer us. In other respects, this vision is indeed ‘fantastic’ and unreal. Might one not at least have to specify what sort of Catholic, Protestant and Jew are intended, for many sorts of all three might think themselves qualified for the task (and perhaps have as much difficulty agreeing with one another as with representatives of the other categories)? (Yet for some reason atheists are unwanted.) For our purposes, though, it is perhaps most important to note that it is apparently assumed what ‘the means of modern historical research’ are, and yet it is at this point that questions begin to arise. For a start, however, it would be as well to note the ambiguity of the term ‘history’, an ambiguity that has, in my opinion, often been noted but has nevertheless often hampered the discussion of topics such as the present one.10 The word ‘history’ can mean a or the course of events in the past,11 but it can also refer to 8

Meier, Jew 1, 1–2. This is a discipline in which most plough their own furrows, with more or less advice from others, or, where teamwork is involved, a certain degree of group homogeneity and shared perspective is usual. 10 Cf. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s critique of Michael Oakeshott for ‘so often (seeming) to blur the distinction between the two meanings of history – history as the past and history as writing about or reflecting upon the past’, a blurring that is in his case intentional: History, 177, referring to Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933, 1978) 100. 11 Or a period of time ‘for which records are available’, in contrast to ‘prehistory’ (Macquarrie, Scope, 59). However, this usage makes no allowance for talking of a future ‘history’ (as Macquarrie himself does, e.g. on p. 80), and when one speaks in the present of one’s actions being vindicated by ‘history’ then this may well refer to the way that future events turn out (unless one means being vindicated by what future historians write about those actions). 9

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accounts of these events or the discipline of studying those events and writing about them.12 Discussions of the role and influence of the scholar’s own perceptions and creativity concern, surely, the latter rather than that which happened in the past; how one perceives the past may certainly affect one’s study of the past and one’s account of it, but, almost by definition, cannot affect the past itself, for it is past. It might, therefore aid clarity if one spoke of the study of, and the writing about, the past as ‘historiography’, rather than ‘history’.13 In this respect I 12 This is admirably put by Wright, New Testament, 81: ‘The word “history” is regularly used in two quite different but related ways, to refer to (1) actual happenings in the real world and (2) what people write about actual happenings in the real world.’ (He claims that only the latter sense is found in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, but my copy, the 6th ed. of 1976, also gives ‘aggregate of past events, course of human affairs; whole train of events connected with nation, person, thing, etc.’, which corresponds more to his first sense.) But, then, in what sense is ‘history’ used a few lines above when Wright tells us that ‘history cannot exist by itself’ and ‘points beyond’? Or that ‘all history is interpreted history’ (88 – the first ‘history’ may be his sense 2 but if that were meant by the second occurrence of the word would one not expect ‘interpretative’?). Cf. also, e.g., E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 16 (‘the two current meanings of the word “history” – the enquiry conducted by the historian and the series of past events into which he enquires’); de Certeau, Writing, 21 (who notes that this ambiguity between the science and that which it studies is not shared by other disciplines and what they study; he for himself distances himself from this ‘current usage’ by treating ‘history’ as a practice, a discipline, a reality, on the one hand, and its result, a discourse, on the other; p. 288 suggests that this corresponds to the distinction between Historie and Geschichte); Fox-Genovese, ‘Literary Criticism’, 216; Lonergan, Method, 175; Mink, ‘Writing’, 92 (‘history-as-written and history-as-lived’); Ricoeur, Memory, 298; Wilson, History, 1 (‘History is both a subject, or what has happened, and the process of recounting and analyzing that subject’). Similarly, when Arthur Marwick insists that one ‘does history’ rather than studying it (New Nature, 1, 10), he is talking about ‘history’ as the discipline, which he carefully distinguishes from ‘the past’ (9; cf. 24–5, 29, 269); more difficult is his further definition of ‘history’ as ‘the bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians …’ (28; cf. 31, 245, 269); one could study them, but hardly ‘do’ them, any more than one could be said to ‘do’ ‘the writings of … historians’ (30). Andrew Norman (‘Telling’, 160–61) gives a telling instance from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre that shows how this ambivalence can lead one badly astray: it does not, pace MacIntyre, follow that ‘since history (in the sense of “our stories”) has a narrative structure, history (in the sense of “the past”) has a narrative structure’. 13 In English it is not so easy to make the distinction proposed by H. Cancik, ‘Geschichtsschreibung II: Griechisch’ in RGG4 3 (2000) 804–6, here 805, and endorsed by Wischmeyer, ‘Orte’, 158, between ‘Historiographie’ as the broader category, which would also include antiquarian, methodological and polemical writings and chronicles, and ‘Geschichtsschreibung’ in a narrower sense, involving a narrative text claiming historical truth and a higher literary quality. McKnight argues (Jesus, 4 n. 3, following P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession [New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988] 8 n. 6) that, in the absence of the use of ‘historiology’ in current usage, ‘historiography’ must do duty for ‘historical science’, including the philosophy of history, as well as descriptive accounts of historical writing in the sense of histories of history. (‘Historiology’ does, however, occur in the English translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time, but there seemingly as a special coinage [cf. Being, 14], in the sense of a ‘science of

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follow the decision of Paul Ricoeur to use the term ‘historiography’ for the whole ‘threefold adventure of archival research, explanation, and representation’, rather than limiting it to the third element, the actual writing of an account.14 The situation is, to my mind, even worse when it comes to the equally ambiguous German word ‘Geschichte’, even before one comes to the contrast which was once so popular, between ‘Historie’ and ‘Geschichte’.15 For the word ‘Geschichte’ can mean ‘history’, what happened in the past,16 but it can also mean ‘story’ (whereas in English ‘story’ and history’ [Being, 430, Ger. 378]; Heidegger himself speaks of ‘Historie’. R. J. Evans’ judgement that ‘“historiology” … has never entered general usage’ holds good: Defence, 45.) But terms like ‘philosophy of history’ and ‘historiographical theory’ lie ready to hand, and it would seem preferable to use ‘historiography’ in its etymological sense of the practice of the writing of (accounts of) history qua what happened in the past (yet contrast Marwick, New Nature, 29, 31, who limits ‘historiography’ to ‘the history of historical writing’). Similar ambiguities beset the phrase ‘oral history’ which Byrskog, Story, uses in his study of ancient historiography and the gospel tradition. When one speaks of the ‘oral history’ of a group in the past, this could mean the events to which this group looks back, informed by an oral tradition, or it can mean their telling of those events in the present, or yet again, particularly when one speaks of the modern discipline of ‘oral history’, it can refer to the discipline with its attendant methodology. 14 Ricoeur, Memory, 138; cf. his ‘Wahrheit’, in Jordan, Lexikon, 317 (a documentary phase, one of explanation/understanding, and one of literary composition). Cf. Cook, History/Writing, 9: ‘historiography remains both an intellectual procedure and a “genre” of writing.’ 15 Cf. Ricoeur, Time 3, 209–10. 16 So Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 6 (cf. 12–13, etc.), ‘the sum of that which has happened in the course of time’ (also ed. Leyh 7: Geschichte refers objectively to a ‘Verlauf von Dingen’, although that is then qualified on the following pages; cf. also ed. Hübner 21 where he speaks of Geschichte as ‘our knowledge of the cosmos of the moral world’ – a somewhat problematic definition; comparable is also 137: ‘history (Geschichte) is not the first and best grasp of the individual events, but the intellectual impression of what happened then, that which happened then seen in terms of its significance, its context, its truth’; further 187, 325 n. 1: ‘a knowledge of what occurred and the occurrence that is known’ [cf. ed. Leyh 397]). (Does this tension in Droysen’s utterances stem from the insertion of earlier material into later that Leyh so criticizes in Hübner’s edition [ed. Leyh xv]?) The sense of ‘that which (has) happened in the past’ is surely also meant when Rüsen (‘Faktizität’, 28) speaks of Geschichte ‘constructing’ us in that we find ourselves, willy-nilly, in a situation that has been moulded and shaped by history (cf. Ricoeur’s talk of our ‘“being-affected” by the past’: Time 3, 207, 213, 216–29; and, he emphasizes, integral to this situation is language, that ‘great institution, the institution of institutions, that has preceded each and every one of us’ – 221; also ‘History’, 22, and Shils, Tradition, esp. 41–8, on the ‘determinant function of the past’ and the consequent ‘restricted autonomy of the individual’, who is ‘constituted by tradition’). This takes up an insight of Droysen’s, that we are ourselves a historical product (Historik, ed. Leyh 399, 425=ed. Hübner 332), and it finds its echo, too, in Gadamer’s stress that we, including historians, belong to history and are shaped by it, having a ‘historically effected consciousness’ (e.g. Truth, 267–8, 340–79, 506). (Elton, Return, 82, speaks of the past as ‘quite simply the matrix in which we live and from which we grow, which utterly and totally conditions us’, though coyly and somewhat cryptically adding in a footnote ‘Totally? Well, well’. Cf. Marwick’s denial of that ‘totally’: New Nature, 46–7.) Another way of putting this may be, with David Brown (Tradition), to speak

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‘history’ are at least different words), so that one can, for instance, say that the episodic Book of Acts creates ‘Geschichte’ from stringing together a number of ‘Geschichten’.17 This ambiguity is stated with admirable clarity by Ulrich H. J. Körtner in the preface to the volume Geschichte und Vergangenheit: ‘The word “Geschichte” has a twofold meaning. On the one hand it refers to the past, which is the object of historical remembering and research, on the other hand the narrative, whose content can be true or also invented. “Geschichte” is the equivalent of “story” as well as “history”.’18 That distinction becomes important when one encounters statements like the following (by Hans-Jürgen Goertz): ‘Whoever speaks both of construction and also of reconstruction has not come to terms with the radicality of [the] new understanding of history (Geschichte). At any rate, the past is not constructed, as if it would not otherwise exist, but history (Geschichte) is constructed.’19 But in English ‘history’ is often used in a sense equivalent to ‘(the) past’ (‘that’s all history now’) and the word ‘Geschichte’ in Goertz’s dictum makes better sense if, in contrast to the past which need not and cannot be constructed, the word here means an account of the past which needs to be constructed or composed.20 Similarly, the claims that ‘facts or events of the past only become part of history (Geschichte) by being appropriated by means of processes of historical Sinnbildung’21 or that ‘history (Geschichte) is always that which has occurred (Geschehen) appropriated by means of interpretation’22 surely refer, yet again, to ‘history’ in the sense of an account of the past.23 In that case, ‘Geschichte’ in this sense must be carefully distinguished from ‘das Geschehene’, that which has occurred, and yet dictionaries will usually give as one of the first meanings of ‘Geschichte’ a definition like ‘series of events’, which comes near to the sense of ‘what has happened’.24 To those two senses may be added the sense of the scholarly discipline concerned with investigating the events of the past, a sense which, as several scholars have pointed out, belongs to the original meanings of the Greek word LMVWRULYD.25 Nonetheless, there are those who deny the possibility of such distinctions, of tradition as that upon whose resources we draw as well as that which we creatively, imaginatively adapt and continue, except that it is more clearly then not only a matter of ‘that which (has) happened in the past’ but also of what has been handed down from the past. 17 So, for instance, M. Dibelius, Aufsätze, 113: the author of Acts fashioned ‘aus Geschichten Geschichte’. Naturally there are synonyms or near-synonyms for ‘Geschichte’ in the sense of ‘story’, such as ‘Erzählung’. 18 Körtner, Geschichte, v. 19 Goertz, Geschichte, 37. 20 Cf. Goertz, Geschichte, 118: ‘Geschichte is the attempt to establish a relationship to the past (historia rerum gestarum), not the past as such (res gestae).’ 21 Schröter, Frage’, 224. (‘Sinnbildung’, in the sense of making sense of things, has been left untranslated, although Lategan is happy to talk of a ‘historical sense-making’: ‘History’ [2002], 211.) 22 Schröter, Jesus von Nazaret, 267. 23 Similarly Schnelle, ‘Anschlussfähigkeit’, 50: ‘Geschichte’ is always ‘sprachlich gestaltete Vermittlung’. 24 Or, more elaborately, ‘political, social, cultural development of a particular geographical, cultural area and the ensuing series of events’ (Duden Bedeutungswörterbuch [2nd ed. 1985]). 25 LSJ s.v. (similarly the first sense given for the cognate verb L-VWRUHYZ is ‘inquire into/ about’). Cf. also Schröter, ‘Überlegungen’, 192. The sense of L-VWRULYD as ‘historical enquiry/ research) is found in Polybius 12.27.6, where work involved in seeking out predecessors’ errors is the most important part of L-VWRULYD

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claiming that the res gestae (that which happened) are always the historia rerum gestarum (the [as yet incomplete] account of what happened).26

In other words, both in English and in German and probably in a great many other languages one must be careful to distinguish at least two or three levels of discourse about ‘history’ or ‘Geschichte’. Most important and most easily confused are the level that speaks of events of the past, what has happened, and the level that involves our perception of, and attempt to describe, interpret and retell what once happened and the resultant account which we give of those events. (I say ‘resultant’ deliberately, for it seems mistaken, even naive, to suppose that historians do not have to do some sifting out of evidence and evaluation of their sources before they are ever in a position to tell their historical story.) And if one is not clear at a given point of time about which of these two levels one means, then it is not surprising that some rather strange and confusing statements and claims emerge. After the clarification of that point it may be helpful to turn to the prolegomena of both Wright and Dunn that laid the foundations for their respective planned multi-volume works not only on Jesus but on Paul and early Christianity, as well as to the corresponding chapter of McKnight’s work, but the various methodological and epistemological contributions of Jens Schröter, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Donald Denton and Scot McKnight also need to be borne in mind at this point. And if this very selective survey of recent literature may, despite its selectivity, seem unduly lengthy, that is because I have not contented myself with simply reporting what these scholars have said on this theme, but have taken the opportunity to interact with their contributions and in doing so hopefully to lay some foundations for the following study.

1.1. N. T. Wright On the matter of epistemology, Wright argues for a position of ‘critical realism’ over against ‘positivism’ and ‘phenomenalism’. (Here his position echoes that of B. F. Meyer, who in turn drew on the work of Bernard Lonergan, although it would appear that Wright had already formulated the theses of this chapter in some form before Meyer’s book on the subject appeared.27 Wright’s use of this 26 Goertz, ‘Abschied’, 7, appealing to Reinhard Koselleck. Cf. also the less extreme statement of a similar position by Francis Watson in his third thesis quoted above in Foreword p. vi. 27 Meyer, Realism, referred to by Wright, New Testament, 32 n. 3. Denton, Historiography, has an appendix (210–25) in which he delineates some of the different conceptions of ‘critical realism’, found not only in Jesus studies but also in relation to philosophy and the natural and social sciences, and is somewhat critical of what Meyer and Wright have made of Lonergan’s epistemology as a result. It is perhaps worth remarking that, if it was

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approach is also taken up with approval by Dunn.)28 This position acknowledges the reality of the object of knowledge (in contrast to phenomenalism where one can only know sense-data that impinge on one’s consciousness) but at the same time grants that we only have access to this reality by means of ‘the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known’ (so that it is ‘critical’ in that sense, in contrast to positivism’s trust in empirical evidence as giving direct knowledge of things).29 Thus an element of provisionality is introduced into all our knowledge of things and statements about them. This ‘critical realist’ model, Wright argues, ‘allows fully for the actuality of knowledge beyond that of one’s own sense-data (that which the “objectivist” desires to safeguard), while also fully allowing for the involvement of the knower in the act of knowing (that upon which the “subjectivist” will rightly insist)’ (45). At this point Wright introduces the notion of ‘stories’, which play a very important part in his account. Yet, anticipating that some would find his use of ‘story’ problematic, he adds a word in defence of its usefulness in his preface and assures us that he uses it in a ‘critical-realist’ way and not, as some postmodern-

of the essence of Lonergan’s epistemology that he set his face against regarding knowing as modelled on seeing, either with the eye (‘naive realism’) or with the mind (‘idealism’), then there should be no question of the historian ‘seeing’ the objects of historical study. What the historian knows about the past is always a matter of inference, from the ‘traces’ left in the present by the past, and inference is a matter of argument and judgement, not of seeing. 28 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 110–11. He draws here on Lonergan’s epistemology, where ‘the reality known … is given in experience, organized and extrapolated by understanding, posited by judgment and belief’ (Lonergan, Method, 238; this formulation is preferable to that followed by Meyer, Reality, 1 et passim, again appealing to Lonergan, where he introduces ‘insight’ as a cognitive act preliminary to ‘judgment’, identified respectively with ‘understanding’ and ‘construal’; on pp. 22 and 142 it is clear that these ‘insights’ may be false, on p. 24 that they are ‘entirely hypothetical’, but does one use ‘insight’ – or ‘understanding’, for that matter, when the content of either is in fact mistaken or ‘entirely hypothetical’? Is an untrue ‘insight’ much more than what we might normally call a [mistaken] ‘hunch’?) On the other hand, can a past reality ever be described as ‘given in experience’? (Lonergan seems to wish to overcome this difficulty by appeal to individual and collective memory in the form of tradition: Method, 182. When we come to deal with memory we will, however, see that memories are not just a matter of what is ‘given’. See also the previous note.) It is, moreover, unclear how far understanding and judgement should be separated from one another as two separate processes following one another (in this order), although that may be true if ‘judgement’ is limited to ‘belief’ (or disbelief?) as the pairing in this quotation suggests; then ‘judgement’ relates solely to one’s final assessment for or against that which one has first understood. On the other hand, it is correct to emphasize the role of the historian in evaluating historical data, both ascertaining what the data might mean and weighing up the reliability of their testimony. The data often do not come with an in-built interpretation (particularly in the case of, e.g., archaeological data) and the reliability of those that do, as is the case with many historical texts, must first be questioned by the historian. On B. F. Meyer’s debt to Lonergan cf. Denton, Historiography, 80–151. 29 Wright, New Testament, 35.

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ists do, as a means of talking about something other than ‘space-time reality’ (xvii). If I find this usage problematic, it is because ‘story’ seems to be used in a very broad, allencompassing and not self-evidently homogeneous way. Wright refers, perfectly intelligibly, to the ‘story’ of God’s dealings with the world and with Israel and to the structuralist analyses of such stories as folk-tales. But he also suggests, as an illustration of what he means, a situation in which he is driving along a road, ‘taking for granted an underlying story about cars, driving and roads’ (43). But how often do we really think and speak in such a way of a ‘story’? We may well be assuming the existence of cars and roads and our ability to drive on them, without these assumptions deserving the status of a ‘story’. At any rate, in the ‘story’ that Wright now tells us (which can clearly be called a story) the car starts to shudder and he eventually traces this to a flat tyre, although other explanations would have been possible. Now ‘the tyre is flat’ or ‘the car shuddered because a tyre was flat’ are statements, but do they qualify in themselves as ‘stories’? Does a story not by definition require some plot, some temporal sequence and development? (E.g., in this case, ‘the car was travelling around the road and began to shudder (because a tyre was flat)’ – something happens and a new situation develops.)30 Again, it seems questionable to state that metaphors are ‘mini-stories’ (129–30), for this plot and sequence seem to be lacking from many or most or even all metaphors, depending on how one defines the term ‘metaphor’. In the light of this seemingly rather loose use of the word ‘story’ on Wright’s part one needs to look more carefully at his assertion that ‘stories’ form an essential part of every ‘worldview’ (45) or that every ‘worldview’ contains an ‘irreducible narrative element’ (38). There may be reason to question, too, whether all writing intends to articulate a world-view as Wright elsewhere seems to imply;31 that goes further than saying that writing (all writing or just that which deserves the name of ‘literature’?) implies a world-view. 30 It is curious that when, in the following chapter, Wright discusses what a ‘basic and typical story’ is, precisely such a sequence or several sequences appear (New Testament, 71–7, drawing on the work of Greimas and Propp); indeed, what I give as the barest form of a story might not satisfy Wright’s requirements there, because ‘Little Red Riding Hood was sent by her mother to take some food to her grandmother; she did so and they were all happy’ is there not a ‘story’, but a ‘sentence’: 71. I would maintain that it is still a ‘story’, even though not the same, more dramatic one as in the well-known version. (Ricoeur, Time 2, 45, notes the suggestion of the French linguist, Lucien Tesnières, ‘that the simplest sentence is already a miniature drama implying a process, actors, and circumstances’.) Also problematic in this respect is Wright’s later assertion that an ‘event’ ‘is basically an acted story’ (116), if in fact a story involves a sequence of events; even the form of story above that Wright demotes to a ‘sentence’ contains the events of the sending by the mother, Little Red Riding Hood’s going and their state of happiness. Cf. here Ricoeur, Time 1, 65: ‘A story … must be more than just an enumeration of events in serial order; it must organize them into an intelligible whole, of a sort such that we can always ask what is the “thought” of this story. In short, emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession.’ 31 E.g. Wright, New Testament, 65. On p. 116 his account is far more nuanced, supplying many alternatives to stories’ articulation of world-views: ‘stories relate in a variety of ways to world-views: they articulate them, legitimate them, support them, modify them, challenge them, subvert them, and perhaps even destroy them.‘ On ‘world-views’ see also Wright, New Testament, 122–6.

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Wright then turns to the epistemology involved in dealing with texts, comparing with the positivist epistemology the expectation that (above all historical) texts tell us ‘what happened’, and with the phenomenalist the view that they only tell us about what was going on in the author’s mind. All readings that lead only to the author’s mind or, in the case of the New Testament and above all the gospels, to the thought of the author’s community are ‘inherently unstable’ (53). We may end up with a situation in which all that matters is what the text means to the individual reader. ‘Authorial intention’ may not encompass all that a text means – the author may have said more than she or he intended or it may reveal some deep structure or, particularly if inspired, may contain a sensus plenior –, but Wright is sceptical about the results of following up the various ways of getting ‘beyond’ the text without involving the author’s mind. Discussing what was in that mind is both possible and desirable, even if at times a difficult task. Yet a theory of reading should do justice to both the reader and the text, which is not to be moulded according to the reader’s whim. It should do justice both to the author’s intention and to the possibility that the text contains other things not present in the author’s mind. Normally, too, the text does not represent everything in the author’s mind, but at the same time does tell us quite a bit about the author. Authors write from a particular viewpoint and also write about events and objects that are ‘not reducible to terms of their own state of mind’ (63). This hermeneutic, which Wright wants to describe as a ‘hermeneutic of love’, takes the form of a conversation between the reader and the text (64). The main thrust of Wright’s chapter on ‘History and the First Century’ is ‘history’ in the sense of ‘history-as-writing-about-events’, i.e. in the sense of historiography, which he then argues is ‘the meaningful narrative of events and intentions’.32 It is impossible to write ‘a bare chronicle of events without a point of view’ (82) and historiography ‘involves selection’ (83), and this in turn entails ‘a major element of interpretation’ as we seek ‘to make sense of the world in which we live’.33 All attempts to reconstruct history, like all study and reading of texts, take place within particular world-views.34 Here, too, it is then a matter of ‘a spiral of knowledge, a long-drawn-out process of interaction between interpreter and source material’ (86). In the case of the study of the New Testament, Wright distinguishes the process of listening, our interaction with the texts, and our readiness or unwillingness to respond appropriately to them.35 32 Wright, New Testament, 82, his italics; but could ‘history’ in this sense of ‘historiography’ ever be thought to be ‘bare facts’; it might well be thought to be ‘subjective interpretations’, the other possibility that he here rejects, but it is surely ‘history’ in the sense of past events that might be mistaken for ‘bare facts’. 33 Wright, New Testament, 83, his italics. 34 Wright, New Testament, 137. 35 Wright, New Testament, 87; he calls these ‘exercises’, but the term seems inappropriate for the third element mentioned here.

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Yet, in seeking to apply the epistemology of ‘critical realism’ to historical methods Wright seems temporarily to lose his hold on some of the insights gained in his earlier epistemological account. As we read some text such as that of Thucydides, he asserts, we are ‘looking at events’ (90). But we are in fact looking at Thucydides’ account, and the events described are only available to us through his account together with any other relevant historical data that may be available to us. Why should we here attempt to get ‘beyond‘ the account ‘without going through the author’s mind’ or his account of events?36 Whether the events that the New Testament authors talked about were real events is one question; whether and how we get access to knowledge of these events is another. Can it be that Wright merges these two questions and that his affirmative answer to the first has led him to give a rash answer to the second? ‘Critical realism’ will show that some ways of viewing events or the information about them are more plausible than others.37 That applies both to the ancient writers and to those of today. It is, however, perhaps symptomatic and significant that Wright makes this point both with regard to ‘looking at events’ and doing ‘justice to the information’ (91). Both phrases might be equally appropriate to the ancient writers, depending on whether they had had direct access to the events or were solely dependent on others’ accounts, but the former would be inappropriate with regard to later writers. In the context it is clear that Wright is in fact primarily thinking of ancient writers (he mentions as examples the authors of the Gospels of Thomas and Mark).

‘[S]ome accounts are closer to the events they purport to describe than are others.’ All may ‘distort’, but some more than others. All ‘interpret’, but some do so in a way that ‘discloses the totality of the event, opening it up in all its actuality and meaning’, others squashing it out of shape, ‘closing down its actuality and meaning’ (92). All historical accounts involve interpretation and the Christian gospels are no exception. In many cases the interpretations that they offer may be theological ones, but that does not automatically rule their interpretations out. It is, however, to be noted that, even if the gospels are theological documents, that does not mean that they are not historical; that they offer interpretations does not rule out the possibility that they offer interpretations of events. Now historical method, Wright notes, has been described as a process involving hypotheses and verification. A good hypothesis (in any field of knowledge) 36

Wright, New Testament, 59 once again, his italics. If one refers back to Lonergan’s work an element of uncertainty (and also puzzlement) creeps in with regard to the word ‘critical’, for Lonergan, Method, 188 n. 9, distinguishes ‘two quite different meanings’ of the word: ‘In precritical history it means that one has tested the credibility of one’s authorities before believing them. In critical history it means that one has shifted data from one field of relevance to another.’ The latter seems a strange sense of ‘critical’ and in the case of the former one wonders how one can be both ‘critical’ and ‘precritical’ at the same time. 37

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must take into account the available data, must ‘construct a basically simple and coherent overall picture’,38 even if this simplicity may be in some tension with the data (particularly if they are complex) and, lastly, must ‘prove itself fruitful in other related areas, must explain or help to explain other problems’ (100). In the case of the historical study of Jesus (and Paul, too) another factor often comes into play, the relevance of the account today. Yet the use of that criterion could prevent the possibility of a picture emerging to challenge our present views. Then, returning to the first criterion, taking account of all the data, 39 Wright argues that ‘one should never suggest removing evidence which does not fit the theory unless there are good arguments for doing so on quite other grounds’ (107), and for this reason he is critical of those who dismiss many Jesus traditions as creations of the early church and therefore of no use for our gaining knowledge of Jesus. The second criterion, too, simplicity, is not without its problems, but would be especially relevant in the area of ‘human aims and motivations, … the continuity of the person’.40 On the other hand, Wright finds the simplicity of neat unilinear schemes of the development of ideas in early Christianity less convincing, for ‘history [here he presumably means the course of events?] does not seem to have moved like this, in neat unilinear patterns’ (108). Historical knowledge is, then, attained ‘by the spiral of epistemology’: we raise questions, we form provisional judgements about possible answers, and then test these judgements ‘by further interaction with data’. But it is to be noted that this discipline also involves questions of ‘human intentionality’, asking what the participants in the events ‘thought they were doing, wanted to do, or tried to do’.41 That involves questions of a person’s or a group of persons’ ‘aims’, ‘intentions’ and ‘motivations’, but need not involve us in psychological speculations. One can raise similar questions of individuals and of groups and societies, seeking answers in the latter case in the symbols that these use, in their characteristic behaviour, and in their literature. This ‘inside’ of the events plays an important part in the historian’s task, which is that of showing the ‘interconnectedness’ of the ‘facts’ at her or his disposal, showing how the one follows from the other, offering a ‘harmonious’ account of the whole, telling a story, a task that calls for ‘an intuitive or imaginative construction’ (113). It is also a task in which the historian of the more distant 38

Thus Wright claims (Jesus, 437) that his explanation of Jesus’ action in the temple ‘achieve[s] the very great historical benefit of coherence … between a good many words and deeds which were most characteristic of Jesus during his itinerant ministry, and the words and deeds which, in Jerusalem, brought the whole prophetic career [of Jesus] to its climax’. 39 Cf. Wright, Jesus, 450: the ‘main strength’ of his hypothesis (of Jesus’ goal of getting Israel to repent of its ‘militaristic nationalism’) ‘is the sense that it makes of the evidence as a whole’. 40 Wright, New Testament, 107, his italics. But what if the person in question were a complex personality (as many are)? 41 Wright, New Testament, 109; cf. his Jesus, 99–105.

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past has a certain advantage over those dealing with far more recent events: one can often in the former case take into account the sequel to the events described, and the historical ‘narrative must therefore point forward beyond itself to embrace the future’ (115). Wright recognizes here that some sequels may be unintended, whereas others are intended by someone or some group. Yet there is a danger in assuming too quickly that we have before us a case of the latter. Wright refers here to Albert Schweitzer’s view that the second generation of Pauline communities may show us what Paul was up to, and that of Ben Meyer that ‘it is in the tradition generated by Jesus that we discover what made him operate in the way he did’.42 Wright correctly notes how controversial that claim is.

That raises the question whether we can speak of the ‘meaning’ of an event, and for Wright this meaning lies in ‘its place, or perceived place, within a sequence of events, which contribute to a more fundamental story’ (116). Such meanings are not just a private matter, for events and their sequels are ‘essentially public’ and a world-view, too, is open to discussion in terms of ‘the adequacy or appropriateness of the meanings assigned to a variety of stories and events within the worldview itself’ (117, his italics). One further aspect of Wright’s account should be mentioned here and that is his appeal to a ‘grand narrative’. This is a point at which, as we shall see (§ 1.4), Dunn criticizes him, and we shall there see that, for a number of reasons, that criticism is justified. One reason has a certain bearing on that ‘critical realism’ that Wright so espouses, for the question needs to be raised whether we are talking of a ‘grand narrative’ and pattern first discernible to the modern interpreter (or at least to later interpreters of the events in question), or whether it was one that also played a formative role in the thinking, intentions and actions of the actors (in this case Jesus and his contemporaries and/or God) in the events of the past in question which Wright is depicting. We shall see that an open verdict is perhaps called for with regard to the validity of ‘grand narratives’ in general, but that Wright’s proposal is in addition very much open to question if it is thought to lay bare a pattern of which Jesus and his contemporaries were conscious.

1.2. J. Schröter Most of the more recent books on Jesus by German speaking scholars have paid little attention to problems of historiography, but have simply followed the ways of historical criticism like their predecessors, as if those ways were self-evidently 42 Wright refers here to Schweit zer, Mysticism (cf. 126–7; above all ch. 13 deals with ‘the Hellenization of Paul’s Mysticism by Ignatius and the Johannine Theology’ – Paul ‘fathered’ this Hellenized mysticism, although Schweitzer regards the parent as more valuable than the offspring: 373), and Meyer, Aims, 253.

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legitimate, naturally with some differences in the results attained. One notable exception is Jens Schröter who, in his work on Jesus und die Anfänge der Christologie, particularly in an initial chapter on the quest for the historical Jesus and the character of historical knowledge, as well as in a series of articles and also in a brief discussion at the beginning of Jesus von Nazaret, has emphasized a number of new insights now current at least among some German philosophers of history, insights that he finds already foreshadowed in the reflections of Johann Gustav Droysen in the nineteenth century.43 For Droysen the past was captured in the sources by being expressed in terms of language, and language, Schröter notes, does not simply reflect reality but is rather a system of symbols that guides our perception of reality in a particular way. Here he invokes the ‘linguistic turn’ that is one prominent feature of many forms of ‘postmodernism’, and sees the linguistic plot as the means by which the historian organizes events in a historical narrative, even if he adds that the historian must also answer for her or his narrative rationally.44 For we have no immediate access to the past, but an access shaped by the sources, and that poses for the study of Jesus’ life the question how access to the reality ‘behind’ the sources is then possible, if this is only preserved in the sources and must constantly be gleaned anew through interpretation of those sources. For Schröter insists that a study of Jesus that is alert to contemporary hermeneutical and epistemological insights will no longer be concerned with seeking a Jesus to be discovered ‘behind’ the sources or a world behind the early Christian texts, our sources for his life. Such an attempt, he maintains, stems from a mistaken reaction to the multiplicity and ambiguity of the traditions.45 Rather it is a matter of a portrayal of Jesus drawn up rationally and responsibly in the light of those sources (‘vor’ instead of ‘hinter’) and reflecting critically on the frame of reference afforded by the systems of societal norms of the time.46 Or, 43 On Schröter’s contributions see also Häfner in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, esp. 97–114. 44 E.g. Schröter, ‘Frage’, 232–3. A more judicious statement is found in the article by Ulrich Muhlack, ‘Theorie’, 607, when he grants that beyond question historical knowledge is imparted linguistically: ‘Historical knowledge is always the linguistic communication of historical knowledge.’ (Or should one say that the claim to historical knowledge that cannot be communicated linguistically would be a dubious claim?). 45 Schröter, ‘Frage’, 220; cf. 233, 248. Yet Moxnes, ‘Jesus’, 149, can conclude his survey of a number of recent accounts of Jesus’ life that include not only more traditional ‘modernist’ historiography (Meier, Sanders) but also approaches indebted to newer historical methods drawing on alternatives to this traditional historiography in the light of social studies and cultural anthropology (Horsley, Crossan, Malina) with the verdict that ‘All these authors presuppose a reality behind the texts, even if they are well aware that the texts are ideological constructions.’ See also the more detailed criticism by Gerd Häfner of this aspect of Schröter’s work in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 102–14, which makes a number of the points raised here and more besides. 46 Schröter, Jesus, 34–5; cf. ‘Überlegungen’, 201. Nonetheless, a Hinterfragen belongs to

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as we shall see in a later chapter, it is a matter of the ‘remembered Jesus’. And yet Schröter himself recognizes that neither the accounts of Jesus in the gospels nor those of today fully match up to the person of Jesus himself. Both forms of representation relate, each in their own way, to the historical person of Jesus, and herein lies the productive character of historical remembering.47 But such a judgement seems somehow to know that neither the gospel accounts nor today’s fully match the historical person of Jesus, and Gerd Häfner observes that Schröter evidently wants to compare the gospel accounts with past events.48 Is the historical person of Jesus then in fact knowable independently of the sources so that one can so confidently make that judgement? And, if one knew that, could one not then improve on the accounts on offer by offering one which showed up the inadequacy of the others? (As ‘Luke’ seems to have wished to do in his day: Luke 1.1–4.)49 Or is it simply a blind assertion born of despair at ever attaining to knowledge of Jesus’ person? Again, two pages later, Schröter speaks of the original situations in which the events described occurred or the sayings or parables were uttered; these can only be recovered through a critical examination of the narratives.50 But if they can be recovered, why should we not then be able to talk of something which can appropriately be said to be ‘behind’ the sources? Very rightly, too, he questions the purely aesthetic approach to the parables of Jesus which ignores the question of any concrete reference that they may have had; for that loosens any connection that they may have with the documents that contain them and increases the risk of an uncritical assimilation of the past to one’s perception of the realities of one’s own existence.51 But is it only their ties to the documents that contain them that are relevant, and not their ties to the life-situations which these documents give them as well as to the potentially relevant situations in the life of Jesus?52 the historian’s discipline according to Rüsen (Rekonstruktion, 131; cf. 129, and Koselleck, Zukunft, 205), although this is, it is true, mentioned under the rubric of what he calls ‘Analytik’, not ‘Hermeneutik’; yet even in the case of the latter he allows some scope for unconscious purposes and going beyond what the sources say or could say. There are, too, those who question that primacy of the text that is characteristic of the work of Barthes, White and Derrida and those influenced by them and the ‘linguistic turn’. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft, 92, cites here the view of Pocock and Skinner that one’s goal should rather be to understand a text’s meaning in the sense of the intentions of the author and to place those intentions in the setting of the time in which that text was written, in other words in the context of the discourse of that time. 47 Schröter, Jesus, 39. 48 Häfner in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 104, citing Schröter, ‘Historizität’, 165–6. 49 ‘Luke’ is set in inverted commas when referring to the author of Luke–Acts; for the reasons for this practice cf. Wedderburn, ‘“We”-Passages’. 50 Schröter, Jesus, 41. 51 Schröter, ‘Frage’, 247. 52 When Matthew sets the Parable of the Great Feast in the context of a polemic against the chief priests and the Pharisees ((Matt 21.45; 22.1) and Luke in that of the question who

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Similarly, Schröter stresses elsewhere that, for all the merits of the discipline of narrative criticism, it is important not to lose sight of the question about the events which lie behind (here ‘zugrunde liegen’) the first stories of Jesus.53 In other words, much of what Schröter writes is hard to understand if one does not presuppose some reality that the available sources have to some extent and for various reasons obscured, yet a reality which one can glimpse, however tentative and hypothetical one’s reconstruction must of necessity remain. To talk of attempting to penetrate behind the texts seems thoroughly appropriate here. Again, in the first chapter of his Jesus von Nazaret, Schröter refers to the justifiable claim that historical research cannot penetrate ‘behind’ the Christian confession inspired by faith to the ‘real’ Jesus, only to grant that ‘contours of Jesus’ person’ can indeed be discerned behind the gospels’ portrayal of him. (A similar problem seems to emerge when the philosopher of history, Hayden White, argues that ‘Postmodernists believe that events exist and have existed in the real world but that in our efforts to represent them, we inevitably obscure them or distort what might have been perceptions of them.’54 But unless we can discover something of those events, how do we know that they have been obscured or distorted?) Nonetheless Schröter concludes, a few pages later, that the goal of historical-critical study of Jesus cannot be to discover that one and only Jesus behind the texts, but a portrayal based on assessment of what is plausible, a portrayal which, being an abstraction from the sources, is always achieved ‘before’ these sources. A historical-critical analysis cannot, he states, penetrate behind the sources or nearer to Jesus.55 ‘Historical pictures of Jesus do not take us back behind the texts; they move, as abstractions from the multifacetedness of the tradition, always in front of them.’56 In the same vein is perhaps his endorsehas a place at banquets here and in the end-time (Luke 14.12–15), one has two literary contexts for the otherwise roughly similar story. Is it not then legitimate to ask which of these contexts was more likely the original one (always allowing for the possibility that Jesus may have re-used the story in different contexts)? Or was neither the original one? And may not that original context be an actual one in the life of Jesus and not just a literary one? 53 Schröter, ‘Überlegungen’, 200. Similarly, Schnelle, ‘Anschlussfähigkeit’, 53, speaks of the events underlying an account, events that have a higher claim to reality. 54 White, ‘Postmodernism’, 39. 55 Schröter, Jesus von Nazaret, 28, 34, 321. 56 Schröter, ‘Jesus’, 121 (his italics). I do not find the spatial imagery here in the use of ‘vor’ particularly illuminating, although it is to be noted that it is one to which Dunn gave his assent in a joint statement with Schröter (‘Der “erinnerte” und der “historische” Jesus’, 60). If it simply means ‘on the basis of, in response to’ the sources, then that is only part of the story, for the sources need to be subjected to a critical sifting and cross-examination, such as Schröter himself repeatedly practises, and that in turn involves a going ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ the sources and what they say. (Cf., e.g., Schröter’s handling of the gospels’ accounts of the Baptist’s witness to ‘the coming one’ – originally not Jesus, but God: Jesus von Nazaret, 128. Or ‘behind’ (hinter) Matt 5.38–48 and Luke 6.27–36 lies, he surmises, a tradition in which love of one's enemies and renunciation of retaliation were associated with one another [220]). Nonetheless, it is to be granted that Paul Ricoeur, too, postulates ‘a

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ment of the view that neither in textual nor in tradition criticism is it appropriate to talk of an ‘original form’ of the text or the tradition;57 this may be true, although it is surely still legitimate to raise the question of earlier and later forms and to try to explain, often very plausibly, how later forms arose from earlier ones.58 At this point, at any rate, Schröter seems to take a very different line to Droysen, for the latter roundly declares that the historical task cannot be content

hermeneutic that aims less at restoring the author’s intention behind the text than at making explicit the movement by which the text unfolds, as it were, a world in front of itself’ (Time 1, 81). However, he here does not exclude the question of the author’s intention nor is the question of that intention ‘behind’ the text the same as the question that arises with historical texts, of the reality that lies ‘behind’ the texts that are our sources (and Ricoeur’s remarks on the following page suggest that he is very much aware of this difference; moreover, in Time 2, 100, he speaks of fictional works as ‘open onto a world, like a “window” that cuts out a fleeting perspective of a landscape beyond’; in 3, 22 he acknowledges his debt here to the phrase of Eugen Fink). Another possible sense of Schröter’s ‘vor’ might be E. V. McKnight’s reference, following David Tracy, to the ‘meaning “in front of” the text, “that way of perceiving reality, i. e., that mode of being-in-the-world which the text opens up for the intelligent reader”’ (Use, 106, quoting Tracy, Rage, 51), but Schröter talks of a portrayal or ‘picture’, not of meaning. This way of speaking that he adopts also seems to clash with the stance typical of the ‘new historicism’ (see § 4.3.1) if John Donahue is correct in his assessment of this perspective: ‘Texts from the past are not simply “windows” into a culture, they are themselves “representations” of the culture. There is no hard and fast distinction between the world of the text and the world behind the text’ (my italics). Nonetheless, Donahue also asserts that ‘Textual representation as understood by the new historicists is not a window [the ‘simply’ of the earlier passage is omitted] to the world behind the text but itself creates a world on which every interpreter confers meaning’ (‘Turn’, 269, 271). It may be granted that Schröter talks of ‘pictures of Jesus’, but they are presumably ‘pictures’ based on texts in which the world behind them in turn finds expression. F. R. Ankersmit might at first seem to support Schröter’s distinction when he asserts that the ‘new historiography’ in contrast to the old regards the texts used by the historian, not as something through which one looks, but something at which one looks, but then he immediately goes on to say that this ‘new historiography tries to show what lies hidden behind the apparently open self-presentation of the text’ (History, 128–9). Daniel Marguerat, Mann, 10, on the other hand, asks whether the gospels are not a ‘fabric through which one must pass to find the historical reality (Realität)’. Must one therefore, he asks, ‘in order to find again the Jesus of history … look [for him] not in, but behind the text of the gospels – at any rate even in opposition to the text’? (Cf. 17–18.) And that this alternative does not run counter to at least some contemporary historical theory seems to be evidenced by Jörg Baberowski’s statement that ‘historians are looking for a reality to be found not in, but behind the texts’ (Sinn, 17; cf. 27). 57 Schröter, ‘Jesus’, 114; cf. also 119: ‘The effort to uncover the one text or the one Jesus behind the multitude of traditions appears therefore more and more clearly as an inappropriate attempt to discover a unified starting point for the tradition’ (his italics). And yet there was surely only one Jesus, however many the traditional images of him may have been that once circulated. 58 And Schröter himself refers, apparently with approval, to Bard Ehrman’s identification of christological tendencies in the textual tradition and speaks of the texts being changed and certain versions being later (‘Jesus’, 119).

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with discovering what the author of a particular source thought had happened.59 That task is rather to discover, as far as possible, what actually happened.60 One seeks a more correct, a more profound understanding of what happened through one’s study of the sources (135), thus going ‘behind’ or, perhaps better, ‘beyond’ what they say.61 In a similar vein, Hans-Georg Gadamer holds that for the historian it is a basic principle that tradition is to be interpreted in a sense different than the texts, of themselves, call for. He will always go back behind them and the meaning they express to inquire into the reality they express voluntarily.62

Perhaps useful here is Francis Watson’s distinction between ‘texts’ (he thinks here of ‘the finished product, abstracted from its relation to a progenitor and considered in terms of its use’), ‘works’ (‘productions which remain perpetually within their author’s sphere of influence’), and ‘historical sources’. The distinction between ‘texts’ and ‘works’ may seem a bit strained, but it is to be noted that both may be used as ‘historical sources’ and then ‘in the interpretative practice that corresponds to [the use of ‘historical sources’], the written artefact effaces itself and becomes transparent to a reality distinct from itself’. 63 It hardly needs to be pointed out that in historical study of the life of Jesus it is primarily a matter of the use of the written accounts as ‘historical sources’.

59 Cf. Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 131–2 (cf. also ed. Leyh 197–8). Schröter, ‘Konstruktion’, 218, appeals to Droysen, Historik, ed. Leyh 431(=ed. Hübner 339) in support of the assertion that ‘criticism does not seek the historical truth (Wahrheit) behind the surviving evidence (Überreste)’, but Droysen’s point seems to be a very different one (cf. the elaboration in ed. Hübner 149–52: historical research is simply not in the position to reach a point that can be called ‘the beginning’ in an absolute sense). 60 Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 131–2; cf. 139. 61 Cf. Rüsen, ‘Faktizität’, 21: ‘Historical thinking must … always go beyond the information offered by the sources.’ Bernard Lategan criticizes Gerd Theissen’s ‘seemingly unstoppable urge to get “behind the texts” to reach the rock-bottom of “historical reality”’ (‘History’ [2004], 142), but he has just stressed how everything is, for Theissen, a matter of hypothesis, and in that case Theissen’s earlier talk of ‘certainty’ needs to be qualified, for one cannot then be certain that one has reached ‘rock-bottom’ – it may be more a matter of a deep layer of mud. 62 Gadamer, Truth, 336, his italics; cf. also 370 on understanding as involving going behind what is said. Cf. also the comments of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘Literary Criticism’, 216: ‘Contemporary critics tend to insist disproportionately on history as the ways in which authors have written about the past at the expense of what might actually have happened … Yet history also consists … in a body of knowledge … And beyond that knowledge, history must also be recognized as what did happen in the past – of the social relations and … “events”, of which our records offer only imperfect clues.’ 63 Watson, Text, 2 (his italics). Danto, Philosophy, 89–90, likens historical evidence to words: neither should be conceived of as an obscuring barrier, but rather as a means of going ‘beyond’ themselves. And to recognize historical evidence as evidence is ‘already to be making a statement about something else, namely that for which it is taken as evidence’.

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Allied to this is a further problem, Schröter’s denial of any fundamental distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter interpretation of Jesus: the pre-Easter Jesus is also an interpreted Jesus.64 But does one not need to add here that this is true of the pre-Easter Jesus as he is portrayed in the gospels? Yet as soon as one admits the possibility of going ‘behind’ that portrayal then indeed the possibility of a distinction opens up, not a distinction between pre- and postEaster interpretations, but a distinction between any interpretations of Jesus and a Jesus who is at least potentially discernible as he was before all interpretations, either pre-Easter or post-Easter. There thus seems to be a considerable tension here between an epistemology that refuses to go ‘behind’ the sources and the recognition that the story that the historian tells must somehow be justified rationally; how is it to be justified if not often by reference to something other than the sources themselves, even if that ‘something’ can only be approached ‘through’ the sources? The story told may, it is true, sometimes be disqualified by internal considerations (e.g. if it is incoherent or contradicts itself or is just thoroughly implausible), but more often it must be measured by the extent to which it seems to account both for what the sources say and by those events in history that lie behind the sources’ accounts. And yet, for all the apparent novelty of the historiographical theory that seems to undergird Schröter’s work, when he gets down to investigating that life the questions asked and the methods used are in practice hard to distinguish from those of other contemporary historical critics. Is this yet a further illustration of Georg Iggers’ observation that the nature of ‘history’ may be more of a problem for theoreticians and philosophers of history, but less so for those who carry out historical research?65 64

Schröter, Jesus von Nazaret, 299. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft, 14; cf. 87–8, 101–2. (Elton, Practice, vii, records his ‘suspicion that a philosophic concern with such problems as the reality of historical knowledge or the nature of historical thought only hinders the practice of history’.) Lorenz, ‘Geschichte’, 35, makes a similar point to Iggers’ regarding the theories of Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, namely that they seem ‘kontraintuitiv’ to many practising historians. Moreover, the alternative accounts given of the past explain why historians must discuss them and argue over them (52; cf. ‘Wissen’ 76). Hans Kellner remarks on the strange isolation of the discipline of the philosophy of history: work in it ‘tends to deal with neither philosophy nor history, but rather with other works in the philosophy of history’, and it has ‘little direct influence on any other historical endeavor, and a set of conceptual concerns unique to itself (or borrowed from an equally problematic discourse, the “philosophy of science”)’ – ‘Bedrock’, 9–10. Conrad and Kessel, too, in their introduction to a collection of essays on historiography and ‘postmodernism’, comment that the insights of ‘postmodernism’ seem to make little difference in the daily practice of the historical guild, although their influence may be more readily perceptible in their own understanding of what they are doing and in their public image (‘Geschichte’, 23). Lorraine Daston comments how relatively little historians in fact reflect on their practice, and so ‘ignore what most historians do most of the time, when they actually write history (rather than talking about it)’. ‘History’s cognitive claims are not to be found in comprehensive theories about causes, but 65

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Like Droysen, too, Schröter accords the term ‘remembering’ a central role both in the philosophy of history and in Jesus research, as we shall see,66 and, picking up a thesis of Jörn Rüsen, sees in narration a specific form of historical remembering.67 For the constructive work of the historian is based on what is remembered, and that is to be found in our sources which contain the communal memory of early Christianity,68 and that in a form which both preserves those memories (which for J. G. Droysen was the purpose for which those sources were composed in the first place)69 and at the same time interprets them and renders them relevant to the present context.70 Following Droysen he comments that it is remembering which prevents some events of the past from being really past; what is not remembered is lost.71 On the one hand historical criticism must mediate between those memories to be found in the sources and interpretations of reality in the present, and on the other Jesus research can itself be described as a remembering of Jesus that makes him present and thus a means of orientation and forming a sense of one’s identity in the present.72 Guided by the hermeneutical and epistemological insights of more recent philosophers of history, Schröter insists that the goal of any historical research is not the reconstruction of the past, but the construction of history (Geschichte).73 In rather in the practice of research and testing that every doctoral student must learn’, in its ‘characteristic practice of investigation and verification’ (‘Praxis’, 21–2). Or does the reason for this apparent tension lie in the observation made by Stanley Fish, admittedly in a somewhat different context, that the arguments of the theorist and those of the practising historian are ‘moves in different games’, the former in the field of ‘metacritical’ accounts of history (and historiography) in general, the latter answering questions like ‘what happened?’ or ‘what is the significance of this event?’ (‘Commentary’, 307 – the former involves the question of the ‘textuality’ of history in his discussion; he then goes on to deny that one’s convictions about history’s ‘textuality’ determine how one does history – p. 309). This divorce between epistemology and practice seems surprising, but it does seem to be paralleled in the tension between Schröter’s professed epistemology and his practice. But then the point is that, pace Fish, Schröter’s epistemology should surely theoretically mean a different practice. 66 Schröter, Jesus, 28–9. 67 Schröter, Jesus, 20. 68 Schröter, Jesus, 34 (he speaks of a ‘soziales Gedächtnis’, but ‘communal’ may be a more readily intelligible translation). 69 Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 333=ed. Leyh 427. This was recognized at least from Herodotus on: Z-PKYWHWD JHQRYPHQDHM[DMQTUZYSZQWZ  FURYQZ HM[LYWKODJHYQKWDL (Hist. 1, praefatio). 70 Cf. Schröter, ‘Überlegungen’, 200, 224; cf. ‘Historizität’, 167 (texts only become ‘sources’ once they have been read, interpreted and set in relationship to other material). 71 Cf. Droysen, Historik, ed. Leyh 397 (cf. ed. Hübner 325 n. 1). But this seems to make no allowance for the possibility that the historian in trying to reconstruct a story of the past may attempt to fill in some of the gaps in what is remembered. 72 Cf. ‘Überlegungen’, 202 on the one hand, and ‘Frage’, 252 on the other. 73 Schröter, ‘Historizität’, 167; ‘Konstruktion’, 203 (here he appeals to Goertz, Geschichte, 32–52, esp. 37; contrast, e.g., Crossan, Birth, 44; Meyer, Realism, 132: ‘the point of the historical enterprise is reconstruction’; cf. 205). Yet, ironically in view of the use that

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connection with Jesus and the gospels he insists again that there can be no reconstruction of the past, but here ‘reconstruction’ seems to merge with the German word ‘Wiederherstellung’, which should perhaps rather be translated ‘restoration’.74 Now it is quite true that one cannot bring the past back again, restoring it in that sense; that possibility belongs more to the time-machines of science-fiction. But is that really what any historians mean if and when they are unenlightened and misguided enough to speak of reconstructing the past? Surely they are not claiming to bring back the past to life, as it were, but rather simply to give an account, however hypothetical, of what may have happened, doing so as best they can in the light of the evidence that is available to them. And the account may well take the form of a story, a narrative of the sequence of events (Geschichte in that sense). The distance between the historian and the past, and the unrepeatability of the past, are not called in question by the talk of ‘reconstruction’, any more than a police investigation of an incident or the verdict of a legal trial would claim to have repeated the past event or events in question – and parallels between historiography and forensic investigations have often been drawn. And to my mind rightly so; for the more that I have confronted the epistemological problems thrown up by modern historiographical theorists, the apter the forensic analogy appears, particularly if one compares a police reconstruction of a crime, rather than the subsequent trial and reaching of a verdict in a court of law. (And it is worth recalling that, even if a physical reconstruction is not involved, a mental reconstruction of the course of events by the investigating officer or officers will usually be involved.) The reconstruction of a crime does not establish what happened, but merely suggests what might (plausibly) have happened. And that plausibility involves a number of consideraSchröter makes of Jörn Rüsen’s work, Rüsen could give one of his studies of historical methods the title ‘reconstruction of the past’ (cf. also Rüsen, ‘Types’, 585), and at times Schröter is himself prepared to speak of historical research yielding provisional ‘reconstructions’ of the past, subject to alteration and revision (Jesus, 20). In a more recent contribution, too, Rüsen at first repeats his talk of the ‘reconstruction’ of what actually happened in the past (‘Faktizität’, 21), but then seems to find room for ‘construction’ when it is a matter of interpreting the evidence of our historical sources and making sense of them (22–3). It is not immediately clear why ‘construction’ is here so much more appropriate than ‘reconstruction’, but perhaps the title of the volume ‘Konstruktion von Wirk lichkeit’ had a role to play in this case (but cf. his earlier ‘Narrativität’, 236). In all this Arthur Marwick’s contention that ‘Probably the most used – and, in my view, abused – verb in contemporary academic writing of all types is the verb “to construct”’ (New Nature, 10) is to be borne in mind. 74 Cf. also Schröter, Jesus, 19; ‘Frage’, 220, and Schnelle, ‘Anschlussfähigkeit’, 48. Here one might also compare Bultmann’s contention that ‘there can be no reconstruction of the real history, any more than one can construct the relationship between “I” and “Thou”, between two friends or married partners or father and child’ (‘Problem einer theologischen Exegese’, 28). The problem envisaged here is presumably that of an objectifying way of handling both history and these relationships, in contrast to the view that historiography entails existential involvement. Gerd Häfner criticizes David du Toit, ‘Jesus’ (esp. 118), for his assumption that the historical quest for Jesus consists in an attempt to restore the past, and in other words clings to the postulates of ‘Historismus’: Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 124–5.

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tions, such as accounting for available evidence or not requiring improbable or even impossible assumptions (e.g. that a person was in two different places at the same time). Such a reconstruction is a hypothesis, vulnerable always to the possibility that someone may come up with a better hypothesis to account for the evidence. The reconstruction, even if it is a physical rather than a mental one, is unreal in the sense that it is not the crime itself; that is a thing of the past and remains present in the form of traces and evidence (such as the discovery of a corpse). If one eschews the language of corresponding to reality – and if the reality is past then it is difficult to measure what corresponds to it –, then at least a successful reconstruction may claim a realism that rings true as a plausible account of what is likely to have happened; it is realistic. (Yet that could also be said of much fiction; in the case of such a reconstruction, however, both the available evidence and the desire to discover what really happened act as constraints that distinguish it from the purely fictional.) It will be for a judge and/or jury then to decide, at a later stage, whether the level of plausibility is so high that it is, if not impossible, at least next to impossible to contemplate an alternative account, so that a verdict may be pronounced. It should also be noted that ‘objectivity’ may be an ideal here, but an ideal that may only be approached, yet rarely, if ever, achieved, through rigorous self-criticism and allowance for the distortions and flawed arguments that result from personal or collective preconceptions and prejudices.

A physical re-enactment of that event or those events in such a reconstruction may be thought desirable, but then it is clear that this does not simply repeat or (better) seek to re-enact that which is past, but also serves a heuristic purpose, to test a hypothesis or jog the memories of potential witnesses.75 The aim of such investigations, like that of a historian investigating the past, is to provide an account of what happened that makes the best possible sense of the available evidence once the latter has been critically scrutinized. Doubtless the hope is that the re-enactment will correspond as nearly as possible to the supposed ‘real thing’, but one would hardly imagine that one was seeing the ‘real thing’ itself again. And if this forensic comparison jars, it is worth noting that J. L. Gaddis argues that something very similar is found in some branches of science where repeated experiments in a laboratory are not possible – sciences like ‘astronomy, geology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology’, which dare to tell us such things as what happens further down in the earth than humans have ever penetrated or how creatures long since extinct appeared; these must each ‘derive past processes from present structures’ through a combination of imagination and logic as well as a particular sequence of procedures involving the data, their assessment of those data and their ability to convince others of the correctness of their judge-

75 Gaddis, Landscape, prefers to speak of ‘simulation’ (as opposed to providing a ‘model’, which is predictive), i.e. illustrating, but not replicating, ‘some specific set of past events’: 65. I still prefer ‘reconstructing’, and indeed Gaddis later speaks of ‘simulations‘ as ‘reconstructions, assembled within the virtual laboratories of our minds, of the processes that produced whatever structure it is we’re seeking to explain’ (105).

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ment, and that is not so very far removed from the sort of inferential processes that such forensic reconstructions call for. 76 Yet Schröter and other German colleagues77 are insistent that one may only speak here of constructing, not reconstructing,78 and are even prepared to speak of this as a ‘fiction’, at least in the sense of the Latin fictio, from fingere, to form or fashion, i.e. as something that one constructs.79 This usage, it should be noted, 76 Gaddis, Landscape, 39–48 (it should be noted that this chapter begins with a reference to Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft in which again the analogy of a ‘police magistrate’ is mentioned: 48). On the role of imagination cf., e.g., Buller, Geschichtstheorien, 30– 4, and the references there to Hayden White, Max Weber, R. G. Collingwood and others. 77 E.g. Schnelle, Paulus, 4, and ‘Anschlussfähigkeit’, 50; C. Strecker, ‘Turn’, 37, and ‘Das Gewesene’; Zimmermann, ‘“Deuten”’, 320 (yet on p. 324 it is a matter of ‘reconstruction’ of meaning as well as ‘construction’). Cf. also Meeks, ‘Why Study the NT?’, 166: ‘all history is fiction’. Behind such views sometimes lurks (e.g. Schröter, Jesus, 31–3; ‘Frage’, 230–2) the observation of Paul Ricoeur that historiography and fiction (in the usual sense) are structurally identical, in the sense that both involve, formally, a narrative with a plot. At the same time Ricoeur himself recognizes the distinction that, while fiction gives free rein to the imagination, historiography is orientated towards the traditions and the traces of the past that it interprets and seeks to reconstruct a specific historical time (e.g. Time 1, 64; 3, 142–3: ‘Unlike novels, historians’ constructions do aim at being reconstructions of the past. Through documents and their critical examination of documents, historians are subject to what once was. They owe a debt to the past, a debt of recognition to the dead, that makes them insolvent debtors’; cf. also 152; Reality, 1–2; Memory, 182, 190, 247, 275). And in Reality, 26, he remarks that ‘If history is a construction, the historian would like this construction to be a reconstruction’, and then goes on to recall historians’ ‘unpaid debt’ to the past. And that seems a very considerable difference, despite all formal and structural similarities. In similar vein Muhlack, ‘Theorie’, 619, observes that a narrative only becomes a historical narrative when it serves to mediate historical knowledge. And despite the differences in what was expected of historians then and and what is expected of them now, C. B. R. Pelling argues that in the ancient world and now (and he quotes tellingly a passage from A. J. P. Taylor) there was a ‘gulf between history and fiction’, despite the fact that ‘history’ may ‘invent and improve’. For it only does so ‘within certain limits’, ‘sometimes to overrule and reject certain well-attested “hardcore” facts, but more usually to supplement them and give them added clarity and vitality’, and that ‘ultimately with a historical purpose: … historians would hope to delight and divert their audience, but to do so by deepening their insight, helping them to understand events as they really happened and people as they really behaved’ (‘Truth’, 52). 78 And yet Hens-Piazza, New Historicism, 13, speaks of the ‘construction of a past’ as characteristic of the ‘Old Historicism’ that is being ‘supplanted and replaced by studies of how the past is constructed, the New Historicism’. The matter is further complicated when Munslow, Deconstructing, 18–19, 22–5, apples the term ‘constructionism’, as opposed to ‘reconstructionism’ and ‘deconstructionism’, to ‘“social theory” schools’ appealing to general laws in historical explanation; as examples he cites the Annales–school as well as ‘the Marxist/neo-Marxist school’, but that is hardly what Schröter is espousing. 79 Geertz, Interpretation, 15; cf. Koselleck, Zukunft, 153 (‘die Fiktion des Faktischen’, comparable to that of literary writers who seek to present a credible story). Körtner notes that the balanced relationship between reconstruction and interpretation that had long prevailed (cf. also his ‘Fragen’, 2) has more recently been rendered questionable by proposals that emphasize the fictional character of historical work (Geschichte, v). Similar is W. Braun’s use of ‘fabrication’ (‘“Wir haben doch den amerikanischen Jesus”’, 30). This recalls

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does not make the more extreme claim that there is no difference between the fictitious and the factual or between the imaginary and the real.80 As Christian Strecker puts it, historiographical works are ‘fiction’ in the sense of something that is made and put together, and not in the sense that they are false, do not correspond to the facts, or are mere experiments in make-believe, 81 and he even emphasizes that, when Hayden White speaks of the contents of historiographies as ‘as much invented as found’, he indicates with the word ‘found’ that he ‘is insisting on an extra-linguistic reality’ as well as the ‘invention’ or ‘construction’ of a linguistic reality.82 Such claims have, nevertheless, a decidedly ‘postmodern’ ring about them, if it is an essentially ‘postmodern’ insight that ‘[to] the extent that discourse configures what it indicates, it is fiction as much as a representation’.83 Now it may be granted that the way in which historians are to tell the claim of Carl Becker, writing already in 1910, that ‘the facts of history do not exist for any historian till he creates them’ (quoted by E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 15, and taken from the Atlantic Monthly in October of that year, p. 528). Carr himself seems to consider this a dangerous view, noting that ‘The emphasis on the role of the historian in the making of history tends, if pressed to its logical conclusion, to rule out any objective history at all: history is what the historian makes’ (p. 20). More circumspect is the view of Droysen as Schröter formulates it (‘Wissenschaft’, 857–8), that there is a ‘konstruktivistische’ component in the acquisition of historical knowledge, and Schröter himself here speaks merely of a mixture of construction and reconstruction as well as, later in ‘Geschichte’, 5, of ‘(Re-) Konstruktion’. 80 Iggers, ‘“Wende”’, 559, sees this implied in Barthes, ‘Discours’. At the same time, it seems inadequate to distinguish historical writing from other forms of ‘fiction’ simply in terms of the expectations of the readers, as Jauss, ‘Gebrauch’, 418, does; surely the intentions of the writer and the resultant methods used and constraints on what is said come into play as well? Oexle, ‘Archiv’, with some justice questions how useful it is to conduct the debate over the nature of historiography in terms of ‘facts’ and ‘fiction(s)’; that is unfortunate, in that it excludes from the start the possibility that there is some tertium quid (97), although as far as I can see he does not suggest what this tertium quid might be. 81 C. Strecker, ‘Das Gewesene’, 127; ‘New Testament Research’, 256–7, alluding to Geertz (Interpretation, 15). In so far as this usage is indebted to writers like Hayden White, it is to be noted that Chris Lorenz argues (‘Geschichte’, 41) that it assumes that all narratives are fictional, but not just because composing them involves some artistic skill, but because they do not reproduce the past as a photograph might; for an empiricist theory of knowledge as a copy and an empiricist theory of truth as a straightforward matter of correspondence lurk behind such theses. 82 C. Strecker, ‘New Testament Research’, 253, quoting White, Tropics, 82=‘Text’, 16. 83 Poster, History, 9. It is to be noted, however, that he says ‘as much as’, not ‘rather than’, just as White, as noted immediately above, spoke of the contents of historiography as ‘as much invented as found’. Much of the discussion of ‘postmodern’ historiography focuses on North American history and that can produce some curiously one-sided results, as when Joyce Appleby and her colleagues conclude that ‘skepticism and relativism about truth, not only in science, but also in history and politics, have grown out of the insistent democratization of American society’ (Appleby/Hunt/Jacob, Telling, 3); would one not then expect that this malaise would be limited to that side of the Atlantic – despite the influence of European scholars

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the story that they tell is not given to them readymade, but must be crafted by them and can be shaped in more than one way, depending both on the outcome of their research into the past events and on their own cultural perspective, but the use of the word ‘fiction’ here seems gratuitously provocative. Here Paul Ricoeur is, to my mind, more prudent, reserving the word ‘fiction’ for literary creations that ‘do not have historical narrative’s ambition to constitute a true narrative’; even if these fictional works and historical narratives have similar ‘configurating operations’ they are distinguished by the ‘truth-claim’ of the latter.84 For the use of such a specialized sense of ‘fiction’ as advocated by such as Schröter and Christian Strecker may, at any rate, be an invitation to misunderstanding in view of the common usage of the term;85 there is then the danger like Foucault and Derrida that these authors acknowledge? If the historiographical epistemology reflected in Schröter’s work is indeed symptomatic of ‘postmodernism’, then it is clear that a less insular explanation is called for. In this respect the explanation of Gabrielle Spiegel is much to be preferred, namely that poststructuralism developed as ‘a displaced, psychological response to the Holocaust and its aftermath’, in that this led to ‘an awareness of the ways in which it made belief in the enlightened and progressive character of Western European civilization impossible to sustain’; this was in turn reinforced by postcolonial theory. As she rightly remarks, ‘“French Theory”, after all, does originate in France among French thinkers contemplating, and revising, the work of German philosophers’, even if social and economic trends in the United States ‘laid the groundwork for a remarkable sensitivity and receptiveness to these Continental intellectual developments’ (‘Revising’, 17). Or one could put it more generally, as Jörn Rüsen does (‘Enlightenment’, 222), as the result of ‘a new encounter in experience with various forms of meaninglessness’, a confrontation with ‘[m]odernity as a threatening derangement’. 84 Ricoeur, Time 2, 3. 85 Even if one could distinguish between ‘fiktional’ and ‘fiktiv’ in German without inviting a similar misunderstanding (the proposal of Hölscher, Annalistik, 31–2: all historical events are, epistemologically, ‘fiktional’ in the sense that all events are ‘constructed’ by language or image and ‘mnemotechnisch’ mediated; cf. also his ‘Einheit’, 29; Körtner, ‘Fragen’, 4, 16), I am pessimistic about the success or intelligibility of such a distinction in English. An interesting, and related, issue is raised when Richard Evans discusses four examples of what he considers more fruitful examples of postmodern historiography, Simon Schama’s work on the French Revolution, Orlando Figes’s on the Russian Revolution, Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Simon Guerre and Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre (Defence, 244–9). He treats these narratives as historical works, but how far are they to be distinguished from historical novels? The boundary-line between the two genres (assuming that there is a boundary between them) seems to have become rather hard to recognize (and Professor Evans was kind enough to confirm in a private communication that in his view there is a line to be drawn between the two, ‘but like all such imaginary or conceptual lines of demarcation, it is bound to be blurred and disputed’). In the first two cases the data may be neither falsified nor invented, although Evans suggests that in the case of one of these authors ‘facts’ may have been invented and he criticizes the absence of certain interpretative elements in the accounts of both revolutions. In the case of the second pair, on the other hand, Davies grants that ‘what I offer you is in part my invention’ and R. J. Evans must concede that, apart from a later brief pamphlet, ‘There is no other evidence to show that the apprentices whom [Darnton] discusses ever massacred any cats at all.’ Have we re-

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that results of the historian’s study of the Jesus traditions may be hard to distinguish from the programme advocated by William Hamilton when he concludes that ‘the great movement of historical criticism has delivered to us a Jesus either inaccessible or irrelevant’, a conclusion that leads him to turn to the ’poets’, in the sense of ‘those who have written about Jesus knowing that they were doing fiction’.86 Furthermore, the dropping of the ‘re-’ in ‘reconstruction’ also seems to me to lose sight of one very important aspect of that ‘construction’ which the historian undertakes. For it is by reference back to the past that the historian constructs her or his account, with the claim that it is meant to be an account of that past and not some fanciful invention at the historian’s whim.87 Or, as Gerd Häfner puts it, if historiography is not a free construction, but an account that can be tested and criticized in the light of the sources, and if this construction is oriented towards a state of affairs in the past discernible in what has been preserved from the past, ‘then talk of re-construction has its proper place’. ‘Construction’ has its place there, but this construction also takes place in relation to the past, through argument and discussion based on factual arguments.88 Another curious formulation is found in the title of a collection of essays dealing with this new approach to historiography: Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit, apparently meaning ‘construction of reality’, a volume where one reviewer detects in a number of contributions a whiff of a ‘nebulous’ ‘postmodernism’ – and also of what Peter Lampe refers to as ‘constructivism’. 89 Some idea of the (rather specialized) sense of ‘reality’ (Wirklichkeit) turned to the situation that Knut Backhaus describes in the ancient world, where it was and is hard to distinguish historical writing from novels and fiction (in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 18–20)? 86 Hamilton, Quest, 73. (It is, however, clear from what follows that not all the examples that he cites may have been aware that they were ‘doing fiction’.) 87 Cf. Lorenz’s quotation (‘Wissen’, 79) of L. O. Mink’s observation that historians ‘still want to call historical knowledge a reconstruction, not a construction simpliciter’ (‘Writing’, 94). It is true that Flaig, ‘Kinderkrankheiten’, 39, 46, insists that historians must ‘construct’ the past reality and not reconstruct it, but then the latter term seems for him to entail the sources providing us with a direct ‘Abbild’ of that past reality; we can still meaningfully attempt to reconstruct the past, however, if they in fact only offer us traces of the past or testimony to it. To be noted is also Arthur Marwick’s rejection of both ‘reconstruction’ and ‘representation’ as guides to what historiography does with the past: ‘historians … produce knowledge about the past’ (New Nature, xiii, 3). Yet, if the forensic analogy mentioned above holds good, then ‘reconstruction’ can hope to lead to (tentative) ‘knowledge about the past’. 88 In Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 95. Klaus Neumann, too, despite the fact that he had previously spoken resolutely only of ‘construction’, suddenly refers to the ‘historical’ understanding of biblical texts that occurs in the context of a Sprachspiel as ‘historical reconstruction’ (Geburt, 20). 89 Schröter/Edelbüttel, Konstruktion, reviewed by C. Landmesser in TLZ 130 (2005) 1227 (Schröter, ‘Wissenschaft’, 863, also speaks of the construction of Wirklichkeit); P. Lampe, ‘Theologie’. Silke-Petra Bergjan warns, in more measured terms, that ‘the matter becomes controversial as soon as one detaches history in the sense of the construction of

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intended here and why it must be ‘constructed’ can perhaps be gleaned from some comments by Dietrich Harth:90 ‘reality’ is not some quality of factual items but refers to ‘a complex whole that can never be experienced as such’. The concept of ‘reality’ organizes a semantic structure to link the various elements of facts, ideas, plans, actions, data and the like, it is a ‘theoretical concept’ that takes certain complexes of actions, facts, ideas, etc., and organizes them into units that are capable of interpretation. He gives two examples of this usage, ‘the Wirklichkeit of Hellenism’ and ‘the Wirklichkeit of the Thirty Years’ War’, and from these examples one can perhaps see that the usual translation of ‘Wirk lichkeit’ as ‘reality’ may be misleading.91 For usually one would ask about the ‘nature’ of Hellenism, and the ‘reality’ of the Thirty Years’ War would really only be discussed when one was confronted by an idealized account and wished to point out how misleading it was: ‘in reality (‘in Wirk lichkeit’ would make good sense here in German, too) it was a horrid business.’ But in the discussions of ‘postmodernism’ the term takes on nuances of the experienced and its interpretation, so that a translation like ‘perceived and interpreted reality’ might be more appropriate. Yet that raises the question, ‘Perceived and interpreted by whom?’, for it could either refer to the perceptions of those living in the past, in the age of Hellenism or at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, or to the perceptions of the modern historian. And in the latter case one must distinguish between the historian’s own perception and his or her perception of the perceptions of the people in the past. The former, the historian’s own perception, need have no connection with the way in which participants in the past events and processes viewed them; the historian today could see things in a wholly different light. But if it is a matter of the perceptions of the participants, then the question is more complex. There may be sources in which literate participants have given expression to their views, to their perceptions of the world around it as they saw it – or as they thought fit or expedient to claim to have seen it (if expressing their real feelings would endanger them or cause them to lose the support of others upon whom they were dependent). The historian today may try to empathize both with these authors and, at a further remove, with the perceptions of the world then held by those without a voice. But is ‘reconstruction’ then not a more fitting term for the attempt of the historian today to share those perceptions, rather than ‘construction’?92 reality from referentiality and thus from its object. However much knowledge of past times may be dependent upon interpretation and inseparable from language, nevertheless it presupposes the facticity of what has happened’ (‘Kontextualisierung’, 50). To be noted here is also Watson’s critique of Hans Frei and his insistence that, while Jesus may be textually ‘mediated’, to regard him as ‘textually constructed’ would amount to docetism (Text, 224–5). (Whether one deals with ‘the final form of the text’ alone, as Watson insists we should, seems to me to be a different issue.) 90 Harth, ‘Fiktion’, 621–2. Alternatively, there is the somewhat more succinct observation of Hayden White that ‘post-modernism recognizes that “reality” is always as much constructed in discourse as it is discovered in the historical record’ (‘Postmodernism’, 38). 91 Although that is still a possible translation of the term in many cases, as a synonym of ‘Realität’, but in others, as here, there is more to it than that, a further dimension ‘that is not immediately amenable to objectifying or to the empirical way of viewing things’ (W. Krötke, ‘Wirk lichkeit’, in RGG4 8.1594). 92 It is, at any rate, a term that Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 59, seems happy to use without any inhibitions, despite the similarity of her approach to that of (at least some manifestations of) the ‘new historicism’.

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If a sense like ‘perceived and interpreted reality’ to convey what is meant by ‘Wirklichkeit’ is a appropriate here,93 then it is a sense that differs considerably from normal German usage (and also seemingly, from that of Max Weber if he could speak of it as a ‘chaotic, amorphous stream of events’,94 as well as, perhaps, that occasionally used by Schröter himself when he speaks of memory selecting from the Wirklichkeit);95 others, too, seem to use the word as a synonym of Realität; at least Lucian Hölscher speaks of the unity of historical Wirklichkeit as well as of a single historical Realität, which are to be presupposed if we are to be able to speak of Realitäten in the past that exist independently of our immediate subjective perception;96 here it would surely be more appropriate to speak of a ‘postulated’ reality rather than one that is ‘perceived and interpreted’; or Gerd Häfner speaks of a statement that does not reflect Wirklichkeit, but expresses a particular perspective.97 Neumann pleads for a ‘moderate constructivism’ that allows for an external ‘Realität’ and yet recognizes that ‘Wirk lichkeit’ can only be encountered as ‘interpreted Wirklichkeit’ (which nevertheless seems to imply that there is a Wirklichkeit to be interpreted).98 In this sense, at any rate, it become more readily intelligible how Hans-Jürgen Goertz can assert that ‘reality (Wirklichkeit) exists … in the present’ and questions whether it makes sense to speak of a past or future ‘reality’.99 Perhaps, then, ‘perception and interpretation of reality’ (Peter Lampe’s preferred phrase is ‘constructed Realität’, in contrast to ‘ontic Realität’;100 that does not make it so clear, however, that it is the present construction that is meant), with the emphasis on the present perceiving and interpretation, might be a still better English equivalent, were it not for the fact that this phrase suggests that there is some ‘reality’ to be perceived and understood whose existence need not necessarily be confined to the present moment of perception and interpretation. (And many would find it difficult epistemologically to see why it should be so restricted.) At least part of the problem for English-speakers is that ‘reality’ usually serves as the translation of both Wirklichkeit and Realität. (At least Rudolf Bultmann saw the potential ambiguity of ‘Wirk lichkeit’: it is commonly understood as the ‘reality of the world as represented in objectifying seeing’, but that raises the question of the relation of this to the existential interpretation of history; nonetheless he rejected the idea of two realms of Wirklichkeit, for there is but one, viewed from two perspectives.)101 Yet to talk of reality being ‘constructed’ seems to go further than speaking of it as ‘perceived and interpreted’, for ‘construct’ suggests that one brings this reality into being, rather than just seeing something that already exists and interpreting it. Or again, Goertz, appealing to Reinhard Koselleck, asserts that ‘a reality cannot be grasped apart from its being interpreted’ (7). When, however, he then goes on to question how far one can separate the subject that knows from the object that is known, one might, with some hesitation, grant that, but less convincing is the appeal to the analogy of expressionist or 93

I am grateful here for some elucidation of this use of the term by my former Assistent Dr Carsten Claussen. 94 Schröter, ‘Wissenschaft’, 858. 95 Schröter, ‘Geschichte’, 5. 96 Hölscher, ‘Einheit’, 24. 97 In Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 71. 98 Neumann, Geburt, 19. 99 Goertz, ‘Abschied’, 6. 100 Lampe, ‘Theologie’, 203 with n. 5. 101 Bultmann, ‘Problem’, 155, 158.

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other forms of modern art and their abandonment of claims to realism. Art is one thing, historiography another. And when Goertz protests at the accusation that ‘postmodern’ thought allows for no reality apart from speech, discourse or one’s own production of ‘reality’ (here Realität: 12), then one has to ask whether his distinction between the assertion of ‘facticity’ and historical statements that always involve understanding and interpretation of the facts, which in turn involve narrative, discourse and self-critical analysis (13), does not in fact mean that speech is indeed an essential ingredient. What there is ‘outside’ its articulation in speech can only be known in the form of speech (15). But that is no excuse for merging ontology and epistemology (what is to be known and how it can be known), and Goertz distances himself from Derrida’s dictum that there is nothing outside the text (16). 102 Another dimension of this elusive word, or at least of the cognate adjective (wirklich), appears in an article by Jörn Rüsen when he uses the adjective in the sense of ‘what can be experienced’ and speaks of history (Geschichte) as always ‘wirklich’, even before one thinks about it historically; for ‘history’ is present and ‘constructs’ those who would ‘construct’ it for they simply find themselves caught up in it.103 (His view here seems to tie in with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections regarding ‘historically effected consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein), in the sense of ‘the consciousness effected in the course of history and determined by history, and the very consciouness of being thus effected and determined’.104 Baberowski, however, sees this foreshadowed already in Droysen’s emphasis on the Geschichtlichkeit of our life, including that of historians today.105 So, too, R. Burns claims that ‘from the outset, we find ourselves historically geworfen, always and irremediably historicized, and the only issue is whether we are going to try to take charge of this historical Geworfenheit or not’.106 Rüsen’s usage of the noun Wirklichkeit seems, on the other hand, rather different in that, although he at first spoke of Wirklichkeit as that which according to the sources ‘wirklich’ occurred in the past (21), he then speaks of historians having to deal with two Wirklichkeiten: one is the

102 On the interpretation of that dictum cf. Poster, History, 41–3: it is ‘a critique of idealist strategies of marginalizing everything outside consciousness’. He quotes Derrida’s dictum in its context [from his Dissemination, 35–6], which also includes the statement that ‘The text affirms the outside’ [his italics]. Contrast, however, Iggers, ‘Historiography and the Challenge’, 287, for a less positive interpretation. But cf. also Derrida/Caputo, Deconstruction, 77–80, where, however, Caputo rather misses the mark as far as historiography is concerned by taking an example from a work of fiction, Jane Eyre; there may be no Jane Eyre outside the text, but does that argument also mean that there is, e.g., no Jesus of Nazareth outside the texts that purportedly tell of him? Cf., however, Caputo, Prayers, 16–17: ‘Derrida is constantly alerting us to the constructedness of what we call the “reality” of the “extra-linguistic”, and he is relentlessly, let us say, Socratically suspicious of the prestige of the ruling discourse, of the system of exclusions that is put in place when a language claims to be the language of reality itself, when a language is taken to be what being itself would say were it given a tongue.’ In this account Caputo stresses Derrida’s concern for the ‘other’ of language and insists that it is a gross misunderstanding of Derrida to accuse him of disinterest in reference. 103 Rüsen, ‘Faktizität’, 21, 28. 104 Gadamer, Truth, xxxiv; cf. xxxv. 105 Baberowski, Sinn, 72, with reference to, e.g., Droysen, Historik, ed. Leyh 14. 106 Burns, in Rethinking History 7, 447.

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present reality in which we have to think historically, the other that which we can recognize in the past by means of the evidence of it recognizable in the present (24).

And yet even in the word ‘reconstruction’ there lurks an ambiguity. For it could mean simply that one ‘reconstructs’ the past as it was, restoring what has been lost to sight through the passage of time, just as one restores old buildings that have been destroyed or have fallen into decay, so that they appear just as they once were (with perhaps a few unobtrusive concessions to modernity, such as new heating system, that do not disturb the impression that all is as it once was). On the other hand, one can so stress the ‘re-’ that ‘reconstruct’ means ‘construct anew’. That seems to be the line that Werner Kelber takes when he quotes Jan Assmann’s dictum that ‘the past is reconstructed in remembering’.107 For Kelber is thinking of an activity of memory that ‘selects and modifies subjects and figures of the past in order to make them serviceable to the image the community [that so remembers] wishes to cultivate of itself’. It is interested not primarily in ‘preservation of the remembered past’ (as with the conservation of old buildings) ‘but of group identity’. And later he appeals to the ‘inventive role of memory’ as when it was at the service of the rhetorical inventio, ‘collecting and arranging materials for the purpose of composing both speeches and texts’: then it is a matter of ‘a judicious plugging into the web of cultural memory, retaining, collating, and adapting traditional items, reclaiming and citing some, responding critically and even deconstructively to others, while recontextualizing many so as to make them serviceable to the present’; it is not the past itself that is retained, but ‘a recreated new past that accom[m]odates present circumstances’.108 And yet is it not one of the tasks of historiography, not to accept uncritically these memories that have been ‘reconstructed’ in this sense, but rather to assess, if possible, the degree of alteration and modification that has taken place in the tradition, so as to get back behind the memories of the past to the past events that have been thus creatively remembered? Nonetheless, what historiography can offer is not a restoration of what belongs to the past, like the restoration of some old building to its former appearance; the past remains past, and one must here, if anything, compare the ‘artist’s impression’ or nowadays the computerized reconstruction, either of the past or of what is still to come; the element of interpretation and imagination inherent in these has its counterpart in the work of the historian. For historiography does not bring the past back to life, but merely seeks to offer an account of what was and what happened, and an account is an account and not the event or events themselves. Yet the importance of the point about the reference back to the past, the given (even if the given may be very hard to discover with any certainty), is not to be underestimated. Take, for instance, Schröter’s claim that it is ‘in the narrative ac107 108

Assmann, Gedächtnis, 31. Kelber, ‘Case’, 56, 79–80.

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count that historical connections are first established (hergestellt) and events set in a causal relationship to one another, and the beginning and end of a historical sequence determined’.109 The last claim may be granted, for it is often or indeed usually with the advantage of hindsight that one can perceive when a particular chain of events began and ended, and any such perception may be challenged and replaced with another proposal. For the course of events in the real world does not come neatly marked with ‘the beginning’ and ‘the end’ (as some old and not so old films and some books used to be, at least in the case of ‘the end’, even if not of ‘the beginning’). But is it not the hope and wish of the historian that she or he, in telling the story of past events, is in fact re-telling it in the sense that the connections and the causal relationships in the story were also there in the past? The historian does not, should not have to create them, but rather seeks to (re-) discover them and by the re-telling of the story to draw the attention of her or his readers to them. That is an important part of the task of the historian. Moreover, the stress on the telling of the story of past events runs the risk of overlooking the fact that this is only part of the historian’s task. Frequently, and rightly, those concerned with the nature of historiography have distinguished the telling of the story from the historical investigation that precedes it and provides the foundation for the narrative. And it is in that investigation that the connections and causal relationships between events may be expected to become apparent. Yet the investigation may itself take a potentially narrative form, ‘Did X cause, lead to Y?’, a question that, if answered in the affirmative, produces the statement that ‘X caused, led to Y’. In other words, the two events are set in a temporal sequence and this produces, in essence, a narrative sequence. Yet the question may be answered with a negative or a ‘not proven’, and in that case no potential narrative emerges, but at the most an annalistic statement that two events occurred; one may know that X happened before Y, but the narrative thread that would connect the two events is missing. In practice, however, the historian may have to weigh up several potential sequences, as hypotheses to be tested, in order to see which provides the most likely account, and that is particularly true when one is investigating a sequence of events like those of the life of Jesus. Confronted by a potentially pivotal event in that life like Jesus’ action in the temple (Mark 11.15–17 parr.), even if its historicity is disputed by some, the question arises as to why Jesus did this. And here a whole range of suggestions have been offered, ranging from a prophetic enactment of the temple’s destruction to a protest directed at a corrupt temple administration. Thus, in the statement that ‘Jesus’ conviction that X led him to take this action in the temple’ ‘X’ can represent a whole range of very different possibilities, some more likely than others. The likelihood of each must, in turn, be assessed by weighing up the intrinsic probability of the sequence of events presup109

Schröter, ‘Frage’, 223.

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posed in each case, as well as by asking how well the conviction that one has hypothetically suggested fits into the larger story of Jesus as far as we know it. (I have elsewhere argued, for instance, that the proposal that Jesus so acted because he was convinced that his impending sacrificial death would render the temple cult obsolete is less plausible because there is so little reliable evidence that Jesus actually saw this atoning significance as the reason for his death.)110 I have devoted considerable attention here to Schröter’s proposals because he has done us the valuable service of drawing our attention a series of insights culled above all from various contributions to the epistemology of historiography in German. It is, however, true that these insights are by no means shared by all German-speaking historians and that many are far more restrained in their claims. For many of the theses adpted by Schröter are more than a little provocatively formulated and are, to my mind, open to misunderstanding or, if taken at face value, misleading. And, as I have already indicated, the way in which Schröter seems to go about his exegetical and historical research into the life of Jesus and into the texts that bear witness to it do not seem, in the last analysis, to be so very different from the way in which I and others would set about this task. The methods, the questions asked, the criteria applied so often seem to be similar to those already employed in New Testament studies that one is forced to ask what change this supposedly new epistemology has in fact introduced.

1.3. E. Schüssler Fiorenza Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s work Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation cannot count as a full-blown attempt to present a historical account of Jesus’ life, and indeed she expressly sets her face against offering such an account, ‘focusing instead on the movement to which Jesus belonged and its expansion in the cities of the Roman Empire’ (32); rather it offers a critique of ‘the rhetoricity and politics of Historical-Jesus interpretation as a rhetorical process of meaning-making’.111 Her goal and agenda in this work, which builds on that of her earlier In Memory of Her and Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet, is ‘to render problematic academic biblical discourses on Jesus and to interrogate them as to whether they support or do not support the rhetorics and structures of domination’ (11). Although she aligns herself explicitly neither with a ‘postmodern’ stance nor with that of the so-called ‘new historicism’,112 the thrust of 110

Wedderburn, ‘Action’. Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, ix–x. 112 See § 4.3 below. Veeser, Reader, 18, notes the scepticism of some feminists with regard to the ‘new historicism’, a scepticism that he expresses, for instance, in the dictum that its emphasis on power necessarily confines it to the study of powerful men. The nearest that 111

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her criticism corresponds closely to certain aspects of both, particularly when she demands, in the name of a ‘critical feminist or emancipatory politics of interpretation’, ‘that the critical reflection on the social contextualization, theoretical perspective, and rhetorical situation of scholars must become an integral part of research’ (88). For Jesus research is always, in her eyes, ‘already implicated in structures of domination’ (4). ‘Historical-Jesus books’ are, like ‘the reverse side of the fundamentalist literalist coin’, ‘concerned with authority’ (5), concerned with ‘meaning-making for their own audiences’ (7). It is true that Schüssler Fiorenza seems occasionally to leave the question open, as when she maintains that ‘as master narratives of Western cultures, Historical-Jesus discourses are always implicated in and collude with the production and maintenance of systems of knowledge that foster either exploitation and oppression or contribute to a praxis and vision of emancipation and liberation’ (42; cf. 58– 9). Nonetheless, despite this ‘either–or’, much of the time she writes as if the vast majority of Jesus research is on the wrong side, aiding and abetting structures of domination.113 Schüssler Fiorenza comes to actually identifying her approach as ‘postmodern’ is perhaps when she sees it as analogous to ‘a postmodern literary theory’ in questioning and rendering problematic ‘the understanding of language presupposed by social-scientific and socialhistorical Jesus research’ (Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 91). On the other hand, she more explicitly calls for resistance to the ‘ludic’ forms of ‘postmodern’ analysis (Jesus: Miriam’s Child, 7–8; on the contrast between ‘ludic’ and ‘oppositional’ forms of ‘postmodernism’ cf. Best/Kellner, Turn, 27, 137, 257) and, if it is true of the ‘linguistic turn’ that its ‘concentration on words diverts attention away from real suffering and oppression and towards the kinds of secondary intellectual issues that matter in the physically comfortable world of academia’ (R. J. Evans, Defence, 185), it is hardly to be expected that this aspect of ‘postmodernism’ would fit into her agenda. 113 Schüssler Fiorenza is rightly critical of the treatment meted out to Jane Schaberg (Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 45–6), but, somewhat unjustly to my mind, contrasts this with the commercial success of books written by the (almost exclusively male) members of the Jesus Seminar; yet some of these might well have been at risk of losing their positions, depending on the nature of the institutions at which they worked and on the source of the funding of those institutions (cf., e.g., Funk, Honest, 5, even if he moved of his own accord rather than being pushed out). A recurrent complaint of Schüssler Fiorenza is also the neglect of feminist writings, particularly her own, by ‘Historical-Jesus’ books, but one may wonder whether this neglect may be attributed to less sinister motives, namely the scarcity of evidence. It is true that there are scattered references to the role of women in the Pauline churches in the middle of the first century and one could infer that they exercised considerable influence then, but it is hard to describe that influence in concrete terms. Women are mentioned, too, in the Jesus traditions, but there is even less to go on when it comes to spelling out their role either during Jesus’ lifetime or in the transmission of the traditions. That scholars are reluctant to engage in too much further speculation could be seen as a historiographical virtue rather than a ‘malestream’ conspiracy to suppress the truth. (To take two examples: in Jesus: Miriam’s Child, 90, Schüssler Fiorenza argues that ‘the variegated Jesus movement must not be separated methodologically from the other messianic movements in first-century Judaism’. But that is not to say that they were similar over and above being messianic. The closest resemblance was probably to the movement

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It seems that for this author ‘domination’ is very much tied up with ‘a series of structuring dualisms and dichtotomies’. She names, amongst others, science and theology, science and politics, history and theology, as well as the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ, ‘Mediterranean culture and U.S. society, itinerant prophets and sedentary householders, Jesus and Judaism, or Jesus and wo/men’ (18), very much as if these pairs were all of a kind. Is it, then, assumed that the relationship between the constituents of these pairs is always one of (attempted) domination of the one by the other? Yet is ‘domination’ the problem here or the ‘either – or’ or antagonism that may be implicit in some of these pairs? It is true that in some cases one may align oneself with one of these sides, e.g. as a ‘scientific’ historian over against the claims of the theologian, in order to assert the superiority of one’s views to those of the other side, but the impropriety of such a superior stance is compounded by the inappropriateness of the antithesis upon which it is based. ‘Historical-Jesus scholars’ are here criticized, on the one hand, for distancing Jesus as ‘the totally other’ and, on the other, projecting ‘either their idealized or their negative-Other image onto him’ (12). The force of this charge is more than a little difficult to assess. For the otherness that is meant could refer either to the temporal and cultural gap between ourselves and Jesus in his world or, less likely if this charge is directed at critical Jesus research, to accounts of Jesus that render his full humanity questionable. At any rate, for the predominantly male scholars the masculinity of Jesus is presumably not part of this otherness, even if it is stumbling-block for many feminist writers.114 And as for the quotation of Rosemary Radford Ruether’s question, ‘Can a male savior save wo/men?’ (9, 147), it very much depends on what one means by ‘save’. It may be granted that the masculinity of Jesus could be a problem if ‘salvation’ came through Jesus’ ‘representation’ of the saved and this ‘representation’ were viewed in a way similar to that which leads some Christian circles to deny women the right to preside at the of the Baptist – if that can properly be called ‘messianic’ if it is the case that John’s ‘coming one’ meant for him God, not a messianic figure, as I think probable. The difficulty here is that we know so little about these other movements; we perhaps know a little, but still regrettably little about that of John, and the information of Josephus and the New Testament is here tendentious. And to talk blithely of a ‘Galilean Jesus movement’ after Jesus’ death that ‘probably understood itself as a prophetic movement of Sophia-Wisdom’ certainly stretches the available evidence to breaking point – cf. Wedderburn, History, 5. It also seems to be assumed that there was a widespread movement or movements centring around the theme of the EDVLOHLYDWRX THRX , but my impression is that, as far as the evidence goes, Jesus’ message was unusual in making this its key theme.) 114 Puzzling ist the reference to scholars who ‘picture the Historical-Jesus as a white European with blue eyes and blond hair’ (Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 12), for one characteristic of that scholarship referred to as the ‘third quest’ for Jesus is its stress on Jesus’ Jewishness – although admittedly such scholars do not usually venture an opinion on the colour of Jesus’ eyes or hair. The problem of the masculinity of Jesus is dealt with more fully in ch. 2 of her Jesus: Miriam’s Child.

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Eucharist, reserving this representation of Jesus’ actions at his last meal for males. But are such views of ‘salvation’ and ‘representation’ not more than a little dubious? At any rate, Schüssler Fiorenza’s strategy for dealing with the stumbling-block of a male Jesus is to shift the focus away from Jesus himself, or at least ‘the Historical-Jesus as the great (male) individual and charismatic leader’ (173), to the wider movement of which he was part, that ‘basileia movement’ that is ‘best understood as a Wisdom/Sophia movement in which Jesus is primus inter pares, first among equals’ (167).115 How then should Jesus be studied and how can one say anything about him? Schüssler Fiorenza calls for ‘an alternative Historical-Jesus discourse’ that satisfies certain criteria. It must, firstly, avoid objectifying and making totally alien ‘the “other” of past societies’ and so controlling them, for in so doing scholars ‘obfuscate common structures of domination across history’ (22). Secondly, it must resist any ‘modern scientific epistemology of abstraction and the “god’seye-view”’ and recognize that ‘what we see depends on where we stand’ (cf. also 79). An attention, thirdly, to an ‘explicit contextualization of Historical-Jesus research in terms of sociopolitical and religious-cultural location’ would liberate us from ‘the unreflected compulsion to reconstruct the Historical-Jesus in the likeness and desire of the individual Historical-Jesus scholar’ (23). Here the hope is offered for a new role for such research if ‘the apocalypticism of the Jesus traditions’ is understood ‘in terms of social movement and motivating vision’; that might make possible ‘an emancipatory rhetoric and politics of meaning that functions no longer to support the status quo but to energize movements for justice and transformation’. That demands, fourthly, that this research needs to engage in ‘a critical discussion of social theory’ (24), willing to criticize current anthropological and sociological models in the light of factors such as they way they function, e.g. in promoting freedom and self-definition and self-determination.116 115 At first Schüssler Fiorenza’s earlier affirmation that ‘the locus of revelation is … the life and ministry of Jesus and the movement of women and men called forth by him’ (Memory, 41) might seem to leave more scope for focussing on Jesus as well as the Jesus movement, but in practice the major part of this work, too, seems to concentrate on the latter. Despite that, this is a move that fails to impress a ‘post-Christian’ feminist such as Daphne Hampson (After Christianity, 72: ‘presumably the reason why one is looking to these women is that they acknowledged Jesus as the Christ’ – and in her eyes the acknowledgement of such a superiority to oneself is suspect, regardless of whether the superior one is male or female, for that involves ‘heteronomy’: cf. 77–8). Another tactic is that adopted by Watson, Text, 202–19, who seeks to meet the feminist challenge by construing the Jesus traditions as directed against ‘patriarchy’. Whether that fully removes the stumbling-block of Jesus’ maleness is questionable; that may depend on one’s views on soteriology as well as christology. 116 A more briefly stated, eight-point agenda is found on p. 74 of Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation.

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That may all seem admirable, but it should be recognized that certain, arguably thoroughly praiseworthy, assumptions undergird this programme, assumptions whose validity seems to be regarded as self-evident. It is assumed, for instance, that nobody should dominate another and that all should be entitled to self-definition and self-determination. That rests in turn on a certain understanding and reading of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its values in particular, and only those who share that understanding (which I for one would in no way want to challenge) will be able to endorse this programme.117 Nonetheless, it is questionable whether the recognition that Jesus research has been used in the service of ‘domination’ – leaving aside the question whether such a sweeping indictment of all the work of the ‘third quest’ and the like is justified – is a legitimate reason to endorse all emancipatory portrayals of Jesus, simply because they are emancipatory. Would that not be to substitute one ideology, however beneficent, for another, to replace one manipulation of past history with another?118 Is it proper to instrumentalize the subject-matter investigated in this way? Does not respect for the past and the traditions that have come to us from it require us to ask whether those traditions in fact support such a programme?119 For it is quite another matter to argue that one can then find a coherence and a continuity with those traditions, and that a tradition containing sayings like Mark 10.43–4 parr., particularly if one thinks that this saying is either an authentic word of Jesus or at least correctly reflects his programme and way of life, undermines any reading of those traditions that is used to support domination.120 Schüssler Fiorenza is aware of the danger of circularity of argu117 Similarly, Schüssler Fiorenza, Memory, 56, gives the impression that it is assumed that inclusivity and equality were characteristic of early Christian beginnings and revelation. 118 But cf. Barr, History, esp. 102–40, on the varying senses and evaluations of the word ‘ideology’ (a usage that is ‘little short of chaotic’: 139). 119 Watson, Text, offers a number of examples of such ‘intratextual’ factors and also refers to ‘Luther’s distinction between the true and the false Christ of holy scripture’ (234); the latter is ‘oppressive’ but Watson remarks that the ‘recognition of a text as oppressive does not proceed from a contextless encounter between a hypersensitive reader and a pure, uninterpreted text, but from the contemporary interpretative context within which the reading takes place’ (235). 120 It should be noted that the question of ‘coherence’ as a yardstick for measuring one’s account of Jesus’ life will figure prominently in ch. 5.2 below; here, however, it is plain that ‘coherence’ should also play an important hermeneutical role in relation to the implications of such an account for us today. (Here I recall Professor Donald Mackinnon’s anecdote of a minister from the Scottish Lowlands who found himself challenged by his elders for picking brambles with his family on a Sunday and defended himself by appealing to Jesus’ conduct in Mark 2.23–8, only to be met with the reply, ‘Aye, and we don't think any the better of him for that!’ In other words, a question of which conduct today coheres best with the tradition – and with which tradition, for the rigorous Presbyterian tradition of Sunday observance obviously loomed large, larger perhaps than any relevant stories about Jesus. Ernst Käsemann has a similar story to tell from the Calvinism of the Netherlands: Jesus, 16.)

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ment, but is it enough simply to say that this is true of ‘all hermeneutical and historiographical practices’ (50; cf. 165)? Or should one be able to argue that some practices are more plausible, more self-coherent and lead to more coherent results than others?

1.4. J. D. G. Dunn Dunn is all too aware of the issue of the nature of history and historiography, having discerned in postmodernist approaches to historical questions yet another example of what he calls the ‘flight from history’, which, along with a ‘flight from dogma’, has been characteristic of so many studies of the life of Jesus. Yet the wish to raise historical questions about Jesus is all too understandable, as he recognizes, and this wish can only be reinforced when one wishes to speak of ‘incarnation’ (in some sense).121 Now Dunn proposes at the outset a distinction between historical ‘events’, ‘data’ and ‘facts’, the first belonging irretrievably to the past, and the last being invariably interpretations of the data.122 This definition may cause some confusion, for very often we use the word ‘facts’ to refer to ‘data’:123 the facts are X, Y and Z and the question is what we are to make of them.124 Nevertheless Dunn’s distinction is one often found amongst historians; so Eric Hobsbawm reminds us that ‘in history the “facts” are always selected, shaped and perhaps distorted 121 Cf. Dunn, ‘Third Quest’, 32: ‘An incarnational theology places incalculable weight on the thirty or so years of Jesus’ life, and particularly on the first three years of the 30s.’ 122 Similarly Collingwood, Idea, 113 (cf. also 176), speaks of ‘facts’ always being ‘arrived at inferentially by a process of interpreting data according to a complicated system of rules and assumptions’. 123 As Mink observes (‘Writing’, 94), other disciplines may treat the two as ‘at least roughly synonymous’; philosophers of history may beg to differ, but Mink insists on upholding the paradox of recognizing that historical facts are ‘complex, abstract, and inferential’, while at the same time clinging to ‘the belief in the independence of the past from our historical constructions and interpretations’ (95). 124 It is presumably of ‘facts’ in the sense of ‘data’ that Ruben Zimmermann speaks of ‘historical facts’ as unintelligible until they can be fitted into a meaningful context (‘“Deuten”’, 320), and a similar identification lies near at hand when Jörn Rüsen speaks of ‘tatsächliche Begebenheiten’ (Vernunft, 91–2); yet he comes near to Zimmermann’s formulation when he speaks of information from the sources (=data?) only achieving the status of ‘historical (geschichtlich) facts’ through being integrated into a web of meaning (Sinnzusammenhang) with other facts (Rekonstruktion, 73; cf. 109, 112); on the other hand he later (p. 107) seems to speak of ‘facts’ and ‘data’ as synonymous, both meaning that ‘something was at a particular place and time the case (or not)’. However, Collingwood, Idea, 243–4, reminds us that it is for the historian first to judge what is a (relevant) datum, interpreting it and fitting it into its place in a historical argument. Something similar, in particular its formulation in speech, makes an ‘event’ into a ‘fact’ according to Häfner in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 70; or cf. Alun Munslow’s assertion (Deconstructing, 6) that ‘“Facts” are literally meaningless in their unprocessed state of simple evidential statement’.

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by the historian who observes them’, although even here the talk of observing ‘facts’ suggests that for Hobsbawm ‘facts’ covers both the data and historians’ use of them. 125 Yet it is to be noted that the assertion that something is a ‘fact’ may be as much a value-judgement as an interpretation (‘Jesus’ death by crucifixion is a fact of history’);126 if anything it is an interpretation, a weighing up of the evidence, rather than of the thing to which this evidence points; one must, at any rate, distinguish between the claimed ‘facts’ themselves and statements to the effect that something is a fact; it is the latter that ‘belong to speech, language and discourse, not to the real world’.127 If there is a distinction to be made between the usage of ‘data’ and ‘facts’ it may lie rather in the function that they have in a historical argument: on the basis of the ‘data’ contained both in documentary and non-documentary sources I might argue that slaves made up a certain percentage of the population of Rome in the early Principate, and this ‘fact’ may then in turn become a ‘datum’ for further arguments, e.g. about the economy of Rome. At the same time, it must be emphasized that the assembling of either relevant data or relevant facts for a particular argument requires an act of judgement, as well as often considerable industry, on the part of the historian; neither come to the historian ‘pre-packaged’, as it were. Nevertheless, it is surely a potentially misleading use of terms to speak of the historian ‘creating’ facts by such an act of judgement.128 The matter is yet further complicated by E. H. Carr’s distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘historical facts’: ‘Not all facts are historical facts.’129 For him a ‘histor125 Hobsbawm, History, 186; cf. his reference to ‘verifiable facts’ (272), i.e. data rather than just our assessment of them. Iggers notes a similar oscillation in Hayden White’s usage between ‘a much simpler and more traditional conception of a fact’ and talk of facts as ‘constituted rather than given’ or having only a ‘linguistic existence’ (‘Historiography’, 383). 126 Dunn’s appeal to Ian G. Barbour’s Issues, 139, may be misleading here: Barbour, in asserting that science’s data are never ‘bare facts’ and that there are ‘no uninterpreted facts’, may just as well wish to say that the data are also accessible to us as we interpret them. Certainly he regards not only ‘facts’ but also ‘data’ as ‘theory-laden’ (taking up a term used by N. R. Hanson), and cites the example of an X-ray plate that is viewed differently by a doctor and someone with no medical training. Assuredly both the historian and the scientist must, for a start, decide which data are relevant for their arguments. At any rate, the distinction between ‘data’ and ‘facts’ may be hard to maintain, either in history or in science. That all four canonical gospels record that Jesus was crucified is a fact and at the same time a datum for our investigation of the life of Jesus. 127 Pace Hayden White as reported by Ewa Domanska, ‘Conversation’, 5. Correctly, ‘it is a fact that …’ is here classed in J. L. Austin’s category of ‘verdictive’ performative utterances, but that does not affect the status of what is judged to be a ‘fact’. 128 Pace Clark, History, 157; it is true that it might also be misleading to speak of ‘discovering’ facts if that usage were to be understood as overlooking the exercise of the historian’s judgement in determining what is a fact and what is not; in other words, ‘creating’ and ‘discovering’ are not the only options available. 129 E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 97; cf. also Häfner in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 69–70.

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ical fact’ is a ‘fact’ that is historically significant for a historian. Two things should be noted here. On the one hand, as Carr himself notes, different historians may decide that different facts are historically significant and have a place in their arguments. On the other hand, Carr’s usage of ‘historical’ seems to take it at least part of the way towards a sense that some give to ‘historic’ as opposed to ‘historical’.130 So Norman Perrin distinguishes ‘historic knowledge’ of Jesus from ‘historical knowledge’ (as well as from ‘faith-knowledge’): the former is found when ‘historical knowledge’ ‘influences a future time which finds itself touched or moved by it in some way’, as the past event in question ‘assumes a direct significance for a future time’.131 The ‘future time’ meant here can, however, be no later than the historian’s present if it is presupposed that this time finds itself ‘touched or moved’ by the knowledge in question. One cannot know in advance what will touch or move future generations (or even oneself at a future point of time). If one leaves aside the existentialist perspective from which this definition is formulated, then it could apply quite well to the work of the historian, engaged in ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’.132 Yet would it not be simpler to let ‘historical facts’ be facts in the past (established as facts, to be sure, by the judgement of the historian), coextensive with historical data (which must also depend on the ability of the historian to show plausibly that they are indeed such data), and to speak of ‘(historically) significant facts’ to make the point that Carr intends.133 And, with regard to ‘events’, there is certainly a distinction to be made here, but it is surely this, that not all historical ‘facts’ or ‘data’ fall in the realm of what we normally describe as ‘events’. That slaves made up such and such a percentage of the population of Rome in the early Principate may be a historical fact, but hardly an event. What is unquestionably true is Dunn’s observation that historical judgements are provisional and may have to be revised or rescinded if fresh evidence turns up. That for Dunn does not conflict with faith, in that faith does not call for certainty; it is, rather, a matter of trust, a trust that lives in dialogue with questions. Noteworthy, too, is Dunn’s suspicion of ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ of any kind.134 Here he at first sight might seem to echo that ‘incredulity toward 130 The same seems to be true of Hayden White as reported by Domanska, ‘Conversation’, e.g. 4. 131 Perrin, Rediscovering, 236. Yet would one really speak of ‘historic knowledge’ rather than of knowledge (and recognition) of some events as ‘historic’? 132 E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 24. 133 Cf. also R. J. Evans, Defence, 76–8, who accuses Carr of confusing ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’; also the discussion in Williams, Truth, 240. Silke-Petra Bergjan, on the other hand, picks up Droysen’s dictum that facts (here ‘Tatsachen’) are dumb without a narrator to let them speak (Historik, ed. Hübner 361=ed. Leyh 446) and interprets this to mean that ‘a historical fact is not yet a historical statement’ (‘Kontextualisierung’, 49). 134 It is, however, not so clear how far Dunn’s critique would apply not only to ‘grand

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metanarratives’ that is one of the characteristics of ‘postmodern’ thinking,135 and, when he later defends his rejection of ‘grand narratives’ against Bengt Holmberg’s criticism, he expressly warns against belittling ‘the postmodern critique of the grand narrative’.136 It is to be noted that this point Dunn does seem to diverge from the programme of ‘critical realism’ characteristic of the work of Wright. There may be good grounds for Dunn’s caution. For, when Meyer speaks of ‘reading as paradigm of knowing’ (sic),137 it narratives’ but also to what Halvor Moxnes, following the American historian Dorothy Ross, describes as ‘master narratives’: whereas ‘grand narratives’ are universal in scope, mythic constructions seeing ‘human history as a single story, uniting past and future in coherent meaning’, ‘master narratives’ are ‘the story of a “segment or nation”’, applying to ‘groups or regions that can enter into dialogue with one another’ (‘Jesus’, 137). (Best and Kellner, Theory, 171, seem, however, to equate ‘master narratives’ with ‘metanarratives’ and ‘grand narratives’, although the following page does seek to differentiate within ‘master narratives’.) Moxnes’ definition, moreover, does not seem adequate when he speaks of Sanders rejecting the dominant ‘master narrative’ of Jesus and his movement breaking away from a legalistic Judaism and replacing it with another (141). In the case of the study of Jesus’ life Moxnes’ understanding of ‘master narratives’ seems to make them equivalent to ‘paradigms of interpretation’ for understanding the data of Jesus’ life and teaching (e.g. 143). Dunn, at any rate, seems to deal with the sort of ‘master narratives’ handled by Moxnes under the subtitle ‘A Grand Narrative?’ (Jesus, 470). 135 Vanhoozer, ‘Theology’, 9–10, summarizing the view of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (cf. esp. p. xxiv on ‘postmodernism’s’ ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’); cf. Ankersmit, History, 183–5 (who then goes on to see postmodernism’s criticism foreshadowed in the work of Ranke and the proponents of Historismus); Conrad/Kessel, Geschichte, 15; Neumann, Geburt, 16, 167; Ross, ‘Grand Narrative’, 673: ‘Postmodern philosophy and linguistic theory deny the ability of the historian to know whether a grand narrative of history exists or not, let alone what its shape might be.’ Moxnes, ‘Jesus’, 136–7, links these postulated master narratives to the assumption of ‘development and progress’ inherent in the historiography of an earlier period. (See also Donahue, ‘Turn’, 270, on this as a characteristic of the ‘new historicism’.) But are ‘postmodernists’ the only ones to be suspicious of these ‘grand narratives’? Not according to R. J. Evans, Defence, 150, who sees it as characteristic of historians in general that they take a particular ‘pleasure in attacking master-narratives of every kind’, citing as an example Sir Geoffrey Elton, who could hardly be labelled a ‘postmodernist’ (and Elton himself grants that his ‘convictions and practices’ ‘may appear to be very old-fashioned’ – Return, 3). And Appleby/Hunt/Jacob, Telling, 232, 235–6, provides an intriguing twist to the discussion by suggesting that ‘even postmodernism itself’ is an example of a metanarrative by offering ‘sweeping stories about the origins of American and Western problems and the direction that lives may take in the present as well as remedies for the future‘ and by ‘its unstated reliance on a narrative of modernism to make its point’; cf. Best/Kellner, Theory, 171–5. 136 Dunn, ‘History’, 477. Whether this is just a matter of Holmberg’s ‘pressing home his initial observation that memory and historiography fictionalize and narrativize the past’, as Dunn asserts, seems to me very much open to question. That seems to be a different point. 137 Meyer, Reality, 2. (He is, like Lonergan, dismissive of the model of knowing as seeing – cf. n. 27 above.) Baberowski, Sinn, 99, is also prepared to speak of ‘reading’ as a ‘model’ for all understanding, but he seems to think more of the understanding of individual artefacts (not only texts, but also pictures, statues, architecture and music), and artefacts are by

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must be asked how far reading is in fact a valid analogy to historical knowing. Confronted with a text we can usually assume that whoever produced it meant something by it and that it is not a random scattering of ‘inkspots’ or ‘curious marks on paper’,138 nor the product of infants or monkeys that have found a computer keyboard to play with. Yet can one presuppose anything analogous in the course of history? The intentions of human actors and what they meant to do may play a role in the way events unfold, but it is going a considerable step further to see the outworking of the intentions of a non-human actor reflected in those events. And even if one were prepared to bring God into one’s historical analysis, does that God have to be, for instance, Meyer’s good, omniscient and, above all, omnipotent God?139

Whether Dunn is in fact to be described as ‘postmodern’ is, however, very much open to doubt. The reasons for his suspicion of ‘grand narratives’may be more pragmatic: he sees how such ‘grand narratives’ have led colleagues along what he regards as false trails,140 and Holmberg asks whether these unsuccessful attempts have led Dunn to throw out the baby with the bathwater and whether the ‘broad picture’, the ‘Gestalt’ of Jesus life and work, with which Dunn wants to start is not another ‘grand narrative’ (although that ‘grand narrative’ would be more something immanent in the course of earthly events than the transcendent dimension that Wright seems to wish to introduce).141 For Dunn explicitly rejects two examples of these ‘grand narratives’ that have influenced recent historical work on Jesus. First there is the grand narrative drawn from cross-cultural anthropology that comes to expression in Dominic Crossan’s Historical Jesus and even more clearly in his Birth of Christianity: this ‘Lenski–Kausky model’ involves the grand narrative of (egalitarian) ‘peasant society’ exploited by, and resistant to, the ruling classes.142 Here Dunn retorts that definition the product of a human ars; the same could not be said of the course of history as such, however much human individuals may leave their mark on it at different points. 138 Here Meyer picks up a phrase from Collingwood, Idea, 244. 139 Cf. Meyer, Reality, 158, 164. Contrast Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection, 177–84. 140 A pragmatism of another sort is apparent in Ricoeur, Time 3, 257, as he roundly declares that ‘There is no plot of all plots capable of equaling the idea of one humanity and one history’ and, interestingly, supports this assertion by appeal to the existence of the four gospels telling of ‘the event held to be the turning point of history in the confessions of the early Christian church’; that, he thinks, ‘suffices to prevent theological thinking from proceeding on the basis of a universal superplot’ (332 n. 15). 141 Holmberg, ‘Questions’, 453–4, referring to Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 332. It is true, however, that both Crossan and Wright appeal to a pattern or structure, a grid, so to speak, be it drawn from the social sciences or from biblical theology (and Dunn, ‘History’, 477, offers more detail on what he finds wrong in Crossan and Wright’s approaches: bracketing out relevant data and privileging other data, imposing ‘a grid on the whole …, which fails to do justice to the full range of data’), that is then used to interpret the data of the Jesus traditions, whereas Dunn’s ‘broad picture’ suggests more an initial impression gleaned from these data themselves rather than imposed upon them from outside. 142 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 470–2. In this respect Crossan’s work would seem to provide a good example of what Munslow, Deconstructing, e.g. 44, 163, describes as ‘(social theory) constructionism’, i.e. a cluster of ‘impositionalist approaches to the study of the past’.

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‘the distinctives of Jewish tradition and identity actually form a counter-narrative, which for Jesus at least seems to have been determinative, and for his message of the kingdom not least’ (471). Furthermore he questions how far one can reconstruct a scenario of escalating unrest from the handful of incidents of unrest mentioned by Josephus, and how far the ‘sapiential kingdom’ postulated by Crossan was an option in the Palestinian society in which Jesus lived, for the sources on which Crossan here draws are drawn solely from texts of the Jewish Diaspora. It is to be noted that in this case the ‘grand narrative’ can also be described as a (sociological) ‘model’, and in this case it may be asked whether all the features of Crossan’s account that Dunn mentions actually belong to this model or whether features like the ‘sapiential kingdom’ are rather elements that can find their place and meaning within the framework of this model. It must also be asked whether these ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ are somehow integral to the past events or belong rather to the level of the observer today or both, in that the observer today discerns and describes something that was inherent in the events observed. And if it is a matter of something already there in the past, was it there on the level of the events themselves or in the thinking and perceptions of some participant(s) in those events? In the case of the model used by Crossan it is clear that he is thinking of a form of society manifesting a certain pattern, but no one living then in that society would have described their existence and their society in such terms; that is the achievement, if one should call it that, of more recent observers.143 But in the case of other ‘grand narratives’ such as that of ‘salvation history’ that is by no means so clear. It may be that it is the theologians of a later period who discern this pattern, but it is also claimed that, for instance, certain New Testament writers presented the foundational events of the Christian church and its antecedents in the history of Israel in salvation-historical terms. In other words, it seems that in principle such ‘grand narratives’ may be located in the past events themselves or, more likely, in the perception of participants in those events in the past or in the analyses of more recent observers.

The other ‘grand narrative’ that Dunn criticizes, at greater length, is that of Wright.144 For the latter Jesus’ talk of the kingly rule of God evokes a story that may be present even when the phrase ‘God’s basileia’ is not mentioned, a story without which individual items in the Jesus traditions make no sense (or at least cannot be correctly understood).145 That way of putting it makes it clear that, for Wright, this ‘grand perspective’ belongs at least to the perspective of Jesus’ immediate followers, if not to that of Jesus himself. For Wright it is in fact implicit in what Jesus did and thought he was doing, and this perspective is then, according to Wright, one that is still valid for Jesus’ followers today. Yet Dunn finds Wright’s reconstruction of that ‘story’ problematic: it centres on the motifs of 143 Cf. Elton, Return, 3–26, on the unwholesome effect on historical studies of ‘general’ and ‘universal’ theories and the way in which they have been undermined by historical evidence. 144 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 472–7; cf. also 120, 331–2. 145 Wright, Jesus, 224–5.

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‘exile and restoration’, on the conviction of most of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries that Israel was still ‘in exile’ under its Roman masters; Jesus proclaimed the end of that ‘exile’, the new exodus and Israel’s return from ‘exile’. In Dunn’s eyes, however, Wright has exaggerated the role of the theme of return from exile in Palestinian Judaism and, above all, fails to provide evidence that those living in that land in Jesus’ day thought of themselves as still living in ‘exile’.146 Moreover, 146 For Wright’s emphasis on the unrest in Palestine during the period between the death of Herod the Great and the outbreak of the revolt in 66 C.E. cf. his New Testament, 170–81. In his Jesus, too, he seems to presuppose an all-pervasive brigandage and simmering violent revolt, despite the facts that (1) Galilee was not under direct Roman rule (a point whose relevance Wright notes in connection with the WHOZ QDL, although he plays down the significance of the difference: Jesus, 266–7; and if the parable of the mustard seed were told in Galilee, then it is unlikely that Jesus’ hearers would expect him ‘to lead a march on a Roman garrison’ [241] – at least it would be a long march; for a healthy dose of scepticism about the extent of political unrest at least in Galilee at that time cf. Ostmeyer, ‘Armenhaus’, in addition to Barnett, ‘Under Tiberius’; Jensen, ‘Herod Antipas’; Schröter, ‘Jesus im Kontext’, e.g. 925; Zangenberg, ‘Jesus’, 31–2; Theissen, Jesusbewegung, 8, 217, 290–1, also speaks of the period between the unrest after the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E. or at least after the upheavals at the time of the deposition of Archelaus in 6 C.E.and the Caligula crisis of 38–40 C.E. as ‘comparatively peaceful’, although he recognizes the existence then of ‘latent tensions’), and that (2), even when confronted by such a grave provocation as Caligula’s plan to set up a statue in the innermost sanctuary of the Jerusalem temple, the Jewish people responded with non-violent resistance (cf. Jos., Bell. 2.197, 200). How far Wright’s reading of the situation may distort things can be seen from, for instance, his appeal to Jos., Vita 110, to illustrate the connotations of Jesus’ call for repentance and faith (Jesus, 250–1); are we really to imagine that Jesus addressed his call to an entire population that was engaged in armed revolt? But, whether or not Wright has exaggerated the unrest, it does not mean that the troubles and problems of the time were construed as ‘exile’ (he goes so far as to speak of the healing of a paralytic as that person’s ‘own personal “return from exile”’ [Jesus, 272–3], but it is hard to believe that it would have occurred to any one at the time to use this figure of speech in this way; cf. also the criticism of Keck, Who Is Jesus?, 46). Wright is perhaps led to this way of speaking by the implicit assumption that, because Israel is still awaiting ‘deliverance’, the reason why this has not yet been realized is that the people is in ‘exile’. Yet the language of ‘deliverance’ points back, rather, to an earlier stage in Israel’s history, before the people had a land from which it could be exiled, namely to the time of the Exodus and Israel’s deliverance from slavery in Egypt (cf. Wright, New Testament, 406–7), and that would be an apter analogy to its situation under the yoke of Rome. Wright is far too ready simply to merge the two stories of exodus from slavery followed by entry into the promised land and exile followed by return from exile. It is clear why he wants to do so: the former was far more clearly ‘in the air’ in the world of the New Testament and in the New Testament itself than the motif of ‘exile’. For, quite apart from the importance of Passover as the setting of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem (cf. also 1 Cor 5.7), there are numerous references to the ensuing rescue from Egypt and Israel’s time in the wilderness (e.g. John 6.31–51; Acts 7.36–44; 1 Cor 10.1–13; Heb 3.17; 11.29; Jude 5). And further, while it may be granted that the rationale of the sacrificial system is problematic, the difficulty of answering this question is compounded for Wright by his assumption that the continuing ‘exile’ is a punishment of the continuing collective sin of Israel, which is then apparently not being dealt with by the sacrificial cult in the Jerusalem temple; cf. New Testament, 272–9 (although he also asserts that ‘Exile itself is to be understood as a sacrifice’: 276).

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the variety of eschatological expectations in the Judaism of Jesus’ day means that, although the return of the scattered people of God featured in some accounts, this was by no means the only ‘controlling story’ at hand and Jesus’ teaching seems rather to have focussed on other motifs current in those expectations. Above all Wright has failed to show that the ‘story’ of ‘return from exile’ was a ‘controlling factor in Jesus’ own teaching’.147 From this discussion it is clear that the issue is, in terms of the distinctions made above, a ‘grand narrative’ at the level of the interpretation of events by participants in those events, so that this ‘story’ informed both Jesus’ own understanding of what was happening and his decisions about the form that his ministry should take as well as, at least potentially, his contemporaries’ understanding and perception of what he was saying and doing. That does not, of course, rule out such an understanding of those words and deeds by the observer today, and indeed Wright would presumably want to claim that we today should adopt a similar understanding (rather than, say, a modern framework of understanding such as Crossan proposes). However, the doubts expressed about the rationale that Wright finds underlying Jesus’ words and deeds make it far more difficult to claim that one is thereby reconstructing something already present in, and integral to, those past words and deeds, of which Jesus and his comtemporaries were conscious. But a last point would, of course, be that Dunn, although he has shown that two proposed ‘grand narratives’ are wanting, has not shown that it is in principle impossible to detect and reconstruct one, and it is to be noted that Joyce Appleby and her colleagues ‘believe that historians must try to develop new and better social theories or new and better meta-narratives, even while making problematic their old ones’.148 Perhaps their plural ‘meta-narratives’ is also appropriate if Terry Eagleton is correct in suggesting that one may have more than one metanarrative.149 It is, however, a further question how one should seek to justify a postulated metanarrative or whether one must await the end of history before one can make such a claim. Or is that more a problem for the theologically orientated metanarrative? For ‘social theories’ and comparable ‘metanarratives’ can legitimately claim to find their justification in their problem-solving and heuristic func147 And Wright does grant (Jesus, 445) how remarkably little ‘Jesus seems to have said on the subject of the Land’ in any context. The themes of the Exodus and of release from captivity may shimmer through in the gospel accounts (e.g. Luke 4.18; 11.20?) but the related one of entry into the promised land is harder to find, despite the fact that John the Baptist’s choice of his place of ministry may have owed something to this tradition as well as those involving Elijah. 148 Cf. the discussion of their mediating position by Moxnes, ‘Jesus’, 137. 149 Eagleton, Illusions, 110. Certainly one may speak of ‘metanarratives’ in the plural in the sense intended by Anthony Le Donne (‘Distortion’, 172) in so far as it means for him a narrative that lies behind an account of another event and that enables that event to be interpreted typologically in terms of that other narrative. The ‘metanarratives’ may be important, indeed ‘standards of significance, by which all similar stories are measured and interpreted’ (what Peter Burke refers to as ‘schemata’: ‘History’, 102–4), but it seems to me that more is meant by ‘metanarratives’ and ‘grand narratives’ in the discussion referred to above. For a start, Le Donne’s use of the term refers to the way in which memories are told in narrative form (‘grand narrativization’ is his term), and so refers neither to the framework in which an actor in history (in this case Jesus) interpreted his activity nor to the framework which a historian today uses to make sense of past events.

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tioning in the present, even if they must recognize that they may be supplemented by other similar theories or superseded by better ones. In other words, the claims of the latter sort of theories are far more modest and acknowledge an inherent potential redundancy, rather than claiming to be the answer to history’s secrets. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting here how John Caputo speaks of Jacques Derrida’s programme of deconstruction as involving a quasi-religious dimension to history, even an element of the messianic.150 It is a matter of the promise of the future, ‘of an absolutely indeterminate’, but that indeterminacy presumably prevents this promise, this hope, from ever offering a role comparable to that of a ‘grand narrative’ as an orientation for the historian in the present. 151 And what is the basis of this optimism? At first sight it seems no better founded than that of Mr Micawber that something will turn up, just as much a matter of wishful thinking, and the talk of ‘faith’ without any indication of that towards which it is directed or which is its basis does not help at all.

Dunn is also critical of many aspects of the ‘linguistic turn’ and of talk of the ‘autonomy’ of texts, in historical work as elsewhere. Texts are never independent of a context, including that of later editions of them as well as that of their present-day readers. At the same time the text has a right to its own identity as determined by its author or by the process that has resulted in its final form. Dunn also makes a plea for attending to the ‘plain meaning’ of texts, arguing that effective communication depends on the assumption that words or sentences that are designed to communicate usually hope to be successful in communicating.152 Practising historians (for at this point Dunn implicitly distin150

Cf. Caputo, Prayers, esp. 117–59. Cf., e.g., Derrida/Caputo, Deconstruction, 117–18, 156–80 (cf. also Caputo, Prayers, 20–6). (It seems problematic to speak of deconstruction as ‘the pursuit of the impossible’ [Deconstruction, 32, Caputo’s italics; cf. also Caputo, Prayers, 20–1]; ‘the inconceivable’ or ‘the unimaginable’ might be less provocative, but surely more appropriate. However, Caputo compares Derrida’s thought to negative or apophatic theology where one denies that one can speak of God but nonetheless goes on speaking, and that is ‘the impossible’ [Prayers, 1] – ‘paradoxical’ might be more appropriate [cf. p. 2], or one could say that this theology nevertheless tries to go on speaking of God.) Also to be noted is Bultmann’s scepticism with regard to the claim that history’s meaning might be revealed at its end: ‘For whom, then would it be revealed? Certainly not for God. For the final generation of men? For the last historian? Certainly not. For whom then?’ (‘Reply’, 264.) 152 Dunn insists that he is not falling into the ‘intentional fallacy’, for the ‘plain meaning’ is sought in the text itself, not in the intentions of its author. The focus is here on ‘authorial intention as entextualised’ (118, his italics). Meyer makes a similar defence against the charge of committing this fallacy: one should not overlook the fact that an ‘intended meaning’ does not just lie in the writer and so extrinsic to the text, but it is ‘precisely the text’s main intrinsic determinant’ (Realism, 20). It might have been more appropriate to point to the ambiguity of references to ‘the meaning’ of a given text: if one takes a text like Luke 13.29 par., ‘Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God’ (NRSV), then it seems at first sight reasonably clear what the text in itself is saying: ‘people’ (Matthew: ‘many’) will come from all directions and eat in God’s kingdom. But is the exclusion of the Jews implicit in the intention of the speaker, as is suggested when Matthew adds ‘while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown out …’ 151

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guishes between the theory and philosophy of history on the one hand and its practice on the other) still believe that language refers to reality. That is too loosely formulated. Language has many functions and not just a referential function; it may, for instance, be performative or evocative. Moreover, when Dunn expands on this point by saying that ‘texts are still viewed as vehicles for communication of consciously held ideas’ (116), is that the same as referring to reality? Historians, believing that texts are usually meant to communicate something, may well hope they may impart information about reality as their authors perceived it or wanted their readers to perceive it.

Furthermore, Dunn argues, a historical text is not ‘autonomous’ in that it draws on the wider linguistic usage of its time and refers to characters and customs not explained in the text itself. It is true that one might claim to make sense of a text without referring to such information, but unquestionably the sense that one makes of a text while using to the full all the philological and background information that one can lay one’s hands on can claim more right to be heard, in that it more obviously respects the text for what it is and for what it was meant to be. The temporal gap between the composition of a text and today is not an empty one, but is filled with the ‘Wirkungsgeschichte’ of that text (assuming that the text has been known during all that time and has not been newly discovered); it is, accordingly, a gap that, so far from having to be overcome, enables understanding: the tradition that bridges that gap is part of us and enables us to understand. Again, that needs to be qualified, for it could be claimed that in some cases that tradition might be a hindrance to understanding. It was claimed, for instance, by Krister Stendahl, (Matt 8.12; Luke 13.30 is more circumspect: ‘some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last’)? Or could the scattered race of the Jews be meant? And does the text ‘mean’ that the later gentile mission or at least the admittance of gentiles into the later Christian community (on that distinction see Wedderburn, History, 211–12 n. 39) is legitimate? One could argue whether Matt 8.12 or Luke 13.30 or neither of them conveyed Jesus’ intended meaning (if he indeed spoke these words), but it seems to me unlikely that the status of gentiles in a future community was a question that arose in Jesus’ mind. A great many utterances (and not only those of Jesus) leave it open what exactly was originally intended; in some cases a knowledge of the context of an utterance may help to throw light on the intended meaning. It is another matter when one seeks to assess the ‘meaning’, in the sense of the ‘significance’, of an utterance in the context of developments that go beyond the time and place of the original utterance (cf. Meyer, Realism, 20, appealing to E. D. Hirsch’s distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’, in which the former term refers to what was originally intended and the latter to ‘new, superadded senses’; later, however, he criticizes Hirsch for failing ‘to differentiate consistently between the intention of the author as in the author and extrinsic to the text and the intention of the author as intrinsic to, or encoded in, or expressed by the text’; to avoid criticism he should have ‘defined the object of interpretation as the sense that the author both intended and managed to encode or express in the text’: 36, 40; cf. Hirsch, Validity, 211, in turn commenting on Frege; Hirsch’s earlier comments on the ‘intentional fallacy’ and the widespread, but in his eyes mistaken, appeal to it are also relevant here: e.g 10–14).

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as Dunn knows only too well, that the tradition of the understanding of Paul’s writings had been dominated by Luther’s interpretation of Paul in such a way as to obscure the points that Paul was actually trying to make.153

Rather than simply the empathy between the reader and the text or its author that was so emphasized by romanticism, the hermeneutical process as Dunn sees it becomes ever more aware of the otherness of the text and yet at the same time of its effect on the self-identity of its interpreter. Reading a text means neither simply finding a completely objective meaning in it nor the reader’s imposing on it a completely subjective one. Here Dunn argues that the ‘historical Jesus’ in the sense of the Jesus constructed by historical research (and not Jesus as he actually was, although Dunn notes that that sense is commonly, but wrongly, read into the phrase) is not some figure back then in history whom we can use to criticize the portrayal of Jesus in the Synoptic tradition. Kähler was right to insist that it is illusory to suppose that we can reconstruct an earthly Jesus from the gospel traditions who is significantly different from the Jesus of the gospels. It is illusory to suppose that one can see through the faith perspective of the New Testament accounts to find a Jesus who did not inspire faith or who inspired faith in a different way. The only Jesus whom we find in the gospels’ picture is the Jesus who inspired that picture. (Or would we not be better advised to speak of ‘pictures’, particularly if the Fourth Gospel is taken into account?) Yet, if it is possible and legitimate for the historian to attempt to go ‘behind’ the texts, as I have argued, to investigate that to which they ostensibly bear witness, then we are not limited to simply accepting the gospels’ pictures of Jesus as they stand. If we are ready to allow that those pictures may have in various ways slanted, distorted or enhanced what in fact occurred, then surely we may legitimately infer that the earthly Jesus may have been at least somewhat different from any of the gospels’ portrayals of him, just as we may argue that John the Baptist, too, differed from the gospels’ portrayals of him as a witness to Jesus as the expected ‘coming one’. At this point it is worth recalling how Dunn has stressed the variety of faithresponses to Jesus.154 Yet, he insists, this is a variety of faith-responses that is contained within the ‘overall homogeneity of the Synoptic tradition’ (134). What is this ‘homogeneity’? Is it much more than the fact that Jesus’ followers had faith in him? (And even then the gospels also witness that others did not have faith and that the faith of Jesus’ disciples was at times gravely inadequate.) Here one must distinguish between the direction of the faith (it is faith ‘in Jesus’) and the reasons for having it; the former may be shared, but for various, differing reasons. Dunn is correct to stress that faith in Jesus goes back to the pre-Easter period, but at the same time the differences in the content of that faith before and 153 154

Cf., e.g., Dunn, ‘Perspective’, 185–6. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 73, 133; also Unity, 11–32, 226–31.

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after Easter must not be lost from sight. The pre-Easter faith of the disciples seemed to be broken with Jesus’ passion, but was refashioned by those events which they interpreted as meaning that God had raised him from the dead. What they now had was not just their old faith restored, but it had a new dimension, a new content, forced upon them by their belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead, with all the implications that such an event held both for the identity of the earthly Jesus before and for the identity of the risen Jesus now. Both before and after Easter, however, there were different responses to Jesus. Some rejected him outright, some wavered, others believed but in different ways and with different estimations and interpretations of Jesus’ person. Those differing estimations and interpretations of Jesus have left their mark on the New Testament texts.155 It is, therefore, with considerable perplexity and misgiving that I read of the ‘homogeneity of the Gospel tradition’. For, in the same year in which Jesus Remembered appeared, the Jewish historian Geza Vermes identified three questions to which the Jesus traditions of the gospels seem to give differing and, in Vermes’ eyes, incompatible answers: (1) was Jesus’ message directed at Jews only or meant to benefit the non-Jewish world also? (2) Did Jesus expect the rule of God to be established in his lifetime or shortly afterwards, as he returned in glory, or in some distant future? (3) Did he clearly predict his sufferings and death or did the events of his passion take his disciples by surprise?156 It is true that some of these alternatives may not in fact be mutually exclusive, although it would be methodologically wrong to presuppose or to demand that they must be reconcilable with one another. It is indisputable, however, that these questions point to considerable tensions in the various gospel traditions, and one may readily identify others, such as those between a Jesus who fully endorsed the Jewish law and one who sat loose to it or even criticized it, or between a Jesus who proclaimed peace and one who was prepared to resort to, and sanction, violence to a greater or lesser extent. One cannot simply assume that all these varying traditions belong to a single ‘homogeneous’ whole. The point here is that these very tensions in the traditions and in the picture of Jesus that they paint compel the historian to try to push behind them and to ask whether all these elements are attributable to Jesus himself. It may well be that there is a choice to be made, and that one cannot be content with an ‘all or nothing’ approach that bars the way to probing behind the sources and asking which traditions more truly reflect the historical reality that purportedly lies behind them. To deny the legitimacy of this question seems to me to reflect an impossible understanding of the nature of the traditions and to pay homage to a 155 Cf. Schröter’s critique of Dunn in ‘Der erinnerte Jesus’, 51–2, as well as Dunn’s rebuttal of the charge in ‘Remembering Jesus’, 56–7. 156 Vermes, Gospel, 376.

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thoroughly dubious epistemology, and it hard to believe that Dunn in fact wants to follow that particular path. For. as Holmberg rightly notes,157 Dunn obviously believes that we are looking for the remembered Jesus ‘through the Jesus tradition’,158 but that obviously raises the question how far those memories correspond to a past reality, and that will be a question that will exercise us in chapter 6.

1.5. D. L. Denton Donald Denton does not attempt to write an account of Jesus’ life; the main part of his study is an analysis of the historiography and hermeneutics found in, or presupposed by, the works of J. Dominic Crossan and Ben F. Meyer, but on the basis of the deficiencies and weaknesses that he has detected in the contributions of both of these he proceeds to offer some suggestions for refinement and improvement. Whereas Crossan in his The Historical Jesus had ostensibly begun with an objective analysis of the material offered by the gospels, both canonical and extracanonical, Denton rightly sees that such a sifting is always guided by certain questions, and these arise in turn out of the perspective from which a scholar approaches the material.159 (Various terms are used to designate this perspective, such as ‘paradigms’ or ‘horizons’, but Bultmann’s ‘pre-understanding’ perhaps serves as well as any.)160 Yet Meyer, too, seems to argue for an initial sifting of the material on the basis of which a hypothesis or hypotheses are proposed and then verified (or falsified), and Dunn’s work (although Denton wrote without knowledge of Dunn’s works published after 2000) also approaches the material by initially identifying ‘any feature which is characteristic of and relatively distinctive within the Jesus tradition’, regarding this as ‘likely to go back to Jesus, that is, to reflect the original impact of Jesus on several of his first disciples’.161 In each case, a first appraisal of the available material should enable the historian to propose a hypothesis or hypotheses that can then be tested by a further scrutiny of the 157

Holmberg, ‘Questions’, 448. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 332. 159 Rightly he criticizes Crossan for treating each unit of tradition in isolation and thus neglecting the context of the larger narratives within which they now find themselves. 160 Denton himself seems to incline towards ‘paradigms’, as does Allison, Jesus, 33–9, who appeals to the usage of Thomas Kuhn in his analysis of scientific methods, whereas William Herzog uses ‘gestalt’ to speak of one’s impression of Jesus: Jesus, 1, 23–4 (in the sense of ‘whole image’), 30, etc. (although he also uses ‘paradigms’ at times, e.g. on pp. 35, 44–5). Denton also speaks of ‘horizons’ (e.g. Historiography, 164), thus echoing the usage of Gadamer. Meyer (e.g. Aims, 97) is happy to follow Bultmann in talking of the scholar or exegete’s ‘pre-understanding’. 161 Dunn, ‘Third Quest’, 46. 158

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material offered as evidence. That leads Denton to reaffirm a point that he had made apropos of Crossan’s handling of the Jesus traditions: distinguishing between ‘testimony’ and ‘evidence’, he argues that ‘data are not simply true or false testimony, but are first of all evidence’ (160). The ‘first of all’ is questionable here, but it is true that, when a historian sifts the available material, she or he has an eye on its suitability as evidence for or against a certain thesis.162 Denton faults approaches that ‘apparently assume that the patterns and themes [sought by the historian] will simply present themselves in the initial examination [of the data], apart from a context of their own’ (164). That could, he feels, lead to a dangerously circular argument, for, if Allison is right in saying that data can be made to fit any paradigm and that one must therefore choose the right paradigm in order to construe the data correctly, then one needs a way of evaluating the paradigms. Accordingly, Denton pleads for starting with the ‘context’ of the sources, a starting-point that has the advantage of being a ‘public’ one. Here he at first seems to side with Bruce Chilton, who seeks no ‘primitive’, ‘historical’ or ‘authentic’ ‘or otherwise real Jesus apart from what the texts promulgate’. The ‘literary reference of the Gospels must be the point of departure for critical reflection’, so that ‘any historical reading of the Gospels must take account of the “literarily historical” Jesus as he is understood and presented in the sources’; implicitly the original ‘quest’ is criticized for assuming ‘that Jesus was knowable apart from or behind the sources’.163 In many ways this seems to be similar to Schröter’s resistance to going ‘behind’ the texts, but again this seems to be undermined by what follows. For the historian must ascertain ‘what must be presupposed of Jesus in order to explain the shape of a given text’, inferring ‘a description of the historical Jesus that would have produced those sources’.164 (This all seems to leave out of account any other factors that may also have played a part in the production of the texts, such as the experiences or the beliefs of early Christian communities or of the evangelists.) At any rate, if we are concerned to infer what sort of Jesus produced these texts, then we are not content with the ‘literarily historical Jesus’, but push back towards a figure that is inferred to lie ‘behind’ them.165 In his ‘holistic’ approach, Denton therefore sets his face against an ‘atomistic’ handling of the ‘particulars’ or data; they are always examined within a particular context. By this ‘context’ he means the pre-understanding of the historian, so 162

The distinction between ‘testimony’ and ‘evidence’ is one that Denton more than once underlines by pointing out that historians are interested, not just in what texts expressly say, but also in what they can point to if one reads between the lines, as implications or corollaries of what is explicitly stated. 163 Chilton, ‘Assessing’, 16–17; cf. Denton, Historiography, 166. 164 So Denton’s summary of Chilton’s position (Historiography, 166). 165 At this point it is unclear how far Denton is prepared to make Chilton’s position his own. At least he summarizes Chilton’s position and his own as ‘beginning with the sources as the necessary initial context for understanding the data on Jesus, but not simply staying in the sources’ (Historiography, 166–7; cf. also 177).

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underlining the extent to which historians are indebted to the cultural and intellectual environment within which they find themselves.166 When, however, he switches his attention to that ‘context’ that is offered by the sources or the texts, then it is a matter of the ‘ultimate narrative context’, which is ‘that by which the agents of history themselves made sense of their actions’, in other words the narratives of the individuals as well as those of the group or groups to which they belonged (175–6). Yet now he is talking of the context of the sources and no longer of the context of the historian today, despite the fact that he had just referred to Wright’s talk of the world-views in which ‘all knowledge and perception take place’ as well as of the ‘stories’ attached to ‘facts’ (175). In other words, ‘context’ operates on more than one level: there is the context of the data, e.g. their literary context if they are statements contained in a text, and the context within which the actions of historical agents are to be understood, including their world-view, and the context within which our perception of the historical data and the historical accounts takes place, and Denton slides rather confusingly from the one to the other, talking rather loosely of ‘contextualism’. It is necessary to be clearer about which context we are speaking of on a given occasion, and at the end of his work Denton seems to realize this and to grant that there are different sorts or levels of ‘contexts’(187). For in addition to naming the three that I have just mentioned, the narrative context of the sources, the context of ‘the historical object’, and the context of the historian’s ‘horizons’, he even adds a fourth whose sense is not immediately clear, ‘the specifically narrative context of the object itself’, ‘that dimension of narrative intelligibility that we have seen explicated by narrative realism, the narrative that was inherent in the lived experience of the historical agents’. This last, rather perplexing ‘context’ seems to reflect the use that he had earlier made of David Carr’s theories of ‘narrative realism’.167 Just as narration is ‘not just telling, but telling from a superior point of view’, the point of view of the narrator whose experience is not limited to the present, but enjoys an ‘authoritative, retrospective point of view’, so in truth we also ‘experience the present and 166 It is misleading when Denton refers to the ‘contextual nature’ of the particulars or data (Historiography, 160, 163), for this would most naturally apply to the (e.g. literary) ‘context’ in which they are placed and this is indeed the ‘context’ that he later advocates as a starting-point (166–7), whereas in the earlier passage it is rather the ‘contextual nature’ of our perception of these data to which he is here referring. The former is, of course, also highly relevant, if, for instance, one finds material in a text that shows signs of being more or less tendentious. 167 Cf. D. Carr, Time and ‘Narrative’. His ‘narrative realism’ is contrasted with the ‘narrative anti-realism’ of such as Hayden White. Yet is it not a problem that a particular sequence of events may be fitted together and described in different narratives, acording to the perspectives not only of the various participants but also of later narrators and historians? The ‘narratives’ of both participants and later narrators are something ‘fitted onto’ the events and raise the question how good the ‘fit’ is in each case; for it may, for instance, be a one-sided or tendentious account.

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recall the past in anticipation of the future’, viewing ‘present events in terms of their relation to possible later events’. Thus Carr comes to speak of narrative as ‘a constitutive part of action’ and of the ‘actions and sufferings of life … as a process of telling ourselves stories, acting them out, or living them through’, and concludes that the ‘retrospective view of the narrator, with its capacity for seeing the whole in all its irony, is not in irreconcilable opposition to the agent’s view but is an extension and refinement of a viewpoint inherent in action itself’.168 Now it is true that there is here no ‘irreconcilable opposition’ and that there are indeed points of contact and of similarity between the narrator’s telling and the perspective of historical agents as they look back on the past and look forward to the future and often, if not always, take past and future into account in their actions in the present. (In other words, it is not quite true that those ‘experiencing the events are confined to the present’, as Denton had just said.) Yet, despite all this similarity, it seems to be a step further when one then talks of the ‘narrativity of lived experience’ as Denton does.169 And as far as one wants to speak of ‘contexts’, would it not be equally intelligible to refer to the ‘context of lived experience’, granting that this experience has certain analogies with the structures of narrative and can thus be appropriately recounted in narrative? Nonetheless, Denton’s stress on the ‘reciprocity’ of the historian and the object of historical research and on the ‘to and fro’ between the present dimension and the past is to be welcomed. The analogies between this and the ‘hermeneutical circle’ or indeed ‘spiral’ experienced by the exegete in encounter with texts should be evident:170 one comes to a given text with a certain ‘pre-understanding’ and with an interest and questions arising out of that ‘pre-understanding’, and the text may provide answers that confirm the ‘pre-understanding’ and perhaps also enhance it or call it in question. In the latter case, the ‘pre-understanding’ needs to be revised and one then needs to turn again afresh to the text with revised questions. In the case of historical questions it is not very different. Nor is it any different with the relation between the part and the whole, whether that whole is a ‘world-view’ or, more modestly, the history of a particular period or, in the case of a text, the contents of a larger corpus. One starts with a preliminary grasp of the whole and brings it into relation with the part, the individual text or the individual event, and in the light of that one’s view of the whole is either confirmed and perhaps enlarged or it is called in question.

168 169 170

Denton, Historiography, 172 (his italics), quoting from D. Carr, ‘Narrative’, 126. Denton, Historiography, 174 and subsequently. Cf., e.g., § 3.1 below on Bultmann.

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1.6. S. McKnight The brief introduction to McKnight’s study begins with a description of various ‘postmodernist’ approaches to historiography, drawing above all on the work of Keith Jenkins, Hayden White and F. R. Ankersmit; as examples of ‘modernist’ approaches he cites E. H. Carr and G. R. Elton. ‘What is history?’ he then asks, although his answers suggest that he is in fact talking about ‘historiography’. For his first point is that ‘history begins with “facts” that survive from the past as evidence.’171 These are not found in a ‘raw’ state but embedded in a ‘contingent world’.172 Through interaction with the data the historian comes to conclusions that are ‘approximate, probabilistic [sic], and contingent’, ‘shaped by the interaction of Object and the Subject’s story’.173 Later he speaks of this interaction as ‘a critical interaction with the evidence and scholarship so that a measure of objectivity is achieved’ (34). In the second place, these facts emerge 'from the waters of context and contingency and intention’ (22), over against Jenkins’ and other postmodernists’ claim that facts are ‘discrete’ in the sense of being ‘unrelated, uninterpreted, and meaningless in and of themselves’, only given a meaning from outside themselves, ‘from theory’.174 Thirdly, ‘at the level of contextualizing the existential facts, … meaning-making begins to take place’.175 He speaks, therefore, of three ‘steps’ that the historian must take, but hastens to add that they are not successive, but simultaneous, so that it would be more appropriate to speak of three ‘aspects’ or ‘dimensions’. In the first place there is the discovery of the facts, then criticism of them, which evidently consists above all in deciding whether they really are facts at all, and then, thirdly, ‘meaning-making’ as the historian interprets ‘what he or she judges to be critically reliable fact in its context and for the author’s own intention’. The last phrase here is somewhat puzzling, but McKnight seems to be thinking of the narrative that the historian wishes to tell, and has decided to tell, in order to give meaning to the facts. For that will involve decisions as to the choice of which facts are relevant and the or-

171 S. McKnight, Jesus, 20. Or does historiography rather begin with texts from the past and other witnesses to the past? Or is what the texts say included in the facts? But then there are two levels of ‘facts’ to be distinguished from one another, what the texts and other sources say, and that to which they refer or of which they tell. 172 Quoting Appleby/Hunt/Jacob, Telling, 250. 173 S. McKnight, Jesus, 21 (the capitals are his choice). Does ‘probabilistic’ simply mean ‘probable’? 174 S. McKnight, Jesus, 9–10, quoting Jenkins, On ‘What Is History?’ From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London: Routledge, 1995) 82–3. 175 S. McKnight, Jesus, 23. He has a tendency to talk of ‘existential’ facts, but these seem in fact to be ones that are ‘existent’ as his talk of ‘nonexistential’ facts (23) indicates: these become ‘nonexistential’ in the hands of historical sceptics; the latter dispute whether they are facts, i.e. they become non-facts or nonexistent.

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der in which they will be told, as well as the exercise of imagination.176 He stresses that it is the historian, not the fact, that ‘makes meaning through what some classic historians call interconnectedness’.177 That is correct, although it should be added that the historian in question may belong to the past or the present. For often, indeed in the majority of cases, a writer in the past, whose work is a source for the contemporary historian, will already have given some meaning to the facts through the narrative in the past that tells of them, and that will be particularly true of the past narratives that tell of Jesus. At this point, it should be emphasized that the modern historian may choose to set the facts in a very different narrative, and thus to give them a very different meaning. Unlike Dunn, but nearer to the position of Wright, with whom he acknowledges a considerable affinity (29), McKnight argues for what in effect is a ‘grand narrative’, ‘a macro-scheme of where things started and where they are ultimately going’ (33). Christian historiography wiil therefore ‘need to carve its own path’, a path different to those of both ‘postmodernist’ and ‘modern’ historiography.178 A last, and very important, point in this discussion is McKnight’s posing of the question of truth. He asks whether there may be a meaning inherent in a fact. For some ‘postmodernists’ ‘no historical narrative is true in the sense of final’, but McKnight retorts that no ‘postmodernist’ would be prepared to see ‘his or her narrative … as nothing more than ideology and language’ (25). Yet from the context it is clear that McKnight is here talking about the truth of the methods used rather than the truth of the narratives produced by the methods, and it seems questionable whether ‘truth’ is really applicable to methods. One can ask about their appropriateness or their reliability or their fruitfulness, but that is not the same as their ‘truth’, although a criterion for assessing the appropriateness or reliability or fruitfulness of a method may well be one’s judgement as to how far it gives one access to the truth. Furthermore, it is questionable whether it is only ‘postmodernists’ that would assert that ‘no historical narrative is true in the sense of final’; for historical narratives, whether ancient or modern, are and remain open to revision, be it through the discovery of new facts or the incorporation of different ones or the application of new methods or strategies. Thus, when McKnight concludes that 176

S. McKnight, Jesus, 24–5. If this interpretation of the ‘intention’ meant here is correct it is unfortunate that ‘author’ is used instead of ‘historian’, and more important for this purpose than the question whether a fact is ‘critically reliable’ is the decision whether it is relevant or salient. Many facts may be ‘critically reliable’, but are irrelevant for the particular story that a given historian wishes to tell. 177 S. McKnight, Jesus, 25. Or, put differently, the historian shows how certain facts are interconnected. 178 S. McKnight, Jesus, 33; ‘postmodernism’ renounces any such ‘grand narrative’ and the ‘modernist’ approach cannot share Christian teleology if it brackets out the ‘question of God’.

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In contrast to the postmodernist agenda, if facts are not simply discrete, if events have context, if the contingency of existential facts is not simply chaos, if humans have intentions in their actions and sayings – that is, in the existential facts for which there is a historical residue – then some narratives and meanings are more truthful than others (27, his italics),

it must again be asked whether ‘truthful’ is here the right word. Some narratives and meanings may be likelier than others, likelier to be true or to correspond or approximate to the truth, but that is a very different matter. There is undoubtedly a ‘truth’ to be sought on the level of what happened in the past and why, but our narratives and assessments of meaning can never be final, can at best be more or less likely accounts of that truth and meaning. And that is why McKnight himself acknowledges that the ‘narrative re-presentations’ of Jesus that are the fruit of historical research go ‘on and on’ (30). All these authors, then, attempt to explain the methodological presuppositions of their work with a thoroughness that has by no means always been the case, as we shall see. It is harder to decide where they fit within the general discussion of the nature of historiography, and in part that may be due to the role played by Christian faith in their thought and the added dimension therefore given to the historical work of at least some of them by the belief that in Jesus they are dealing with a historical person who is God incarnate; in other cases, this dimension is by no means so evident. If anything, Wright emphasizes his points of contact with the questions raised by the Enlightenment: if Christianity is committed to history, as he insists that it is, then it must meet the Enlightenment’s demand for the genuine historical reconstruction of actual events in the past, both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, but without succumbing to the further illusion that this historical work, any more than any historical work, can be either neutral or objective.179 This readiness, even eagerness, to come to terms with the Enlightenment’s programme would suggest that Wright is here more ‘modern’ than ‘postmodern’. Dunn, too, treats any ‘flight from history’ as to be avoided and, as we have seen, despite his sharing ‘postmodernism’s’ distaste for ‘grand narratives’, regards ‘postmodernism’ as one manifestation of this ‘flight’.180 But equally, too, both are keen to do justice to the interpretative role of the historian and thus to develop a historical hermeneutic in which that role is adequately taken into account, an aspect that is also prominent in Denton’s study. That is also true of McKnight’s work, but regrettably his account suffers too often from an unfortunate choice of terminology. Schröter’s approach is somewhat different, in that he seeks to set his work within the context of a particular German tradition of historiography and to 179

Wright, New Testament, 137. S. McKnight, Jesus, 5 n. 9, asks whether one may describe Dunn as being ‘of a postmodernist bent’, but thinks that he is probably more representative of a ‘chastened modernism … than consistently postmodern’. 180

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take account of contemporary hermeneutical and epistemological insights into the historian’s task. The debt to various trends within ‘postmodernism’ is clearer in his case, but the main problem lies rather in recognizing how the principles that he lays down are actually reflected in his handling of concrete historical problems. For it seems to be very much a case of ‘business as usual’, despite the gestures in the direction of the ‘linguistic turn’ and other manifestations of ‘postmodernism’. Similarly, Schüssler Fiorenza at times distances herself quite clearly from certain manifestations of the ‘postmodern’ while sharing much in common with at least one strand of ‘postmodern’ historiography. In other words, there seems to be at this point a basic uncertainty and hesitancy with regard to the epistemological basis of historical work. That basis is, however, important and it would be unfortunate if one were to embark on the study of the life of Jesus, or indeed of any other historical work, without reflecting on such problems. In the case of work on the life of Jesus the matter is perhaps complicated by the potential tensions between the implications of such historical research on the one hand and the traditions of Christian theology and christology as well as the expectations of Christian faith on the other. If ‘postmodern’ approaches can indeed be a form of a ‘flight from history’, to use Dunn’s phrase, then there would be a temptation to blunt the edge of the challenges to theology and faith presented by historical research by casting doubt on the standing of the results of such research and relativizing their validity and status, a temptation to which some may well have succumbed as we shall see. That danger, as well as the many problems involved in actually carrying out such research, justify a fresh look at the assumptions and the methods that are appropriate to such research. On the other hand, one should perhaps not expect to find much in the way of ‘postmodern’ attempts to carry out historical research into the life of Jesus. For, quite apart from the question of the motivation to engage in such research and the expectations as to its results, a thoroughgoing ‘postmodernist’ might well find himself or herself hamstrung in practice by a whole galaxy of methodological inhibitions stemming from a philosophy of history or rather historiography, prevented in principle from getting beyond the situation of the historian or beyond the texts to anything or anyone lying beyond.

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2. The Historiography of the ‘Old Quest’ 2.1. Schweitzer and Historical Research Although the nineteenth century saw a steady stream of accounts of the life of Jesus of various kinds,1 at least in theological circles more attention has been paid to the motives which provoked such a flood of works than to the understanding of history and of historical investigation which undergirded them and which their authors presupposed.2 And perhaps that was also true of much of the historical work in the nineteenth century if E. H. Carr is right in describing this as an ‘age of innocence’ in which ‘historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history’.3 Klaus Neumann points out that Gustav Droysen was here a notable exception with his exhaustive and explicit reflections on historical methods: most of his fellow historians failed to see how problematic and speculative their assumptions were.4 In so far as the ‘liberal’ lives of Jesus are to be located within 1 Bernejo Rubio, ‘Fiction’, 217–23, rightly emphasizes how varied the depictions of Jesus were that were produced in this period, and it would seem to follow that the understandings of historiography and the historical discipline implicit in them are correspondingly varied. 2 In this respect the situation with regard to the study of the Book of Acts may be comparable. For Daniel Marguerat remarks that two scholars, Ferdinand Christian Baur and Franz Overbeck, though the works dealing with Acts to which Marguerat refers were widely separated in time (the former’s Über den Ursprung des Episcopats in der christlichen Kirche of 1838 and the latter’s Christentum und Kultur which appeared posthumously in 1919), nevertheless had this in common, that neither appealed to any particular philosophy of history, a silence which he regards as symptomatic; for both historical truth meant simply the recording of the bruta facta of the past (Histoire, 16–17). (Overbeck had already, in his inaugural lecture in Basel in 1870, spoken of his pursuit of ‘a purely historical investigation – that is, an investigation that rests on no other suppositions than those of general historical science (die allgemeine historische Wissenschaft)’: Kümmel, New Testament, 200.) If Marguerat’s verdict were true of Baur’s work in 1838, it is nevertheless to be noted that Jens Schröter singles out Baur, along with the work of Emmanuel Hirsch at a later point of time, as exceptions to the general neglect of a hermeneutics of history in New Testament scholarship (‘Überlegungen’, 198; cf. also Köpf, ‘Baur’, esp. 445, 452–9; Moltmann, Theology, 249–51.) Moreover we shall see below that David Friedrich Strauss’s work reveals certain reflections upon a philosophy of history. 3 Carr, What Is History?, 14. 4 Neumann, Geburt, 81–2.

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the romantic movement, as Dunn notes,5 we should perhaps not expect to find in them many traces of self-analysis and self-criticism in the form of a scrutiny of their epistemological foundations. In his analysis of his predecessors’ work, Albert Schweitzer, whose account and analysis of these studies is to this day unsurpassed, remarked that these studies arose, not out of pure historical interest, but because the Jesus of history was viewed as a likely ally against the tyranny of dogma.6 Schweitzer himself was not altogether unaware of such motives, judging by his criticism of Schleiermacher for being in bondage to his dogmatic assumptions and for seeking, not the ‘historical Jesus’ but the Jesus Christ of his own theological system, subordinating empirical facts to his dialectical apparatus.7 Nevertheless Schweitzer remained thoroughly sceptical as to historical research’s potential as a means of renewing or revitalizing Christianity and treated true religion as something independent of history.8 Or else, he also notes, those studying the life of Jesus were motivated by hate, as in the case of Hermann Samuel Reimarus or David Friedrich Strauss, a hate not so much of the person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which 5

Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 33. Schweitzer, Geschichte, 47=Quest, 4; cf. Keck, Future, 18. Herzog, Jesus, 29, draws a parallel between ‘the polemical intent of many of the productions of the first quest’ and the motivations of the North American Jesus Seminar. Dahl’s formulation is more positive: common to all liberal lives of Jesus was the conviction that they had in the historical Jesus an ally in their search for a modern theology and a liberal Christianity (‘Problem’, 142=85), although he also describes the research into the life of Jesus in the nineteenth century as ‘in the main a gigantic attempt to get free from the christological dogma of the Church, but at the same time to maintain the uniquely religious significance of Jesus’ (140=83). Georgi, ‘Interest’, 72–3, puts this in a wider context: for both Pietism and the Enlightenment ‘history became the magic wand of bourgeois consciousness and developed a critical stance towards such enslaving forces of inauthentic history by which the individual was kept the object of history.’ He adds, however, that not only the individual was affected, in that individuals became the acting subjects of history, but this was also accompanied by a ‘concern for change, not just of the individual or the group but also of social conditions and the world’. That the motivation to which Schweitzer draws attention did not end with the period that he himself surveyed is evidenced by W. A. Meeks’ testimony that ‘for most of us, as for our intellectual forebears, the science of history was a weapon of liberation’ – not just from dogma, but also from ‘lazy credulity, … venomous prejudices, … authoritarian structures’ (‘Why Study the NT?’, 157); cf. Braun, ‘“Wir haben doch den amerikanischen Jesus”’, 33; also Arnal, Jesus, 60; Roloff, ‘Suche’, 563–4 (on Adolf Holl). 7 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 101–2=Quest, 62–3. Cf. Grässer, Albert Schweitzer, 39; yet he also notes (57) that Schweitzer’s early work on the Lord’s Supper (1901) let a systematic construction determine his historical reconstruction. 8 Cf., e.g., Schweit zer, Geschichte, 513, 519, 621=Quest, 397. Schröter, ‘Wissenschaft’, 861, comments on Schweitzer and Adolf von Harnack that neither spent time reflecting on the character of historical knowledge. Grässer, Albert Schweitzer, 43, noting Schweitzer’s adherence to a historicism as yet untroubled by any crisis, adds (n. 24) that he had not reflected upon claims to objectivity, the social environment of historiography and its dependence on the historian’s values, and adds: ‘Schweitzer als Historiker wäre eine kritische Studie wert.’ The observations in this part of the chapter make no pretence of filling this gap. 6

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dogma had surrounded him, or they were motivated by love, although those motivated by the latter ‘found it a cruel task to be honest’.9 It is true that Schweitzer himself, who also concluded his account of Jesus research with his own outline of a life of Jesus, doubted whether the ordinary standards of historical science were applicable in the case of research into the life of Jesus, and suggested that this research was in fact required to develop its own methods, above all those of historical experimentation rather than historical research (7).10 Yet even the critique of others’ attempts at historical work as well as, of course, the praise of those aspects of others’ work which please the critic, tell us, by implication, something of the concept of historiography of the critic, and this is also true of Schweitzer’s work. Sometimes, it is true, Schweitzer’s criticisms as well as his praise are more aesthetic in nature: he can measure the literary productions of those scholars whose works he reviews against his own brilliant and trenchant style with its telling and memorable imagery and at times find them gravely wanting.11 Or else he can complain of the questionable taste shown by a writer such as Ernest Renan.12 Other features on which he comments, however, bear more directly on the methods of historical enquiry and the presentation of its results: (1) It is, for instance, an important mark of a satisfactory historical account that it recognizes and shows the connections between events.13 In this respect he finds the work of Paulus wanting and praises that of Weisse.14 And the former, he complains, preserves his own integrity at the expense of that of the characters in his story.15 For it is apparent that for Schweitzer at least an important part of such a connectedness lies in being able to show the development, particularly the psychological development, of the characters in the story, 16 although he was also 9 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 49=Quest, 5. Meyer, too, writes of deism’s ‘smouldering and obsessive hatred for revealed religion, with its priests and mysteries, its pomps and superstitions’ (Aims, 29). 10 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 49–50=Quest, 6–7. (It may be going too far to claim, as William Herzog, Jesus, 7, does, that Schweitzer wrote the ‘biography’ that he did at the close of his work so as to ‘shatter all future biographies’; it may have been easier for Herzog to claim this because of his adherence to a rigid scheme of ‘old quest – no quest – new quest – third quest’, despite his mention of ‘business as usual’, at least in England [11]; but cf. ch. 4 n. 1 below. Yet, even if Schweitzer had succeeded in silencing all attempts to carry on the quest, does it necessarily follow that he deliberately set out to do so?). 11 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 94=Quest, 55, relating to Paulus. 12 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 208=Quest, 182. 13 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 87, 192=Quest, 47, 162. 14 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 90, 156=Quest, 50, 122. 15 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 95=Quest, 57. 16 So he finds Schleiermacher wanting in his neglect of ‘natural psychology’ (Schweitzer, Geschichte, 101=Quest, 62). Yet, in turn, he also finds the application of ‘natural psychology’ wanting, particularly when it leads to its practitioners sitting loose to the text, and calls instead for a ‘historical psychology’ that must first be deduced from certain basic historical assumptions (Grundvoraussetzungen), although these are not spelled out here

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fully alert to the possibility of (in his view) false pictures of that development.17 The ability to show such a development was a positive point in Schweitzer’s assessment of Hase,18 and the lack of it a grave weakness in Renan’s in his opinion, for the latter’s study reveals no historical plan or view of Jesus’ development, in particular with regard to his eschatological expectations.19 It was a unifying structure that he himself found in Jesus’ secret messianic consciousness.20 (2) A further point, and one in which Schweitzer foreshadows one of the emphases of the so-called ‘third quest’ of the historical Jesus, as well as picking up a concern of Hermann Samuel Reimarus,21 is his concern that a worthwhile account of Jesus’ life should set him in relation to the Judaism of that time, and accordingly he criticizes Weisse for placing too much emphasis on Jesus’ ‘originality’.22 For it is one of the most basic requirements of any scholarly approach that the accounts of Jesus’ life in the Gospels should be related to that Jewish world of Jesus.23 And, lastly, (3) he criticized the tendency of each epoch of theological research to read its own theological ideas into its portrayals of Jesus, bringing him to life, but at the cost of creating him in its own image,24 a tendency from which contemporary research is still not free, if some of the charges brought against the (cf. Geschichte, 240, 243–4, 346, 357, 387=Quest, 217, 220–1, 298, 309, 334). It is to be noted that Schweitzer himself later brought out a study of Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu at the conclusion of his medical studies (cf. Grässer, Albert Schweitzer, 139–54). 17 Cf. Schweit zer, Geschichte, 229=Quest, 204. But cf. Grässer’s comments on Schweitzer’s earlier Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis (Albert Schweitzer, 71, 76). 18 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 100=Quest, 61. 19 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 210, 217=Quest, 183, 191 (for Reimarus cf. 59=16). 20 E.g. Schweit zer, Geschichte, 448=Quest, 393 (‘Every Life of Jesus remains therefore a reconstruction on the basis of a more or less accurate insight into the nature of the dynamic self-consciousness of Jesus which created the history’). 21 Bernejo Rubio, ‘Fiction’, 218, gives a number of instances where it would be ‘simply ridiculous’ to treat Reimarus’ work as ‘for the most part old-fashioned’. 22 Schweit zer, Ge schichte, 170, 192=Quest, 136, 162. This criticism may be compared with the ‘third quest’s’ protest at the use of the criterion of dissimilarity to produce a Jesus divorced from contemporary Judaism. 23 Cf., e.g., Schweit zer, Geschichte, 554. 24 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 48=Quest, 4. So, for instance, the liberal lives of Jesus written in the 1860s present a picture that is determined from the outset by the intellectual atmosphere and religious horizons of the time (Geschichte, 226=Quest, 200), and just as ‘formerly in Renan the romantic spirit created the personality of Jesus in its own image, so at the present day the Germanic spirit is making a Jesus after its own likeness’ (Quest, 307=Geschichte, 356; cf. 311, 398–9=359, 622) – a charge that finds an echo in George Tyrrell’s much-quoted reference to Harnack as seeing a Christ who ‘is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well’ (Christianity, 44); Tyrrell refers just before to ‘Johannes Weiss and his followers’ who had been ‘forced back, very unwillingly in most cases, to the eschatological and apocalyptic interpretation of the Gospel’ (43), but not explicitly to Schweitzer’s survey that had first appeared three years earlier. Cf. also Kähler, Jesus, 57; Wernle, Quellen, 4.

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picture of Jesus emanating from the North American Jesus Seminar are at all valid.25 Those who defend Jesus’ historicity must, Schweitzer warns them, be prepared to find that they are left with a Jesus who differs from their expectations.26 That was, however, a danger and a criticism that Schweitzer himself sought to avoid, taking pains to stress the distance between the thought of Jesus and his world and our own.27 Again and again, and nowhere more than in the concluding section of the various versions of his work, he stresses the otherness and strangeness of the Jesus who lived then in Galilee and who is not to be separated from his own time and its concepts,28 and warns against attempting to modernize him.29 That Jesus is the basis neither of our religion nor of our ethics.30 For Schweitzer stresses that historical research, while able to offer historical explanations, was unable to mediate between past and present. Historical knowledge may be able to reconcile past and present and to some extent interpret the past in terms of the present, but it cannot contribute to the fashioning of the present – a view in marked contrast to the hopes and aspirations of historians in antiquity, who saw a moral value and purpose for their readers in the present in their writing of history.31 Erich Grässer refers here to the paradox of Schweitzer’s thought 25

So, for instance, L. T. Johnson finds in Marcus Borg’s account of Jesus ‘the mirror reflection of Borg’s own social location in the liberal academy’ (Jesus, 43), and Paul Barnett comments that ‘The Jesus of the “third questers” [usually a considerably wider group than the members of the Jesus Seminar is so designated] … often looks remarkably like the scholars who write about him: postmodern, ideologically reformist and eminently reasonable’ (Jesus, 17). 26 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 515. 27 Cf., too, Strauss, Life, 39–40. This finds an echo in Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 477. 28 Cf., e.g., Schweit zer, Geschichte, 516, 519. 29 Cf. Schweit zer, Ge schichte, 620, 625, and Quest, 396–7. See the discussion of this hermeneutical problem in Grässer, Albert Schweitzer, 79–88. Schröter, Jesus, 15, while noting Schweitzer’s stress on the otherness of Jesus, also points out that every reconstruction of the past is undertaken from the perspective of the present. 30 Cf. esp. Schweit zer, Geschichte, 588. In attempting to say, then, what relevance Jesus has for us he spoke in earlier versions of his work of Jesus’ spirit (e.g. Quest, 399–400; cf. also Life, 68) but then latterly more in terms of a distinction between Jesus’ world-view (or sometimes Schweitzer speaks rather of his ‘will’) and the concepts used to express it; the former and the impact of his personality should shape our world-view and awake in us the energies at work in his world-view (so esp. Geschichte, 624), even if we conceptualize this world-view very differently – whereas he expected a supernatural consummation, we look for one that is the product of our moral endeavours (627). Or, as Schweitzer put it in My Life and Thought (67), Jesus’ religion of love was clothed then in ideas which we cannot appropriate and we must ‘re-clothe it in those of our modern world-view’. 31 Thuc. 1.22.4; Livy Praefatio 10 (cf. Timpe, ‘Erinnerung’, 303: ‘he was concerned with patriotic and moral edification, not with imparting factual information to his readers’, as well as his following comments on Roman historiography in general; also 315 and Wheeldon, ‘“Stories”’, esp. 38); Polybius 1.35.9 (Burrow, History, esp. 82, comments on Polybius’ role as a model for eighteenth-century writers who saw history as the basis for political science, though it is Sallust and Livy to whom Burrow ascribes a moral rather than a pragmatic purpose as found in Polybius; cf. also 169–70). On ‘exemplarische Sinnbildung’ in

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summed up as ‘Being freed from history by means of history’, for ‘Schweitzer wants to get to know the historical Jesus in order to be freed from him’. 32 Nevertheless Schweitzer looked forward to a time when, as he put it in the foreword to the second edition of his work, thought (Denken) and history would both come into their rightful place (whereas the latter alone had long exercised ‘religious spirits’) and seek to be reconciled with one another. That can only consist in our realization that we are at one and the same time inextricably related to the past and also free from it. It hardly needs to be said that, writing in his day and age, Schweitzer laid claim to objectivity in his methods.33 And yet he was alert to the reality that historical research could at best yield results that were more or less probable or improbable. That was particularly true in the case of the study of Jesus and earliest Christianity because of the absence of external sources. 34 He sought, at any rate, an account of Jesus’ life in which events were set in motion by purely historical forces, as opposed to those who reckoned with the intervention of the supernatural.35 Some, he felt, have here an instinctive feel for the real course of events, a historical intuition, and are ‘historians by the grace of God’, but at the same times warns against a mere erudition (Wissen) that, particularly in the case of theology, can all too often seek to obscure the insights of historical research.36 At least one aspect of that historical research into the life of Jesus which Schweitzer documented can, however, be traced to the then fashionable currents of thought. For amongst these was a conviction of the importance for all history of the influence of a number of formative personalities,37 and such a conviction historiography in general cf. Rüsen, Geschichte, 45–9. Schweitzer’s aspirations are, however, in line with the much-quoted intention of Leopold von Ranke to ‘zeigen wie es eigentlich gewesen’ in contrast to either sitting in judgement upon the past or providing instruction for the present (Geschichten, vii [ET Stern, Varieties, 57]). 32 Grässer, Albert Schweitzer, 243–4. 33 So in the foreword to the first ed. of 1906: Schweit zer, Geschichte, 26. But cf. Grässer’s comments in n. 8 above. 34 Schweit zer, Ge schichte, 512–13. At this point he seems to have felt it necessary to reckon with the at least theoretical possibility that one would have to abandon the historicity of Jesus, despite the trenchant criticisms which he had brought against those scholars who had ventured such an opinion. 35 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 200=Quest, 171. 36 Schweit zer, Quest, 25=Geschichte, 67. 37 Cf. Schröter, Jesus von Nazaret, 31–2. This conviction was, Hayden White notes, typical of ‘aristocratic’ historians in the analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville (Metahistory, esp. 201). It was a conviction that Schweitzer shared with Ernest Renan, however severely he criticizes him on other grounds (cf. Renan, Life, e.g. 24, 27). For the importance of this aspect for Hegel’s view of history cf. Ricoeur, Time 3, 197–8, 205. Georgi, ‘Interest’, 73, sees in the Enlightenment and in Pietism the development of the view of Jesus as a ‘charismatic personality’, transforming ‘the cultic and metaphysical elements of religion into the personal and private, essential for the liberated bourgeois individual in its stewardship efforts in a born-again, that is, enlightened life’.

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would very naturally motivate scholars to attempt to describe the life of such a formative individual as Jesus, the founding personality of the Christian movement. Such an emphasis on the role of human actors in history has its roots earlier in the nineteenth century where Thomas Carlyle could speak of history as ‘the essence of innumerable Biographies’, 38 but it is a further step to focus so much on the life of an exceptional and decisively important figure. So for Schweitzer Jesus, in the knowledge that he is the coming son of man, lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. … The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign.39

Even if this particularly memorable passage was to be omitted from later editions of the work the influence of that view of history which was shaped by nineteenth-century romanticism is clear in the earlier version. 40 Nor are all traces of The opposite extreme would be the eclipse of the person, the individual, that Iggers, ‘“Wende”’, 559, sees in the work of Foucault. At the same time he sees a resemblance to the traditional history of ideas as found in the work of historians such as Croce, Meinecke, Collingwood or Lovejoy, but at the same time a difference in that the emphasis is laid, not on great men and ideas that have influenced political thought, but on forms of political discourse. 38 Carlyle, ‘History’, 57 (Stern, Varieties, 93), quoted again two years later in ‘Biography’, 249 (cf. also his lectures ‘On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History’, quoted in Stern, 101, in which he holds that ‘Universal History , the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here’; see also 103). Gooch, History, 301–2, notes, however, that, whereas Carlyle had earlier poured scorn on the historian’s concentration on the lives of the prominent to the neglect of the contribution of the masses, ‘when he began to practise his trade it became the biography of great men rather than the record of the unnumbered and unnamed; and the narratives to which he devoted his middle and later life assumed precisely the character against which he had raised a warning finger in 1830.’ Gooch then comments that ‘Like the Calvinistic theologians he thought that the elect were few. Without the sheep-dog the flock would go astray’ (305). On the continued influence of this tradition cf. E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 39–49; also Crossley, ‘Writing’, 78 n. 42. However, Schweitzer himself (Life, 111) comments, rather abruptly: ‘Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship is not a profound book.’ And, on the other hand, it is clear that for Carlyle it is not only the biographies of the great figures of history that find a place in his narratives (cf. e.g. Burrow, History, 387, 504). 39 Schweit zer, Quest, 369. Grässer, Albert Schweitzer, 82 n. 12, points out that, contrary to the view of Jürgen Moltmann (Theology, 39), this ‘wheel’ does not symbolize ‘eternal recurrence of the same cycle’, but is to be understood eschatologically, 40 Cf. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 47 n. 101. A comparison of older and newer versions of the work reveals how much has been both omitted and added in the course of the various editions. It was perhaps the very active and aggressive imagery of the original version that caused Schweitzer to leave this passage out – Jesus travels now to Jerusalem prepared, more passively, to take upon himself vicariously the tribulation that must precede the coming of the end and God’s reign. Yet still we read of Jesus’ ‘imperious forcing [a gewaltsames

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this perspective omitted from the later versions of the work, nor from his autobiography published in 1931. In both earlier and later versions of his survey of research into the life of Jesus Schweitzer finds in the gospel narratives a confusion wrought by the ‘volcanic force of an incalculable personality’ or rather ‘selfawareness’, 41 a self-awareness that for Schweitzer was messianic: it is, he later states, ‘understandable that an exceptional religious personality (Persönlichkeit) of Davidic descent could regard himself as God’s elect one, who at the time of the great transformation [of the world] would be exalted to the status of the Messiah and Son of Man’.42 In the same vein is his statement in a brief postscript to his Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis that this work was meant ‘to show to the modern age and the modern dogmatics the figure of Jesus in its overwhelming, heroic stature’, to ‘revive the heroic in our Christianity and in our world-view’ (109; cf. also 97). Wayne Meeks charges Schweitzer with turning back at the end of his work to ‘a lonely [i.e. individualist?] romanticism’ as he speaks of Jesus coming to us ‘as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who did not know who he was’.43 This concentration on individual personalities was one that fell out of fashion amongst later schools of historical work such as the Annales-school,44 but nevertheless Keck finds in the portrayal of Jesus by Geza Vermes ‘the persistent legacy of early-nineteenth century romanticism which was fascinated by the heroic individual who stands out from his environment’.45 Yet it should also be noted that writing biographies of historical figures has by no means passed out of fashion, even among historians, despite Ricoeur’s judgement that ‘as the emphasis on political history wanes, it is the great anonymous forces of history that hold our attention, fascinate us, and make us uneasy, more than do the disastrous fates of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, and the involuntary sacrifice of their passion on the altar of history’.46 Nevertheless, biographies do not only serve the purposes of political history, but can even help to make those ‘great anonymous forces’ concretely tangible. Yet, before one leaps too quickly to criticize such a perspective as hopelessly outmoded historiography,47 it would be wise to reflect that a history of ChristiHineinzerren] of eschatology into history’, which at the same time destroys history (Schweit zer, Quest, 389=Ge schichte, 444; cf. Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis, 3). Watson, Text, 256, also speaks of ‘the late-romantic, post-Nietzschean but still idealist ethos that Schweitzer himself inhabited’. 41 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 403=Quest, 349. 42 Schweit zer, Geschichte, 407; cf. Beurteilung, 20–1. 43 Meeks, Christ, 38, quoting Schweit zer, Quest, 401 (=Geschichte, 630). 44 Cf. Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft, 45; Ricoeur, Time 1, esp. 103–4; Memory, 240. 45 Keck, Who Is Jesus?, 41. 46 Ricoeur, Time 3, 205. If this emphasis has waned, it has by no means died out entirely; cf. Evans, Defence, 162–4. 47 One of Bernejo Rubio’s criticisms of the talk of the ‘old quest’ is that ‘old’ may give the impression of meaning ‘outmoded’ and such a sweeping verdict on the work of this period of Jesus study would be misplaced (‘Fiction’ 221–2).

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anity may be compelled by its very nature to concentrate more on the personality of the founder of that religion than is the case in other fields of historical research. For what would Christianity look like without this focus on the man from Nazareth? It is true that, as we shall see, attempts have been made to concentrate on the message abstracted from the messenger or on the texts of the gospels while refusing to recognize the legitimacy of any attempt to go behind those texts, but such attempts, we will also see, are beset with difficulties. It may be legitimate to stress that the ‘object of history is of a societal order’ and that ‘History sees the thoughts, feelings and actions of individuals in the specific context of their social environment’, as Paul Ricoeur argues,48 but Maurice Mandelbaum, whom he then cites, seems to go a step further, a step whose legitimacy is more questionable: ‘It is only insofar as individuals are viewed with reference to the nature and changes of a society existing at a particular time and place that they are of interest to historians’.49 The individuals are often of interest, and it would be a mistake to suppose that this interest arises only because they represent or are related to the society in which they live, if that is in fact what Mandelbaum intends.50 The very fact that they are interesting in themselves may well prompt the historian to ask what it was in their society and their situation that led to them being so interesting. In the case of Jesus, it is undoubtedly both valid and valuable to investigate his life and teaching against the background of first-century Jewish society in order better to understand why his life took the form that it did and what the content of his teaching was, but Jesus himself remains the focus of, and the motivation for, this enquiry, even if that should not be seen as an invitation to an uncritical hagiography.51 Historical study of Jesus’ life has provided a considerable impulse for the study of Jewish society at that time, so that one might reverse Mandelbaum’s judgement and say that in this case, if not in 48

Ricoeur, Time 1, 195 (his italics). Mandelbaum, Anatomy, 10. He goes on (p. 11; cf. also 14) to repeat his characterization of‘the domain of historians’ as ‘the study of human activities in their societal context and with their societal implications’ (quoting from his earlier Problem, 9), although he grants that this laid ‘undue stress on the institutional structures of society’, and not enough on aspects of human culture that have a bearing on the organization of societies, but may also be studied in themselves. 50 Cf. also Mandelbaum, Anatomy, 13: he does not ‘wish to minimize the historian’s concern with individual human beings’, but only to insist that ‘in order for an individual to be of concern to a historian his character and actions must be viewed in relation to the place that he occupied and the role that he played in the life of a society or in relation to some facet of culture’ (he adds that this applies to groups as well); cf. also 111. 51 Nonetheless, Ricoeur warns that, because of the pluralism of peoples and civilizations, there can be no single historical figure who would be ‘the superhero of history’, any more than there could be a ‘single plot encompassing every possible plot’ (Time 1, 203). That should be a reminder that, if one should want to ascribe any such role to Jesus, then that is no historical judgement, but a theological. Yet that should hardly be a surprising conclusion. 49

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others, the society of the time is of interest to the historian because of its relevance for understanding the life of this individual. Naturally that focus on his life and the motivation for the study of that life becomes all the more pronounced the higher the christology that one espouses; if one holds a traditional view of the incarnation it is inevitable that the figure of Jesus of Nazareth should become the clue to the meaning of history, the point at which God, traditionally viewed as the Lord of history, enters that history. Thus, when Dieter Georgi remarks that the ‘view that Jesus had been a genius of sorts became the dominant view in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, not only in Germany but also in western Europe and North America, among both Protestants and Catholics’,52 then such a viewpoint is not simply to be dismissed as a cultural fad or the product of an out-dated historiography. And yet, as we shall see, part of the fascination of this figure may paradoxically lie in his subverting of the tendency to focus upon himself as a remarkable individual, in his pointing away from his own person as the focus of attention.53

2.2. Troeltsch and Historical Research What was presumably present and presupposed, yet seldom openly stated, in so much Jesus research of the nineteenth century comes to expression in a famous essay of Ernst Troeltsch, first published in 1900,54 that in many respects still remains programmatic for historical critical methods, at least among theologians (for one has to search hard to find a mention of his name in the methodological discussions of secular historians).55 Here he outlined three principles of all historical investigation: first, a historical criticism that leads only to results of a greater or lesser probability that always remain open to revision;56 secondly, a principle of analogy that presupposes the basic similarity of all historical events;57 and, thirdly, a correlation of all events so that they are never without in52

Georgi, ‘Interest’, 76; cf. also Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus, 32, 36. See § 8.5 below. 54 Coakley, Christ, 23 n. 31, notes that its publication was wrongly dated to 1898 in the Gesammelte Schriften ed. of Troeltsch’s works. 55 Troeltsch, ‘Methode’. Cf. the endorsement of Troeltsch’s views, with some modifications and reservations by Harvey, Historian, esp. 33–4. For secular historians it is rather the works of Leopold von Ranke (cf., e.g., Evans, Defence, 16–23) or Gustav Droysen (as we saw above, § 1.2, in the works of Jens Schröter) that are held up as major contributions to historiographical method. 56 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 69, abbreviates somewhat in describing this characteristic of historical method as ‘probability’; the above description is, at any rate, to be preferred to that which he quotes as ‘the habituation on principle to historical criticism’ (whatever that means!). 57 More specifically ‘psychological’ analogies (Troeltsch, Absolutheit, 3). 53

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fluence upon one another and are always interwoven with one another.58 These principles and this method he viewed as revolutionary for theological thought, just as much as for all our thinking, as revolutionary as the thinking of the natural sciences of his day was in comparison with antiquity and the Middle Ages. For they call into question every individual fact and relativize everything, not in the sense that all value-judgements are excluded or that a nihilistic scepticism must ensue,59 but in the sense that every moment and every object in history can only be conceived of in connection with others and ultimately with, and in the context of, the whole.60 It is true that the third principle could be interpreted as pressing historical enquiry into a materialist and deterministic mould comparable to that attributed to the natural sciences.61 E. H. Carr notes that it had gone out of fashion to speak of a historical ‘cause’, ‘partly owing to certain philosophical ambiguities …, and partly owing to its supposed association with determinism’; instead one spoke of ‘explanation’, ‘interpretation’, ‘the logic of the situation’, ‘the inner logic of events’, or rejected the causal approach in favour of the functional, asking how something happened rather than why. Carr himself, however, holds the search for causes to be the historian’s task,62 just as Bultmann considered it possible for 58 As Harvey, Historian, 15, notes, D. F. Strauss was aware that our ‘modern world … has attained a conviction, that all things are linked together by a chain of causes and effects, which suffers no interruption’ (Life, 78). 59 And yet, two years earlier, he had remarked to a group of theologians that ‘everything is tottering’ (‘alles wackelt’ – so Iggers, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 230). 60 Meyer remarks that almost all those involved in the ‘old quest’ viewed ‘reality as an impermeable system of finite causes’ (Aims, 57). 61 It is the view of Otto Gerhard Oexle (‘Archiv’, 101–3) that contemporary historians, unlike their predecessors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have given too little thought to the relation of their discipline to those of the natural sciences and that that has allowed the likes of Hayden White to measure historiography by the yardstick of, say, physics and find it wanting as a ‘science’. (Oexle adds the comment that, whereas German-speaking historians stress that their discipline is a ‘Wissenschaft’, ‘science’ in the English-speaking world is reserved for the natural sciences.) For the attempt to differentiate between the natural sciences and historiography cf., e.g., the historical account offered by Collingwood, Idea, esp. 126–33 on positivism, but also the repeated references to the issue in the following Part 4 of his work, or Evans, Defence, 45–74, as well as Jörn Rüsen’s careful attempt to differentiate between a ‘nomologisches Erklären’ modelled on the natural sciences and the sort of explanation that is characteristic of historical enquiry, although he recognizes a certain role for ‘nomologisches Erklären’ within the discipline, e.g. in connection with economic factors (Rekonstruktion, 22–47); on the distinction between ‘Erklären’ and ‘Verstehen’ and Dilthey’s use of it, as well as Max Weber’s critique of it cf., e.g., Baberowski, Sinn, 102, 132–3. 62 E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 82; that is a verdict that Evans, Defence, 135, qualifies: consequences are often more important than causes for the historian, and ‘“Why?” is far from being the only question historians ask’ (he gives as examples ‘Categorizing past societies or political systems or structures of belief’). At the same time he reserves far more serious criticism for ‘postmodern’ attacks on the idea of historical causation (and even on the idea of sequential time). Cf. also Appleby/Hunt/Jacob, Telling, 223; Zagorin, ‘Historiog-

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an objectifying view of history to look back and understand it as ‘a closed causal continuum’.63 At any rate it would be a mistake to suppose that the model of causation in the natural world was appropriate or adequate in a historical account, for, although natural events great and small have had their undoubted impact on the course of history and as such must enter into the reckoning of historians as they seek to account for the events that have taken place,64 they are by no means the only causative factors that have played a part. For, rightly, the role of human decisions and initiatives has been stressed, as also highly relevant for the course of events and for understanding it, or indeed as the decisive causal factor in history.65 Yet, as soon as one talks of the need to demonstrate ‘continuity’ in the raphy’, 199; also Bunzl, History, 57–77, on the problems of Foucault’s ostensible ‘acausality’ (‘ostensible’ because Bunzl argues that, while Foucault rejects a causal determinism through ‘laws of history’, he is more ‘benign’ in his attitude to causation in the sense that ‘particulars are amenable to an analysis in terms of their etiology’: 74). 63 Bultmann, ‘Problem’, 158. (He views this as essentially demythologizing in that this causal continuum excludes God’s intervention in history; but whereas the natural sciences simply eliminate this mythology, historiography must interpret it: 160.) On the other hand, in ‘Exegesis’, 147, he seems to accept that ‘Historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect.’ 64 One could reflect here on the impact of food shortages on the relations between the Jerusalem church and other churches (cf. Acts 11.28) or that of the illness that killed Herod Agrippa I on the history of the church (Acts 12.23). There is much to be said for John Macquarrie’s formulation: ‘a natural event is also a historical event only in so far as it touches on human existence’ (Scope, 82). On the other hand, is it legitimate to make ‘human actions’ the sole object of historical study (cf., e.g., Collingwood, Idea, 9)? (Jörn Rüsen, if I interpret him rightly, only goes so far as to make them the distinctive characteristic of ‘history’: cf., e.g., Rekonstruktion, 30– 1; that would not exclude other factors from also contributing to the course of events; cf., e.g. 135–6, on the ‘mediation’ between the roles of intentional human decisions and actions and of non-intentional factors that is involved in the process that Rüsen describes as ‘Dialektik’ as well as on the distortion that arises from a one-sided concentration on either the one or the other set of factors.) In the two cases mentioned above in this note the role of the human participants in these events is rather passive and they are described as at the mercy of events outside their control (cf. the critique in Bultmann, History, 136–7; he later argues that the dimension of ‘Widerfahrnisse’ must also be taken into account: 139–40). Equally, it seems forced to maintain, as Collingwood does (e.g. Idea, 200), that history is only interested in such factors via human agents’ perception of these factors. And are these considerations not somewhat modified by Collingwood’s contention (p. 213) that actions involve both the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of events? If the latter includes the spilling of Caesar’s blood could it not also include the illness to which Herod Agrippa succumbed, even if the work of human agents was more obviously involved in the former? (I leave aside the author of Acts’ reference to the act of blasphemous adulation on the part of Agrippa’s subjects that allegedly triggered his demise.) It is also to be noted that it is a definition of ‘history’ that a priori excludes consideration of divine actions (cf. Collingwood, Idea, 12, 14–16, who regards the resultant ‘theocratic history’ as only ‘quasi-historical’). 65 Cf. Ricoeur, Time 1, 111–20, on Karl Hempel’s attempt to make historical explanation conform to that of the natural sciences. Bultmann, in contrast, argues that human beings

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course of events, then the idea of a causal nexus lies near at hand.66 Perhaps Ricoeur’s talk of the need for the facts in historical accounts to ‘interlock’ with one another and for the work of different investigators to complement one another expresses this (inter-)connectedness without making the causation of the natural sciences into the model for historical work.67 Alternatively, J. L. Gaddis devotes a whole chapter to what he calls ‘the interdependency of variables’ and in doing so refers to historians’ having ‘a weblike sense of reality, in that we see everything as connected in some way to everything else’.68 Here, however, it seems necessary to distinguish again between ‘history’ and ‘historiography’, for Lucian Hölscher ends his Neue Annalistik with the claim that ‘history … appears as a kind of temporal fabric’, with historical events as the points at which the threads intersect, while the threads themselves are the historical pictures that we establish and recognize as connecting the events. In his view everything does not fit together with everything else but only those things fit together between which human beings establish historical relationships.69 But do we establish them or do we recognize them (for at first Hölscher claims both)? For if it is the latter then we do not create them, but they are there to be found or recognized by us, and belong to ‘history’ before they belong to ‘historiography’, are the true subject of history and that therefore ‘the causality of history is human will, which calls forth actions, which in turn set in motion historical events’, ‘the conscious and willing action of man’; yet he also recognizes that there are actions that are reactions to ‘accidental occurrences’, by which he presumably means events that are not the product of human decisions (‘Reply’, 263–4). But does one not also have to make more allowance for the unintended results of human actions? 66 So Rüsen, ‘Typen’, 530, speaks of historical accounts as depicting the temporal changes of the past as continuous sequences, and through this continuity comes a sense of their unity as history (cf. also 601). Cf. also the programme of Holmén, Jesus, with his ‘continuum approach’ with his continual posing of the question ‘why?’ (2). 67 Ricoeur, Time 1, 176. At other times, however, he speaks as if, for instance, narrative were restricted to the actions of acting beings (Time 2, 88) or as if he agreed with Collingwood (Idea 213), that all events possess an ‘“inner” face, which we can call thought’, and an ‘“outer” face, namely the physical events affecting bodies’. Yet it becomes clear on p. 147 that he wishes to ‘question the very decomposition of an action into an outside, which would be just physical movement, and an inside, which would just be thought’. Rightly, for not only do ‘events’ in the natural world often play a decisive role in the course of human history (e.g. the storms and adverse weather conditions preventing various projected invasions of England), yet according to this definition these would no longer be ‘events’, but there are human actions where ‘thought’ plays little part, e.g. when someone acts thoughtlessly, be it in a blind rage or simply as an instinctive reaction. 68 Gaddis, Landscape, 53–70 (also in the following ch., 74–6; he contrasts this with the ‘reductionism’ of the methods of the social sciences, maintaining that other sciences operate with the contrasted ‘ecological view of reality’). 69 Hölscher, Annalistik, 84. This limitation seems to disappear in his ‘Einheit’ for there he speaks of a space–time system of coordinates in which each element finds itself in a possible relation with every other one (23). Lorenz, ‘Geschichte’, 46, points out how Frank Ankersmit reverses the positivist principle of ‘no explanation without causal determination’ so that causal connections are excluded from the historian’s narratives.

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and indeed Hölscher also seems to acknowledge that there are many other possible relationships, perhaps ones that no one has recognized, if indeed all historical events are so polyvalent as he claims.70 It should be noted, however, that it is sometimes claimed that historiography is not concerned with ‘explanation’ at all, but rather with ‘interpretation’ or more precisely the ‘interpretation of meaning’.71 In that case it might be thought to be less appropriate to investigate causation at all, whether it be causation like that of the natural sciences or something different. Yet it is by no means clear that this distinction is a helpful or valid one. Certainly the historian investigating the death of Jesus can ask why Jesus was crucified by the Romans and that will involve a discussion of possible causes such as Pilate’s perception of Jesus, his interests and those of the Jewish leadership, and the situation in Jerusalem at that Passover festival. Nevertheless, interpretation is very much involved as well, starting with the interpretation of the sources for Jesus’ death, but also the interpretation of such things as the possible motives of the principal actors involved, of the nature of the political circumstances in this Roman province and of the character of Jesus’ ministry, and then finally of what one is to make of this event and its impact on world history. It is, therefore, quite appropriate for scholars to write works with titles like Who Killed Jesus? (Crossan)72 or What Crucified Jesus? (Rivkin), works involving a search for causes, be they persons, particularly if one is concerned to impute blame for the death of Jesus, or other factors, as well as any amount of interpretation. For inevitably interpretation will play an important part in trying to understand what led to Jesus’ death and it would be mistaken to pose ‘interpretation’ and ‘explanation’ as alternatives. They are both complementary and interwoven.73 70

Hölscher, Annalistik, 71. Yet if Ankersmit were right in claiming that ‘unity and cohesion do not lie in the past itself and thus cannot be “discovered” by the historian as if they had always been there’ but must be ‘given … to the past’ through the historians’ narrative proposals (History, 93, his italics), then these interconnections between events would be wholly a matter of ‘historiography’, not of ‘history’. That is hard to square with the activities of those historians (most of them?) who are still concerned with explanation and the search for causal connections. 71 So, e.g., Ankersmit, History, 98, noting a shift in the terminology used from the 1970s onwards. 72 Cf. the earlier work of P. E. Lapide, Wer war schuld an Jesus Tod? (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1987). 73 I am (unrepentantly) aware that Ankersmit refers to the mixing of the interpretation, admittedly of meaning (although the listing of the different sorts of interpretation involved in the historian’s investigation of Jesus’ death may indicate that it would be unwise to single out this sort of interpretation, particularly since many of the sources and the actors involved had their own views of why Jesus had to die, and Ankersmit goes on to mention some of the problems involved in this concentration on ‘meaning’, whether in the sense of agents’ intentions or the ‘meaning’ of texts), and of the explanation of the past as an ‘original sin’ (History, 98–100).

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Similarly, many of the methodological reflections of historians and philosophers of history today seem to presuppose something like Troeltsch’s principle of analogy.74 For one can only speak of extending the experiences of the present back into the past, as it were,75 if one assumes that present experiences are in some measure analogous to those of the past and vice versa.76 As Bernard Williams puts it, a historian’s account of the past can only make sense if, ‘at some level of generality, that sort of thing makes sense’, is intelligible, and, again ‘at some level of generality, the explanations must be the same as they are of things now’.77 Over against ‘postmodernist’ trends Terry Eagleton rightly emphasizes the consistency and the continuities of history: ‘if history really were wholly random and discontinuous, how could we account for this strangely persistent continuity?’78 The presupposition of the validity of such forms of argument is immediately clear, for instance, from Van Harvey’s arguments relating to the question of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.79 For he criticizes the argument of 74 Cf. P. Lampe, ‘Theologie’, 204: many of the judgements of historians are based on discernible similarities and ‘historians cannot dispense with arguments based on analogy’. It is true that G. R. Elton expresses a mistrust over against the use of analogy, particularly under the influence of anthropology, but in the last analysis grants that the historian must use this form of argument (Practice, 32–3, 86). Over against this B. F. Meyer appeals to the epistemology of Bernard Lonergan to call the validity of this principle and that of a causal continuum in question (Aims, 16–17), but it must be asked whether, if there are exceptions to these principles, historical research is going to be any help in accounting for them. In other words, if one is compelled to posit an exception, either an irruption into the causal continuum (as miracles have traditionally often been interpreted) or an event without analogy (e.g. the final resurrection of a person in the midst of history), then the historian may well be compelled to acknowledge that these are beyond her or his competence (cf. the conclusions of the first part of Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection, 95–9). Similarly, David Tracy contrasts the ‘belief in sameness’ characteristic of ‘modernity’ with ‘postmodernity’s’ ‘turn to the other’ or, put theologically, to ‘the Other’ (‘Theology’). 75 So Rüsen, ‘Typen’, 528; something similar is surely presupposed by his Rekonstruktion, 110, when he speaks of historians scrutinizing the sources in the light of their own understanding of reality acquired from their world; a corollary of this is that, when sources reveal a different understanding of what is factual (e.g. in descriptions of supernatural or divine interventions), they must be ‘silenced’ and treated as ‘Überreste’, i.e. as traces of the past that contain no self-interpretation, so as to yield statements that they themselves could not formulate (cf. also 119–20). Pace Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 105–6, it only makes sense to speak of this analogy in terms of a homogeneity and similarity between the historian and the historian’s subject matter if the latter is limited to persons. What is presupposed is a similarity between the historian and other human beings in the past as well as between the historian’s world and the world in which those past figures lived. (A historian would have little in common with the eruption of Vesuvius, but more with its victims.) 76 Yet cf. Poster, History, 22–31, on Lawrence Stone’s use of analogies between the past and the present; he holds him guilty of erasing the difference between past and present. 77 Williams, Truth, 166–7 (his italics). 78 Eagleton, Illusions, 51 (his italics); the ‘persistent continuity’ to which he refers are things like ‘the stubbornly persisting realities of wretchedness and exploitation’. 79 Esp. Van Harvey, Historian, 227–30.

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Richard R. Niebuhr that Jesus’ appearance to the disciples involved ‘identification’ and ‘recognition’ and must therefore have involved the flesh as ‘the medium of recognition’.80 For Harvey notes that terms like ‘identification’, ‘recognition’ and ‘flesh’ involve an appeal to non-unique aspects of human experience and therein lies the force of Niebuhr’s argument that ‘identification’ and ‘recognition’ must have involved the flesh – that is how we usually identify and recognize people, by means of their physical, bodily appearance (or at least bodily, physical features of some sort if a person is recognizable by her or his voice or the like). But that argument is difficult to apply when dealing with an event that is claimed to be unique, for then the usual rules of logic presumably need not apply and may well have to be suspended.81 Nonetheless, the onus is then on those who would still talk of ‘identification’ and ‘recognition’ to say how they would ‘recognize’ or ‘identify’ someone or something if not by the usual means. And yet the problem with the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances is, if anything, rather the failure to recognize him when one would normally have expected it to be possible (cf. Lk 24.16; John 20.14–15; also 21.4; Matt 28.17).82 More generally, historians used to make widespread use of analogy (and to some extent at least still do) as a tool in their search for understanding of the past, appealing particularly, at least in the case of a classical exponent of historical methods like Droysen, to the continuity to be found in human nature. 83 And more recently Jörn Rüsen, quoting Jacob Burckhardt, speaks of a ‘theoretical historical anthropology’ and the ‘unity of historical experience and the inner cohesion of all (possible) histories’ in humanity as it endures, strives and acts, hu-

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Niebuhr, Resurrection, 172–7. Harvey does not expressly say so, but presumably what is meant is that the ‘recognition’ and ‘identification’ could in such a case have occurred without the usual ‘medium of recognition’, ‘flesh’. Or did the normal rules still apply in the case of the identification and recognition? 82 Cf. Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection, 29–31, 130. It is at this point that several logical and philosophical problems relating to identity arise. 83 E.g. Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 146, 202, 265, 329 (=ed. Leyh 423); Texte, 12–15; also Collingwood, Idea, 65–7, on Vico; Ricoeur, ‘History’, 22; Rüsen, Geschichte, 70 (‘a perspective of anthropological universality’). Such an assumption seems already to have been made by Schleiermacher in his hermeneutics in that he presupposes that ‘the author [of a historical work] and the interpreter share the same human nature’ (Bultmann, History, 111; but that Bultmann should speak of ‘man, as he is and was and ever shall be’ [115] seems to stand in a certain tension with his insistence on our ‘historicity’ as our nature in that we ‘can never possess [our] genuine life in any present moment, but [are] always … on the way’); in that respect Schleiermacher would share a view that is, according to Ankersmit, History, 79, ‘characteristic of the Enlightenment and Enlightened natural-law philosophy’. (He quotes as an example Hume, Enquiries, 83: ‘… there is a great uniformity among the actions of men … and human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations’). But cf. Danto, Philosophy, 126, quoting Ibn Khaldun. 81

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manity, ‘as it is and always was and will be’.84 Yet, as Iggers points out,85 such assumptions have been challenged, especially with the rise to prominence of social and cultural history, which emphasized rather the otherness of the world studied,86 and Marc Bloch observes that history is full of examples of ‘states of mind which were formerly common, yet which appear peculiar to us because we no longer share them’.87 (It is, however, difficult to imagine the application in historical research of methods adapted from the social sciences without the implicit recognition that there are analogies between different societies, either contemporary or separated in time, such that the beliefs and practices of the one can throw light upon those of another.) Perhaps with such a shift in mind as that which Bloch noted Schüssler Fiorenza claims that in both historical-critical and social-scientific studies it is presupposed ‘almost as a dogma that a deep chasm exists between people of the past and people today’. That would certainly place a question mark against arguments that ‘Jesus must have’ been aware of this or thought that, because it seems to us from our standpoint self-evident. Yet we might be entitled to a more tentative ‘Jesus may have’ if Schüssler Fiorenza’s counter-argument holds good: This distancing move … obscures on the one hand that we can comprehend historical worlds and societies only by means of contemporary languages, perceptions, theories, or analogies, and on the other that history is written by and for people today about people of the past. 88

The alternative to making some sort of use of analogies may well turn out to be the abandonment of the attempt to carry out historical research into the life of Jesus; that, at least, seems to be in Carl Braaten’s eyes the implication of Martin 84 Rüsen, Rekonstruktion, 56–7, quoting Burckhardt’s ‘Weltgeschicht liche Betrachtungen’ in the ed. by P. Ganz: J. Burckhardt, Über das Studium der Geschichte (München: Beck, 1982) 226. 85 Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft, 76–7, 84. And Coakley, Christ, 41, notes that in ‘Der Historismus [published 1902] Troeltsch also drops his earlier claims both for an “essential uniformity of human nature”, and for universally applicable laws of psychology and sociology’. 86 Collingwood, too, refers to and criticizes the assumption of Enlightenment historians ‘that human nature had existed ever since the creation of the world exactly as it existed among themselves’ (Idea, 82–5; cf. 224). Cf. Ankersmit, History, 56; Best/Kellner, Theory, 20; E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 27; Neumann, Geburt, 152 (it is the exegete’s duty to protect the Bible from the misconception that it was written by people ‘like us’; in other words, he stresses the ‘otherness’ of the biblical texts and their authors; cf. also 91 on the rise of the doctrine of the ‘ewiger Mensch’ and 160 on Febvre’s critique, within the Annales-school, of the assumption of the likeness of all humanity). Iggers, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 21, counts among the postulates of ‘historicism’ the dogmatic exclusion of the possibility of talking of a general ‘human nature’; history was regarded as the ‘realm of the unique’. 87 Bloch, Craft, 80. 88 Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 100–1. Her own solution is to think of the past as ‘neighbor’ rather than ‘other’.

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Kähler’s argument that ‘The inner development of a sinless person is as inconceivable to us as life on the Sandwich Islands is to a Laplander.’89 Yet Kähler’s sights were set above all on attempts to write a life of Jesus and the psychologizing inherent in them, and he goes on to emphasize that ‘we would not deny that historical research can help to explain and clarify particular features of Jesus’ actions and attitudes as well as many aspects of his teaching’, refusing to ‘exaggerate the issue by casting doubt on the historian’s capacity to trace the broad outlines of the historical institutions and forces which influenced the human development of our Lord’.90 Yet even those more limited roles could hardly be carried out by the historian without some use of analogies, and the same is true of a more extensive role even if that role must stop short of writing a life of Jesus. And, lastly, what Troeltsch more prosaically described as ‘historical criticism’ corresponds more or less to what Hayden White calls the ‘Irony’ of the historian, that scepticism with which documents are assumed to mean something other than what they say or as saying something other than what they mean91 or, put more positively, to that questioning of the evidence that can be considered integral to historical methods.92 Or Peter Stuhlmacher describes it as an attitude of methodical doubt adopted by the historian over against all tradition93 – even if it must thereby ‘blaze a difficult trail between spontaneous credulity and Pyrrhonian scepticism’.94 And doubt is, if we are to believe Jürgen Kocka, still central to historical work.95 That scepticism or doubt, however, need not simply be regarded, on a literary or semantic level, in terms of a distinction between what documents say and mean. It extends, too, to the intentions of those documents’ authors, to their ability to witness faithfully and accurately to the historical real89

So Braaten’s introduction to Kähler’s Jesus, 25, and his ‘Martin Kähler’, 86, quoting Kähler, Jesus, 53. A historian qua historian would, however, find it difficult to share Kähler’s (dogmatic) assumption of Jesus’ sinlessness as a starting-point, perhaps finding a sinless life as such just as difficult to envisage as its ‘inner development’. 90 Kähler, Jesus, 54. 91 White, Metahistory, 375. 92 Cf. Collingwood, Idea, e.g. 25–6, on the cross-questioning involved in Greek historians’ handling of eyewitness accounts, that enquiring inherent in the meaning of the word L-VWRULYD. 93 Stuhlmacher, Schriftauslegung, 14. Here one may also compare Burrow’s quotation (History, 462) from Lord Acton’s Cambridge inaugural lecture: ‘the critic is one who, when he lights on an interesting statement, begins by suspecting it.’ 94 So Ricoeur, Memory, 172. He also speaks of the correlation between historiography and secularization (440). 95 Kocka, ‘Paradigmawechsel?’, 76: doubt is history’s methodical principle. So, too, Rüsen, Vernunft, 88, regards doubting the validity of statements as a ‘constitutive factor’ in historical thinking, a factor that then calls for systematic and methodical counter-arguments and above all an explanatory narrative to remove the doubt. ‘Scholarly historical thinking is on principle critical of tradition’ (92). In a memorable turn of phrase he also speaks of historical research leading one ‘from an uncertain certainty to a certain uncertainty’ (94; cf. 100, 113).

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ity of the events described or attested.96 On the other hand, Richard Bauckham, pleading for a more trusting approach to the testimony of past witnesses, criticizes that scepticism that he finds in the writings of a philosopher of history such as R. G. Collingwood: whereas in everyday life we treat testimony as reliable unless or until we find reason to doubt it, in scientific history [as Collingwood conceives of it] testimony is suspicious from the outset and can be believed only when it is independently verified, at which point it ceases to be testimony.97

There is, however, a considerable problem in the application of this principle to historical research into such an object as the life of Jesus. For at first sight such questioning or doubting seems to be antithetical to the faith of many researchers into that life. Almost as hard to reconcile with such a commitment as faith usually entails may also be that impartiality that Ricoeur sees as integral to the historian’s work.98 It will not completely allay unease that one can claim that such questioning is a refining process from which faith may emerge strengthened. It may also emerge weakened, at least in the eyes of others who have their own very clear ideas as to what faith involves. Perhaps here one should speak rather of a circle or spiral or else, to change the spatial metaphor, an oscillation between the two positions in which, at one point in the circling or oscillating movement of thought, the believer seeks, as far as possible, to step outside the position of faith and view the life of Jesus from the outside, as it were. Then having suspended belief and having adopted that unbelieving perspective, the historian may, in the light of the results of that questioning and doubting, turn once more to the question of faith and commitment, but commitment to whom and to what? The whole issue of such ‘internal’ and ‘external’ perspectives has been raised by Heikki Räisänen in connection with the question of the project of a New Testament theology.99 Too often this issue has been discussed in this context in terms of an either–or, whereas 96 This definition of ‘criticism’ is narrower than that of Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 92–148, who distinguishes ‘criticism’ of the authenticity of the materials available (cf. also ed. Leyh 117–28), the sifting of earlier and later, ‘criticism’ in the sense of distinguishing the correct from the incorrect (which perhaps most closely corresponds to Troeltsch’s sense of ‘criticism’; cf. also ed. Leyh 138–45), and the critical ordering of the material. 97 Bauckham, Jesus, 485. (Is it true that it would cease to be testimony or merely that it would cease to be the sole witness to something? And is the critical handling of testimony, which Bauckham defends, possible solely on the basis of some other testimony? Can it not equally, e.g., arise from the historian’s own perception of the way the world works or from the world-view current in her or his society?) 98 Ricoeur, Memory, 314. 99 Cf., e.g., Räisänen, Beyond New Testament Theology; ‘Gedankenwelt’; ‘“Theologie”’ and Theologie, as well as other contributions to the debate such as Penner/Vander Stichele (ed.), Moving beyond New Testament Theology? (Particularly to be noted is Stephen Stell’s article in this volume with its questioning of the ‘objectivity’ that Räisänen claims.)

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the suggestion here is that both perspectives should be regarded as complementary and mutually enriching and corrective. New Testament theologians must be prepared to step outside the faith-perspective of the New Testament authors, as indeed happens already if theologians are prepared to engage in Sachkritik of this subject-matter. They also need, however, to step outside their own faith-perspective if they are to engage effectively with philosophical and other such issues that the claims of the New Testament writings raise. Yet, if faith is still possible after this ‘step outside’, it will, as likely as not, be an altered or modified faith, as well as hopefully a more robust faith, as a result of having been prepared to confront the sceptical world outside, rather than remaining insulated and isolated in an intellectual and cognitive ghetto.

In similar fashion, faith in Jesus may well emerge changed and modified from such an encounter with historical questions and criticism, both with regard to the perception of the Jesus in whom one believes and with regard to one’s understanding of the nature of this belief. Yet, however much these three principles may still be valid, in some form or other, other aspects of Troeltsch’s approach are more questionable. He seems to operate, for instance, as did many other historians and philosophers in the nineteenth century, with a teleological (and thoroughly optimistic) view of history, viewing Christianity, the highest moral and religious force in history (746–7), as the goal and climax of antiquity. Towards it the great developments in the ancient Near East and the western world were leading and upon it widely divergent lines of development converge (734). Thus he is confident that with the consistent application of this historical critical method we will be able to discern God’s glory in history with greater openness and freedom (739), and he regards history as the unfolding of a divine rationality. For ‘history is no chaos but, driven by unitary forces, reaches for a unitary goal’ (747).100 Here there comes to expression the belief in a principle of reason at work in history that reveals itself with ever greater clarity there (746). Nor does Troeltsch wish to deny the formative influence and significance of individual personalities for major areas of human life. For he maintains, with regard to religion, that all human religion is rooted in religious intuition or divine revelation that achieves in specific religious personalities a potency that leads to the formation of communities … The faith in God contained in this intuition, which is veiled in the early stages of a naturalistically restricted consciousness in nature-religions, finally breaks through, together with various parallel developments, in the religion of Yahweh and in the message of Jesus that arises from it …101

100 It is true that Carlyle had spoken of the ‘Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements’ (‘History’, 6=Stern, Varieties, 95), but nevertheless in the context of a causal nexus of events; nonetheless the strong teleological sense of Troeltsch’s utterance is lacking in Carlyle’s way of speaking. 101 Troeltsch, ‘Methode’, 739.

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For faith in God in all its forms is restricted by the natural limitations of the human spirit, except for one point, at which these restraints are overcome, namely in the religion of Israel’s prophets and in the person of Jesus, ‘where the God that is other than nature brings forth that personality that is superior to nature, with its eternally transcendent goals and its strength of will that resists the world’. For there the restraints of nature are broken through in the faith of the prophets and in the active, living love for God and for humanity which is the faith of Jesus (748). Here is the end of all religious movements and the starting point of a new phase in the history of religions. Troeltsch claims that this insight is not a dogmatic absolute but rather something that can be achieved by the methods of a geschichtsphilosophisch-historische Denkweise and suffices for the religious person. However, it seems that even this breakthrough cannot be the last word for Troeltsch, for history has no place for an absolute religion or absolute personalities,102 and every revelation is therefore relative and historically conditioned, as he was very soon to argue: ‘Christianity is at every moment of its history a purely historical phenomenon like all the other great religions. … If one wants to formulate it thus, that “Christianity is a relative phenomenon”, then there is no objection to that.’103 Nonetheless, he takes considerable pains to go on to allay the fears of those that see in this the danger of an unfettered relativism and the consequent absence of values and norms.104 Thus, while we earlier saw that a scholar like Schweitzer assigned a decisive role to a single religious personality, we may note that, perhaps from very different reasons to those that later led to this focus on personalities going out of fashion in historiography, Troeltsch seems in the end to set clear limits to the validity of this approach.105 Yet I earlier commented that Schweitzer’s now (at least historiographically speaking) unfashionable view had this to be said for it, that it would be difficult for a Christian historiography not to assign a central role to the figure of Jesus. However, we now come up against the problem that it is questionable how central it can or should be: does that not make the way free for both 102 No ‘absolute personalities’ perhaps, but Coakley, Christ, 143–5, shows how in Troeltsch’s later thought Jesus’ ‘archetypal’ personality is socially necessary for the Christian community and psychologically necessary for Christians. 103 Troeltsch, Absolutheit, 20–42. (The lecture published in Die Absolutheit was delivered in 1901.) 104 But cf. Coakley, Christ, esp. 27–30, on the ‘oscillation’ detectable in Troeltsch’s statements in this work. She also goes on to document further, more radical moves in some of Troeltsch’s later works. 105 Cf. Iggers, Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft, 239: whereas Troeltsch, too, may earlier have seen Jesus as a religious genius, he was later to give up the idea of Christianity’s centrality in the religious development of humanity and the basis of further progress, viewing it now as a historical religion that arose in the west as part of the general culture of that epoch. See further Coakley, Christ, esp. 45–79, on the sometimes contradictory christological statements that Troeltsch makes as he distanced himself more and more from Ritschl and Herrmann.

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relativism and pluralism, and would that be something to be deprecated? Or should it be viewed more positively? A concentration on a historical personality that might at one one time have seemed a historiographical asset and thoroughly de rigueur now becomes rather more of a liability – despite the repeated claim of Christian theologians and apologists that this is indeed the central point of history.106 That is something that historians cannot claim qua historians, however, for Arthur Danto reminds us that ‘the philosopher of history does not have before him the whole of history. He has at best a fragment – the whole past.’ And without knowing that whole it would be difficult for the historian to identify its centre; to enjoy that privilege now, before the end of history, would be to make the historian a god. Indeed, Danto concurs with Karl Löwith’s claim that such ways of viewing the whole of history are ‘essentially theological’, even when those so viewing it may be ‘materialists and explicit atheists’.107 If historians, qua historians, still want to make such claims, then they can surely only do so on the grounds that such perspectives are ones that they find personally and subjectively illuminating, ones that speak to them individually, rather than in some intersubjective sense (although they may of course seek to share their sense of illumination with others and convince them of its worth). With that one seemingly finds oneself on the threshold of some version of that existentialist view of history found in the ‘new quest’ for Jesus. Thus, with regard to historical methods at least, Troeltsch not only seems to have described those at least implicitly operative in the historical arguments that scholars used in the nineteenth century, but the principles that he outlined also seem, mutatis mutandis and inter alia, still to undergird historical discourse and argumentation to this day – if one is prepared to argue historically. That qualification is necessary because, on the one hand, it would be possible to say that historiography is so hopelessly subjective a matter that seeking to convince others of the rightness or truth of one’s assertions is from the start doomed to failure. And, on the other hand, one might claim that some events were of such a kind that normal criteria of historical argument no longer applied. That is a problem 106 Indeed, Collingwood, Idea, 49–50, holds that any ‘history written on Christian principles … will set itself to detect an intelligible pattern in [the] general course of events, and in particular it will attach a central importance in this pattern to the historical life of Christ … It will make its narrative crystallize itself round that event’, dividing history into two parts, before and after Christ; in short, ‘apocalyptic history’ (his italics). Cf., e.g., Cullmann, Christ, esp. 81–93. Contrast Bultmann’s reaction to Cullmann’s account (‘Heilsgeschichte’; cf. also Young, History, 75–83). 107 Danto, Philosophy, 8–9. He is here thinking of what he calls the ‘substantive philosophy of history’ over against the ‘analytical’. Cf. also Mandelbaum, Problem, 319: ‘It is impossible to hold that history represents a teleological development unless one knows (or believes that one knows) what the end of that process will be’, and such knowledge is only possible by means of a non-empirical, i.e. ‘transcendent’, approach. (Earlier he had criticized Troeltsch’s ‘metaphysical faith’: 161.)

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that becomes particularly acute in the case of the study of the life of Jesus, where claims of the miraculous abound in the sources, from his birth to the sequel to his death, in the claims that he had risen from the dead. If, nevertheless, one wants and is prepared to argue historically about Jesus’s life, then one must run the gauntlet of some such criteria as Troeltsch proposed, however uncomfortable their application may turn out to be and however meagre the probable results that they yield may prove to be.

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3. The Historiography of the ‘New Quest’ 3.1. Bultmann and the ‘New Quest’ The movement which James Robinson designated as the ‘new quest’ was perhaps a more unified one than the old ‘quest’.1 For a start it arose among Bultmann’s former pupils and it therefore both shared the existentialist world-view of Bultmann himself as well as, Robinson notes,2 a theological context marked by the influence of Gogarten and Tillich, and at the same time reacted to what it perceived as Bultmann’s negative attitude towards the possibility, legitimacy and value of historical knowledge of Jesus.3 For, as Van Harvey puts it, the representatives of this movement ‘all suppose it would be fatal to the Christian faith were it to be shown that the kerygma is not firmly grounded in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth’. 4 But Robinson saw, too, in this group a new view of history, an existentialist view of history which members of this group had inherited from their teacher. (Or would it be truer to Bultmann’s views to speak of an ‘existential’ view of history?)5 At any rate, this view of history focussed on 1 Crossan, ‘Faces’, 306, argues, however, that ‘no New Quest ever took place’ and criticizes the ‘positivist delusions’ haunting terms like ‘search’ or ‘quest’ (cf. also his Birth, 43– 4; however, in the light of what we saw concerning ‘construction’ and ‘reconstruction’ in the first chapter, it is significant that Crossan there opts for the latter to replace ‘quest’ and ‘search’). 2 J. M. Robinson, Quest, 11. He also notes that the post-Bultmannian reaction to Bultmann’s work is based ‘largely on Bultmannian presuppositions and can in fact appeal to an undercurrent in Bultmann’s writings which already moves in this direction’. Cf. also Schürmann, ‘Situation’, 305. 3 In speaking of a ‘new quest’, despite Crossan’s strictures (n. 1 above) and despite Bernejo Rubio’s protests (‘Fiction’, 228–32, 237), I do so, not in the sense of the output of a particular period of ‘a global history’ or ‘an epoch-describing label’ (a major objection brought forward by Bernejo Rubio), but in the sense of the work of a small, but very influential, group of scholars united by this philosophical tradition. 4 Harvey, Historian, 167. Moxnes, ‘Jesus’, 138, finds in the ‘new quest’ ‘a master narrative of continuity between the historical Jesus and the resurrected Christ of the church, a narrative within which the present church could inscribe itself’. 5 That needs to be asked in the light of Bultmann’s argument with Helmut Thielicke regarding an ‘existentialist’ and an ‘existential’ self-understanding; cf. Young, History, 69–70, quoting Bultmann in Bartsch, Kerygma 1, 203. And yet in his 1961 article ‘On the Problem of Demythologizing’ Bultmann still speaks of the ‘existentialist (existentiale: Glauben und Verstehen 4, 132) interpretation of history’, although he had a page earlier spoken of the ‘ex-

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the act of intention, the commitment, the meaning for the participants, behind the external occurrence. In such intention and commitment the self of the participant actualizes itself, and in this act of self-actualization the self is revealed. Hence it is the task of modern historiography to grasp such acts of intention, such commitments, such meaning, such self-actualization; and it is the task of modern biography to lay hold of the selfhood which is therein revealed.6

And in a later article by Robinson the existentialist basis of the ‘new quest’ is even clearer: its goal is ‘the understanding of existence which emerged in history from [Jesus’] words and deeds’,7 a goal that is clearly very much in line with Bultmann’s own.8 It is important to stress this unifying factor in the works of those scholars who are usually assigned to this movement,9 a factor that is based upon a particular view of historical enquiry, a view that goes back to Rudolf Bultmann himself.10 This starting-point and the ensuing dialogue with their former teacher istentielle Interpretation der Geschichte’. One therefore gets the impression that Bultmann wants to speak of this ‘interpretation of history’ as both ‘existential’ and ‘existentialist’! 6 J. M. Robinson, Quest, 67–8. And yet Perrin, Rediscovering, 231, makes the point that in a a later essay (‘Debate’) Robinson quietly abandons ‘a good deal of the emphasis upon the encounter with the historical Jesus by means of an existentialist historiography’, focussing more ‘on the basic parallel between the message of Jesus and the kerygma of the early Church, and on the significance of scholarly study of the message of Jesus for the Church’. 7 J. M. Robinson, ‘Debate’, 200. Ogden, ‘Bultmann’, 212, points out how critical Bultmann was of some representatives of the ‘new quest’ (above all Ernst Fuchs) for confusing this ‘understanding of existence’ with Jesus’ self-consciousness. Perrin, Rediscovering, 222–3, stresses the importance of distinguishing the two for Bultmann and states that ‘By self-understanding Bultmann means the understanding to which the self comes concerning the nature of its historical existence.’ However, Perrin recognizes that what may be described as ‘self-consciousness’ constitutes that by ‘means of which that understanding is reached’. 8 So, e.g., in Bultmann’s introduction to his Primitive Christianity (12), where he declared it to be his intention to ask ‘what understanding of human existence is enshrined in primitive Christianity, what new philosophy of life (neue Möglichkeit menschlichen Existenzverständnisses). Or, to put it more cautiously, is there such an understanding, and if so, how far does it go?’ However cf. Harvey/Ogden, ‘How New?’, 218–22: ironically (for he does not seem to realize what he is doing) Robinson does betray a difference between his view and Bultmann’s, in that the latter saw in Jesus’ message a possibility for us of a certain existential self-understanding, whereas Robinson goes further and sees this as an existential possibility that was actually realized in Jesus’ own selfhood. (Yet it is to be noted that Robinson in the passage just quoted (Robinson, ‘Debate’, 200) spoke of an ‘understanding of existence which emerged in history from [Jesus’] words and deeds’, not ‘in’ those words and deeds.) Harvey and Ogden then rightly ask whether such a search for Jesus’ selfhood does not run up against much the same problems that Robinson had detected in the programme of the ‘old quest’ (cf., e.g., pp. 236–7). 9 As examples of this movement Theissen and Merz (Jesus, 27) name Bultmann himself as well as Käsemann, Bornkamm, Fuchs, Braun and Ebeling, but if this unifying programme is not identified then it is at first sight hard to see what holds the various positions of these scholars together. 10 This common factor between Bultmann and his pupils is particularly stressed by Ogden, ‘Bultmann’, esp. 211, 213. Harvey and Ogden also note that, along with other dif-

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and reaction against his position makes it possible to see this movement as more unified than was the case with the original ‘quest’ or than would be the case with its successor, the so-called ‘third quest’.11 For such a view of history was already implicit in the introductory chapter of Bultmann’s Jesus and the Word, where he stressed the historian’s involvement in the history that she or he investigated: the historian is, like all of us, ‘a part of history’,12 for the object of historical enquiry is ‘a living complex of events in which he is essentially involved’ (11).13 As a consequence, whatever historians say about history, they also at the same time include themselves in what they say. So Bultmann speaks of a ‘dialogue with history’ in which we must listen to the ‘demand’ that history makes of us if we are to ‘understand at all what history is about’,14 or, as he put it in a later article, we must interpret history on the basis of a historical, that is an existential encounter with history.15 We must ‘interrogate’ history, questioning our own subjectivity and ready to ‘listen to history as an authority’.16 This does not, however, lead to relativism, for history itself must be allowed to speak and it can only speak to someone who ‘comes seeking answers to the questions which agitate him’.17 In the case of the study of Jesus’ life a preferences between the two versions of Robinson’s book, the German ed. suggested a wider gap between Bultmann’s present position and that of his pupils than the English version (‘How New?’, 197 n. 1; cf. also Ott, ‘Jesus’, 149). 11 So Kümmel, Vierzig Jahre, 21, sees this group of scholars as unified in their dialogue with Bultmann’s position but also in that they in differing ways adopted his critical stance and his reservations with regard to the methods to be used and their viability. And Harvey and Ogden (‘How New?’) repeatedly call in question the claim by Robinson, above all in the English version of his work, concerning a ‘shift’ in Bultmann’s position that brought it nearer to that of his pupils. 12 Cf. Bultmann, ‘Problem einer theologischen Exegese’, 17, 21. (In this essay he also distances himself from other views of historiography, including the ‘romantic’ one concentrating on ‘personalities’, as well as idealistic and psychologizing ones.) 13 Cf. also Bultmann, ‘Exegesis’, 149. Thiselton, Horizons, 234–40, points to the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey on Bultmann’s hermeneutics at this point and, following Macquarrie (Scope, 81–90), sees the participation of the reflecting subject, ‘in a sense’, in the object of reflection as an element common to the hermeneutics of Bultmann, Dilthey, Collingwood and Heidegger (245). However, Macquarrie also notes (69) that not only Bultmann, but also Troeltsch were indebted to Dilthey and he notes the closeness of Bultmann to Troeltsch when it comes to the role of ‘self-understanding’. 14 Bultmann, Jesus, 11–12; cf. Ott, Geschichte, 39–40. 15 Bultmann, ‘Verhältnis’, 18/459 (he goes on to speak approvingly of Robinson’s work as well as that of others); cf. Lindemann, ‘Einführung’, 13. 16 Bultmann expresses himself similarly in ‘Problem einer theologischen Exegese’ with regard to the ‘authority’ of a text, to counter the charge of ‘subjectivism’ (23–4) as well as referring again to the ‘authority of history’ (30). However, this leads him then to argue that a correct and appropriate questioning of the text of the New Testament can only stem from faith and obedience towards the authority of scripture (33), an assertion that opens up the possibility of a dangerous circularity. It would be another, and far less questionable, matter to speak of the givenness of history and of the text. 17 Cf. Bultmann, ‘Problem einer theologischen Exegese’, 28.

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condition for it is that ‘we be ourselves deeply disturbed by the problem of our own life’.18 Bultmann grants, nevertheless, that there is a sort of objectivity where the student of history applies the method of a particular epoch or school of historiography, but it yields only limited, but nonetheless indispensable, results such as establishing matters of chronology. Yet, necessary though it is, such an approach misses the real point of history; it may glean a multitude of facts from history, but learns nothing new about history and humanity. At this point some would speak of ‘two modes of historical knowledge’ in Bultmann’s thought, the authentic, primary knowledge of the real historical (geschichtlich) event and an inauthentic, secondary historical knowledge of merely historical (historisch) factual material.19 And in fact Bultmann seems to acknowledge as much when he says that, just as the one reality (Wirklichkeit) can be viewed from two different perspectives, corresponding to the two possibilities of human existence, authentic and inauthentic,20 history can be viewed in different ways: … in an objectivizing manner in so far as it presents the picture of a chain of events … understandable as a chain of cause and effect. … On the other hand, history can also be understood as the range of possibilities for human self-understanding, which range is disclosed precisely in man’s decisions.21

Moreover, neither perspective, neither understanding of history can dispense with the other:

18 Cf. Bultmann, History, 115: the interpreter’s questioning is only possible if ‘the interpreter himself is moved by the question about his own existence’. 19 So Ott, Geschichte, 10, quoted by Thiselton, Horizons, 246; cf. also Young, History, 18–26. Ott seeks to move beyond this dichtotomy, or aporia as he calls it, in his ‘Jesus’, but at the cost of asserting ‘that there are no such things as historical facts at all; rather, the very nature of historical reality is to be an appearance, a picture’ (150). The judgement and the existential attitude of the historian may well play an important role in recognizing a historical fact (e.g. that Jesus was crucified), but that does not prevent us from still talking of it as a historical fact (even if there may be those that wish to deny it). The question whether it is a fact is, however, very different from the question of its significance, and the two questions will require very different sorts of answers and arguments. 20 Bultmann, ‘Problem of Demythologizing’, 158. Bultmann, History, 117–18, again refers to two viewpoints, that of the perspective chosen by the historian (e.g. political, economic, psychological, ethical, aesthetic) and the existential encounter with history and argues that ‘from each viewpoint something objectively true will appear’; the mistake would be to make only one viewpoint absolute. Yet these two viewpoints are not unconnected, for the historian’s existential encounter with history is reflected in the choice of a viewpoint (119). 21 Bultmann, ‘Reply‘, 266–7; cf. also Bultmann, ‘Reflexionen’, 67: ‘the past shows me the possibilities for an understanding of human existence and shows me them as questions directed to me. To see its historical “relativity” in fact means to understand them as questions.’ He goes on to deny that it is a matter of taking over an understanding of existence from the past as an answer in the present; an ‘existentialist’ interpretation of history ‘can only point to possibilities and thereby call to decisions’.

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existentialist interpretation of history has need of objectifying observation of the historical (historisch) past. Even if such observation cannot grasp the historical (geschichtlich) meaning of an act or an event, existentialist interpretation is equally unable to dispense with the (most reliable possible) determination of facts.22

In essence, history is for Bultmann ‘event in time’ but, nevertheless, our attention is directed towards Jesus’ purpose, ‘and hence to what in his purpose as a part of history makes a demand on us’. And, in contrast to the earlier interest in the influence of great personalities, Bultmann eschews all interest in the personality of Jesus, which in his eyes cannot be recovered from our sources, but rather, as in the case of other great ‘personalities’ of history, is concerned with his ‘work’ (Werk), the ‘cause’ (Sache) to which he surrendered his life, the ‘end’ that he really sought; that is, in fact, true of all historical enquiry into great figures of the past. And in the case of Jesus that goal of his work can be discerned in his teaching. And yet, if Robinson is remaining true to Bultmann’s heritage, it is important that ‘the act of intention’ and the rest should not be interpreted psychologically, for Bultmann goes on to caution his readers against setting themselves a goal of a ‘psychologically comprehensible’ account of historical events, thus dismissing one of Schweitzer’s chief standards for an adequate account of Jesus’ life.23 Bultmann dealt once again with the theme of subjectivity and objectivity in the study of history in a contribution on ‘science and existence’ that appeared in the Festschrift for Albert Schweitzer’s eightieth birthday in 1955. ‘Science’ objectifies what it investigates and that raises the question whether that is also true of the discipline of historical ‘science’ (the expression sounds odd in English, for the word ‘science’ has been appropriated by the natural sciences to a far greater extent than the German ‘Wissenschaft’). There are indeed areas of historical investigation where such an objectivity is possible, as long as it is just a matter of what happened when. Again, there are those forces that bear upon the human actors in history, although historians may differ among themselves in identifying those forces. And historical phenomena can certainly be viewed from different perspectives, so that it would be wrong to make out an exclusive claim for any one particular viewpoint; every perspective has something to be said for it – perhaps a rather too sweeping claim. But, quite apart from the question of the historian’s viewpoint, Bultmann emphasizes the element of existential encounter. Events in history, he maintains, are only historical (geschichtlich) in their relationship to the future, and that calls for a knowledge of the end of history such as was to be found in Judeo-Christian eschatology and later in a secularized form in Hegel and Marx. Such a knowledge, however, he 22

Bultmann, ‘Problem of Demythologizing’, 159. Bultmann, Jesus, 11–16 (the ‘goal’ in the case of actors in history is ‘das, was sie eigentlich gewollt haben’). 23

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apparently views as impossible.24 And yet again, as in his Jesus and the Word, Bultmann emphasizes that, if the historian’s questions arise from his or her involvement in history, from his or her openness to the language of history that stems from a sense of responsibility for the future, then the historian will be ready to hear the claim upon him or her that is to be encountered in the historical event.25 Thus Bultmann reaches the paradoxical conclusion that it is ‘the historian who is most intensely and passionately involved’ who is forced to a perception that achieves the highest level of objectivity. Only so can he share his insights with others for them to acknowledge or criticize, rather than continuing to deliver a monologue or falling into lyrical declamations.26

What this leaves unclear, however, is whether it is, in the last analysis, the historian’s intensity or passion that ensures the objectivity or rather the historian’s readiness to submit his or her views to others; it is by no means clear that there is a direct correlation between the degree of intensity or passion and this readiness.

3.2. Van Harvey (and Schubert Ogden) and the ‘New Quest’ Van Harvey reacted to the programme of the ‘new quest’ as outlined by Robinson above all in two ways. As regards the methods of historical research he questioned whether those of the ‘new quest’ differed that much from those of the old ‘quest’ and, with regard to the goals of the ‘new quest’, he recognized here a new delimitation of the focus of the historian’s interest, but questioned whether this goal was really attainable. And that, he believed, was a mortal blow to the aspirations and hopes of the ‘new questers’. On the first point Harvey questions, both in his monograph and in the essay on Robinson’s work that he produced with Schubert Ogden, whether the methods advocated by the ‘new quest’, if rightly understood, have really departed from those presupposed by nineteenth-century historical research.27 The ‘open24

Bultmann, History, 138; ‘Problem of Demythologizing’, 157. Cf. also Bultmann, History, 121–2: ‘historical research includes the readiness to hear the claim which meets one in the historical phenomena.’ 26 Bultmann, ‘Wissenschaft’, 115. Cf. Bultmann, History, 122. It is worth comparing here the thesis of Jörn Rüsen (‘Interests’, 54–5) that ‘subjectivity’ (i.e. the historian’s ‘involvement in the current affairs of practical life’) is ‘a necessary presupposition of historical objectivity’. 27 See also Harvey/Ogden, ‘How New?’, esp . 222–42. That is a question also raised by, e.g., Georgi, ‘Interest’, 80; Perrin, Rediscovering, 232 (the ‘new quest’ may tend ‘to ask different questions, such as those concerning the understanding of existence implicit in Jesus’ teaching, but its work is still based on exactly the same kind of historical-critical method25

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ness’ that the ‘new quest’ demands is not a rejection of objectivity, but rather calls for an objectivity that is to be found in ‘a willingness to listen for the underlying intentions and the understanding of existence they convey, with an ear sharpened by one’s own awareness of the problems of human existence, and a willingness to suspend one’s own answers and one’s own understanding of existence sufficiently to grasp as a possibility what the other is saying’.28 Harvey’s assessment of the position of both Bultmann and Robinson is that their view of openness does not mean that the Christian historian has privileged access to a set of presuppositions enabling her or him to understand, say, the intentions of Paul or Jesus in a way that the non-Christian historian cannot. And that in turn would mean that the Christian historian should be able to secure the assent of the non-Christian to her or his judgement about the intentions of Paul or Jesus, even if the non-Christian cannot make them her or his own. This discussion remains, therefore, in the public domain and not in some ghetto of an exclusively Christian historiography. Again, the call for the historian’s ‘engagement’ might seem to conflict with the nineteenth-centrury historian’s ideal of ‘detachment’. Yet that is not the case, Harvey argues, as long as the ‘engagement’ comes into play only after the nature of the events in question has been established. For judgements about the past cannot claim to be justified by the ‘engagement’ of the historian who makes them: the events of the past must first be established on the basis of the data and ‘warrants’ ‘relative to present fields of knowledge’ (184) – only these will carry weight as the historian seeks to gain the assent of others to her or his judgements. The appeal to ‘openness’ and engagement … may illumine the aims of understanding and its preconditions, but it in no way materially alters the criteria implicit in the morality of historical knowledge. In this respect, it does not constitute a new methodology. (184–5)

So, for instance, the principle of analogy still holds good even in the task of describing the self-understanding of a historical person; that principle is still the basis of a rational assessment of that description. Harvey’s second main point concerned the aims and goals of the ‘new quest’. For the ‘real newness of the new quest does not consist in its modification of the morality of historical knowledge’, as he puts it, ‘but in its reconception of the aims of historical understanding, the recovery and encounter with certain possibilities of self-understanding which have been actualized in the past’ (185). But at the same time he deplores the attempt to claim that this is the only legitimate ology as that used by Bultmann or Jeremias’); and Keck, Future, 25 (‘The concern for the “new quest for the historical Jesus” rests precisely on the use of the old quest for facts, especially on the recovery of the words of Jesus, for without them the self-understanding of Jesus [or, Jesus’ understanding of existence] could not be located in order to be compared with that of the kerygma’). 28 J. M. Robinson, Quest, 96 n. 1, quoted by Harvey, Historian, 182.

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sort of history or the only way of doing history, for there are many other sorts of histories, economic, political, cultural, military and the like, each with their own ways of going about historical research and in which the ‘existentialist model … is not very illuminating’ (186). Concentrating on one sort of history also involves a concentration on one sort of historical explanation to the exclusion of others. The choice of this focus is, however, all the more unfortunate in this case in that it causes the burden of faith – and the theme of Harvey’s work is the relationship between faith and history – to be made to rest on a logical type of judgement that is least able to support it. For this proposal ‘fails to understand the delicate relationship between the quality, or texture, of the historian’s assent and the type of warrant which justifies that quality of assent’.29 Judgements about the existential selfhood of a person in the past are inferences drawn from certain data possessed by the historian as she or he tries to reconstruct the thought of that person. For that an intelligible picture of that person must be available, and at the same time it is necessary to reckon with that person’s having changed her or his mind. That presupposes a knowledge of the chronological relations between the data to hand, and it was precisely on this point and on the search for this sort of information that Robinson faulted the old ‘quest’. The goal of the ‘new quest’ is, therefore, one where the chances of achieving a high degree of certitude are slim. The problems are compounded by the claim not to be interested in the ‘personality’ of the person in question, but only with the self underlying that personality. For, Harvey rightly asks, how does one get to know that self without reflecting on the conscious beliefs, intentions and motives of that ‘personality’? Historical judgments about motives are difficult enough, but judgements about the self underlying the motives are even more problematic. In the field of motives the arguments used must generally be rather tentative. This type of argument is even more difficult in the case of Jesus because the evidence is so scanty. Moreover, Harvey complains, one must assume a greater consistency between Jesus’ selfhood and his life and thought than is generally the case, and it does not follow from the fact that Jesus spoke with authority that he was a person of perfect obedience. The ‘new quest’, in other words, seems to equate ‘faith’ with assent to a most dubious and tenuous historical judgement about Jesus’ selfhood (whatever that might be). On this point Bultmann is on surer ground in that he did not regard existentialist methods as enabling one to 29 Harvey, Historian, 187. The reference to the ‘quality’ of assent is to be understood in the light of Harvey’s earlier discussion on pp. 61–2: the historian ‘communicates his own estimate of the matter, the quality of assent it serves, by a careful and judicious placement of qualifications. He indicates what he believes can be affirmed with practical certainty, what can be asserted only with caution or guardedly, and what is to be asserted as possible, given the present state of his knowledge. The historian’s assent, so to speak, possesses a texture.’

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reconstruct the selfhood of figures of the past; indeed he regarded these methods as enabling the historian to avoid such questions. Nonetheless the ‘new quest’ was not prepared to stick to Jesus as the bearer of a message, but demanded to know whether the possibility of self-understanding to be found in that message was actualized in the selfhood of Jesus. But instead of criticizing Bultmann for not recognizing that, the ‘new quest’ would have been better advised, in Harvey’s eyes, to criticize him for failing to see that the figure of Jesus that he describes in fact informs faith; he failed to recognize that, for fear that Christian faith should then turn out to be dependent on the results of biblical criticism. The figure of Jesus, as it emerges in Bultmann’s work, shares, Harvey notes, a good deal with the message of Paul, but at the level of our relationship with God; that was integral to the message of both men, but Bultmann failed to see the importance of distinguishing between that understanding of human existence to be found in Jesus’ message and Jesus’ own appropriation and actualization of that self-understanding. Yet, if for Robinson it was the element of the intentions of the participants in the original story that was of central importance for the new view of history that was to be emphasized in the new quest, it was rather Bultmann’s stress on the existential involvement of the historian today, an emphasis common to him and his pupils, that was to be taken up and play a central role in new views of historiography that came into vogue in the latter part of the twentieth century.

3.3. A ‘Renewed “New Quest”’? In an interesting and provocative way N. T. Wright seeks to see in the North American ‘Jesus Seminar’ and some of its members the successors to the ‘new quest’,30 and Dunn seems to envisage something similar when he asserts that ‘the second quest has enjoyed a recent flowering in the portrayal of a Jesus draped in Cynic clothes’.31 And yet, as Wright notes, the initial declarations of this Seminar indicated a markedly different approach to history to that espoused by the post-Bultmannian proponents of the ‘new quest’. The initial flyer for the Seminar, Wright recalls, ‘spoke in classic positivist terms of “the quest for fact and history, for honesty and candour, for the truth and its consequences”’. Yet Wright also observes that ‘this positivistic mood … accords ill with the actual practice of the Seminar, and the methodological pronouncements of some of its members’, with the result that the ‘Seminar appears … to hover uneasily between 30

Wright, Jesus, 29–82. Dunn, ‘Third Quest’, 33. Wayne Meeks, refers to a ‘New New Quest, churning out books, press releases, and television interviews’, without, however, naming its representatives or connecting it with the original ‘New Quest’ (Christ, 30, his italics). 31

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a positivistic public image and an inner methodological uncertainty’.32 Yet ‘methodological uncertainty’ does not capture the spirit of the view of history and historiography that shaped the efforts of the original proponents of the ‘new quest’. What Wright seems to mean is that these North American scholars tend to share the scepticism of Bultmann and, before him, Wrede with regard to the possibility of knowing something about Jesus, coupled with a sceptical attitude towards the value of the gospels as a source of such knowledge. Yet the ‘new quest’ was more typically characterized by a reaction to Bultmann’s scepticism, in that its proponents maintained that one could say at least something about Jesus and that he was important for the kerygma and for theology.33 Furthermore, amongst the more recent scholars whose work Wright analyses, few, if any, show much sign of that existentialist view of history and historiography that was the mark of this movement, a view that its proponents shared with their teacher. Indeed, in the case of Crossan, Wright sees that this scholar differs from Bultmann in reading history ‘politically rather than existentially’.34 Again, in the case of another more recent scholar, Geza Vermes, although he does not belong to the Jesus Seminar, Wright seems to regard his methods as properly ‘historical’, at least with regard to setting Jesus in a Jewish context, but complains that the result is Jesus as an existentialist teacher.35 Is that, however, a sufficient reason to assign him, at least partly, to the ‘renewed New Quest’? If that should seem to be the case, then should we not distinguish more carefully between (a) the methods used by a historian, (b) the results achieved by her or him, and (c) the historian’s judgement about what is important and of significance in the past? That a historian sharing the existentialist perspectives of the ‘new quest’ (whether or not that can really be said of Vermes’ work)36 should share the historical methods of the ‘third quest’ should come as no surprise if Harvey and Ogden were right to question how ‘new’ the methods of historical research of the ‘new quest’ were in comparison with those of the old ‘quest’. 32 Wright, Jesus, 31. On the work of Crossan Wright comments that, despite the dominant ‘postmodern tone’ of his The Historical Jesus (cf. particularly 423), Crossan’s ‘massive inventory of material is bound to look like a thoroughly modernist piece of work, appearing to lay firm, almost positivist, foundations for the main argument of the book’ (Wright, Jesus, 50; cf. also 55). 33 Contrast W. Braun, ‘“Wir haben doch den amerikanischen Jesus”’, 37–8, following W. E. Arnal: ‘one does not need the historical Jesus, either for theological reasons (as Paul has already shown) or for the secular historical enterprise of understanding the formation of the first Christian communities’. For ‘neither the historical Jesus nor the Christ of the creeds nor biblical or post-biblical stories of the origin of Christianity are accurate accounts of the past; rather they are mythical accounts of the origin that reflect nothing other than our all too recognizable interests, in our time and place.’ 34 Wright, Jesus, 45. 35 Wright, Jesus, 83; cf. 92. 36 It may be important here to distinguish between ‘existentialist’ in the strict sense and an interpretation in terms of the ‘existential’ relevance of historical phenomena.

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One scholar, however, who does claim to have picked up the baton of the ‘new quest’ (or, as he calls it, the ‘second quest’) is Paul Zahl in his book The First Christian. Yet, despite his contacts with Ernst Käsemann while writing a thesis on that scholar’s doctrine of justification under Jürgen Moltmann in Tübingen, and despite his concern to emphasize Jesus’ discontinuity with Judaism and continuity with the message of the Christian church, there seems to be a fundamental difference between his avowedly ‘traditional’ Christianity and the theology of Käsemann, which is not usually described by that adjective. Nor is it clear to me that the pupils of Bultmann that took up the ‘new quest’ had all broken so fully with ‘individualism and existentialism’ as Zahl suggests (28), even if the likes of Käsemann trod a markedly independent path in this respect.37 It is true that Zahl proposes to undertake a ‘fourth quest’, rather than simply to resume the earlier one, but he nevertheless sees this as building on it (12). Nor do I find his explanation of the demise of the ‘new quest’ as the result of the student revolution of 1968 particularly convincing. Even if it were true that Käsemann ‘switched from Jesus-studies to “Ban the Bomb”’, as Zahl puts it (31), it does not follow that other representatives of the ‘new quest’ also did so. (I saw no sign of such a switch in the interests of Günther Bornkamm when I was studying in Heidelberg in 1969 nor in those of Hans Conzelmann in Göttingen in 1971/2.) It seems more likely that the explanation is that the particular sort of existentialist theology presupposed to varying degrees by proponents of the ‘new quest’ simply went out of fashion, and with it that approach to historiography adopted by Bultmann and his pupils.38 And whether Zahl will find many followers for his particular analysis of how that version of ‘traditional’ Christianity that he espouses occurred to the Jewish Jesus seems to me doubtful.39 For it would be a mistake to view the ‘new quest’ as being reincarnated in more recent works if one sees it as essentially working within the framework of Bultmann’s existentialism. It is not, however, that an element of the existential and of existential relevance does not or should not play a part still in historiography, but rather that the framework and categories of existentialism, if made the 37 E.g. in his holding together ‘Individualisierung’ as well as relating God’s grace and righteousness to the world and a new creation (Käsemann, ‘Rechtfertigung’, 138). 38 Dunn, ‘Third Quest’, 32–3, attributes the demise or eclipse of the ‘new quest’ to its becoming ‘bogged down in unending debate over particular texts and in unresolved disputes regarding criteria for recognizing authentic words of Jesus’ (Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 3, also traces the fizzling out of the ‘new quest' to exhaustion), but such obstacles have surely imperilled more than the ‘new quest’. 39 Zahl may be correct in saying that Jesus’ expectations of the coming end allowed more time for repentance than those of John the Baptist, but I find it harder to distinguish the calls for repentance of the two preachers than Zahl does (cf. Zahl, Christian, 79–82), and even if this allowed more scope for the exercise of compassion, that does not explain why Jesus was compassionate (cf. 75) – to have an opportunity for exercising compassion does not necessarily make one compassionate.

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centre of historiography, leave us with an attenuated and limited view of the historian’s task. What Ben Meyer says cuttingly, and thereby perhaps overstating his case, of Bultmann’s existentialism may apply, mutatis mutandis, to that hermeneutic as the key to historiography: Bultmannian existentialism, incisive within its limits, but exceedingly limited in both resources and themes, simply died out for having said what it could and having no more to say.40

Wayne Meeks, too, sees existentialist historiography as a fashion that has had its day, ‘gone the way of the other attempts through the centuries to find what Bultmann called “the right philosophy” by which to translate the myths and mysteries of the New Testament into contemporary thought forms’.41 And in similar vein Heinz Schürmann sees in this ‘new quest’ ‘the same understanding of existence’, ‘a meagre outcome that is an individualistic restriction of Jesus’ significance and hinders one’s perspective on history, society and the world’.42 It is noteworthy that Ernst Käsemann, whose name is so intimately bound up with the ‘new quest’ as well as with the Bultmann school, recognized in existentialist interpretation ‘an indispensable, though by no means an exclusive, means of exposition’ of the New Testament. Its drawback is that, although it enables one to see the historicity of man, it does not give an adequate view of world history. It will not do for us to reduce world history … to the historicity of human existence.43

In keeping with this, William Herzog may well be correct in seeing the attempt to set Jesus in his social and political contexts, so prominent in some representatives of the ‘third quest’, as a factor that also contributed to the dying out of the ‘new quest’: ‘The existentialist emphasis on the moment was rendered irrelevant by the introduction of the larger social and political world of the first century.’44 Or, if not ‘irrelevant’, it was sidelined by other, more pressing interests. 40 Meyer, Reality, 70. Moltmann, too, observes that ‘the texts that come to us from history are not to be examined merely in regard to the possibilities of existence …, but have to be read in terms of their historical place and their historical time, in terms of their own historical connections before and after. … The temporal, historical difference between then and now is not bridged by tracing past and present possibilities back to human existence as such, but is preserved, and yet at the ame time also bridged, by the context of events that joins them both together’ (Theology, 277). 41 Meeks, Christ, 30. 42 Schürmann, ‘Situation’, 305; cf. also 307: ‘the existentialist horizon of the Bultmann school can no longer be that of our day, in which questions regarding society and the future of the world have become extremely urgent’. 43 Käsemann, Jesus, 132–3; he goes on to remark that the Book of ‘Revelation shows us beyond doubt that the New Testament is concerned, not merely with human existence, but at the same time with world history.’ 44 Herzog, Jesus, 23,

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4. A New View of History and Historiography? It is first of all necessary to note that these views of history that are surveyed in the previous two chapters and the present one do not correspond exactly with the phases which scholars have detected in historical investigation of Jesus’ life. It is true that the phase which is usually described as the ‘new quest’ is marked by a distinctive, existentialist view of what history and historiography are and that this was the basis of James Robinson’s assigning the work of various scholars to this phase, although that would be equally true, as we saw, of Rudolf Bultmann’s view of history, and he is not usually reckoned among the proponents of the ‘new quest’; rather his views are the foil over against which those proponents develop their own concept of how one should set about studying the life of Jesus. But we have seen that the view of history and historiography presupposed by earlier Jesus research is harder to detect, and the phase that is now designated as the ‘third quest’ has certainly not been dominated by any distinctively different view to that of either of these phases in Jesus research. The scholars associated with it have, it is true, claimed to be working historically, but their views of what history and historical research are have often been almost as hard to discover as those of the original ‘quest’. Dale Allison finds little of originality in the methods employed by representatives of the ‘third quest’ and little agreement, either, although he notes that the latter is true of ‘every other subject in the humanities in recent decades’.1 Indeed, Halvor Moxnes names two scholars who, in the eyes of some at least, belong to the representatives of the ‘third quest’, J. P. Meier and E. P. Sanders, and labels them as ‘historians within the modernist tradition’.2 On the other hand, is it enough to point to the absence of either the ‘cultural synthe-

1 Allison, ‘Secularizing’, 142–3, 145. He is generally highly critical of the schema usually adopted for speaking of three ‘quests’ and even more of the practice of speaking of a period of ‘no quest’, listing a large number of studies of Jesus published in the period when there was supposed to be ‘no quest’ as well as those falling in the period between 1954 and 1979, including many that are not to be ascribed to the ‘new quest’. Cf. also Bernejo Rubio, ‘Fiction’ (further bibliography 21–13 n. 3); Porter, Criteria, 28–62; Weaver, Jesus, xi–xii. 2 Moxnes, ‘Jesus’, 138. R. Horsley, J. D. Crossan and B. J. Malina, on the other hand, represent ‘social and cultural criticism of traditional history’ (143). Sometimes he finds in their work traces of ‘postmodernism’ (e.g. 147 on Malina), but whether the recognition that ‘words … are rendered meaningful only through shared usage through groups’ is a sufficiently specific ‘postmodern’ insight seems to me questionable.

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sis’ of the Enlightenment or of Heideggerian hermeneutics in order to claim , as William Herzog does, that we now have ‘a postmodern quest’?3

4.1. Historical Research in the ‘Third Quest’ Perhaps nowhere is it clearer than in relation to the so-called ‘third quest for the historical Jesus’ that differing understandings of historiography and of the philosophy of history do not correspond to the usual delimitations of the various phases of Jesus research. The historical, as opposed to any theological, interest in this question is often all too clearly to be seen.4 So E. P. Sanders, one of the scholars most associated with this phase of research, prefaced his work on Jesus and Judaism with the observation that he was interested in the debate about the significance of the historical Jesus for theology in the way one is interested in something he once found fascinating. The present work is written without that question in mind, however …

In the light of that remark it is perhaps not so surprising that Cilliers Breytenbach, at the close of a short survey of Jesus research in the years 1990 to 1995, should remark on the similarity between the newer North American work on Jesus and the liberal theology of the closing years of the nineteenth century as well as that between the comparison of Jesus with the Graeco–Roman Cynics and the views of Nietzsche.5 Tellingly, Dale Allison draws attention to the way in which John Riches, whom Wright assigned to the ranks of the ‘third questers’, expressly takes as his starting-point questions raised by Reimarus and Lessing, although that does not, of course, mean that his methods or his answers were the same as theirs.6 In a similar vein, Dunn describes much work on Jesus from the mid-70s on as ‘neo-Liberal’, sharing the ‘Liberal’ lives’ concern ‘to see Jesus within his historical context’ and their ethical concern, although he recognizes that this ‘neo-Liberal’ Jesus differs from that of the ‘old quest’, while just as much divested

3

Herzog, Jesus, 31–3. At any rate, other aspects of the more recent work mentioned by him under this heading, such as its interdisciplinary approach, studies of first-century Galilee, or interest in Jesus as ‘a political and public figure concerned with the issues that impacted the lives of the rural peasants, artisans, the unclean and degraded, and the expendables with whom he spent so much of his time’, hardly seem sufficient to warrant the use of this admittedly slippery adjective, ‘postmodern’, so that one is left with this absence of such a ‘cultural synthesis’ and the diversity of accounts that it consequently spawns. 4 Cf. Frey, ‘Jesus’, 287. Of this Wright, Jesus, 84, comments: ‘There is now a real attempt to do history seriously.’ (It seems that he is confident that he knows what ‘doing history’ involves and does not involve.) 5 Breytenbach, ‘Jesusforschung’, 247; cf. also von Scheliha, ‘Kyniker’, esp. 25. 6 Allison, ‘Secularizing’, 143, referring to the first chapter of Riches, Jesus.

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of elements superimposed by a later faith.7 Of a piece with that observation is the complaint of Jens Schröter that the hermeneutical and epistemological framework in which Jesus research should be set had hitherto been neglected by the ‘third quest’.8 Dunn, too, as we have already seen, seems at first sight to make common cause with those hermeneutical and epistemological insights of Schröter and to set a question mark against the legitimacy of going behind our records of Jesus, although, on the one hand, he is not apparently motivated by any particular fashion of hermeneutical or epistemological concerns and, on the other, speaks of the barrier that cannot be penetrated as the ‘impression’ made by Jesus.9 It is, however, puzzling to find him then giving a chapter of his Jesus Remembered the title ‘Through the Gospels to Jesus’ as if one could then indeed get behind the witness of the gospels; yet the same, short chapter also asserts that he does not ‘envisage “getting back to Jesus” himself’, but only to the impact made by him, an impact that he sums up as ‘Jesus remembered’; but he adds: ‘the Jesus thus remembered is Jesus, or as close as we will ever be able to reach back to him’.10 And in a later contribution he insisted again that We cannot press through the tradition to some objective Jesus whom we can discern and evaluate independently of the diverse witness to him, that is, a Jesus disentangled from the differing perspectives of the tradition, with their differing “fictions” stripped away.11

Yet, if we are to criticize the traditions at all or to argue that at any point they have misrepresented Jesus or not represented him adequately, what is to be the basis of that criticism? Even if one appeals to conflicting traditions about Jesus, the decision in favour of the one over against the other presupposes some point of reference that lies beyond and external to the traditions that we have. It is to be noted at this point that also in his shorter, later book he afterwards goes on to talk of the ‘impact’ made by Jesus, as he had earlier in his Jesus Remembered (129), and this term sounds less subjective than ‘impression’, but the language of ‘impressions’ recurs at various points in his account; herein lies a danger, a danger that also affects the word ‘impact’ if it is meant to be synonymous with ‘impression’.12 For one thing, one must distinguish between the ‘impression’ that 7

Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 52, 58–65, referring particularly to Funk, Crossan, Helmut Koester and Marcus Borg. 8 Schröter, Jesus, 34. 9 Dunn, Perspective, 30. 10 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 327–36 (quotations are from 329 and 335, his italics); he notes that the phrase ‘through the gospels to Jesus’ is borrowed from Keck, Future, 26–35. 11 Dunn, ‘History’, 475. 12 Claussen, ‘Jesus’, 4, offers ‘Eindruck’ as the German translation of Dunn’s ‘impact’ (cf. his and C. Maser’s translation of Dunn, ‘Remembering Jesus’), which does nothing to lessen the possibility of a thoroughly subjective interpretation of what is involved. In response to Gerhardsson’s complaint that ‘impact’ is ‘rather difficult to explain’ (‘Secret’, 8) Dunn, ‘Eyewitnesses’, 90, offers a further clarification: the word expresses the effect Jesus

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Jesus made on his disciples and contemporaries and the ‘impression’ mediated to us by his disciples, for the latter is certainly a selection from the former and it may, intentionally or unintentionally, be a biased selection. To be heeded here is the distinction that Rudolf Bultmann makes in warding off the impression that historical critical work will leave us with nothing of Jesus; rather, one penetrates nearer and nearer to a centre from which the various layers of the tradition spring, either as direct reflections of that centre or as refractions of it in different historical material.13 And it seems to me, further, that historians do in fact seek to penetrate behind the impression given by their records and indeed to subject that impression to critical scrutiny. One only needs to recall the negative impression of certain Roman emperors given in our principal literary sources, above all the writings of Suetonius and Tacitus, and the tendency in contemporary historical study to moderate that negative impression and to rehabilitate the emperors in question, at least to some extent. A particularly striking case is that of the emperor Domitian, for the historiographical sources, as opposed to the poets Martial and Statius, are dominated by the hostility towards this emperor shown by the senatorial classes in the time of Nerva and Trajan; that is particularly true of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger, to a lesser extent of Suetonius. Historians today acknowledge that it is difficult to penetrate behind the sources to the reality of his reign.14 Nonetheless it is clear, for example, from Pliny’s letters that Domitian’s administrative decisions were generally endorsed by his successors and that he enjoyed some modest success as a military commander. One historian comments, too, on the irony that so many of his later critics owed their first steps in their successful careers to his shrewd patronage.15 The implication here is that, whatever impression the emperor in question actually made on his contemporaries, the authors in question have given a distorted picture and have given their readers a false impression. Aloys Winterling, too, commenting on the picture of Caligula as mad that we gain from historical sources, a picture formerly repeated by more recent historians, observes that these sources have a clearly recognizable aim, to depict the irrational beviour of a monster; they supply information that lends this picture credence and suppress what might refute it; they divorce this emperor’s actions from their context so that their original meaning is very hard to discern and pass judgements that conflict with information that they themselves give. Not all modern historians, however, have swallowed this tendentious picture; a source-critical comparison of the traditions has enabled false information to be had on his disciples, ‘by his life and actions as well as by his teaching’. But that is not just a matter of what he did and said, but of their perception and interpretation of those actions and words. 13 Bultmann, Erforschung, 41–2. 14 E.g. W. Eck in DNP 3, 747. 15 Goodman, World, 65.

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identified and information that conflicted with an author’s bias can be better trusted. And ‘by drawing on the entire tradition one can gain knowledge of the context, theorizing with regard to politics, society, religion and ways of thinking of that time in such a way as to make it possible to distinguish accounts that are plausible from those that are not.’16 Edward Champlin provides a good example of the sort of ‘source-critical comparison’ involved in his study of another reputed ‘monster’, the emperor Nero: behind the accounts of three later historians, Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio, lie other accounts that supplied these three with information, above all the hostile accounts of the elder Pliny and Fabius Rusticus and the more neutral one of Cluvius Rufus; Champlin can then show several examples of how the accounts given by Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio in many cases interpreted the traditions to show Nero in an unfavourable light, but against this must be set the evidence that many hoped that Nero had not died and would return.17 In such cases the impression conveyed by the written sources is compared with other data, often even data yielded by those sources despite themselves and despite the bias of their authors.18 In short, a historical-critical study of Jesus will also try to subject the impressions given by the gospels and Jesus’ ‘impact’ reflected in them to critical analysis, asking particularly whether any of the material presented in them runs counter to the bias and purpose of the evangelist in question as well as raising questions of contextual plausibility and the like. In the case of the Christian gospels it is no different. While the newer approaches to historiography have emphasized the influence exercised by their cultural setting on modern historians, it has long been recognized that the cultural setting of the evangelists left a decisive mark on the way in which they told their story. Thus when Bernard Lategan draws attention to that interpretation to be found in the New Testament writings, and yet criticizes Theissen for probing ‘behind’ the texts,19 it may be objected that it is precisely because they are interpretations that we must seek to go ‘behind’ them, even if we can never be ‘certain’ that we have been successful in discovering what it was that they interpreted thus. 16

Winterling, Caligula, 9, 11. Champlin, Nero, esp. 36–52. 18 In the case of Domitian it is this that counts, rather than the alternative impressions given by other authors such as the poets Martial and Statius, for the latter may be equally tendentious, but in the opposite direction. So it is noteworthy that Witschel, ‘Kaiser’, who warns against taking over the one-sided accounts of our sources and urges us rather to try to appreciate the viewpoint of the emperors in question and the logic of their actions, finds the evidence for the strategy that they adopted and the circles to which they appealed in the first place in the more or less hostile sources themselves, although he then measures this against epigraphical and other evidence. It is, for instance, Suetonius who records the reaction of the army to the murder of this emperor who had particularly presented himself as a military leader (Suet., Dom. 23.1). 19 Lategan, ‘History’ (2004), esp. 142, 145. 17

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Another problem with the talk of the ‘impact’ made by Jesus is the impression that the term may give of something instantaneous, something that happened immediately during Jesus’ lifetime. Whether Dunn intends this or not, it is clear that others talk of something of far longer duration. So Samuel Byrskog, despite sharing Dunn’s interest in ‘Jesus remembered’, insists that ‘the Jesus of history emerges through a process that transmitted tradition and reconfigured him narratively on the basis of conventional plot structures and shared mnemonic patterns’.20 Jesus is not simply ‘remembered’, but also ‘reconfigured’. Indeed, could not the whole Wirkungsgeschichte of Jesus’ life and teaching be described as ‘the impact of Jesus’ down the centuries, even though that history presumably stretches well beyond the period envisaged by Byrskog and even further beyond what Dunn presumably has in mind? In the last analysis, however, as Byrskog notes,21 Dunn is not content to stick to the ‘impact’ made by Jesus, for he is prepared, in introducing his chapter on ‘How Did Jesus See His Own Role?’, to ‘hazard the next step’, of asking not just about the ‘shape’ of the impact made by Jesus, but also about the ‘shape’ of what made that impact.22 Yet at the close of his work Dunn seems temporarily to forget that further step and reasserts his earlier position: ‘All we have is the impact Jesus made on those who responded to him, the impact crystallized in the tradition – the remembered Jesus.’ ‘Resurrection’ is for him a ‘crystallization of that impact’. Yet that reversion is only temporary, for slightly later the hazardous step returns, but now more confidently: ‘We can certainly hope to look behind that impact to the one who made that impact.’23 The importance of such a penetrating behind, and questioning of, the sources or the impressions that they mediate is underlined when one recalls, once again, that the historian’s work is not just about giving an account of past events or sequences of events, but also involves investigating what happened, so that one may give an account that is historical. And that investigation will involve a critical questioning of the sources and evidence that we have, as well as an interpretation of them and of their significance for the story that is to be told. Such a questioning cannot content itself with what the sources say or seem to say; it must not only relate them as well to the evidence of other sources, but must also ask what led to their production. With written texts of any sort it is clear that questions about their authors, their intentions and purposes and their ability and 20 Byrskog, ‘Quest’, 326. It is true that Byrskog does not talk in terms of Jesus’ ‘impact’, perhaps precisely because of the connotations of immediacy that the term might convey. 21 Byrskog, ‘Perspective’, 462, points to Dunn’s chapter 13, ‘For Whom Did Jesus Intend His Message?’, as well as to discussions of ‘why Jesus went up to Jerusalem, what meaning he gave his anticipated death, his hope of vindication and so on’, in the recognition that one is thereby attempting the impossible, ‘to “get inside” the head of a historical figure’ (Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 790–824, with a quotation from 818). 22 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 705. 23 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 827, 882 (his italics).

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authority to say what they say will come into play, but even with non-textual data a probing behind the data themselves may be highly relevant. Were, for instance, the jars containing the Dead Sea Scrolls put there by the occupants of the nearby Qumran settlement or not? That non-textual question has potentially very important consequences both for our interpretation of the contents of the jars and for our understanding of the nature of the Qumran settlement. It is a question that quite deliberately – and legitimately – goes ‘behind’ the sources, and that is part and parcel of historical enquiry.

4.2. A New Historiography? Behind Schröter’s appeal to contemporary hermeneutical and epistemological insights that we noted earlier (ch. 1) lies a complex and to the uninitiated somewhat confusing debate on the nature of history, the historian’s work and historiography. As I also indicated at the beginning, the ambiguity of the term ‘history’ itself has not added clarity to this discussion, but the debate is further complicated by two factors, (a) a use of literary theories to classify the work of historians, and (b) the relevance of the historian’s study of the past to issues of the present and to expectations for the future. To take the latter point first: historians often, but not always,24 see in their analyses of the past lessons and implications for the present, and often write in the awareness or with the sense that the course of history is moving or can be made to move in a particular direction. Nowhere is this perhaps clearer than in Karl Marx’s historical reflection if indeed his use of the concepts of law and causation were ‘to make possible a heroic confrontation of the evils of his own present and a hopeful projection of man into his possible future’.25 Both of these aspects relating to present and future have often been given a theological dimension, but these are far from the only perspectives on history that can be and have been employed. Yet undoubtedly many historians who study the life of Jesus see in the results of their study a relevance for the present and pointers to the future. But this perspective need not be, as is frequently the case in much other historical study, a conviction about history in general and about the direction in which human history is moving, but is frequently a conviction about the significance of the particular figure they are investigating. That conviction may be undergirded by a traditional incarnational christology, by the belief that in this person God became a human being and entered history, or it may take a weaker form, for example that of regarding the person of Jesus as a window or lens by which one 24 25

Cf. White, Metahistory, on Benedetto Croce: e.g. 399–400. White, Metahistory, 334–5.

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may look on the world and the forces at work in it, a point of orientation and a yardstick by which to measure that world. Then this window or lens may simply be one that this student of Jesus’ life finds particularly illuminating or satisfactory, even if she or he does not want to exclude the value or worth of the views to be gained from other windows. The student’s view may then widen out to take in the whole of the past, the present and the future, whether this viewpoint is ontologically undergirded as in the case of a traditional incarnational christology or is simply acknowledged to be the student’s chosen viewpoint whose only claim lies rather in its heuristic worth, that is, as an interpretative tool that this particular student has found to be profitable and insightful as a means of understanding what has been going on and is going on. But in this case it is the student’s view of this person that forms his or her starting-point and is applied to history, rather than a general view of history. The second point was the role played by literary theories, a role that was particularly stressed in the influential work of Hayden White.26 In Hayden White’s work one constantly encounters four basic ‘tropes’ that he uses in the analysis of ‘poetic’ language, including historiography, four ‘tropes’ or ‘modes of figurative representation’ that Giambattista Vico identified as the ‘“logic” of all “poetic wisdom”’:27 metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, the latter three being kinds of metaphors, but differing from one another in the kinds of reductions or integrations that they effect on the literal level and in the kind of illuminations effected on the figurative level. Metaphor is essentially ‘representational’, metonymy ‘reductionist’, synecdoche ‘integrative’, and irony ‘negational’.28 Here difficulties with this classification begin for me, since the very example that White chooses for metonymy (‘fifty sail’ for ‘fifty ships’) can be found given as an example of synecdoche (e.g. in the Concise Oxford Dictionary) and Lausberg states that the metonymy of the quantitative relation between a word and its meaning is called synecdoche:29 the latter makes ‘us realise many things from one, the whole from a part, the genus from a species, things which follow from things that have preceded’ or vice versa.30 What White designates as a separate trope therefore seems to be but a subspecies of another.31 Again, ‘irony’ is defined in a way that seems to catch but part of the sense that this term usually has: an ironic statement for White aims ‘to affirm tacitly the negative of what is on the literal level affirmed positively, or the reverse’; those 26 Cf. the critique of White and Frank Ankersmit by Lorenz, ‘Geschichte’, with the bibliography of further discussion of both in 34–5 n. 3. 27 White, ‘Text’, 27–8 (=Tropics, 94–5); cf. also Metahistory, 32; Kellner, ‘Bedrock’, 5, 11. 28 White, Metahistory, 34. 29 Lausberg, Handbuch § 572. Cf. also the criticism of Oexle, ‘Sehnsucht’, 2. 30 Quintilian 8.6.19, tr. Butler. 31 Cf. Häfner’s criticism in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 80 n. 43. It should also be noted that for Cook, History/Writing, 208, ‘All history writing must be synecdochic’, in the sense that the historian should be aware of the widest possible context while writing about a particular aspect or selection from the whole; at the same time ‘the historian’s awareness of the synecdochic nature of his work’ can be defined as an irony ‘insofar as as the juxtaposition of one selected detail to another frequently and characteristically entails some ironic reflection of the discrepancy between them’.

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to whom it is addressed know or can recognize ‘the absurdity of the characterization of the thing designated in the Metaphor, Metonymy, or Synecdoche used to give form to it’ (37, his capitalization). But need irony only apply to figurative language? To take one example from the famed Johannine irony: in John 7.27 some inhabitants of Jerusalem assert: ‘we know where this man [Jesus] is from.’ That is not figurative language, but for John and his readers it is undoubtedly ironic, for these inhabitants of Jerusalem do not know of Jesus’ true, heavenly origin. Yet, although the constant appeal to these tropes adds little, in my view, to the clarity of White’s analysis, even less is gained by the identification of a further triad of foursomes (29):32 Mode of emplotment

Mode of argument33

Mode of ideological implication

romantic tragic comic satirical

formist34

anarchist radical conservative liberal

mechanist organicist contextualist

In this selection of four ‘modes of emplotment’ White appeals to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, although he concedes that the list may not be exhaustive.35 (Yet Paul Ricoeur comments on the ‘irony’ that Frye is concerned to keep poetics and historiography separate: ‘Fiction, for Frye, concerns the possible, history has to do with the real’.)36 Essentially there are, White maintained in his Metahistory, but four principal types of explanatory strategies that correspond to the four principal tropes of poetic language already mentioned.37 The romance is fundamentally a ‘drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall’, while the satire is the precise op32 Cf. White, Tropics, 70. Kellner, ‘Bedrock’, 8 n. 15, 26, adds the quartet of ‘emplotment, argumentation, ideology, and “deep structure”’, linked respectively to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, to form a ‘quadruple tetrad’. Williams, Truth, 243, speaks of ‘the fantastical elaboration of the scheme and its ability to process almost any possibility without much resistance’. 33 It is true that White only identifies ‘a certain elective affinity’ between the four ‘modes of argument’ or ‘modes of explanation’ and the four ‘modes of emplotment’ and denies that the chosen ‘mode of emplotment‘ ‘dictates’ the ‘mode of explanation’ used: Tropics, 66 (his italics). 34 As Clark, History, 259 n. 107, notes, White elsewhere substitutes the term ‘idiographic’ (e.g. Tropics, 66, 70). 35 White, Metahistory, 7, 426, 429. And in fact in his ‘Modellierung’, 145, he seems to list six types with an ‘et cetera’ that seems to allow for yet further types (added are ‘epic’ and ‘idyllic’). Cf. also Oexle, ‘Sehnsucht’, 4. 36 Ricoeur, Time 1, 163. Cf. White’s comments on Frye in his ‘Text’, 16–17 (=Tropics, 82–3), and Tropics, 57–9 (including Frye’s refusal to allow the historian to impose a pattern on her or his data), and contrast with Frye’s view referred to above White’s ‘Postmodernism’, 40: for ‘postmodernism’ ‘there is no substantial difference between representations of historical reality and representations of imagined events and processes’ (his italics). 37 White, Metahistory, 31.

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posite, ‘a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master’ (a definition that seems hard to square with either ancient usage of the term or what we today understand by the term). Comedy and tragedy, on the other hand, ‘suggest the possibility of at least partial liberation from the condition of the Fall and provisional release from the divided state in which men find themselves in this world’; comedy holds out the hope of a temporary triumph of humanity over its world, whereas in tragedy ‘the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits … are not regarded as totally threatening to those who survive the agonic test’ (8–9 – again definitions that are hard to reconcile with the usual ones for these terms). White recognizes that Frye’s classification has been criticized and cannot do justice to ‘richly textured and multi-leveled works’ (8 n. 6), and it is presumably in the light of this that he himself has recourse to mixed forms such as tragicomedy.38 But more serious is the question whether classifications appropriate to compositions where the author has a free hand to write as she or he chooses are also appropriate to accounts whose author is constrained by the results of her or his investigation of the past and by what can be heard from the sources available.39 For Iggers argues that for White, once historians have made their choice of strategies or tropes, they are captives of this strategy.40 Linked to this is what Maurice Mandelbaum described as one of the ‘oddities’ of White’s Metahistory, that, ‘in spite of its “linguistic” approach, it failed to include as part of its implicit theory of language any account of how languages function with respect to their referential uses. … Only a person treating a historical account solely as a literary document would not immediately raise the issue of reference, and with it the question of historical truth.’41 It is because the historian’s account seeks to ‘refer’ to some past reality other than itself that it is constrained by that reality and must seek to justify itself by reference to that reality, by appeal to evidence of that reality available to us in the present.

However, it should be stressed, first of all, that White’s classifications come into play primarily at the stage of giving an account of what happened. Yet it must be granted that one’s view of the appropriate account in a given case may not be wholly dependent on, or subsequent to, one’s investigation of what happened, but 38 Cf. the comment of Albert Cook that ‘A historical narrative … both illustrates and supersedes the tropes under which one could classify it’ (History/Writing, 9). 39 Ricoeur, Time 3, 154, comments that ‘White’s recourse to tropology runs the risk of wiping out the boundary between fiction and history’ (cf. also p. 311 n. 39; Reality, 33; Memory, 253; also R. J. Evans, Defence, 100–1; R. Habermas, ‘Herausforderungen’, 67; but cf. Carroll, ‘Interpretation’, 35–6; on the other hand, White, Tropics, 121, grants ‘that historical events differ from fictional events in the ways that it has been conventional to characterize their differences since Aristotle’ [his italics]). On the other hand, Ricoeur also seems to concede too much to White’s approach when he speaks of historical discourse’s allegiance, not only to the past as far as it is accessible to us, but also ‘to the constraints related to the privileged type of plot’ (Reality, 29, his italics). Or is he here simply stating White’s position and not his own? For one must ask whether historians owe allegiance to any form of emplotment except in so far as it seems to them to correspond to what the course of events calls for, those ‘incitements to redescription that come from the past itself’ (Ricoeur, Reality, 34, his italics)? 40 Iggers, ‘Historiography’, 377. 41 Mandelbaum, ‘Presuppositions’, 53.

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may inform and guide that investigation, at least as a heuristic tool.42 Nevertheless, is it not the case that an investigation whose course and results are too much determined by the plot of the account to be told would be discredited as onesided and distorted? Must there not be some recognizable match between the shape of the account and the events, or at least the evidence for those events, a match recognizable by the outside observer even when she or he does not share the particular perspective embodied in that account?43 And it is to be noted that White himself later insisted that ‘an interpretation falls into the category of a lie when it denies the reality of the events of which it treats, and into the category of an untruth when it draws false conclusions from reflection on events whose reality remains attestable on the level of “positive” historical inquiry’.44 Yet, despite this important limitation on the principle of ‘anything goes’ and recognition of the categories of ‘lies’ and ‘untruths’, it is over against ‘a relativist position à la Hayden White’ that Roger Chartier insists ‘forcefully that history is commanded by an intention and a principle of truth, that the past history has taken as its object is a reality external to discourse, and that knowledge of it can be verified’.45 It is at this point, too, that Ricoeur speaks of ‘an ongoing search for a way to fill 42 Cf., e.g., Rüsen, Geschichte, 19: it would be artificial to separate historical research and the writing of history, for in the last analysis the former has the latter as its goal and the results of the former function as the building blocks of the latter and are seen as such. And yet Rüsen also is prepared to distinguish the two as distinct phases in the pursuit of historical knowledge. 43 A. P. Norman, ‘Telling’, 154–5, refers to White’s ‘impositionalism’ involving the ‘projection’ of a genre of ‘literary figuration’ onto ‘the facts of the plot structure’. R. J. Evans, Defence, 125, emphasizes the importance of White’s later acknowledgement (see his ‘Emplotment’/‘Modellierung’) that ‘the facts of the Holocaust closed off the possibility of using certain types of emplotment to describe it’. (If White does in fact acknowledge that, it is a more than somewhat grudging acknowledgement that may be called in question by his defence of Art Spiegelmann’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale [New York: Pantheon Books, 1986]; instead he proposes that Roland Barthes’ ‘intransitive writing’ would be appropriate for this subject-matter. On the other hand, he did recognize that it would be inappropriate to cast the life of President Kennedy as comedy [‘Text’, 18=Tropics, 84], an admission to which Behan McCullagh rightly draws attention, commenting that ‘The plots which historians use have to fit the facts, have to be true to what is known of the history of the subject, and give an idea of it which is not misleading’: ‘Metaphor’, 26; cf. Gaddis, Landscape, e.g. 107, on the aptness of the language of ‘fitting’.) Rightly Evans saw that this would not then just apply to the Holocaust – it was an acknowledgement of ‘the primacy of past reality in shaping the way historians write about it, thus abandoning his [White’s] central theoretical tenet.’ To note, too, is Rüsen’s fear that White’s one-sided stress on literary form and plot could mean that historiography might lose its rationality (‘Geschichtsschreibung’, 33–4) as well as Häfner’s unease at White’s contention that one has no reasons to prefer one historical account to another (in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 84–5; he sees similar problems in Ankersmit’s reduction of historical accounts to proposals for particular perspectives on the past that can be neither true nor false: 85–6). 44 White, Content, 78. 45 Chartier, Edge, 8.

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the gap between the representative capacity of discourse and what the event demands’.46 It should be noted, however, that Ankersmit points to two possible ways of interpreting White’s Metahistory: either one can understand it as questioning how far historians can ever attain to a historical reality antecedent to their accounts of it or one can understand his thesis, as Ankersmit himself prefers to do, not as disputing that one can attain to this historical reality, but as demonstrating ‘the naivete of the kind of positivist intuition customarily cherished in the [historiographical] discipline for how to achieve this goal’; for ‘what these positivist intuitions proudly present as historical reality itself is a mere spectral illusion that is created by the historical discipline itself.’ White in fact saw the ‘poetic genius’ of the great historians that he reviews as that which enabled them to catch a glimpse of that ‘historical reality’; we have also seen how he, like Auerbach, allows for mixed forms, and this, Ankersmit suggests, serves ‘to demonstrate how historical reality can be made visible not by a docile submission, but by a subtle and poetic evasion of [the] protocols’ to which ‘mediocre historians’ who follow one trope alone submit themselves. Irony is as prominent as it is for White because it ‘is the trope that confronts us with the limitations and shortcomings of the other tropes’, ‘the trope that is the natural ally of historical reality itself and that enables it to reassert its rights against the pressure of the other tropes’.47 A further cause for disquiet is the seeming readiness of White to assume that all historical accounts will take a narrative form with a corresponding narrative plot.48 Yet this was an assumption that Droysen had already criticized, despite the acknowledged attractiveness of this form of historical work: he named, apart 46

Ricoeur, Memory, 260. Ankersmit, Representation, 254–5. He further compares White’s appeal to Schiller in Content, 68–9. 48 Cf. Oexle, ‘Sehnsucht’, 8. And yet in a later work White seems to recognize that a narrative form is not a sine qua non for history: 'Historians do not have to report their truths about the real world in narrative form’ (Content, 2; cf. also 27). And Poster, History, 3, argues that one of the contributions of the introduction of ‘social history’ to the field of historical work was that ‘explanatory strategies shifted from narrative to analysis’. Contrast Chartier, Edge, 7: ‘The writing of history, even the most quantitative or the most structural history, belongs to the genre of the narrative, whose fundamental categories it shares’; Hunt, ‘Geschichte’, 113: ‘Even the most rigorous form of “analytical” historiography possesses an inherent narrative form’; Munslow, Deconstructing, 2, 67–74 (from which one gets some idea of how divided opinions are on this point; more problematic is Munslow’s description of White as ‘anti-narrativist’ – 71; cf. 95; or is this meant solely in the sense that White ‘believes that there is no actual narrative in the past to be discovered and retold’ – 134? Who does believe that there is an actual narrative in the past, as opposed to a potential one whose potential or potentials can then be realized by subsequent narrators? Yet see D. Carr, ‘Narrative’ on White and others like him as well as the discussion of Denton’s use of Carr’s theories in § 1.5 above); Rüsen, Vernunft, 52 (narrative as normative and basic for all historical knowledge; cf. also 108–10). 47

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from narrative accounts, those that he classified as investigative, didactic and ‘diskussiv’, the last-named involving the application of the results of historical enquiry to the present.49 Maurice Mandelbaum, too, viewed ‘the current tendency to identify history with narrative’ as ‘basically misleading’.50 It is true that the investigative account, for instance, could also take the form of a narrative account of the course that an investigation that had already taken place had followed,51 but more often it would pose questions and involve the reader in the sifting of the relevant evidence in order to find an answer.52 The historian’s account may, it is true, take a deceptively simple form, just telling a story, but that form of the account would then leave unsaid all the gathering and evaluation of evidence that lays the foundation for a historical account as well as the weighing up of alternative ways of telling the story, whereas a (self-)critical account will at least not only give reasons for what it says happened, i.e. reasons in the world of 49 Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 273, 276–7, etc.; cf. ed. Leyh 445–50; cf. R. J. Evans, Defence, 151–2. Muhlack, ‘Theorie’, esp. 616–20, is critical of the loose talk of ‘narrative’ (Erzählung) with reference both to the theory and the practice of historiography, and Ricoeur, Time 1, 175–6, stresses that ‘history as a science removes the explanatory process from the fabric of the narrative and sets it up as a separate problematic’; historians make the explanatory form ‘autonomous’ and the ‘distinct object of a process of authentication and justification’, like judges seeking ‘warrants’ for this explanation or that. With that he links problems of conceptualization and objectivity and the question of the limits of objectivity, which are not inherent to narrative as such. In his ‘History’, however, Ricoeur seems to give the narrative form a more prominent and all-embracing role: it is ‘consubstantial’ with explanation (p. 13). Rüsen, ‘Narrativität’, 230–1, sees in historians’ and historical theorists’ use of the term ‘narrative’ two different concepts, for the former a way of presenting material, for the latter a way of thinking (‘eine Struktur von Aussagen oder einen Prozess der sprachlichen Weltdeutung’). Cf. also Kocka, ‘Paradigmawechsel?’, 68, who is concerned to distinguish historical argumentation from narrating. 50 Mandelbaum, Anatomy, 30; cf. 24–45, where Mandelbaum sets ‘explanatory’ and ‘interpretive’ structures alongside the narrative or ‘sequential’. The first of these types of historical accounts starts from what is known or thought to be known and works backwards. And, whereas ‘sequential historians’ must describe ‘the state of affairs obtaining at the outset of their sequential accounts’, the ‘interpretative historian‘ must offer ‘a sequential background that sets the stage for the patterns of life with which he is to be concerned‘ and will be guided by his ‘view of what aspects in the times were most characteristic, pervasive, and fundamental for the pattern of life he is attempting to portray’ (40). 51 Cf., e.g., Ong, Orality, 140. I find puzzling, however, Denton’s claim that historians’ narratives ‘include a description of their own acquisition of knowledge of the historical object and thereby invite the reader into the knowing process with them’ (Historiography, 190). It is presumably, also, what Michel de Certeau means when he says that history ‘remains always a narrative. History tells of its own work and, simultaneously, of the work which can be read in a past time’ (Writing, 43). That may sometimes be the case, but is it always so (at least explicitly)? 52 So Marwick, New Nature, 103, comments on the works of Lewis Namier that they are ‘works of analysis, lacking the narrative element that is so cherished by the proponents of auteur history’. On the other hand, D. Brown, Tradition, 11, claims that ‘in most historical writing an adequate narrative has been seen as the ultimate aim’ (cf. also 21).

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the past, but also reasons for the version of the account for which the historian has opted, i.e. reasons from the area of the historian’s scholarly research. 53 One can, moreover, claim rather too much for narration qua narration. This seems to me a danger in Ruben Zimmermann’s argument, which draws heavily on White’s work in the context of a discussion of interpretations of Jesus’ death. 54 Now it is true that narration may be a form of explanation and interpretation of events, but is a narrative as such bound to tell us more than what happened and perhaps also how? 55 Need it also explain why, let alone what the events mean for later generations, including out own? Zimmermann is concerned with the accounts of Jesus’ death, but it must be borne in mind that by definition Christians stand in a special relationship to the events of that story, a relationship that does not obtain in the case of most other stories. It is true that the way that this story of Jesus’ death is told has an interpretative function, e.g. in the widespread allusions to the Old Testament, above all to certain Psalms. One cannot, however, generalize from the interpretative function of this narrative and assume that all narratives are comparable or even that all historical narratives share the characteristics of this one. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that Zimmermann regards White’s categories as too ‘abstract and indefinite’, and if he is right in saying that they only class the passion narratives as ‘tragedy’, then that certainly does not offer us much in the way of a deeper insight into the reasons for the events narrated there, nor into their implications for ourselves. If we return to Schröter’s approach, we can see that, at least in his more recent contributions, it is based on the distinction between fictional or (merely) literary narratives and historical narratives, in that the latter are bound to, and constrained by, the sources, and are not at liberty to develop any narrative that they choose.56 This distinction might seem to be obvious, were it not that it sometimes seems to be denied, as when Udo Schnelle claims that one cannot make ‘a distinction between fictional and non-fictional narration’.57 Yet Collingwood’s 53 However, William H. Dray argues, not only that historical narratives presuppose a certain amount of analysis, but also that ‘good’ analyses usually not only presuppose narratives but often contain them (‘Überlegungen’, 226–7). 54 Zimmermann, ‘“Deuten”’. 55 The matter is, however, complicated by Ankersmit’s insistence that when he talks of ‘narrativism’ he wishes to distance this from ‘all associations of storytelling’: ‘Narrativism should rather be associated with (historical) interpretation’ (History, 45, his italics). Is that to be taken as implying that all historical interpretation is somehow ‘narrative’? 56 Cf. Schröter, ‘Frage’, 231, 233; Moxter, ‘Erzählung’, 68; also Chartier, ‘Zeit’, 92–3; Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 284–5; Hobsbawm, History, 271–2; Lorenz, ‘Geschichte’, 54: historiography, unlike all fictional literature, deals with, refers to, something ‘outside’ the text, the ‘real’ (wirklich) past; historical accounts can therefore be false (60). Yet in his Jesus, e.g. 30–1, Schröter seemed nearer to those such as Schnelle who seem to dissolve the distinction between the fictional and the factual. 57 Schnelle, ‘Anschlussfähigkeit’, 59; cf. also the views of Natalie Zemon Davis and Hayden White cited by Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft, 83, 106.

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distinction here seems to me to be appropriate:58 novelists and historians are both obliged to construct a coherent picture, but the latter have the added task, ‘to construct a picture of things as [they] really were and of events as they really happened’ – or at least (an important qualification!) as the historians think they were and happened.59 That means, Collingwood maintains, localizing the picture painted ‘in space and time’. Furthermore, ‘all history must be consistent with itself’, whereas imaginary worlds cannot come into conflict with one another (or at least it does not matter if they do). On the other hand, ‘there is only one historical world, and everything in it must stand in some relation to everything else, even if that relation is only topographical and chronological’ – in other words, again some form of that causal nexus postulated by Ernst Troeltsch. And, finally, ‘the historian’s picture stands in a peculiar relation to something called evidence’: can the picture be justified by appeal to evidence or, in Schröter’s terminology, sources, or what the historian judges to be relevant evidence? However, the problem here is that to go back to the sources is not enough. For, as the analogy with ‘Luke’s’ historiography shows, the New Testament texts may themselves contain an element of the ‘fictional’, and even the sources which the New Testament writers themselves used need not be free from ‘fiction’. (Thus I have argued that one explanation for the similarities between Acts’ account of the phenomena accompanying the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost and Jewish traditions, particularly in Philo’s writings, describing the manifestations of divine power at the giving of the Law at Sinai may be that ‘Luke’s’ source here was seeking to compare the two events, motivated by a theology similar to that of Paul in 2 Corinthians 3: just as the giving of the Law was glorious, but was surpassed by the even more glorious dispensation of the Spirit, so, too, the phenomena accompanying the giving of the two gifts are comparable. However, ‘Luke’ seems unaware of this parallelism and of any such origins of the phenomena which he describes in Acts 2, and thus it seems possible that he has taken over an account of the phenomena at Pentecost without himself being aware of their original, theological and symbolic significance or at least showing any knowledge of it. Similarly, the choice of the date of Pentecost may be equally significant symbolically and theologically, if this Jewish festival commemorated the giving of the Law or at least of the covenant, if one can separate the two. Again, however, ‘Luke’ gives no hint that he knew of the symbolism of the date.)60

Why, then, should one stop at the sources or even at the sources of the sources, rather than raising the question, what lies behind both of them? Now it may be that the prospects of success in this sort of archaeological excavation, so to speak, are in practice slim, and the temptation is then to remain at the ground-level of 58

Collingwood, Idea, 246. Cf. Rüsen, ‘Narrativität’, 234: in a scholarly historical narrative, in contrast to other narratives, the claims as to the truth of the story told tend to be defended against possible doubt by means of reasoned arguments. 60 Cf. Wedderburn, ‘Traditions’. 59

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the tangible and assured, the documents which we have before us. Pushing beyond them may be a highly conjectural business and the best that we can offer may, therefore, be no more than more or less intelligent guesswork. Nevertheless, a procedure that is ‘truly historical-critical in the traditional sense’ involves, in the words of James Barr, ‘penetrating behind the existing documents and reconstructing things as they really were’ – or at least as they might plausibly have been.61 Yet even in our handling of the sources we are at the mercy of variant readings of the texts and can only offer what seems to us to be the most plausible reading. Nonetheless, Georg Iggers is right to insist on a distinction between a theory that denies any claim to reality for historical accounts and a historiography that is fully aware of the complexity of historical knowledge but yet operates on the assumption that real people had real ideas and feelings that led to real actions that can be known historically and described.62 Moreover, it is a thoroughly legitimate question for the historian to ask what lies behind our sources, what sources of information their authors had at their disposal, as well as posing the question how these authors used the information which they had. It may be the goal of the historian to tell a story, but before it comes to that, does she or he not first have to look at the materials which must be put together in that story and to ask how reliable those materials are? At this point, however, it is as well to note the claim that knowledge of these sources or of the events to which they bear witness somehow alters the objects of one’s knowledge.63 This claim is one that it is hard to justify epistemologically. Is it conceivable that my knowledge that Julius Caesar was murdered or that the Romans sacked Jerusalem in any way alters those events? Rightly Egon Flaig insists that the Roman empire existed apart from his knowledge of it and that the violent transitions from one emperor to another took place regardless of whether he studied them or not.64 Or is it that the sources that tell of these events are somehow changed by my knowledge of them? That, too, is hard to believe or comprehend. At most one could perhaps say that the traditions regarding those events 61 Barr, History, 52 (his italics). (He admits to the ‘Rankean’ flavour of this as he argues that Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is in fact trying to do something that conforms to the ‘“Rankean paradigm” from which she seeks to escape’.) 62 Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft, 88; cf. 95 for examples of the contrasting denial of any such reality. 63 Schnelle, ‘Anschlussfähigkeit’, 49: ‘knowing (Erkennen) always alters its object too. The awareness gained by means of the process of knowing and the reality in the past are not related to one another as original and copy.’ (How are these assertions related to one another?) A similar assertion is found in Fried, ‘Wissenschaft’, 304–5, to the effect that historiography’s object is altered by the historian’s taking up his or her theme; he then goes on to speak of history as wax in the hands of the historian, who forms it as he or she will, even though he recognizes that it is history’s (i.e. historiography’s) intention that its utterances correspond to past reality (Wirklichkeit). Is that intention a delusion or a worthwhile, even if elusive, ideal? 64 Flaig, ‘Kinderkrankheiten’, 39.

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are modified by my knowledge in that I join the long line of those nurturing those traditions and may perhaps indeed play some small part in their nurture if I come up with some particular way of interpreting or appropriating them. Yet not only is the talk of ‘knowing’ here somewhat unguarded, but the ‘object’ that is allegedly changed by my ‘knowing’ needs to be specified further if it is a matter of the traditions concerning past events, not the events themselves. For, on the one hand, it is self-evident that we have no direct access to the past, but only an access mediated by witnesses and their testimony. And, on the other, what passes for ‘knowledge’ in historical research can only be ‘knowledge’ in the loose sense of that which is beyond reasonable doubt or that which can be convincingly supported according to the conventions and accepted standards of historical discourse.65 And, on the other hand, the uncertainty that I have just shown regarding the ‘objects’ of this knowledge, be they events, sources telling of the events, traditions concerning them or something else, shows the need to be more precise about the ‘objects’ that one means. And, as we shall see in the following chapter, there has been much discussion of the methods to be employed in investigating the life of Jesus, a discussion that focusses principally on the vexed question of establishing valid criteria for distinguishing authentic Jesus traditions from later embellishments of these traditions. That, too, is a matter of going behind the sources, not viewing them solely on the surface level, but pushing behind them to ask whether their contents first arose in the post-Easter period or whether one can trace them back into the preEaster period, perhaps then even to Jesus himself. And that is true of any historical documents that claim to pass on the words of a figure of the past (e.g. the sayings attributed to various Roman emperors in Suetonius’ Lives). One can and must ask, legitimately, how the author came to know what had been said and how the account given relates to what was actually said at the time. Only rarely does one encounter a case where the ancient world’s report of what was said on a given occasion can be correlated with another more direct witness. One such case is the report of Claudius’ speech in 48 C.E. arguing for the admission of Gauls to the Roman senate that is found in an abbreviated form in Tacitus Annales 11.24, parts of which are also found in a fuller form in CIL 13.1668.66 Had Jesus or his immediate followers been able to afford to carve his sayings in stone in the manner of the dicta of Delphi the situation might have been comparable, but unfortunately it is not. 65 On the ambiguities inherent in the term ‘discourse’ cf. Schöttler, ‘Angst’, esp. 138– 42, who distinguishes between the philosophical use stemming from Jürgen Habermas and the use of the term originating with Foucault and referring to institutionalized or ‘institutionalizable’ ways of speaking. 66 Cf. Backhaus in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 12 (while the inscription reflects the needs of the day, Tacitus’ version shows what was at stake); cf. also Mattila, ‘Question’, 209.

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4.3. A ‘Postmodern’ Historiography? In the stress amongst German-speaking scholars on constructing history rather than reconstructing it and in the reluctance to admit the necessity and propriety of going behind the sources one may indeed detect more than a whiff of ‘postmodernism’ – and that this aroma may for some be a very distasteful one is indicated by James Barr’s confession that ‘to me, to utter the word “postmodern” is equivalent to saying “I am now going to start talking nonsense”’.67 Yet this ‘whiff’ affects primarily the epistemological and methodological level of historical work, rather than the work itself, including Jesus research. Moreover, it is to be noted that ‘postmodernism’ can manifest itself in more than one way in historical research and writing: 4.3.1. The ‘New Historicism’ In the English-speaking world, for instance, it has been attempted to apply to Jesus research an approach or approaches labelled as the ‘new historicism’.68 It is true that the attempt has sometimes been made to distinguish this from ‘postmodernism’,69 but undoubtedly it shares enough in common with the latter to be considered a subspecies of ‘postmodernism’, so to speak. It is also true that 67

Barr, History, 30. Marsh, ‘Quests’; Graham/Moore, ‘Quest’. On the rise and nature of this movement cf. Wilson, History, 131–6. Stephen Greenblatt lays claim to having coined the phrase a or the ‘new historicism’, in his search for a different way of approaching the relation between art and society from those of Marxism and poststructuralism: ‘Poetics’, 1. However, HensPiazza, New Historicism, 5, traces the term back to an essay by Michael McCanles in 1980 (‘The Authentic Discourse of the Renaissance’, Diacritics 10, 85). Also to be noted is her discussion of the relationship between the ‘new historicism’ and the comparable ‘cultural materialism’, which she describes as a ‘British relative’ of the former (74; cf. 80 n. 18; also Kaes, ‘New Historicism’, 252). (This is presumably the same as the ‘British cultural studies’ discussed by Ralph Broadbent, ‘Ideology’, and undertaken by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. At any rate Broadbent asks whether ‘ideological studies’ might not be more appropriate and describes this discipline as ‘concerned with issues such as power and hegemony’ – p. 34 – and therefore very much in tune with Marsh’s understanding of the ‘new historicism’.) And what Mark Poster writes about as ‘cultural history’ looks very much like a further relative of these two, although he goes no further than to say that ‘Productive affinities link cultural history to emerging perspectives such as discourse analysis, deconstruction, new historicism, and cultural studies’ (10). 69 Brook Thomas distinguishes the ‘new historicism’ from ‘postmodernism’: the one promises to make the past new, the other ‘announces that we are past the new’; for ‘“Post” implies a belatedness, an age in which everything has always already occurred’. ‘Postmodernism’ ‘questions the assumptions of self-consciously modern ages … “New”, in contrast, implies an impulse toward the very modern that postmodernism calls into question.’ And yet he grants that both, despite such differences, ‘could be considered complementary descriptions of the same condition’ (‘New Historicism’, 199–200). 68

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the ‘new historicism’ has manifested itself above all as a form of literary criticism,70 but on the one hand this approach to literature often impinges on historiography and, on the other, Jesus research involves handling texts, and thus ‘literature’ in some sense of the word.71 However, the application of the ‘new historicism’ to this research as it is advocated by Clive Marsh seems at first sight to have little to do with literary criticism, for this approach seems to operate more on an ethical level, and, if one bears in mind the programmatic impulses offered by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, on a rhetorical and political level as well, and that with regard to the position of the historian rather than the texts that she or he investigates.72 Anton 70 Hayden White remarks that ‘New Historicists present their project as little more than an attempt to restore a historical dimension to American literary studies’ (‘New Historicism’, 293), although it is clear from what follows that, in his view, there is more to it than that. Conrad and Kessel, ‘Geschichte’, 21, remark that ‘while White aligns historiography with literature, the new historicism moves in the opposite direction, putting literature on the same level as historical sources, and blurring drastically the boundary between text and context’ (cf. Hunt, ‘Geschichte’, 117; Flaig, ‘Kinderkrankheiten’, 45). Yet that is not the same as denying any difference between a text and its (historical) context. B. Thomas quotes Michael Warner’s judgement that ‘New Historicists’ are reacting against the ‘New Critics’ in literary studies and that the movement is thus no concern of historians (B. Thomas, New Historicism, 6; but cf. his protest at Warner’s seeming disdain towards historians [10]). 71 The ‘new historicism’ is very far from being confined to the realm of historiography as a glance at the contents of the two anthologies edited by Aram Veeser, particularly the second, will show. Indeed, they give more attention to the study of literature, although Veeser at one point speaks of ‘new historicism’ occupying ‘the shifting ground between history … and literature’ (Veeser, Reader, 7). On the other hand, when Gina Hens-Piazza comes to discuss the ‘new historicism’ in relation to biblical studies the relevance to history is all too plain: e.g. ‘a new set of questions occupy the new historian in biblical studies. Whose history does criticism relate? What transactions take place in the ancient and contemporary context in history’s production? How does that history get told? Who is empowered to do the telling? What changes in the social fabric does biblical studies effect – or fail to effect?’ (New Historicism, 19). Nonetheless, she can also speak of the ‘new historicism’ as residing ‘within the discipline of literary studies, not history’ (31). And yet if the much-quoted reference of Louis Montrose to ‘the historicity of texts and the textuality of history’ (‘Professing’, 20) is to be taken seriously as programmatic of the ‘new historicism’, one would expect it to have a more reciprocal and balanced impact on both literary criticism and historiography; in Kaes, ‘New Historicism’, one sees, for instance, its application to the writing of the history of literature, but why should one stop there? After all, ‘postmodernism’ surely encourages one to disregard such boundaries as ‘literature’, and the term ‘culture’, which so often crops up in discussions of the ‘new historicism’, surely means that the history to be written involves far more than ‘literature’. 72 To the work of Schüssler Fiorenza should be added the article of Dieter Georgi discussed below (‘Interest’). That one can also postulate the effect of such factors on the production of the ancient texts is amply demonstrated in the case of the history of Israel, as is shown by James Barr’s survey and criticism of ‘revisionist’ accounts of that history that see the relevant historical narratives as the product of the ‘ideology’ of a later period (History, 59–101). Also very relevant here is his discussion of David Clines ‘ideological criticism’ (132–4).

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Kaes puts it thus: ‘Like Foucault the new historicism interested itself in the mechanisms of power, authority and oppression in the writing of history.’73 That perspective on historical work in the case of French historiography is exemplified by the analysis of Michel de Certeau,74 and Elizabeth Clark notes how scholars such as Frank Ankersmit have detected in the later work of Hayden White a shift away from ‘tropes’ to ‘the politics of interpretation’ and ‘attention to the ideological function of language’.75 Such a perspective may share with German-speaking historiographical theorizing the stress on the historian as a factor in historical research, but poses questions like the identity of the sort of persons who engage in this research, the interests that their research serves,76 and the market to which it is directed, as well as stressing ‘the priority of the local over the universal’ and calling for an appraisal of the ‘strategic forgetfulness’ to be found in their research.77 And the mention of that forgetfulness ties in with a further 73

Kaes, ‘New Historicism’, 255. De Certeau, Writing, esp. 56–69. 75 Clark, History, 103, in part quoting Ankersmit, History, 13 (‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation’ is the title of the third essay in White, Content, 58–82). Georg Iggers sees in White’s work a shift from the ‘scientistic structuralism’ of the 1960s to a ‘post-structuralist’ or ‘postmodernist’ position and comments that White’s categories as set out in his Metahistory may anyway be dismissed as in fact peripheral to his epistemological position (‘Historiography’, 376–7). 76 Meeks (‘Why Study the NT?’, 157; cf. also 160–1) bluntly states that ‘our [he refers to New Testament scholars] practice of writing history was never innocent. It was a means of power.’ (Frank Lentricchia sees in the ‘coded term “power”’ in ‘new historicism’ the result of an ‘(I think, uncritical) acceptance’ of Foucault’s theories: ‘Foucault’s Legacy’, 234, while Hens-Piazza, New Historicism, 10, also sees here an invitation to ascribe such language to Marxist influence, although in her view such an influence is to be found rather in a theory of ideology.) The nearness to ‘cultural history’ can perhaps also be seen in Poster’s delineation of that approach as ‘the study of the construction of the subject, the extent to which and the mechanisms through which individuals are attached to identities, the shapes and characteristics of those identities, the role the process of self-constitution plays in the disruption or stabilization of political formations, and the relation of all these processes to distinctions of gender, ethnicity, and class’ (History, 10). 77 Marsh, ‘Quests’, 417; cf. also Braun, ‘“Wir haben doch den amerikanischen Jesus”’, esp. 30–3, 37, as well as the critique of this aspect of ‘postmodernism’ in R. J. Evans, Defence, ch. 7 (pp.191–223). Perhaps relevant here, mutatis mutandis, is the argument advanced by Ricoeur, Memory, 304: ‘The relativity resulting from the temporalization of history can nourish for a while the charge of ideology addressed by a protagonist to an adversary – in the form of the peremptory question, “Where are you speaking from?” – but it finally turns against the one making it and becomes internalized as paralyzing suspicion’. ‘Forgetfulness’ is, at any rate, intrinsic to the historian’s selection of which data are to be considered relevant – if, that is, the term ‘forgetfulness’ is appropriately used of the historian’s judgement that certain data are irrelevant to the argument that she or he is advancing and may be left aside; the weight must therefore be placed here on the ‘strategic’ and the ‘strategy’ may not be just a matter of the historian’s historical judgement. There seems to be, on the face of it, a considerable overlap here with what Manfred Oeming describes as ‘socio-historical exegesis’, which requires of the exegete that he or she 74

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theme that will call for attention later, namely the factors that determine what is remembered and what is forgotten in ‘collective memory’ (if we may for the moment use that term), for that memory is intimately bound up with history.78 Or there is, among Fred Burnett’s ‘six basic points’ common to ‘theorists … engaged in discourse analysis’, the insight that ‘power is distributed hierarchically within institutions’ and that this ‘means that some discourses are favored within any institution, some are marginal, and some are suppressed and/or excluded’.79 That applies, naturally, to historical ‘discourse’ and to the sort of arguments and warrants that will carry weight in academic ‘discourse’, although Burnett goes on to point out the differences between this ‘discourse’ and that which functions in the church (although both academic ‘discourse’ and ecclesiastical should not be treated as homogeneous, as if all academics and all ecclesiastics observed the same rules).80 This approach to historical work can, at any rate, be appropriately located within the pervading atmosphere of ‘postmodernism’ with its stress, inter alia, on the dominance of competing groups and interests, each with their own discourse, rhetoric and criteria for what their respective group regards as valid, and the consequent relativizing of any claimed knowledge. And here one must grant that any historical discussion presupposes some sort of shared as-

should exercise ideological criticism: because the standpoint of the various biblical authors is determined by their respective interests, their theology can only be ‘relative’ and an expression of a social discourse among different groups as to how particular historical developments can be interpreted with reference to God and as to what should be done in accordance with the divine will. Rightly, however, he warns that the various socio-historical exegetes are not themselves immune to ideology (Hermeneutik, 46–51). A similar overlap is found to some extent in Klaus Neumann’s plea for a ‘culture–anthropological exegesis’ (Geburt, esp. 175–80), although one misses there the emphasis on the ‘power’ factor and the subsequent suspicion with regard to the exegete’s motivation. 78 Cf. here, e.g., Irwin-Zarecka, Frames. Note, for instance, her concern to arrive at ‘a historical base line’ (e.g. 16) in order to evaluate what one tells about the past; that would apply to both what one told about the past and what one tells about it now. She recognizes that ‘the “official” version of history carries different weight in different political systems – and for different groups within a society; those who identify with it are likely to be people with power’ (19). And yet ‘collective memory is not a terrain where anything goes’ (18; cf. 23); ‘there are limits to what people would accept as the definition of what just happened to them’, and ‘Practically all memory work … is judged, however implicitly, as to its “fit” with the past experience’ (75, 147, her italics). 79 Burnett, ‘Exegesis’, 65. Cf. the admission of Montrose, ‘Professing’, 30, that ‘my professional practice as a teacher–scholar is also a vehicle for my partly unconscious and partly calculating negotiation of disciplinary, institutional, and societal demands and expectations’. The stress on the question of ‘power’ can be linked to the influence of Michel Foucault; cf. Best/Kellner, Theory, 68: ‘one of the most valuable aspects of [Foucault’s] work is to sensitize theorists to the pervasive operations of power and to highlight the problematic or suspicious aspects of rationality, knowledge, subjectivity, and the production of social norms.’ 80 Cf. Burnett, ‘Exegesis’, 68.

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sumptions about what constitute valid historical arguments.81 Among most historians, at any rate, ‘the Bible says so’ would not count as a decisive argument, whereas arguments of the form, say, that ‘X could not have done Y because X was already dead (or was somewhere else at the time)’ would be accepted if it was generally agreed when X had died or where she or he was at a given time. However, given that questions of epistemology are still a matter of heated discussion among historians, it should be clear that one cannot reckon here with universally accepted assumptions, in particular as regards epistemological theory. We noted, for example, that Schröter appeals to the insights shared by a particular strand of thought within German historical work, yet not only was it hard to see how these insights shaped his own historical work, but it should also be recognized that not all historians, not even all German ones, would wholeheartedly endorse such an epistemology. And yet, if in the last analysis it seems to make very little perceptible difference to one’s actual historical work whether one shares these assumptions or not, then one is compelled to ask whether one should be expected to endorse them or not. And such questions as those raised by Marsh would, in turn, undermine Sanders’ claim, noted earlier, to have separated his pure historical research from theological issues. For with research into a figure invested with such religious significance as Jesus it is inevitable that theological interests, even if they are more accurately to be described as antitheological, are likely to lie just under the surface of the historian’s work. The example of a ‘new historicist’ reading of Jesus’ story offered by Graham and Moore in the same volume as Marsh’s essay seems, however, to focus on something quite different, the technique of telling the story and its theme of ‘power, resistance, and containment’ or its strategy of ‘anecdote, outrage, resistance, containment, and autobiography’.82 The mention of ‘autobiography’, it is true, is a common element in both Marsh’s version and that of Graham and Moore, in that the personality of the historian once again comes into play, but in the latter account only as one element in the shaping of the story that is told.83 Yet, whereas the mention of ‘autobiography’ might suggest a very individualistic approach to historiography, it is by no means clear that Marsh’s account demands that. An article by Dieter Georgi suggests that the ‘interests’ involved may, in fact, be far more broadly conceived, for he traces the impetus for the quest of the historical Jesus to the 81 Cf. the role given to the ‘framework of interpretation’ by Lorenz, ‘Wissen’, illustrated with reference to the ‘Historikerstreit’ in the late 1980s, as well as his recognition (102) that historians write with a particular public in view. 82 Graham/Moore, ‘Quest’, 439, 453. Cf. the same quintet listed by Hens-Piazza, New Historicism, 38, with reference to the work of Greenblatt and Veeser, along with a reference to Graham and Moore’s ‘coy parody’. 83 R. J. Evans, Defence, 200, speaks critically of the ‘narcissism’ that this strand of ‘postmodernism’ encourages in historians.

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rise of the bourgeois consciousness in the Middle Ages. The slump in interest in the historical Jesus in the first half of the twentieth century he ascribes to the eclipse of the bourgeois mercantile establishment during that period, and the revival of interest to the restoration of this establishment in the second half of the century. Yet it is not clear from his account how the ‘quest’ conformed to, and was shaped by, the interests of this bourgeois establishment, beyond saying that for the emergent class of burghers ‘the interest in Jesus as a superhuman individual became prominent again’.84 Whether this amounts to being a foretaste of the ‘quest’ is another matter and it is not clear how the ‘life of Jesus theology’ of Georgi’s title relates to any of the phases of the ‘quest’; a concern for a ‘faith-image’ of Jesus with which the individual can identify and in which he or she can seek inspiration by no means amounts to a ‘quest of the historical Jesus’ as it has usually been understood, even if Georgi has shown how far back the roots of the ‘quest’ stretch. Nor is this gap filled in by Helmut Koester when he picks up the threads of Georgi’s argument, although he is correct to refer to a ‘cultural paradigm’ marked by, amongst other things, an ‘aversion to eschatology’ and an admiration for social commitment. That may be true of the ‘cultural paradigm’ in the latter part of the twentieth century, but it is doubtful how far one can trace it back into the Middle Ages. But at least this analysis warns us against concentrating simply on the private interests of the historian. As soon as one introduces factors such as the market towards which the historian’s research is directed, as Marsh does, then quite obviously that market is going to be largely shaped by the dominant ‘cultural paradigm’. The same paradigm is also likely to have been formative of the interests, perceptions and intellectual horizons of the historian embarking on the task of research. At the same time this approach cannot escape the question of the criteria by which one can evaluate the research, if not with regard to the truth or falsity of the results, at least with regard to the question which ones are more or less probable, more or less to be commended. Marsh asks, for instance, whether one does not, sooner or later, have to make judgements ‘about the relative merits of respective contributions’;85 ‘some kind of check is needed’, he insists, on the enactment of that ‘performance’ that is the form in which Jesus ‘exists’ today.86 The research may lead to more than one (picture, performance or enactment of) Jesus, but that by no means entails that just any Jesus will do.87

And if a use of Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’ is characteristic of the ‘new historicism’ it seems that this is a dimension largely lacking from these two ‘new historicist’ treatments of the Jesus traditions.88 It would seem that the ‘new historicism’ means different things to different ‘new historians’ or ‘new historicists’, to use Veeser’s preferred designation – probably a sensible choice of formulation if one is to avoid confusing them with the movement of the ‘new history’ and the ‘new historians’ that arose in the early twentieth century and, according to Ger84 Georgi, ‘Interest’, 57 (‘again’ because Jesus as a ‘divine man’ had been important in the first two centuries of the Christian movement). 85 Marsh, ‘Quests’, 429. 86 Marsh, ‘Quests’, 432, picking up Crossan’s language from his Jesus, xxvi. 87 Marsh, ‘Quests’, 433. 88 On the use of Geertz by the ‘new historicism’ cf., e.g., Kaes, ‘New Historicism’, 259– 60.

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trude Himmelfarb, has its followers in a ‘new “new history”’. 89 Yet the use of the ‘-ism’ and ‘-ist’ terms seems to shift the focus away from the actual practice of doing history towards historical and epistemological theory, from what one should do towards questions of what one can do and the epistemological status of one’s results. And, quite apart from different manifestations of this ‘new historicism’, there are other historiographical approaches that could be labelled ‘postmodern’.

89 So Aram Veeser states that ‘“the New Historicism” remains a phrase without an adequate referent’ and that ‘the rubric offers a site that many parties contend to appropriate’ and speaks of its ‘portmanteau quality‘ as it ‘brackets together literature, ethnography, anthropology, art history, and other disciplines and sciences, hard and soft’ (New Historicism, x–xi). (Montrose, ‘Professing’, 18–19, remarks that the ‘new historicism’ does not refer to ‘any agreed upon intellectual and institutional program’, and Moritz Bassler, in his introduction to his collection of essays illustrating the ‘new historicism’, comments that the works representing this phenomenon show that it is ‘not so much a readymade method as a spectrum of attempts to solve’ a particular problem, namely ‘how to carry on historical work in the light of a historicist situation and against the background of a poststructuralist theory’: ‘Einleitung’, 20, 23–4.) Nonetheless Veeser lists a number of ‘key assumptions’ recurring again and again in practitioners of the ‘new historicism’ and giving some sort of unity to the movement: (1) ‘every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices’; (2) ‘every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes’; (3) ‘literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparably’; (4) ‘no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature’; (5) ‘a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe’ (xi; the last point he later rephrases as ‘it’s high time for criticism to catch up with capitalism’ or ‘literature in capitalism requires a capitalist poetics’: Reader, 2, 19; the introduction to this later work also fleshes out these five assumptions with concrete examples: 14–25). Hens-Piazza, New Historicism, 6, offers another set of assumptions that she regards as common to the ‘mind-set’ of the ‘new historicists’: (1) Literature is viewed as integrally tied to and identified with other material realities that make up a social context’; (2) ‘Viewing literature as on par with other types of texts, the privileging of literature or its composition over and above other social practices is rejected’; (3) ‘Characteristic distinctions between literature and history are sidelined’; (4) ‘The constructions of the past are presumed as intimately tied to the present.’ To these she later adds (39) a further quartet: ‘(1) ways of reading that look less at the center and more at the borders of the literary domain, (2) attention to the struggle in texts, (3) identifying and defining the interests and forces of the past and of the present that crisscross and rebound across these representations, (4) exploring narrative as a vast intertext, “a mosaic of citations (where) every text is the absorption and transformation of other texts”’ (a quotation from Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse [Paris: Seueil, 1969] 146). And yet ‘new historicism’ is, in her eyes, ‘more … an ethos ascribed to by its practitioners than anything approximating a method’ (55). On the ‘new history’ movement and the ‘new “new history”’ cf. Himmelfarb, History.

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4.3.2. Various Forms of ‘Postmodern’ Historiography Given the diversity and complexity of the phenomena that are labelled as ‘postmodern’, including the ‘new historicism’, it is hardly surprising that they should manifest themselves in different ways in the field of historical research. On the one hand there is the stress on the manipulative, power-seeking nature of discourse, and Marsh’s depiction of the ‘new historicism’ highlights that aspect. It should, however, be noted that that would apply not only to the discourse that the ‘new historicism’ analyses, but also to the ‘new historicist’ discourse itself, if Winfried Fluck is correct in his analysis of what the ‘new historicism’ is usually doing: it is not aiming at a systematic apprehension of historical connections, but at ‘using historical material to support one’s own theses about the existence and modus operandi of a discursive power structure’, and this implies that this approach carries conviction and weight thanks to the political perspective which it serves to support. In practice this means that the ‘new historicism’ is regarded as having conservative tendencies, and Fluck himself regards it as a diluted version of Foucault’s theories, a ‘transformed, “Americanized” Foucault’, mediating his theses according to ‘the needs and requirements of a particular professional culture’.90 On the other hand there is the linguistic approach, which is perhaps more prominent, and which concentrates more on language and rhetoric, ignoring any referential element, and Graham and Moore’s article, in the tradition of Hayden White, concentrates rather on this, whereas Marsh’s is perhaps more closely allied to what some designate as a ‘cultural turn’ in historiography.91 At the same time we should note the perhaps even more crucial division in such ‘postmodern’ approaches between those that use these approaches in such a way 90 Fluck, ‘“Amerikanisierung”’, 237–9. The ‘Amerikanisierung’ to which he refers lies in the tendency to ‘authorization through performance’ and consequent ‘aestheticizing’ that he regards as increasingly characteristic of social and political authority in western societies, above all in the USA (242–3). 91 On the ‘cultural turn’ cf. Körtner, ‘Fragen’, 6, with the ref. there to the works of Hölscher; C. Strecker, ‘Turn’. (White, ‘New Historicism’, 294, charges the ‘new historicists’ with being guilty of the ‘culturalist fallacy’, at least in the eyes of historians, in that they base social institutions and practices on the ‘cultural system’, rather than vice versa. Yet White goes on to defend the ‘new historicist’ practice and its ‘textualism’ against its critics.) Veeser, too, refers to the work of the ‘New Cultural Historians’ and their common assumptions, which would ‘be congenial to the [New Historicists] represented in this volume’ (Reader, 9; Stephen Greenblatt entitles his review of the rise of this approach or bundle of approaches ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’, and Louis Montrose speaks of the ‘prevailing tendency across cultural studies … to emphasize’ the ‘reciprocity and mutual constitution’ of ‘the linguistic and the social’: ‘On the one hand, the social is understood to be discursively constructed; and on the other, language-use is understood to be always and necessarily dialogical, to be socially and materially determined and constrained’ – ‘Professing’, 15; he also notes that Greenblatt subsequently preferred ‘cultural poetics’ to ‘new historicism’ as a description of his approach: 17). Hayden White, though, notes that Montrose relates literary works to a ‘cultural system’ (‘New Historicism’, 293).

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as to protect traditional views, in this case theological ones, and those that apply them in support of more radical and less traditional views.92 With regard to the linguistic aspect, Georg Iggers’ comments on the ‘linguistic turn’ in the philosophy of history and in historiography are cautionary: If one thought it through, then the emphasis on the fact that speech relates to no object and does not communicate the intentions of subjects means that no scholarly approach in the usual sense, that of interpreting an assumed reality, is possible.

Yet, he maintains, this radical stance has not been adopted in recent historiography (his article appeared in 1995), but rather a more moderate one making greater allowance for the role played by language in the form of discourse in so92 Cf. here, e.g., Watson, Text, 82–3, who offers another taxonomy of ‘postmodernism’, first distinguishing its manifestation in terms of either indeterminacy or particularity; the former can lead either to a negative theology or to free textual play(fulness), the latter may lead to neoconservatism (preferring to be known as ‘postliberal’ rather than ‘postmodern’, although by no means all that is labelled ‘postliberal’ can be called ‘conservative’ in any sense – cf. Liechty, Theology, who, ironically, eschews ‘postmodern’ as being too ‘liquid’ in meaning – xi; just how far from being ‘conservative’ Liechty is would be clearer if one knew whether he means ‘God’ is a human construction or merely our image of ‘God’). The latter, more conservative phenomenon manifests itself, for instance, in a number of contributions to Vanhoozer’s Postmodern Theology (cf. the taxonomies mentioned by Vanhoozer, ‘Theology’, 19–20, in particular the examples of ‘conservative’ and ‘postliberal’ theologies represented by John Paul II and George Lindbeck, the latter being the subject of George Hunsinger‘s contribution to the same volume). Veeser, too, remarks on the ‘potential conservatism’ of the ‘new historicism’ (Reader, 2; cf. 7), and Hal Foster remarks on the ‘basic opposition’ within ‘postmodernism’ in general between ‘a postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism of reaction’; there is ‘a postmodernism which seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo and a postmodernism which repudiates the former to celebrate the latter’ (Anti-Aesthetic, xi–xii; cf. also Hodgson, Winds, 55; Hodgson would want to describe his approach as ‘postmodern’, but the resultant pluralist theology would then represent a more positive and constructive approach which could not be described as conservative); Best/Kellner, Turn, 11: ‘Paradoxically, the postmodern discourses were both part of the conservative turn toward individualism, local empowerment, and renunciation of the liberal welfare state and a form of oppositional discourse that assailed the assumptions of conservative theory and in turn was vilified by conservatives in their culture wars against radical discourses’ (their italics; cf. J. Habermas, Diskurs, 12–13: ‘neo-conservative’ vs ‘anarchistic’). It should then come as no surprise that theology, too, has its ‘reactionary’ ‘postmodernists’. (Is there an analogy to this in Eagleton’s discussion of the ‘anti-ethnocentrism’ of ‘postmodernism’ – Illusions, 124? For if this involves no culture being able to judge another, one’s own culture is left ‘conveniently insulated from any one else’s critique’, and this is surely also something that may happen in the case of religious cultures.) On this conservative form of ‘postmodernism’ or ‘postmodern‘ form of conservative theology cf. further Barr, History, 143–4, 150–2. Similarities between ‘postmodernism’ and apophatic or negative theology have also been remarked on, for instance in a couple of the contributions to Davies/Turner, Silence (cf. e.g. 33, 41, 202; also 215–17), and this theology can seemingly take a relatively conservative form, even though one might think that the way in which this theological tradition often seeks to dismantle the verbal structures of other traditional theologies would militate against too great a conservatism and would subvert those theologies’ formulations.

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ciety and culture.93 (Richard Evans adds the further point that historians have long been aware that the documents and texts with which they work do not have ‘a wholly fixed and unalterable meaning’ given them by their respective authors: some are ambiguous, whether that ambiguity is deliberate or unintended, and Evans points to the utterances of politicians whose meaning is unclear to their audience and provide examples of an ‘unruly text spewing out its manifold significations, connotations and implications’.94 ‘Postmodernism’, he claims, has merely taken up ‘familiar arguments about the transparency or opacity of historical texts and sources’ and has developed these further ‘to a set of binary opposites and polarized extremes’.95 At any rate, one is here confronted, in one form or another and to varying degrees, with various manifestations of that elusive phenomenon that is often labelled as ‘postmodernism’.96 For, as already indicated, it is questionable whether the phenomena ascribed to ‘postmodernism’ admit of any clear definition, and definition is perhaps by nature something foreign to this collection of movements, even if they are recognizable as being, in various ways, manifestations of 93

Iggers, ‘“Wende”’, 557. He also points to the apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, the contention of radical proponents of the ‘linguistic turn’ that language as such has no meaning, but is a system of signs or sounds with only an arbitrary relation to objects, and the representatives of the post-structuralist ‘new cultural history’ who maintain that language is the source of a system of values formative of a culture (569). ‘Linguistic distinctions impose structure on society, but social distinctions impose structure on language’ (570); here he is very much in line with the perceptive article of Gabrielle Spiegel (‘History’). But cf. the critique of Iggers by Schöttler, ‘Angst’, 143 n. 24, who argues that historians must be prepared to find something of worth in some ‘postmodernist’ approaches, but without, for his part, really addressing the main source of ‘Angst’ in many historians, namely the fear that there is nothing outside of or beyond the text or language, and the consequent loss of what most historians still consider their field of study. Furthermore, it is to be noted that it is none other than Hayden White who comments on the ‘new historicism’ that it conflicts with ‘the newer, Post-structuralist versions of formalism’ in that they suggest that it is ‘possible to distinguish between text and context’. For ‘According to Post-structuralist theory, there is nothing “outside” of texts, and consequently the efforts of the New Historicists to distinguish between text and context lead to the commission of the “referential fallacy”’ (White, ‘New Historicism’, 294). Mark Poster, on the other hand, denounces such a misunderstanding of poststructuralism; it might apply to structuralism, but not to the likes of Derrida and Foucault, for anyone familiar with their works ‘must find it quite amusing to see them berated for opposing truth and banishing reality’ (History, 36–7; cf. 41–3; 53–9). 94 R. J. Evans, Defence, 104, picking up a phrase from David Harlan, ‘Intellectual History and the Return of Literature’, American Historical Review 94 (1989) 581–609, here 585. 95 Ch. 4 of R. J. Evans, Defence (pp. 103–28) is a telling critique of ‘postmodernist’ claims about language and texts and about historians’ practice. 96 The elusiveness of the term is eloquently put by Philip Clayton, with apologies to Qoheleth: ‘of the inventing of new postmodernisms there is no end, and the encounter with too many postmodernisms can be wearying to the soul’ (‘God’, 216). Cf. Welsch, Moderne, 9–12, on the varieties of the ‘postmodern’.

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a particular way of thinking or of what Anthony Thiselton describes as ‘the postmodern self’.97 David Tracy’s comment is apposite: If postmodernity is to avoid the essentialism it hopes to rout, it must first admit there is no such phenomenon as postmodernity. There are only postmodernities.

With the same breath he then speaks of ‘a plurality of modernities’. 98 Another way of putting it would be to say that what unites ‘postmodernism’ is a dissatisfaction with various aspects of what had hitherto held sway as ‘modernism’,99 despite Hayden White’s claim that ‘Post-modernism knows that it comes after Modernism even without knowing what Modernism consisted of and without knowing what its own “posterity” consists of’.100 And if, as Tracy states, ‘modernism’ is in fact something multiform then it is scarcely surprising if these expressions of dissatisfaction are directed against different manifestations and aspects and presuppositions of ‘modernism’.101 Nonetheless, a certain ‘family resemblance’ may be discernible in the varied manifestations of both ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’.102 In line with this, Best and Kellner also speak of 97

Thiselton, Interpreting God. Tracy, ‘Fragments’, 170. I have avoided the term ‘postmodernity’, noting Terry Eagleton’s distinction between ‘postmodernity’ as a specific historical period characterized by that form of modern culture known as ‘postmodernism’, although he then states that he has used the latter term to refer to both the period and the culture ‘since they are clearly closely related’ (Illusions, vii–viii). However, as Tracy‘s use of the plural shows, he is clearly using ‘postmodernity’ in another sense such as ‘form/manifestation of postmodernism’. 99 Cf. Rüsen, ‘Enlightenment’, 221: ‘The prefix “post” indicates the presence of a pervasive discontent with those patterns of cultural interpretation which categorize current social and cultural relations as “modern”.’ E. V. McKnight, Use, 25 n. 1, provocatively states that the ‘term postmodern is useful because of its imprecision and convoluted logic’ (his italics), but then goes on to explain the different forms of ‘postmodernism’ by the different expressions of ‘modernism’, for ‘the postmodern “advance” utilizes the assumptions and strategies of the modern in order to challenge them’. Cf. also Zagorin, ‘Historiography’, 194. 100 White, ‘Postmodernism’, 29. This, he explains, results from ‘post-modernism’s’ extending ‘the modernist project of demystifying the past’ for this involved ‘the very “historical knowledge” on which the demystification was based’. 101 On the variety of the ‘modern’ see Welsch, Moderne, esp. 46–52, and on the reciprocal relationship and conflicting diagnoses of ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, 53–63. Cf. also D. Brown, Tradition, 9: ‘“Modernist” and “postmodernist” are in fact rather slippery terms, used as they are in quite a wide variety of different senses.’ ( He goes on later [33–44] to mention and criticize five different versions of ‘postmodernism’: that which excludes master-narratives, that which denies that there are adequate criteria for choosing between various proposed master-narratives, that which, particularly in the area of history or art, postulates the failure of a ‘local’ master-narrative, that which sees narratives as self-sufficient in that they are the sole source of their own meaning, regardless of any context, and that which denies any reference beyond the text itself.) Fredric Jameson, too, states that there are ‘as many different forms of postmodernism as there were high modernisms … ’; ‘the unity of this new impulse – if it has one – is given not in itself but in the very modernism it seeks to displace’ (‘Postmodernism’, 112). 102 Cf. Eagleton, Illusions, 22. 98

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an emerging postmodern paradigm organized around a family of concepts, shared methodological assumptions, and a general sensibility that attack modern methods and concepts as overly totalizing and reductionistic; that decry utopian and humanistic values as dystopian and dehumanizing; that abandon mechanical and deterministic schemes in favor of new principles of chaos, contingency, spontaneity, and organism; that challenge all beliefs in foundations, absolutes, truth, and objectivity, often to embrace a radical skepticism, relativism, and nihilism; and that subvert boundaries of all kinds.103

They, too, are agreed that the ‘modern’ is ‘highly polysemous and unstable’ (25), so that it is no wonder that the ‘postmodern’ as a ‘radicalization’ of the ‘modern’ (26) is a multiform phenomenon. Moreover, amidst the various factors that contribute to the diversity of ‘postmodernism’,104 the relationship between the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’ varies widely: whereas they speak of a ‘radicalization’ of the ‘modern’ or certain aspects of it, others, the ‘extreme’ representatives of ‘postmodernism’, talk in terms of a sharp ‘rupture’ and radical discontinuity between the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’.105 Best and Kellner themselves endorse the more moderate form of ‘postmodernism’ that sees it ‘merely as a mutation of the modern, as a shift within modernity’: they regard ‘postmodern theory’ as ‘continuous with and supplementary to modern theory’, intensifying ‘critical tendencies of such modern figures as Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Dewey’ rather than leaping ‘into a whole new mode of discourse altogether’ (25). In the following chapters they seek to show how ‘postmodernity emerges out of modernity, out of a magnification of the dynamics of commodification, massification, and technification, while postmodern theory originates from modern theory’s critiques of some of its own presuppositions and values’ (40).106 At this point Chris Lorenz picks up two aspects that in his opinion unite those varied manifestations of the ‘postmodern’: one is that mistrust of metanarratives of history that we have already noted, the other the rejection of the idea that there a reality independent of the subject’s own position.107 With particular re103 Best/Kellner, Turn, 19 (their italics); cf. also 254 with its reference to Wittgenstein as well as the following pages identifying ‘four main thematic similarities that break with distinct modern concepts and themes’ (255–8). 104 In addition they distinguish between ‘ludic’ and ‘oppositional’ forms of ‘postmodern discourse’ (Best/Kellner, Turn, 26) and ‘postmodern’ as a ‘temporal marker’ and as a ‘philosophical marker’, depending on whether the ‘post-’ means ‘after’ or ‘against/ anti-’ (27). 105 Cf. also Best/Kellner, Theory, 29–30, 256–7. 106 Earlier, in Best/Kellner, Theory, 256–304, they had spoken of and advocated a ‘reconstruction of critical social theory’. 107 Lorenz, ‘Wissen’, 66 n. 5, who here claims the support of Welsch, Moderne, 1–8; but I find it hard to recognize such an identification of these two aspects in Welsch’s study; the latter sides, it is true, with Lyotard’s rejection of metanarratives, which he counts as typical of what he calls ‘precise postmodernism’ (as opposed to ‘diffuse’), and finds support therein for his own advocacy of ‘plurality’, which he also regards as a dominant motif of the ‘mo-

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ference to ‘postmodern’ historiography he quotes four points mentioned by Rüdiger Graf: (1) the insistence on a plurality of possible descriptions with the resultant inference that facts do not determine interpretations and that there is therefore no distinction between true and false interpretations; (2) the ‘textualizing’ of history, in that historians only deal with texts and have no immediate access to the past itself and so cannot establish the truth of historical accounts by means of their correspondence with past events; historical texts can only be compared with other texts; (3) the ‘dereferentializing’ of language, in that words receive their meaning with regard to other words and not to some extra-linguistic reality; (4) ‘narrativity’, i.e. the concept that stories have their own logic independent of the statements of fact that they contain and thus cannot be true or false.108 All of these points, as formulated here, seem to me questionable, and it will be the task of § 4.3.4 to see what can be salvaged from them. But first it needs to be asked whether aspects of them are not already relatively well established. 4.3.3. The Old and the New For how new are these phenomenon that call themselves ‘postmodern’ or the ‘new historicism’? Many of their contentions in the field of historiography have seemingly been around for a surprisingly long time. J. L. Gaddis, for instance, refers to ‘postmodernist insights about the relative character of all historical judgments – the inseparability of the observer from that which is being observed’, and then adds, ‘although some of us feel that we’ve known this all along’.109 And Detlef Briesen goes back further than any of ‘us’ when he claims that ‘“postmodern” arguments have been an important part of the European tradition since the Enlightenment’.110 Nor should that be so surprising, if indeed F. R. Andern’ in the twentieth century; yet he recognizes that there are representatives of the ‘postmodern’ that seem to move in the opposite direction (cf. esp. 54–7). And the epistemological principle of the rejection of the idea that there is a reality independent of the subject’s own position seems to play little part in Welsch’s account. 108 Lorenz, ‘Wissen’, 66 n. 5, quoting Graf, ‘Interpretation’, esp. 388–90. Moxnes, ‘Jesus’, 136–7, sums up the postmodern ‘criticism of history’ as ‘a focus on the self reflection of the historians and the literary construction of history as text’; the second factor is recognizable, but the first needs to be more precise: do ‘postmodern’ historians reflect on themselves or on the role of the self of other historians in their historical work? 109 Gaddis, Landscape, 10. And C. Vann Woodward is presumably speaking of a wide range of historiography when he complains that ‘The demagoguery, the cant, and the charlatanry of historians in the service of a fashionable cause can at times rival that of politicians’ (‘Clio’, 488, also quoted by Stern, Varieties, 10; cf. also his strictures on ‘the inextinguishable role of the self of the historian’ which prevents her or him from being ‘passive recorders of the past’ and his discussion of the decisions that historians must make and the influences upon them: 25–32). 110 Briesen, ‘Challenge’, 62 (he is thinking of the position known as ‘(historical) Pyrrhonism’ which, in its radical form, ‘denied any possibility of acquiring certain knowledge

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kersmit is correct in arguing that ‘historism … possesses an innate talent for developing into postmodernism’, although distinguished from it by the likes of ‘Ranke’s robust confidence in the unproblematic existence of a past reality which is the object of historical research’.111 And Jürgen Habermas finds distinct continuities between some ‘postmodern’ theories and the entire counter-Enlightenment and conservative tradition of ‘modern’ theory.112 Turning to another area of cultural influence, Richard Evans traces the influence of Einstein’s theory of relativity on historians,113 citing as examples Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood, as well as Wilhelm Dilthey before them, and Brook Thomas maintains that ‘many “poststructuralist” assumptions of the new historicism are in fact part of the tradition of progressive historiography’.114 And it was in reading Van Harvey’s perceptive and carefully argued little study, The Historian and the Believer, that I was struck by the echoes of these claims of ‘postmodernists’ to be of the past’: 65; on the later influence of the Sceptics cf. M. Albrecht, ‘Skeptizismus’, in DNP 15/3 38–47). 111 Ankersmit, History, 188, also 194: ‘postmodernism is a consistent and radical historism that is no longer content to stop halfway’(similarly 197, 223, 238). Best and Kellner, too, devote a chapter to the similarities between ‘critical theory [e.g. in the works of Horkheimer and Adorno and Habermas] and postmodern theory’ (Theory, 215–55). 112 E.g. J. Habermas, Diskurs, 12–13, 131. 113 Evans, Defence, 30; cf. also Bloch, Craft, 17. Welsch, Moderne, 186, 188, adds, too, the theories of Heisenberg and Gödel and others as paving the way to ‘postmodern’ thinking (cf. 37, 77), although he insists that, rather than philosophy following these, it is rather that these scientists were following insights advanced by the likes of Kant and Nietzsche. (Welsch’s work does not deal, however, with ‘postmodern’ historiography.) Cf. also Clark, History, 16. Best and Kellner’s study of The Postmodern Turn devotes a chapter to ‘Entropy, Chaos, and Organism in Postmodern Science’ (195–251). 114 R. J. Evans, Defence, 30; B. Thomas, ‘New Historicism’, 195 (he compares the views of Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, Walter Benn Michaels and others, and in his New Historicism, 15, comments that statements by earlier historians like J. H. Robinson, Beard and Becker ‘might surprise a few critics who think that an awareness of the constructed nature of the past is a metahistorical or poststructuralist discovery’; cf. also 49, 78). On the growth of an awareness of the influence of temporal and geographical factors as well as bias (e.g. political or religious) on the perspective from which historians view the past cf. Koselleck, Zukunft, 176–207. Klaus Neumann, too, argues that ‘postmodernism’ has in fact adopted certain elements of (‘modern’) ‘historical’ discourse and has taken them to extremes (Geburt, 16), and Conrad and Kessel point out how the ‘postmodern’ is ‘anchored in the philosophical tradition of the “modern”’; ‘it is often not very original, unashamedly eclectic and taken to almost unendurable extremes’ (‘Geschichte’, 16). Cf. also Barr, History, 158–9. David Brown goes a step further in claiming that ‘Postmodern scepticism is … crucially dependent on what it rejects’ in that that scepticism ‘seems to concede to the Enlightenment what ought never to have been conceded, that mathematical truth is the only adequate model of what might constitute knowledge’ (Tradition, 22). On the other hand, the sweeping criticism of Stanley Fish, to the effect that a ‘new’ historicism is impossible, for, although one may come up with new historical truths, this does not come about from a new ‘way of doing history, but merely another move in the practice of history as it has always been done’ (in Veeser, New Historicism, 313), goes too far; it seems to imply that there has always been one way of doing history and only one (cf. B. Thomas, New Historicism, 102).

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found in what Harvey labels ‘(hard) relativism’ and ‘(hard) perspectivism’;115 these views he illustrates from the contributions of Carl L. Becker and Charles A. Beard to Hans Meyerhoff’s collection of essays entitled The Philosophy of History in Our Time, published in 1959,116 but he also finds their echo to varying degrees in the apologetics of Alan Richardson, C. H. Dodd, John Knox and others.117 Arthur Danto, too, also takes up the question of Beard’s relativism, and makes a useful distinction between the causes for a belief and the reasons for it. We can decide, ‘in utter ignorance of the causes which may have operated on the man who held it’, whether a belief – including a historical judgement – is well-grounded.118 It remains true, however, that the person who held this belief is more likely to have reached a well-founded belief if she or he were aware of, and made due allowance for, the factors influencing (rather than ‘causing’) the holding of that belief.119 In the German-speaking world, too, the role of the historian’s own historical situation and its influence on his or her historical judgements and decisions has long been recognized. As Peter Biehl points out, Martin Heidegger had also postulated the ‘historicality’ of the historian as a presupposition of historiography: Our going back to ‘the past’ does not first get its start from the acquisition, sifting and securing of such material [i.e. the ‘remains, monuments, and records that are still present-at-hand, are possible “material” for the concrete disclosure of the Dasein which has-been-there’]; these activities presuppose historical Being towards the Dasein that

115 It is to be noted that Lonergan (Method, 217) seeks to distinguish ‘relativism’ and ‘perspectivism’, in that the former has no hope of attaining to truth, whereas the latter ‘does not lock historians up in their backgrounds, confine them to their biases, deny them access to development and openness’. Is Lonergan’s ‘perspectivism’ a ‘softer’ ‘relativism’? 116 To be noted, however, is the distinction drawn by Martin Bunzl (History, 4–5), discussing Peter Novick’s treatment of Beard and Becker, between ‘relativism about facts and relativism about grander historical constructs’; ‘facts’ were not the problem, but rather any synthesis that could be based upon them. 117 See Harvey, Historian, 204–45. Barr, History, 30–40, following up a remark made by Basil Mitchell, illustrates how one ‘postmodern’ work of Old Testament scholarship combines insights shared by older scholarship with a caricature and misrepresentation of the assumptions of that older scholarship. 118 Danto, Philosophy, 98. Particularly to be noted is his comment that ‘There are few more pernicious beliefs than the one which suggests that we have cast serious doubts upon a belief by explaining why someone came to hold it.’ 119 Also germane may be the comment of another Arthur, Arthur Marwick, when he draws attention to the irony of the fact that when Richard Rorty edited a collection of essays entitled The Linguistic Turn it was devoted to examples of ‘pre-postmodernist’ philosophy drawn from the period of the inter-war years when ‘the study of language formed the core of the empirical philosophy’ that was then current (New Nature, 11, 20 n. 10: the volume contains ‘essays from the thirties to the fifties, by such distinctively non-postmodernist thinkers as Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire and P. F. Strawson’).

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has-been-there – that is to say, they presuppose the historicality of the historian’s existence.120

And this ‘historicality’ determines the historian’s choice of objects to study: The ‘selection’ of what is to become a possible object for historiology has already been met with in the factical existentiell choice of Dasein’s historicality, in which historiology first of all arises, and in which alone it is.121

Biehl therefore concludes, appealing also to R. G. Collingwood, that historiography (Geschichtswissenschaft) rightly understood is aware that historical knowledge is not attainable in the sense that the historian is a spectator of history and so not in the sense of the traditional framework of subject and object. Instead, conscious of its responsibility for the future, it entrusts itself, listening critically, to the demands with which it is confronted in each historical phenomenon. And there the historian is free to decide which area of history he or she wishes to tackle.122 Yet, for all the factors that suggest a continuity between the old and the new, others have detected a difference between the two, at least a difference of degree. Anton Kaes, for instance, grants that the ‘old historicism’ was also interested, like the ‘new historicism’, in reconstructing the historical context of texts, yet it simply set text and context over against one another. For the ‘new historicism’, however, the text is seen as the ‘product of a historical, material constellation, in which social and psychic factors (Vorgaben), collective and private impulses mingle in a specific way’ – and that way is a potentially subversive one.123 If, then, ‘postmodern’ approaches to texts and to historiography are not simply a continuation of what went before them, that raises the question what can be learnt from them and what use can or should be made of them. 4.3.4. Lessons from ‘Postmodern’ Historiography? For much of the most recent research into the life of Jesus, then, the business of this research has been relatively untroubled by reflection on the nature of history and historical research, and it is only relatively recently that a small group of scholars have tried to apply to this field of enquiry views of historical research which could be described as ‘postmodern’. Yet it must be conceded that, when 120

Biehl, ‘Frage’, 69, citing Heidegger, Being, 446 (Ger. 394). Biehl, ‘Frage’, 70–1, citing Heidegger, Being, 447 (Ger. 395). Already Bultmann had emphasized the extent to which every interpretation of texts and documents from the past is guided by a certain interest in the subject-matter, an interest that he identified as the interpreter’s ‘pre-understanding’ and that reflected the interpreter’s ‘Lebensverhältnis’ to the subject-matter (History, 113). 122 Biehl, ‘Frage’, 71. 123 Kaes, ‘New Historicism’, 255. 121

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those scholars have actually set about the business of giving an account of the life and work of Jesus or of Paul, the results have shown surprisingly little trace of any practical impact of this new view of historiography. Generally it seems to be very much a case of ‘business as usual’, and that poses once again the question Georg Iggers raises whether there are any actual examples of ‘postmodern’ historiography apart from the various theories about it.124 A comparable problem has also arisen in recent years in the context of the study of the Book of Acts.125 For there, too, there is a now increasingly dominant tendency in research to stress the ‘rhetoric’ of the author of Acts and explicitly to leave aside the questions of a history lying behind the account or of its value for our knowledge of that history.126 Now it is, to my mind, beyond question that an understanding of the ‘rhetoric’ of this author is both a thoroughly legitimate avenue of enquiry and at the same time essential for appreciating and evaluating what this author is trying to say. (At the same time it brings his work into line with at least one aspect of modern notions of historiography, for Jens Schröter commends his handling of his material in order to present history from a particular perspective on early Christianity as matching up to the task of a historian to impart meaning to the events.)127 Yet the often highly illuminating and suggestive parallels from the works of other ancient historiographers cited in such studies of Acts show that there, too, ‘rhetorical’ concerns were very much operative, and yet that has not produced amongst contemporary students of ancient history a comparable disinterest or disinclination to use the works of these authors as sources for the history of the periods in question. They may be compelled to make due allowance for the effects of the ‘rhetorical’ concerns of these ancient writers on the information which they impart and which can be gleaned from their writings, but they do not cease to use them in their attempts to trace what happened in the ancient world, however much they may take

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Iggers, Geschichtswissenschaft, 87. And also in the study of the works of Josephus, with a stress on his ‘rhetoric’ leading to a similar evaluation of the minimal value of many of his statements for historical study: Mason, Josephus, 36–50 (36: ‘Ancient writing was so completely given over to persuasion, or “rhetoric”, that no author from that time should be taken at face value’ – the following pages provide many instances of information that is to be taken with a pinch of salt; more to be trusted are unintentional pieces of information – 38); cf. 74–6; cf. his introduction to Josephus’ Life, e.g. xxxviii.) Contrast Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 40, 130. 126 Cf., e.g., T. Penner, ‘Discourse’, 84: ‘one is no longer interested primarily (or even not at all) in the historicity of the material in Acts but rather in examining the only thing Acts can really yield in the end: a window to Luke’s socio-cultural world.’ And yet M. J. Wheeldon can argue that ‘the most common expectation’ of ancient texts identified by their readers as historiae ‘was that they should present a straightforward account of past events’ (‘“Stories”’, 44). If Luke’s readers expected that (and ‘Luke‘s’ prefaces, above all to his Gospel, would surely have encouraged that expectation), were they so deluded and deceived? On the (false) dichotomy between historiography and fiction here see Backhaus in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, esp. 37–41; cf. also 62–6, 133. 127 Schröter, ‘Lukas’, 249. On the other hand, in his ‘Konstruktion’, 213, Schröter seemingly endorses wholeheartedly the tendency of much recent scholarship to treat Acts as a historical work, distinguishing carefully the question of ‘Luke’s’ aim in his narrative from that of its value as a source of historical knowledge of the events described. 125

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some of the statements which they find in those sources with a pinch or two of salt.128 Nor do the students of ancient history only make use of those ancient writers like Thucydides or Polybius who professed to employ the highest critical standards and were at times, at least in the case of Polybius, as well as the later Lucian of Samosata, more than a little critical and disparaging of other ancient historiographers because of the way in which they handled their material. All ancient historiography is grist to the mills of these scholars, even if the proportion of chaff to grain may be much higher in some works than in others. For there is, rather, a growing realization that there may only be differences of degree within ancient historiography, and that a hard and fast distinction between factual accounts and rhetorically motivated ones is thoroughly inappropriate; the erection of such a cordon sanitaire may, indeed, betray a rather naive acceptance at their face value of the claims to objectivity of writers like Polybius at the expense of their competitors. In other words, the element of ‘construction’, of fictio (if one were to use that term), in the conventions of all ancient historiography should be recognized, and due allowance must then be made for the ensuing Tendenzen of the writers of such works in handling their accounts. Yet, if ‘rhetorical’ interests and purposes are served by all ancient historiography, more or less, and ancient historiographical works are nevertheless are still regularly used and evaluated by today’s students of ancient history, then the surprise and disquiet of one European scholar confronted by the disinterest in the history behind the text of Acts evidenced by his North American colleagues is only too understandable.129 Postmodernity in the name of ancient rhetoric may here have gone a step too far, too far to be credible.

In matters of epistemology ‘postmodernism’ in all its many forms is united by a negative feature, a purported criticism of, a turning away from, a rejection of ‘the modern’ and the epistemological criteria of modernity (itself hardly a uniform and homogeneous phenomenon) that had for so long dominated research and above all historical critical methods.130 Yet we have seen that this rejection can easily leave the impression of an anarchic situation where ‘anything goes’, and more moderate exponents of ‘postmodernism’ and a ‘postmodern’ epistemology and hermeneutic have been anxious to guard against that impression and to insist that there are indeed limits to what is legitimate. So Bernadette Dodge argues that, although the ‘fragments’ of the past may be ‘chaotic’, the historian will choose, weigh and evaluate the evidence, producing not reality but certainly the best, most valid story possible. Chaotic sources do not equate to equally valid ones. The historian does not have carte-blanche to rewrite an account of the past as personal whim.131 128

Cf. the use of Tacitus, Suetonius and others mentioned above in § 4.1. Byrskog, ‘History’, 258. 130 Cf. Ricoeur, Memory, 313, who also notes that ‘postmodern’ is ‘frequently employed by English-language authors as a synonym for modernist’! Perhaps that is neither so perverse nor so bizarre as it sounds if indeed, as some claim (see above), ‘postmodern’ historiography in fact still operates within the framework of the methods of the ‘modern’. 131 Dodge, ‘Re-imag(in)ing’, 348. That, however, could and should be rephrased as ‘what is in his or her eyes, and in his or her particular situation, the best, most valid (or plausible) story possible’. Later, however, she calls on the historian to ‘abjure any conno129

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Yet would it not be better to grant that there were indeed virtues in the methods of ‘the modern’ and instead of a wholesale rejection of ‘the modern’ to seek some union of the insights of the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’ in such a way that they each act as a brake on the excesses of the other? That would, in any case, become necessary if one accepts Wolfgang Welsch’s thesis that what is called ‘postmodern’ would in fact be better described as ‘radically modern’, in that it realizes insights characteristic of the ‘modern’, or at least of the ‘modern’ of the twentieth century.132 ‘Postmodern’ critics are right, for instance, to draw attention to the extent to which historians are themselves historically conditioned and to question the possibility of a neutral, detached and thoroughly ‘objective’ viewpoint such as the ‘modernist’ approach seemed to assume.133 But does that prevent us from seeking to take that historical conditioning into account and self-critically to ask how it has influenced and perhaps distorted our way of seeing things? Or, as Meyer puts it, an element of ‘cognitional self-transcendence’ is called for.134 Yet, while one control on that influence and potential distortion may be an analysis of the factors that influence us, another is surely a fresh and critical look at the historical data available to us, in order to see how far they in fact bear out what we have made out of them, indeed the ‘construction’ that we have put upon them. And if they in fact call that ‘construction’ in question, then that in turn challenges us to revise that ‘construction’. In other words, the term ‘construction’ here represents, not something that is inevitable and inescapable in historical work, but something that must be questioned and as far as possible, if not resisted, at least held in check, as something that, if unchecked, undermines the essential nature of historical work. The term ‘reconstruction’, on the other hand, contains in itself a recognition of the determinative and controlling role that the data of the past ought to play in our ‘constructions’, so that an acceptable and legitimate ‘construction’ is at one and the same time a ‘reconstruction’. tations of “what really happened”’ (360), but should that not remain the historian’s goal and ideal? 132 Welsch, Moderne, e.g. 36, 84; he quotes with approval from the wrapper of Lyotard’s Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris, 1986) the view that the ‘postmodern is not to be located after the modern nor in opposition to it; it was already included in it, but incognito’ (82); cf. also Aichele, Bible, 12–13 (‘postmodernism foregrounds, heightens, and problematizes modernity’s enabling assumptions about reference, representation, method, and subjectivity’) and Ankersmit, History, 194, 197, 223, 238, quoted above (n. 111). 133 R. J. Evans, Defence, 106–9, rightly asks how far historians like himself give that impression to their hearers and readers. However, while this ‘postmodern’ reaction might be appropriate as a response to ‘historical positivism’, it is by no means clear that it offers an appropriate corrective to ‘historicism’, which also belongs very much to the ‘modern’. Indeed, if Neumann is correct in characterizing the ‘historicism’ of the late nineteenth century as in crisis because of its relativism, including its epistemological relativism (Geburt, 100–1), then it is hard to see in ‘postmodern’ historiography a break with this tradition. 134 E.g. Meyer, Realism, 139.

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At this point it may be appropriate to insist that ‘reconstruction’ is an apter description of the historian’s task than ‘representation’ or ‘re-presentation’, although, for instance, F. R. Ankersmit pleads for the appropriateness of the latter term, comparing it to the work of an artist painting the likeness of someone or something.135 For the historian differs from an artist painting a model or a scene, in that the past is not before his or her eyes. Or if the painter is painting something or someone unseen (Ankersmit mentions ‘the absent God’), then there is relatively little scope for rational discussion of the appropriateness or otherwise of the picture (except perhaps to question the appropriateness of any picture at all). In neither case does the artist have to argue from ‘traces’ left by the past, and the merits of the painting are judged by other (most likely aesthetic) criteria than those appropriate to historical discourse;136 the criteria employed by the latter are, as we have seen, far closer to those appropriate in forensic investigations. Another term often used in this context is ‘mimesis’, yet here too misgivings arise. It might be appropriate to use the term when talking of the element of realism and lifelikeness in a fictional account, but it seems odd to speak of the historian’s goal as the production of an account that ‘imitates’ or ‘mirrors’ the past of which it is an account. For the one is an account, the other is a past reality of which it is an account. ‘Imitation’ could meaningfully be applied to a stage-play or to a pageant re-enacting past events, but far less meaningfully to the script or the author’s stage directions for the dramatic work. The historian’s account of past events is not a re-enactment of those events either; that term, ‘re-enactment’, might be appropriate to the visual reconstruction of a crime, not to the subsequent account written about that reconstruction, and it is the latter that is closer to the sort of thing that a historical account is, stating both what most probably happened and why it probably happened.137 For the term ‘account’ offers more scope for the role of explanation and analysis that is an important part of the historian’s task; ‘representation’ or ‘re-presentation’ seem, on the other hand, not to suggest this part of the task.

135 Ankersmit, Representation, 11; cf. also his History, 102–24, 191–3. (I must confess to being unaccustomed to speaking of pictures as ‘representations’ or, for that matter, as ‘substitutes’ as Ankersmit argues in his ‘Reply to Professor Zagorin’, e.g. 292, 294. ‘Reconstruction’ has the great advantage of allowing more scope for the role of inference and argument in the historian’s work.) Gaddis, too, speaks constantly of ‘representation’, influenced by the analogy of landscapes ‘represented’ by maps of different sorts (Landscape; cf. Droysen, Historik, ed. Leyh 8, who also resorts to a cartographical analogy, Buller, Geschichtstheorien, 169–83, who devotes a whole section to ‘the cartography of historiography’, as well as Mandelbaum, Anatomy, 15–17, 115, 152). But cartography is but a very partial analogy when set beside the complexity of the task or tasks of historiography. 136 But cf. Ankersmit, Representation, 44, where he tries to speak of the rules and criteria applying to artistic representation and to argue that those for writing history are similar: ‘the figurative painter painting a landscape cannot paint the rind of individual trees into the greatest detail, while at the same reducing the staffage in the foreground to a mere suggestive smear.’ But why not if he or she so chooses? 137 One seems, in other words, to be in danger of committing a similar sort of ‘category mistake’ to that which Andrew Norman detects in the assertion that events in the past have a certain ‘narrative structure’ or ‘plot’ (‘Telling’, 159–61). His point would then be that narratives have narrative structures, but events do not.

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If ‘modernism’ meant an uncritical trust in the possibility of fully ‘objective’ research, then ‘postmodernism’s’ protest was justified. A self-critical awareness on the part of historians will make them conscious how much they and their work are conditioned by various factors. For, on the one hand, they are each the products of their own time, and the questions that they ask and the perspective from which they view the past will inevitably be coloured and shaped by the fashions and interests of that time. As Ben Meyer puts it, the ‘historian does not start from some set of postulates, but from the sum-total of himself and his horizon’ and ‘operates in the light of his whole personal development’.138 They will also, in all likelihood, be working within a certain tradition of historical research and be guided by its conventions, the way it goes about its work, and the criteria for valid historical argumentation that it accepts. And both the narrower circle of the guild of historians and the wider circle of the society and the public for which they write will have certain interests that historical writing is meant to serve, and certain expectations that it is meant to satisfy (not that the interests and the expectations of the two circles will necessarily coincide).139 In the case of the wider public, history and historical writing may be expected to serve the construction or the maintenance of a particular self-identity, and issues of one’s self-identity as a historian will also arise in an academic context. Both in the academic guild and in society at large such questions of self-identity are in turn bound up with those of standing, power and influence, and historians are not immune to the pressures that may thus be brought to bear on their work.140 They are not immune to them, despite Geoffrey Elton’s dismissal of the view that they ‘cannot ever eliminate themselves from the search for truth’ as ‘nonsense’,141 but that 138

Meyer, Reality, 108. Williams, Truth, 250–8, takes up Nancy S. Struever’s criticism of Hayden White’s application of rhetorical traditions to historiography in which she points out his neglect of the role played by the historian’s audience and their possible objections (‘Topics’, esp. 77–8) and develops this in a consideration of the historian’s relation to her or his public and intended audience. When the wider circle is, in the case of New Testament study, above all that of the Christian church, with its concern for its self-identity, then the interests and expectations may differ very greatly from those of academic historians, and the dilemma of the historian of earliest Christianity may, accordingly, be very great indeed. 140 In more recent times there have been some much publicized cases of scientists falsifying the results of their experiments, in order to enhance their academic and also public standing. In historical work there is today perhaps less danger of, say, falsifying documents for such a purpose, and in the case of the early Christian world even newly discovered documents that are genuine can expect to be submitted to a rigorous and highly sceptical scrutiny (one instance that springs to mind is the case of the Secret Gospel of Mark; as J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, 148, notes, ‘its antiquity and genuineness are questioned by many scholars’). 141 Elton, Practice, 57. Yet he later (102) speaks of ‘the understandable reaction against claims to “ultimate history”, free of all personal preconceptions’, while admittedly maintaining that the reaction has gone too far, and states (105) that the ‘historian who thinks 139

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does not mean that they should tamely submit to them or regard their influence as inevitable. If historiography must always be critical of ideology, as Ulrich Körtner insists,142 then that criticism must also be directed against the ideology lurking in the historian’s own culture as well as against those of others, past and present.143 That in itself militates against any assumption that all attempts at historiography are equally valid or equally vitiated or that ‘anything goes’: it is implicit in such a criticism that some historical accounts are to be preferred to others and that one can in some measure weigh the merits and demerits of one proposal against those of another. On the other hand, it seems to me that the relevance of historical work to the present and future can be overestimated. So Jörn Rüsen seems to assume that this relevance or meaning lies in the applicability of the history studied and described to the activities of those to whom this account of the past is addressed. If the latter call its relevance into question, then, he suggests, one must be able to show its importance for the orientation (more specifically: Zeitorientierung) for our lives, must be able to show that the norms that make these past events important are the same norms as guide us in our planning of our future actions.144 In many instances the case to be made out for such a relevance to the present and future seems a little thin and to speak of ‘norms’ could be misleading.145 The past can be interesting, indeed fascinating in itself, arousing our curiosity and challenging us to explain how things turned out as they did. It is true that the application to the present may be more direct if we are studying recent history, rather than ancient history or medieval history, for this recent history can more aptly be described as a ‘pre-history’ (Vorgeschichte) of the times of those for whom the history that has been written is intended and in which they intend to act. On the other hand, the history of Jesus’ work and of the early Christian movement can indeed be more appropriately described as having a potentially normative role, at least for the Christian movement today, but a comparable that he has removed himself from his work is almost certainly mistaken’ (cf. also Return, 43). 142 Körtner, ‘Fragen’, 9. To be noted is Jürgen Moltmann’s conclusion that the historian ‘stands both within history and also above history’ (Theology, 271; his italics). 143 It is telling that Gertrude Himmelfarb, History, 89, supports the Marxist’s conviction that ‘all historians reflect in their work a political bias of some sort, that the ideas, interests, and experiences of the historian inevitably intrude upon the writing of history, that the very process of selecting sources, presenting facts, and writing a coherent account necessarily presumes some conception of reality, some order of values, that precludes objectivity’, but nevertheless insists that the historian should have ‘made an effort to control and correct his bias, to look for evidence that might confute his thesis, and, no less important, to construct a thesis capable of confutation’. 144 Rüsen, Vernunft, e.g. 98–9. 145 One can, it is true, as Rüsen goes on to argue, discuss the question of ‘the correct historical perspective’ in which to view events in the past (and Rüsen goes on to deny that there can only be one correct historical perspective: Vernunft, 100–1, 104), but this seems to be something other than questions of normativity or indeed of meaning if the meaning is to be not only discerned in the present, but also applicable to the present and future. Is the ‘dependence of historical thinking upon the needs and interests’ of the historians not something else, even if it may sometimes be linked to questions of normativity and meaning for the present and future?

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role could hardly be ascribed to the history of the early Principate in general. At any rate, that entails that more is at stake in the case of the history of Jesus and his movement than in that of other facets of ancient history.

We have also seen how prominent a role the ‘linguistic turn’ has played in much ‘postmodernist’ thinking, and whatever excesses it has engendered, this ‘linguistic turn’ has rightly made us more aware that the stories that historians tell are literary creations. These stories may be told well or told badly; above all, each story may be told in different ways, often in very many different ways. Which aspects are stressed and which omitted may be in part a matter of aesthetic choice, but an element of scholarly judgement must also play an important role: some aspects of the story are vital since otherwise the course of events that the historian seeks to describe and analyse will be unintelligible. Yet here, too, the communicative skills of the historian may play a part: he or she must judge how best to convey to readers what is essential for understanding the story or for making a point that he or she wishes to make. All that is in the highest degree creative, is ‘constructing’ something. And yet I would wish to argue that language is, rightly understood, the historian’s tool that is meant to serve her or his purposes,146 rather than being the master to which historians are subservient and at whose mercy they are placed,147 even if they often may not be fully aware of the constraints placed upon them by the language that is at their disposal, as well as of the culture that has moulded them together with the language that they use and the ways in which it can be used.148 The self-reflective historian is the more likely to be conscious how her or his options may be limited by these linguistic and cultural constraints, and that limitation is one shared by many, if not all, branches of scholarly work, the more so as they push up against the frontiers of human knowledge. Yet, as I have already said, each and every story may be told in different ways, and often has been told in different ways, and may in the future be told in yet more different ways. It does not follow from this, Rüdiger Graf insists, ‘that there 146 Cf. here Welsch’s critique of Lyotard’s stress on the ‘priority and autonomy of language’, his ‘Sprachobjektivismus’ and ‘anti-anthropologische[r] Affekt’ (Moderne, 249–61). Spiegel, ‘Revising’, 18, remarks on the waning ‘prestige of “linguistic-turn” historiography’, ‘accompanied by a growing sense of dissatisfaction with its overly systematic account of the operation of language in the domain of human endeavors of all kinds, and an evident attempt to rehabilitate social history’. Cf. also Zagorin, ‘Historiography’, 200. 147 Cf. Burrow, History, 498: ‘Foucault … seems to regard language as a kind of prison’; White, too, speaks of the ‘linguistic determinism to which the conventional narrative historian remains enslaved’ (Tropics, 117). 148 Cf. Bloch, Craft, 156–89; Poster, History, 44: ‘Only by attending to the role of language can one comprehend the operations through which gender and race are socially constituted.’ And the same applies to other dimensions of one’s ‘social constitution’. Nonetheless it is also true that language in turn is dependent upon its social context (cf. Flaig, ‘Kinderkrankheiten’, 40–1). And language is also ‘historical and has an intrinsic connection with the past’, as Rüdiger Graf reminds us (‘Interpretation’, 394).

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can be no true description at all, but rather that there can be many’; ‘one thing happened, but we have an enormous amount of different ways of speaking about it’.149 Each historian, if he or she is not too ‘postmodern’,150 may want to claim, explicitly or implicitly, that his or her version is ‘true’ or at least one of the ‘true’ ones, but upon reflection may have to be content with the still more modest claim, as J. H. Hexter puts it, that they are telling ‘about the past the best and most likely story that can be sustained by the relevant extrinsic evidence’.151 Particularly in view of the different accounts that may be given in the future, there is no escaping the provisionality of each and every account. It is not just that each may be subverted or even refuted by the appearance of new evidence, but also that someone may subsequently come up with a better and more convincing way of doing justice to the evidence that already exists.152 And Collingwood rightly reminds us that this ‘someone’ may even be oneself, trying to reopen an old question and finding that the question has changed.153 Yet the same scholar could earlier claim that the merely probable or possible are not good enough for the historian, who can only assert what the evidence available obliges her or him to say. 154 Yet to speak of ‘obligation’ here is not advisable: all too often the evidence, that is the evidence used by a historian in his or her argument, often exactly the same evidence, only differently interpreted and weighted, seems to lead different historians to different conclusions, and it would be a delusion if a particular historian were to stand there, as it were echoing Luther’s ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise’, for in the majority of cases he or she could indeed do otherwise. The available evidence may, at any rate, make some assertions, some standpoints more probable than others, but, particularly when one is dealing with something so far in the past as the life of Jesus, attested in such potentially tendentious sources, the range of possible readings is very considerable indeed 149

Graf, ‘Interpretation’, 395. Cf., e.g., Jenkins, ‘“Nobody”’, 67: ‘“the past” can be read and “made to mean” any way you like’; also 70–1: ‘“the past” has no legitimate gatekeepers who can tell us what we can and cannot do with it (least of all academic historians); … no one owns the past nor has a monopoly of how to appropriate it; … the interminable openness of the past to countless readings should be celebrated and democratised … historisations of the past can be any thing you want them to be’. 151 Hexter, ‘Rhetoric’, 61. Cf. Dodge, ‘Re-imag(in)ing’, 356: ‘Historical reconstructions assembled from … traces and simulacra represent nothing so much as the narrative that the historian is best able to imagine’; also Caputo, Prayers, 274 (‘the best story we can [reconstruct]’, as we ‘pick our way among the remains, wrestle with and conjure the ghosts of the past, ply them with patient importunity’). 152 Cf. also Rüsen, Vernunft, 40: advances in knowledge as a result of historical research always mean that ‘the results of that particular research are basically liable to be superseded by further research’ (cf. also 93–4). And this regular feature of historical enquiry, along with the possibility of detecting forgeries and the like, is, Egon Flaig argues (‘Kinderkrankheiten’, 39), hard to square with the claims of deconstructionism. 153 Cf. Fried, Schleier, 126; Moltmann, Theology, 240. 154 Collingwood, Idea, 204. 150

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and the best that one may hope for is the most probable reading.155 Being ‘obliged’ to say one thing or the other would be to claim too much in this case. If one may speak of ‘knowing’ anything about the past it is a matter of ‘knowledge’ in a relative sense, of something that is beyond reasonable doubt (as I can claim at least to ‘know’ when and where I was born – assuming that my birth certificate is genuine and correct). And how often do most historians claim any more than this? Despite the arguments of some ‘postmodern’ historians that their not yet ‘postmodern’ colleagues do suppose that, it seems that the latter’s claims are usually more modest. So Robert Burns, reviewing Keith Jenkins’ Refiguring History, comments that this ‘postmodern’ historian ‘imputes to traditional historians an aim of achieving complete certainty and final closure (which, incidentally, none known to me has ever claimed)’, and comments that this identification of “truth” with absolute definitiveness disregards entirely the possibility of working in the face of what is undeniably an infinity of factors … by the making of probability judgements which at times might reach certainty “beyond reasonable doubt”.156

It may perhaps apply to some of the events of Jesus’ life, such as his baptism by John or his crucifixion in Jerusalem, that they are established beyond reasonable doubt; with sayings attributed to him it is usually impossible to be so confident.157 In fact, the ‘truth’ of a historical account is a very elusive ideal.158 Nonetheless, it is an ideal, and an ideal that is worth striving for, however elusive it may prove to be. This is what distinguishes historical research and writing from the composing and writing of fiction (in the usual sense of the word), and this is the 155

Cf. the range of possible interpretations of Jesus’ action in the Jerusalem temple, assuming that something like what the gospels describe actually happened (see Wedderburn, ‘Jesus’ Action’). The evidence here does not ‘oblige’ one to adopt any of the possibilities. 156 Burns in Rethinking History 7, 445–6. Cf. Bevir, ‘Objectivity’, 337: ‘Historians make sense of the past as best they can; they do not discover certainties’; also McCullagh, ‘Metaphor’, 37. 157 In speaking of being able to be reasonably certain about some of the events associated with Jesus’ life rather than about any of the sayings I find myself in agreement with the judgement of E. P. Sanders (cf. also here C. A. Evans, ‘Developments’, 14), except that Sanders endorses as one of the known events the much disputed action of Jesus in the temple and then goes on with far too great a confidence to interpret what Jesus intended by this action (Jesus, esp. 3–18, 61–90). See further the following chapter. 158 To be noted here is also Rüdiger Graf’s complaint that it is ‘one of the basic flaws of the current debates about truth that talking about the concept of truth, on the one hand, and talking about our practices of attaining true beliefs, on the other hand, are rarely clearly distinguished’ (‘Interpretation’, 390). Helpful here is Maurice Mandelbaum’s clear distinction between the ‘objectivity’ that pertains to the ways in which and the conditions under which a judgement is reached and historical knowledge and truth: if ‘objectivity’ is a matter of trying to avoid letting personal sentiments or interests and the like influence one’s judgement, then one may still reach a true judgement despite these influences or a false one however much one has been ‘objective’ in this sense (Anatomy, 146–7).

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yardstick by which the value of the historical research and writing must ultimately be judged, even if the application of such an elusive, even theoretical, yardstick is hardly a very exact or cut and dried exercise. And in a sense one can never say finally that the yardstick has been successfully applied, for one has no direct access to the past so that one can measure a historiographical account against that reality. At best the account will give a plausible account that does justice to the available evidence. Nonetheless, the historian believes that that absent reality once existed, and he or she attempts to approximate to it as far as possible. That approximation must be a matter of inference, based on the ‘traces’ or evidence from the past that is available in the present. Naturally, not everyone will draw the same inferences from that evidence and not everyone will therefore offer the same account of the past. Nonetheless, the various competing stories will be judged according to the degree that they are plausible inferences from the evidence, and according to the extent that they offer a plausible explanation of the existence of that evidence, evidence that is the ‘traces’ of the past reality being investigated. The historical account at least seeks, accordingly, to be a ‘true story’, even if White regards this as ‘virtually a contradiction in terms’,159 as opposed to a piece of fiction that makes no such claims. The account seeks, at least, to be ‘true to’, faithful to the evidence at its disposal, to account as adequately as possible for its existence, and not to manipulate it according to the whims and fancies of the presentday writer. Ankersmit speaks of a historical ‘representation’ ‘being about’ what is represented rather than ‘referring’ to something as a ‘description’ does.160 ‘Being about’ is surely more than a little imprecise; ‘referring’ would be better, in that it signals that there is a past reality that the historiographical account seeks to describe and to which the historian is ‘accountable’, but ‘accounting for’ or ‘giving an account of’ might be better, in that the historian seeks to ‘account for’ the ‘traces’ left by the past in the present and to ‘give an account of’ the past in the light of those ‘traces’. Again the forensic analogy is apt: one seeks to ‘account for’ the available evidence/‘traces’ and to ‘give an account of’ what really happened. And ‘accounting’ gives more scope to the explanatory dimension of the historiographical task: it is not just a matter of saying what probably happened but also suggesting why it happened.

However, the implications of the ‘linguistic turn’ are not to be limited to historical accounts in the present. That is illustrated by Elizabeth Clark’s attempt to apply her thorough survey of various historiographical approaches in the twentieth century to her own field of specialization, what she, somewhat awkwardly, calls ‘late ancient Christianity’, i.e. the post-New Testament phase of the early church. For there it is not upon the linguisticality of present accounts that she dwells, but 159 Quoted by Carroll, ‘Interpretation’, 35, from White, ‘“Figuring the Nature of Times Deceased”: Literary Theory and Historical Writing’, in The Future of Literary Theory (ed. R. Cohen; New York: Routledge, 1989) 27. 160 E.g. Ankersmit, Representation, 41.

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upon certain features of the ‘high’ literature of early Christian writings. There it is above all the ideological aspects of some of these texts that she highlights; there she focuses on these texts’ treatment of women and on the application to them of ‘postcolonial theory’ and criticism. In the latter case, in contrast to those literary studies whose colonialism is that of Western European powers, it is with the Roman Empire that she is concerned, alluding at the very close of her work to the possible implications of this approach to Christian writings in the period when Christianity had achieved dominance in the Roman Empire so that she can speak of ‘Christian imperial identity’.161 Confronted by the implications of the ‘linguistic turn’ for historiography both in the present and in the past, one would do well to note Brian Fay’s recognition of the possibility and even the likelihood of an oscillation between what he terms ‘the Scientific Attitude’ and ‘the Rhetorical Attitude’ in historiographical theory and his plea that we acknowledge the need for ‘any adequate view of history’ (historiography) of ‘an ongoing dialectical tension between’ these two attitudes: ‘no expression of either the Rhetorical or the Scientific Attitude which is of lasting interest will fail to take account of the insights of its opponent’. For, he contends, the application of the rhetorical to the exclusion of the scientific leads ultimately to solipsism in which one’s utterances lack any anchorage in a world outside of those utterances; on the other hand, a purely ‘scientific’ approach overlooks that this enterprise is a ‘representational’ one that follows ‘essential representational conventions’. 162 Now Dunn speaks of a hermeneutical ‘dialogue’ between the historian and the past,163 although Andreas Buller corrects this by saying that the ‘dialogue’ is 161

Clark, History, 185, here drawing on Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). More briefly, she had earlier hinted at examples of ‘an examination of “authorial function” that calls into question attributions of intention and context’, and ‘‘symptomatic and Derridean readings that attend to the gaps, absences, and aporias in texts’ (170). That the latter, for instance, is also true of the New Testament period is clear from instances like the differences between Paul’s account of his dealings with the Jerusalem church in Gal 2.1–14 and the various references in Acts (cf. Wedderburn, ‘Paul and Barnabas’; History, 104–20). The former is clearly applicable, especially with New Testament texts that are anonymous (like the gospels) or pseudonymous. (Potentially somewhat misleading is Clark’s selection of apocryphal Acts as an example of this phenomenon, in that she describes them as ‘composed … in the name of a New Testament apostle’; this presumably does not mean that they are pseudonymous – for the apostle in question is described in the third person –, but that they claim the authority of an apostle for the teaching and practice that they contain.) 162 Introduction to Fay et al., History, 8–9 (his capitals and italics). 163 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, ch. 6. His former Durham colleague David Brown would presumably qualify this by making it explicit that the ‘past’ involved is not only that of the original events but potentially the whole intervening time with its variegated transmission of the tradition of those events, ‘tradition as a staged process, where the steps on the way might be of as intrinsic interest as the beginning or the end’ and where ‘each stage of the transmission of the tradition, including those aspects that were jettisoned, has the poten-

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rather with the historian’s present,164 and such ways of speaking and looking at the problem in terms of a dialogue are in many ways preferable to, say, the to my mind rather static categories which Paul Ricoeur favours in his Time and Narrative, preoccupied as he is, and as the title of his work indicates, with the question and the aporias of time: in the present we have but ‘traces’ of the past and the historical narrative somehow ‘stands for’ the past.165 Yet if one were to speak, however metaphorically, of ‘voices’ from the past instead of ‘traces’, although ‘traces’ is better fitted to indicate the investigation and interpretation of the evidence from the past that is part and parcel of historical research,166 and of our ‘answertial to act as a critique of our own present concerns and obsessions’ (Tradition, 50–1). R. J. Evans, Defence, 106, also speaks of historical research as a dialogue between ‘two kinds of significances – the historian’s and the documents’’, referring approvingly to Dominick LaCapra (e.g. Rethinking, 27 n. 1, 30–2, 48, 64, 69), and himself employs the language of a ‘dialogue’ (230–1). Wilson, History, 2–3, speaks of a ‘process of dialectical feedback in which evidence and hypothesis constantly modify each other’. Similarly, E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 24, speaks of history (historiography?) as ‘a continuous process of interrelation between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past’, although he later modifies this to speak of ‘a dialogue between the events of the past and progressively emerging future ends’ (p. 118). In some ways the earlier formulation is preferable, inasmuch as the historian’s judgement about the direction in which things are moving will always be shaped primarily by the situation and events of the historian’s present. (Most historians do not resort to crystal balls and lay no claim to the second sight.) Crossan, Birth, 42, chooses another term, ‘interactivism’ (rather than ‘interaction’?), which seems to mean much the same thing (describing this as ‘the way I understand postmodernism’ – would that things were quite that simple!): ‘The past and the present must interact with one another, each changing and challenging the other, and the ideal is an absolutely fair and equal reaction between one another.’ (Cf. also the definition of ‘history’ on p. 20 [his italics]: ‘History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse’.) Denton’s criticism is, however, that it is unclear how this actually affects the way that Crossan works historically: ‘Crossan’s notion of interactivism seems to be a theoretical concession, with little or no practical consequence for the way he does history’ (Historiography, 76). Yet a further term employed by Michel de Certeau is that of a ‘discourse’ relating to one another the ‘known’ from the past and the ‘real’ of the historian’s present location from which the historian’s ‘problematics, procedures, modes of comprehension, and finally a practice of meaning’ derive (Writing, 35). 164 Buller, Geschichtstheorien, 34. Yet what he goes on to say about the sources being activated by the historian and being thus called into life could be interpreted as their being enabled to become conversation partners of the historian that point her or him towards the past realities to which they bear witness or can be made (by the historian) to bear witness. 165 That the categories are so static may seem somewhat paradoxical, but that is the impression given in this work. On ‘standing for’ cf. also Ricoeur, Memory, 274–80, 363. Ricoeur is at one with G. R. Elton in speaking of the historian’s having to deal with ‘traces’ of the past: ‘Historical study is not the study of the past but the study of present traces of the past’ (Elton, Practice, 9; cf. 60; Return, 53; also Baberowski, Sinn, 11 [‘Zeugnisse’]; Marwick, New Nature, 26, 153, 246; Bloch, Craft, 55, talks similarly of ‘tracks’). 166 Ricoeur, Memory, xvi, also introduces the term HLMNZYQ or ‘image’ as well as ‘trace’ and then goes on (13–15) to distinguish ‘three major uses of the word “trace”’, the ‘traces on which historians work’ (must these also be written, as Ricoeur seems to assume? Can one, for instance, always speak of the data yielded by archaeology as ‘written’?), ‘impres-

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ing to’ them and being ‘true’ and ‘faithful’ (though not uncritically or slavishly faithful) to them, then the dynamic of the historical task may become clearer and we draw nearer to the image of ‘dialogue’.167 For, although Droysen might give the impression that it is only the historian in the present who lets historical sources speak,168 this is not strictly true, particularly when ‘voices’ from the past have set down their accounts and thoughts in written forms. Nor is this a dynamic that is wholly alien to Ricoeur’s work if he can speak of historians being ‘debtors to the dead’.169 It is true that he here expressly eschews the language of ‘representation’,170 but ‘representing’ in the sense that an advocate or barrister ‘represents’, speaks for, a client would not be an inappropriate term to use here. For the historian, as it were, ‘speaks for’ the past.171 It is clear that the past can be manipulated by succeeding generations, and it is here that historians need to be able to ‘speak for’ the past, for the persons and the entities that have passed away, out of regard for them as they in fact were, rather than as their successors would like to see them and to make them to serve their own ends and interests. The idea sions … resulting from the shock of an event that can be said to be striking, marking’, and ‘the corporeal, cerebral, cortical imprint’. Cf. also pp. 175 and 352 (where ‘trace’ is linked to Augustine’s talk of vestigia – Conf. 11.18; cf. 1.7). White, Content, 102, also finds ‘traces’ in ‘the praxis of present social formations’. For others these ‘traces’ of the past that we can experience in the present are ‘(consequences and) effects’ of the past – cf. Danto, Philosophy, 37, quoting John Dewey – or simply ‘evidence’ (the term that Danto himself seems to prefer at this point) or what is still present and extant from the past (Rüsen, Vernunft, 90–1). Denton, Historiography, 160, also points to Lonergan’s use of ‘traces’ (Lonergan, ‘Philosophy’, 56: ‘Everything that exists in the present and had its origin in the past constitutes a trace of the past’). 167 LaCapra, Rethinking, 64, refers to the past having its own ‘voices’ and the need to respect them, particularly when they resist or qualify the interpretations that we would like to place on them. 168 Droysen, Historik, ed. Leyh 236 (‘the things themselves do not speak, but we let them speak’); cf. ed. Hübner 361. 169 Ricoeur, Time 3, 143; cf. also 257, 184; Reality, 2; ‘History’, 23; Memory, 363 (here one finds this language associated with ‘standing for’ as well as a cross-reference to Heidegger’s view of Dasein as ‘being-in-debt’, although the English translation of Heidegger uses the more negative phrase ‘being guilty’, whereas Ricoeur wants at this point to speak in more neutral terms [cf. 381]: Being, 326–9 [Ger. 281–3]). 170 Yet ‘representation’ seems to be used with a far greater freedom and fewer inhibitions in Ricoeur, Memory, in many different contexts (cf. Index s.v.); at times he invokes the distinction between Vorstellung and Vertretung (e.g. Reality, 2); the former would mean making the past appear in the mind, the latter involves ‘traces’ taking the place of the past. Contrast Ankersmit’s use of ‘representation’ on the analogy of an artist’s ‘representation’ of that which he or she paints (as noted above, perhaps a somewhat unusual choice of word), although it only muddies the waters when he combines this analogy with the representation of the electorate by Congress or Parliament (Representation, 80; cf. also 272–9). (See also above p. 129). 171 Analogous to this is perhaps E. P. Thompson’s talk of historians listening to the past and to the material at their disposal, so that the material takes comand of them and speaks through them (in Abelove et al., Visions, 14).

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of respect for the dead, for those past, is also inherent in Ricoeur’s striking reference to historiography as ‘an act of sepulcher’,172 for burial rites are a mark of such a respect and honour, just as withholding them shames the unburied. This connection with the past, implicit in the talk of ‘traces’, is not one that I would wish to delete from the historian’s use of evidence. In contrast Ankersmit contends that ‘evidence does not point towards the past but to other interpretations of the past’, and he invokes the imagery of a tile: the historian does not pick it up to see what lies beneath it, but ‘steps on it in order to move on to other tiles’. Or, to change the imagery, it ’is not a magnifying glass through which we can study the past, but bears more resemblance to the brushstrokes used by the painter to achieve a certain effect’.173 On the contrary, ‘evidence’ seems to me rather to stand in judgement over our interpretations of the past: they are judged according to the degree to which they are faithful, do justice to the evidence from the past. It may be true, as Reinhard Koselleck argues, that the evidence of the past has more of a negative role, dictating what we may not say about the past, rather than prescribing what we can say,174 but it remains the case that we are called to be faithful to the past. Moreover, to say that we are dealing only with interpretations of the past seems to me to overlook the important distinction between ‘traces’ of the past that are already more or less deliberately interpretative, e.g. accounts of the past that have been written by others, and ‘traces’ of the past that can be described as ‘dumb’ or ‘speechless’, in the sense that they are simply there in our present and need the interpretation of the historian even to say whether they are in fact ‘traces’ of the past, and in that case what light they throw on that past and on which past. That is obviously true of many artefacts from the past, such as those discovered by archaeologists, the materials that Droysen characterized as ‘Überreste’ in contrast to ‘monuments’ and ‘sources’,175 but even a text from the past may indirectly and inadvertently attest to aspects of the past that its author did not intend. (Presumably the evangelists did not intend to inform their readers about first-century agricultural procedures or social conditions, but simply assumed them as the background to their accounts; nonetheless one may still be able to discern aspects of both in the situations presupposed in the gospels. However, it must still be asked whether the situations presupposed are those of Jesus’ ministry or those of the evangelist in question in a given case. In other words, which past and whose is indirectly attested?) 172 Ricoeur, Memory, 499. Also connected with, indeed inseparable from, the idea of our debt to the past is the notion of heritage (89). For Michael de Certeau, too, in the words of Elizabeth Clark (History, 120), ‘Historiography … can … be understood as a form of mourning, a burial rite that attempts to exorcise death through its insertion into discourse.’ At the same time she maintains that de Certeau did not seek to ‘familiarize’ the dead, but left them in their ‘alterity’. One is reminded again of Schweitzer’s refusal to modernize Jesus (see § 2.1). 173 Ankersmit, ‘Historiography’, 184 (his italics). It is true that Ankersmit also speaks of traces (p. 185) but maintains that the historian seeks ‘to project a pattern onto the traces’, rather than searching ‘for something behind the traces’ (his italics). Yet I would certainly not want to separate the pattern from the something behind the traces that has produced it. 174 Koselleck, Zukunft, 153 (cf. 206: the sources’ ‘Vetorecht’). 175 Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner e.g. 38. ‘Monuments’ (Denkmäler) are another matter, for they were meant to say something, to offer an interpretation. But with regard to the ‘sources’ (Quellen) one must differentiate: there are things that they were meant to say, other things that they may tell us, yet were not intended by those that wrote them.

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Yet speaking for and being true to the past by no means entails simply repeating the testimony of the past, particularly where the past is already narrated or has come to expression in texts from the past. For in any dialogue or discussion we may come to the conclusion that our interlocutor is not being wholly honest with us or not wholly honest with himself or herself or is simply mistaken, and texts from the past may be equally erroneous or misleading, whether intentionally or unintentionally. All the ‘new historicism’s’ stress on the frailties of the historian today should not blind us to the possible frailties of the historian’s interlocutors in the past, as Elizabeth Clark’s application of literary theories to texts from that past, mentioned above, all too clearly shows.176 Nevertheless, it is, as I have already indicated, the particular service of the ‘new historicism’ to have highlighted the factors that may influence the judgement of historians today and the constraints under which they must operate, factors and constraints that therefore relativize the results of their research as well as their communication of that research to others.177 Yet it should not be assumed that this is altogether a novel insight; again it is, on the contrary, a relatively old one that has become increasingly prominent. For already in Droysen’s Historik we find the recognition that historians are subject to the limitations imposed by their respective historical standpoints, their country or their religious or political convictions; they must have the courage to acknowledge these limitations, aware that an objective lack of bias is inhuman; in fact ‘it is human to be biased’. From that limitation through the historian’s present circumstances there follows ineluctably a limited apprehension of what is true, and the door is opened to a degree of relativism.178 Aware of these limitations historians therefore need, 176

Cf. R. J. Evans, Defence, 81–2. Also to be noted are Mark Poster’s comments on ‘the historian’s tendency … to accept as the experience of the past what historical figures state it to be, though of course only after these statements are verified as actual statements’ (History, 80). 177 Rightly, therefore, Gadamer speaks of historical consciousness as ‘a mode of selfknowledge’ (Truth, 235, his italics), in that it ‘no longer simply applies its own criteria of understanding to a tradition in which it is situated, nor does it naively assimilate tradition and simply carry it on. Rather it adopts a reflective posture toward both itself and the tradition in which it is situated. It understands itself in terms of its own history.’ Yet there is also an element of self-criticism implicit in that reflection, for, as David Brown reminds us (Tradition, 6; cf. also 366), ‘Against the Enlightenment and modernism “tradition” asserts the importance of situatedness: the impossibility of standing totally outside deep-rooted perspectives that shape who we are.’ At the same time he resists the claim of ‘postmodernism’ that the openness of tradition means that it is arbitrary, and yet, in describing how Christian faith and doctrine has in fact gone beyond scripture and has exercised a considerable degree of imagination in the formation of its tradition, he runs the risk of loosing sight of the question whether what has in fact happened is at the same time legitimate, while at the same time seeking to cover his flanks by repeated references to the need to view critically what has happened. 178 Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 287=ed. Leyh 236; cf. also, e.g., ed. Leyh 204; also Buller, Geschichtstheorien, 187: ‘Droysen’s theory of historical knowledge is based on the

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ideally, to strive to be able to hear the ‘voices’ from the past without being totally limited by what they are used to hearing today or by only being able to hear what they want to hear and without being completely deafened by the cacophony of voices in their present.179 They need to be aware enough of the ‘otherness’ of those voices and what they are saying to be able to discern that their message may also be ‘other’. They need to be alert to the fact that what is to be heard may well not be what they and their contemporaries want to hear or are willing to hear. In the case of Jesus research Geoffrey Elton’s warning of the dangers of faith in overarching theories is especially applicable, namely that a historian who ‘believes in a real religion is particularly at risk and needs to be specially on his guard’.180 One’s reception of the message of the past may thus be distorted or blocked, and one’s communication of it, even if one is able to receive it oneself, may fall on deaf ears.181 On the other hand, as Gerd Häfner reminds us, the influence of the present may also open up new opportunities for a truer apprehension of the past. Here he points to the anti-Judaism and antisemitism of the twentieth century as a factor that has made scholars more sensitive to the prejudices of the New Testament writers and readier to recognize how much Jesus belonged to the Judaism of his day. ‘The element of the present in historical knowledge is not necessarily an obstacle to the attempt to apprehend phenomena of the past appropriately.’182 That is certainly both a more realistic and a salutary appraisal than Geoffrey Elton’s advocacy of the historian’s ‘deliberate abandonment of the present’.183 These dangers of deafness or blindness are all too apparent when the object of the historical research is someone like Jesus, one venerated by his followers today and one who determines, in one way or another, their self-identity. They idea of historical relativism’. On the (slippery) notion of ‘(historical) relativism’ see Coakley, Christ, esp. 8–23. 179 E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 38, gives expression to the belief ‘that the historian who is most conscious of his own situation is also more capable of transcending it, and more capable of appreciating the essential nature of the differences between his own society and outlook and those of other periods and other countries, than the historian who loudly protests that he is an individual and not a social phenomenon’. And this, he later adds, is one criterion of ‘objectivity’ in a historian, ‘namely a capacity to rise above the limited vision of his own situation in society and history’ (p. 117). But that, as Danto reminds us (Philosophy, 96–7), is something that applies to other disciplines than the historical: ‘A disposition towards bias is something common to the different disciplines’, including the natural sciences. 180 Elton, Return, 24 (he has dealt with other forms of ‘faith‘, especially Marxist theory). 181 Ralph Broadbent, ‘Ideology’, 47–55, offers some telling examples of the cultural and ideological bias of a number of British New Testament commentaries. (He does, however, rather exaggerate the role of Oxbridge by transferring A. M. Hunter from Aberdeen to an Oxford chair!) 182 Häfner in Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 129. 183 Elton, Practice, 48; cf. also Return, 9.

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have, perhaps without exception, a vested interest in the results of that research and there will be a corresponding danger that the historian who belongs to their number will trim the results of his or her research accordingly. That should not be so, but it is perhaps wishful thinking when Eric Hobsbawm gives the impression that it is only the ‘non-professionals’ who confuse ‘good history’ with ‘history that is good for us’.184 (The historian hostile to the Christian tradition and community is, of course, equally at risk of allowing prejudice to distort the results of his or her enquiry.) That applies to the study of Jesus’ life as well as to the study of the New Testament in general inasmuch as that whole collection of writings is related in some way or another to the self-identity of the Christian community. Seeing that danger, William Wrede struggled with the dominance of Christian systematic theology and its inclination to force its questions and the answers that it wanted to hear upon the historical study of the New Testament, as well as blocking out those answers that it was unwilling to hear.185 If that is true of the New Testament as a whole, it applies a fortiori to that figure who is the focus of the whole christological reflection of Christian theology.186 Yet, over against the claims of extremer ‘postmodernists’ that historiography served to buttress vested interests and the status quo, Richard Evans points out that ‘The thrust of professional history has more often been towards puncturing the clichés of popular historical myth than towards sustaining them,’187 and Ernst Käsemann drily remarks that ‘Historical research has perhaps its final and deepest value in the fact that it disillusions.’188 That, again, if it is also true of historical study of Jesus (and I see no reason why it should not be so), makes this study and its findings, however tentative they may be, an uncomfortable business if one finds comfort in the ‘popular historical myth’ of traditional Christian belief – whether the one that finds comfort there be the historian or the historian’s

184 Hobsbawm, History, 270. Contrast 276, where he concedes that ‘Historians do not and cannot stand outside their subject as objective observers and analysts sub specie aeternitatis. All of us are plunged into the assumptions of our times and places …’. Nonetheless, he maintains that historians cannot ‘abandon the criteria of their profession’ ‘without ceasing to be historians’. ‘We cannot say what we can show to be untrue.’ Perhaps one should go further and say that we cannot say that which in our judgement is not likely to be the case, i.e. to become advocates for the improbable or even the less probable. 185 Wrede, Aufgabe, 82 (ET 69). 186 Cf. Keck, Future, 35: ‘the delineation of Jesus implicates the historian himself’ (or herself) – that is inevitable due to ‘the historicity of the historian’; also Dahl, ‘Problem’, 150=92. 187 R. J. Evans, Defence, 207; also Elton, Return, 44–5; MacMillan, Uses, 42–5. Cf. also Rüsen, Vernunft, 138, who also denies that historiography confines itself to the limits imposed by one’s social context; it ‘transcends the framework within which life is lived’, in part confirming it, in part criticizing it, leading to a qualitative enrichment through new historical experiences. 188 Käsemann, ‘Paul’, 238.

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audience.189 And this discomfort may explain the odd phenomenon of invoking ‘postmodernism’ as an ally of neo-orthodoxy to blunt those claims of critical historical work that threaten to undermine the traditional fabric of Christian belief.190

189 Fritz Stern quotes the telling remark of F. W. Maitland to the effect that ‘An orthodox history seems to me a contradiction in terms’ (Varieties, 10–11). 190 See the reference to Watson’s analysis in n. 92 above.

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5. Handling the Jesus Traditions Today, even if we find ourselves in a period of Jesus research which is dignified by the common name of the ‘third quest’,1 the results of that research diverge vastly from one another, ranging from conservative and apologetic attempts to buttress traditional Christian beliefs and christological assertions to provocatively iconoclastic recastings of the story of Jesus. Yet common to the movement known as the ‘third quest‘, as we have seen, at least seems to be an agreement that the ‘third questers’ are engaged in historical criticism of some sort or other, perhaps with the aid of other disciplines such as those of the social sciences. They diverge, however, quite widely in the extent to which they lay bare the methods upon which their work is based, but nevertheless usually offer some information and justification of their procedure, and nevertheless differ so drastically in their conclusions. Above all, Dominic Crossan gives the impression of having given especially careful thought to this matter, and yet sometimes his actual conclusions are very much at variance with his alleged principles. Not only are decisions like the preference given to extracanonical texts over against canonical texts often hard to justify, but at times he seems to violate his own principles: having declared that he will leave out of consideration material that is only attested once in the Jesus traditions, he nevertheless seems to regard as authentic some material which is only found in Luke or in the Gospel of Thomas2 This last point highlights the importance of the question of the sources and their relative value, as well as that of the right way to use them and evaluate them.

1 Yet Wright, the originator of the phrase, emphasizes that not all that now carry on research into Jesus’ life come into this category; in the list in his Jesus, 84, for instance, the name of Crossan is lacking, for Crossan is assigned by him, as we have seen (ch. 3), to the ‘“new quest” renewed’, whereas others such as Borg have for him a foot in both camps. 2 E.g. Luke 10.30–5; 15.11–32; 16.1–7, 19–26; 18.10–14a; Gos. Thom. §§ 42, 47a, 58, 77b, 97–8; cf. Crossan, Jesus, xiii–xxvi; however, the claim to authenticity of these sayings from Gos. Thom. are not endorsed by the Jesus Seminar as a whole. Cf. also Herzog, Jesus, 29.

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5.1. The Nature of the Sources One factor, which led to a lull in research into the life and teaching of Jesus, was a recognition of the likely nature of those sources. W. G. Kümmel describes in his work on the history of New Testament research how the period of the First World War marked a ‘decisive turning-point for New Testament research: it was a period of ‘a revolutionary change’, ‘especially in German-speaking postwar theology, which took its departure from New Testament exegesis and compelled all New Testament research to undertake a radical reconsideration of its task’.3 For at this time there appeared in 1919 Karl Ludwig Schmidt’s study on the framework of the story of Jesus, which, as Kümmel summarizes it, showed that behind our gospels ‘stand individual reports orally transmitted, which the evangelists have linked together at second-hand without any knowledge of the historical connection in accordance with principles based on their content, or even on pragmatic grounds’, with the exception of the passion narrative which was transmitted from the first as a ‘connected whole’, 4 and would ‘have been read in its entirety as a lectio continua in the worship’ of the early church.5 The passion narrative, which would have arisen as a response to the needs of the community and which was earlier on given a fixed form, is contrasted with the accounts of Jesus’ earlier work, based on ‘a tradition with various layers, called into being by various interests, fragmented into a mass of individual stories’.6 Stephen Hultgren, it is true, has tried to show the falsity of this proposal by arguing for the existence from very early on of a narrative framework for the story of Jesus and for his teaching, and as far as a broad outline and characterization of Jesus’ ministry from his baptism to his crucifixion is concerned this may well be correct. And yet that is not the same as saying that each individual pericope of the Jesus traditions was handed down with precise chronological or geographical coordinates that would locate it within this outline, and to that extent Schmidt’s proposal may still hold good in a modified form.7 What is perhaps true and should warn us against a too atomizing ap3

Kümmel, The New Testament, 325. Kümmel, The New Testament, 328, who goes on to quote Schmidt, Rahmen, esp. v–vii. (Schmidt does not go so far as to assert that the oldest tradition was totally bereft of all chronological or topographical information: e.g. Rahmen, vi.) Cf. Schweitzer, Geschichte, 50=Quest, 7 as well as 126=89–90, where he refers to Strauss’s view of the sayings material (cf. Strauss, Life, esp. 342). 5 Schmidt, Rahmen, 305: for ‘only as a whole could [the passion story] provide an answer to a question that time and again arose in the missionary age of the church: how could Jesus be delivered up to the cross by the people that had been privileged to see his signs and wonders?’ 6 Schmidt, Rahmen, 305. 7 Cf. Schmidt, Rahmen, v. Is it not, however, tendentious to speak of Mark ‘leaving out’ the Sermon on the Mount/Plain and the story of the centurion at Capernaum (Hultgren, 4

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proach to the earliest traditions is the observation that it is culturally plausible that Jesus’ teaching circulated in the form of short speeches, and that ‘Individual sayings are not the basic units but rather components of the basic units of oral communication.’8 Schmidt also argued that ‘the individual tradition has its “life situation” … in worship, so that the tradition about Jesus owes its preservation and formulation, not to historical concerns, but to interest[s] that are related to faith’.9 That rendered questionable any attempt to write ‘a “life of Jesus in the sense of a developing history of his life”, but directed attention instead to the religious motives to which the gospel tradition owes its formulation and transmission.’ 10 Also relevant for our purposes is Schmidt’s recognition that, although Mark might be the oldest of our gospels, it does not follow from that that it is the most valuable historically,11 as well as his assumption that Mark is what might be described as, to use Richard Bauckham’s expression, ‘oral literature’, based on individual stories or episodes handed down by word of mouth.12 Moreover, Schmidt is inclined to think that Mark sometimes inherited various stories already grouped together in the tradition, as in Mark 2.1–3.6, for this evangelist elsewhere shows little sign of grouping material together according to a certain category.13 He is for Schmidt but a compiler and collector of such stories.14 In the same year Martin Dibelius’s Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums was published, in which the various units of tradition were linked to ‘different functions’ in the life of the early church, in other words not just to its worship, as Schmidt had proposed,15 and then, two years later Rudolf Bultmann’s Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition.16 The latter work stressed even more strongly the creative influence of the Christian community on the formation and development of the Jesus traditions and consequently emphasized the influence of Elements, 314)? Mark’s knowledge of a ‘narrative structure upon which this … ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing is based’ need not entail that he knew of a sequence of material in which the Sermon and the story of the centurion were located. 8 Horsley, ‘Oral Performance’, 59. 9 Kümmel’s summary (The New Testament, 328); cf. Schmidt, Rahmen, vi, 77 (in the context of worship it was only the story itself, detached from any such framework, that was important). 10 Again as summarized in Kümmel, The New Testament, 328. 11 Schmidt, Rahmen, 17; cf. 77. What is, on the other hand, potentially valuable for the historian are various topographical references that the evangelist mentions by chance (209– 10), and the passion story is far closer to historical reality than the accounts of Jesus’ deeds and words, just as the accounts of martyrs’ deaths were nearer their reality than the legends of their lives (305). 12 Bauckham, Jesus, 242; cf., e.g., Schmidt, Rahmen, 19. 13 Schmidt, Rahmen, 104 (the early church needed such groups of material in its controversies with Judaism); cf. also, e.g., 150, 208. 14 Schmidt, Rahmen, 209. 15 ET From Tradition to Gospel (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1934). 16 ET The History of the Synoptic Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963, 2nd ed. 1968)

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faith on the gospel tradition. For the task that Bultmann had undertaken in this work was undergirded, as he himself said, by the insight that the literature in which the life of a community, and thus in this case of the Christian community, found its literary expression sprang from specific expressions of that life and from the needs of this community, which produced a particular style and particular forms and genres.17 And these forms and genres were, in his opinion, primarily sociological rather than aesthetic in nature. Nevertheless he granted that ‘it is difficult in individual cases to say which particular pieces of tradition played a part in concrete situations in the life of the community’ (395). He was also aware that he differed from Dibelius in realizing that such an investigation as his must necessarily lead to critical judgements as to ‘the authenticity of a saying, the historicity of an account and the like’ (6). Particularly significant is his recognition that the gospels’ lack of real biographical material and the gaps which they left in the story of Jesus’ life are to be explained by the fact that they had to tell their story on the basis of the tradition which lay to hand. The particular character of these gospels, which they owed to Mark, can only be understood on the basis of the Christian kerygma or proclamation which these writings served to supplement and illustrate. For, Bultmann maintained, echoing the thesis of Martin Kähler’s Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche biblische Christus, the Christ who is proclaimed is not the historical Jesus, but the Christ of faith and of the cult (396). The gospels are not interested in history or biography and consequently they tell us nothing of Jesus’ human personality, his appearance or his character, his origins, his education or his development (397). Thus it was realized that that the evangelists’ aim was not to write a life of Jesus as the nineteenth-century writers of lives of Jesus wanted to do. The evangelists used their narratives as a means to proclaim their faith in Jesus, that is the kerygma, the proclamation. In keeping with this ‘kerygmatic’ understanding of the nature of the gospels Bultmann maintained, in an article on the relevance of the historical Jesus for Paul, that it is ‘illegitimate to go behind the kerygma, using it as a ‘source’, in order to reconstruct a “historical Jesus” with his “messianic consciousness”, his “inner life” or his “heroism”’.18 The nature of our sources presents us therefore with considerable problems and it is by no means clear that contemporary research has mastered them. Luke Johnson, for instance, complains that the works of more recent North American scholarship, above all those of Dominic Crossan, have torn the individual items of Jesus tradition out of their context in the gospels and are therefore at liberty to fit them together in new and arbitrary ways.19 The difficulty here is thus a two17 Bultmann, Geschichte, 4. And yet his Erforschung, ch. 5 (25–43), goes to considerable lengths to show how many features of, e.g., miracle stories were shared by similar stories in the Graeco-Roman culture, 18 Bultmann, ‘Significance’, 241. 19 Johnson, Jesus, 47. Cf., too, the criticism of Denton, Historiography, 176: ‘Crossan’s is

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fold one: in the first place the individual pericopes lose their place in the broader context of the whole story of Jesus, and secondly they lose at the same time their immediate context and with that an important key to understanding them. Inasmuch as the units of tradition circulated as isolated sayings and pericopes, they lost the one context without finding another, an alternative context within a certain narrative framework. One might almost say that they are in danger of being reduced to what Ben Meyer calls ‘purely phatic acts’, expressions that observe ‘the rules of language, but otherwise anonymous, relatively indeterminate, open to many senses’.20 (It is true that they are not anonymous in that they are at least attributed to Jesus, but once one questions that attribution the difference is slight.) The form of the Gospel of Thomas shows that all too clearly: because it consists of individual sayings, without any narrative framework that could offer them a context, even if it were a secondary one without any claim to historical accuracy, one is often in the dark and unable to understand how this logion or that is to be understood. (What, for instance, is one to make of logion 71: ‘I shall [destroy this] house, and no one will be able to build it […]’?21 Does the ‘house’ here refer to the Jerusalem temple or to the the human body?) The first aspect of this problem, which was raised by Schmidt’s insights into the nature of the synoptic tradition, namely the removal of the units of tradition from their setting in Jesus’ life as they circulated as individual sayings and pericopes, is summed up by Joachim Gnilka as follows: the various pericopes were joined together in the gospels more on the basis of their subject-matter and their theology than in accordance with the interests of chronological accuracy. It is impossible to infer a sequence of events in the ministry of Jesus from the way in which they have been juxtaposed to one another.22

And we have just seen, in the example from the Gospel of Thomas, the second aspect of the problem: this work is a collection of isolated logia without any narrative context, and that makes our understanding of what is meant in any given case immeasurably harder. That holds good whether it is a matter of what Jesus may have meant if the saying is authentic or whether it is a question of what the writer of the Gospel of Thomas meant by it. On the other hand, Joanna Dewey argues that the earlier form critics were mistaken in supposing that units of oral tradition would circulate for long in isolation from one another. Studies of ‘folka prime example of a method that presumes to understand, and evaluate, data apart from any public context. The context of the sources in which the data are found is systematically, and as a matter of principle, disregarded.’ 20 Meyer, Reality, 132. Helmut Koester, however, sees things the other way round: sayings that had their original setting in the life of the later community take on a different form and function when transferred to the biographical framework of the life of Jesus (‘Gospels’, 296). 21 NHC II,2 34–5, tr. T. O. Lambdin. 22 Gnilka, Jesus, 23.

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lore, oral tradition, and oral history’ suggest rather a tendency to ‘coalesce into a continuous narrative or narrative framework’.23 Moreover, in all probability one of the sources of our gospels, the source ‘Q’, be it a written source or oral tradition(s) or both, was, at least in appearance, in large measure in a similar form to the Gospel of Thomas, or at least the extent of the narrative structure in it was considerably less than in the canonical gospels that we have. That would then place a question mark against the supposition that traditional material always tended to coalesce and would mean that at least the material which came from such a source was, at most, only very loosely embedded in any narrative context, so that the evangelists were at liberty to integrate it into their narratives in whatever way seemed to them fitting. However, there is a tendency in some circles to argue that ‘Q’ is not so much a collection of sayings as a series of discourses or speeches;24 in that case the various sayings would already be located in an interpretative context and have their place in larger units of communication. Nevertheless, one needs to note the differing contexts in which material is sometimes to be found in the different gospels and the differing meanings which are then given to the material from its various narrative settings or different interpretative contexts. If, nevertheless, the evangelists had found or heard this material already embedded in a narrative context or a speech, then it was either embedded in different narrative contexts or the evangelists felt free to assign it to a different narrative context. The Parable of the Great Meal (Matt 22.1–14//Luke 14.15–24), for instance, is found in two different settings and thus has two different meanings in Matthew and Luke. In Luke Jesus has just told his host that he should not invite his friends in the hope that they will return the invitation, but rather the poor, crippled, lame and blind, who are not in the position to repay his hospitality (14.13). Then Jesus introduces the parable, which thus becomes a depiction of the way in which God issues invitations and thus provides an example for us to imitate. In Matthew 22, on the other hand, this parable follows that of the Wicked Tenants in the Vineyard (Matt 21.33–43 [44]) and it therefore takes on a far more threatening tone: in the words, ‘Therefore, I tell you, God’s kingdom will be taken from you and given to 23

Dewey, ‘Survival’, 500–1, appealing to the work of Boman, Vansina and Ong. With regard to the tradition of Jesus’ sayings and to the narrative tradition, Georg Strecker argues that ‘already before the writing of the gospels, at the stage of the oral tradition, series of sayings were to be found’ and narrative traditions are attested that are both older and more recent than the ‘gospel’ genre (‘Schriftlichkeit’, 164). 24 Cf. Horsley, Oral Performance, 2–3 (referring to an emerging consensus as evidenced in Robinson et al., The Critical Edition of Q, lxii–lxvi), and in Horsley/Draper, Whoever Hears, 23–7, 83–93, 147–8 (appealing to Harnack’s study of ‘Q’). The existence of discourses in ‘Q’ would provide an alternative interpretative context to a narrative setting. Nevertheless, it is, of course, another matter whether the setting offered by such discourses in ‘Q’ corresponds to the setting of such sayings in Jesus’ own discourse and another matter again the setting given to the material in the narratives of the various gospels.

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a people that produces the fruits of this kingdom’, at the close of this parable (21.43), the Pharisees saw a warning directed against themselves. In the following parable those who heard it would then see the Pharisees as those who were represented by those who had rejected the invitation, now an invitation to the marriage feast of the king’s son; correspondingly those whom the servants fetched to fill the banqueting-hall would be that people to which the kingdom would be given. Perhaps, too, they would see in the following, attached, parable about the wedding-guest who found himself without a wedding-garment a commentary on the words about the people who produced the fruit of the kingdom.25 Thus one can ask what the original context of the parable was: was it that of Matthew’s version or was it that of Luke’s or was it neither or both? For there are those who explain such divergences by postulating that Jesus may have used the same story on different occasions and with a different purpose. There is a fairly long line of scholars, often, but by no means always, rather conservative ones, who remind us that Jesus could have used the same saying or the same parable more than once, and perhaps not always with the same wording or the same purpose.26 Dunn, too, in his treatment of the teaching of Jesus, forcefully declares that ‘any idea that Jesus gave particular teachings to his disciples on only one occasion and only as a sequence of unrepeated statements has to be seriously questioned’, without, however, expressly using this here as an argument for the validity of different versions of the same material.27 And naturally that is above all true of a parable, which is by its very nature open-ended and provokes its hearers to decide for themselves and act accordingly. That one strand of the tradition or traditions that we call ‘Q’ should have picked up the one context and meaning, the other the alternative ones, seems to me, however, none too plausible and would entail a bifurcation of the ‘Q’ tradition from the very beginning, a separate and fully independent existence of parts of the double tradition as found in Matthew and Luke. To explain the variations in this way would mean not only that Jesus had used this parable on at least two different occasions and with two different purposes, in two different ‘performances’,28 which in itself is by no means impossible, but also that one strand of tradition had

25 That this continuation of the Parable of the Great Feast is a secondary addition seems to me clear: it simply does not fit the story of the feast, for who could expect anyone so summarily invited in from the streets to be wearing a wedding-garment? By definition that was not something that one would wear if one had not been invited. Thus this addition ruins the story as a story. 26 Cf., e.g., Bauckham, Jesus, 286; Draper in Horsley/Draper, Whoever Hears, 183; Kelber, Gospel, 30; ‘Jesus’, 146; ‘Force’, 17; Wright, Jesus, 170. On the other hand, Meyer speaks of the ‘naive biblicist’ who readily believes ‘that literary doublets regularly reflect repeated historical actions’ (Realism, 131). 27 Dunn, ‘Social Memory’, 185. 28 For the concept of ‘performances’ of the tradition see further below and in ch. 7.

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picked up and perpetuated the one ‘performance’ and the other the other, and that both strands had existed separately from one another. It is, for instance, quite conceivable that Jesus on one occasion said ‘Blessed are you when they revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you for my sake’ (Matt 5.11) and on another ‘Blessed are you when men hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil because of the son of man’ (Luke 6.22), but if that is the explanation of the different wording then the one gospel has received the tradition by one route and the other by another, and there is no common ground, no common transmission or overlapping of the tradition between them. Both derive from different ‘performances’ of the saying by Jesus and have reached the respective evangelists independently of one another.

What would then distinguish these strands of tradition from all the others that circulated in earliest Christianity? Would the ‘Q’ tradition not lose its identity, and the very raison d’être of the ‘Q’ hypothesis would disappear? (This is a possibility that some today would view as thoroughly beneficial, but perhaps for rather different reasons.)29 And, moreover, when one notes how, for instance, Matthew’s version of the parable has probably been told in the light of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and therefore cannot, in this form, go back to Jesus, one sees that the number of possible contexts and the number of possible purposes with which Jesus might have told this story are not limitless. One can also ask, furthermore, how likely it is that Luke’s use of the parable almost as if it were an exemplary story like some of the other parables of Jesus found in his gospel, and only in his gospel, goes back to Jesus himself.30 Was the parable then a statement of God’s goodness, which one should then emulate, or was its original setting one of conflict? This is only one example of the problems with which we are confronted because of the nature of our sources. However, the insights of the form critics with regard to the Sitz im Leben of the Jesus traditions in the life of the early Christian community present a further problem. Bultmann alluded to this in distinguishing himself from Dibelius in calling attention to the critical (more precisely, sachkritische) judgements that one is compelled to make in such an investigation as his, judgements about ‘the authenticity of a saying, the historicity of an account and the like’.31 For in his eyes it was often the Christian community that 29

Cf. Goodacre, Case, elaborating and improving on the work of such as Austin Farrer and Michael Goulder. For a critique of this position cf., e.g., Kloppenborg, ‘Dispensing’. 30 That observation does raise the awkward question whether this use of these stories is the work of this evangelist. Would one then have either to say that these stories as such stem from his hand, or to argue that they earlier served a different purpose? But what other purpose than the exemplary would, e.g., the story of the Samaritan (Luke 10.30–7) then have served? For an attempt, to my mind a none too successful one, to suggest an alternative cf. Funk, Honest, 170–80, who switches the focus away from the Samaritan to the victim: ‘only victims need apply for help.’ 31 Bultmann, Geschichte, 6.

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had been responsible for the creative formation of Jesus material. ‘The production of Jesus’ ‘I’-sayings’, he maintained, ‘is mostly the work of the gentile-Christian community, even if the Palestinian community had already made a start with it’ (176). But here the ways of scholarship part. For some the Christian community has for the most part handed down the sayings of Jesus, word for word, perhaps on the analogy of the traditions of the rabbis, whose words were faithfully handed down by their followers, partly due to the form of their sayings which made them suitable for learning by heart thanks to their built-in aids to memory, partly thanks to the capacity of the human memory to learn sayings by heart in a predominantly oral culture.32 In that case we would, one might have thought, have to reckon with a generally trustworthy and almost slavishly accurate transmission of Jesus’ sayings, and contrary examples are exceptions to the rule. This would then count as an example of that orality that Jan Assmann reckons as exceptional in its form: the oral tradition is transmitted unchanged and word for word, even over centuries; memory is here used as a sort of text or writing.33 Werner Kelber comments that ‘the first and virtually only time in modern biblical scholarship when memory was introduced as an analytical model for conceptualizing what is conventionally called the synoptic tradition, it was in its retentive, passive and strictly preservative function’, what he calls ‘cold memory’. 34 However, Gerhardsson wants to distinguish here between halachic and haggadic traditions, emphasizing a feature and nuance that he admits was not prominent enough in his earlier work, but one that he now, in the light of what he considers misguided and cavalier dismissals of his approach by the likes of Dunn, wishes to highlight. The former sort of traditions may be transmitted by verbatim memorizing, but that of haggada was looser and less literal. ‘And the gospel tradition’, he argues, ‘is mainly haggadic.’35 That observation may surprise those who place great weight on the early circulation of sayings of Jesus as isolated sayings, for these seem at first sight to correspond more closely to halachic material. For, as Gerhardsson grants (15), the ‘message of Jesus dealt a good deal with the right way to live’.

32

Above all the work of the Scandinavian New Testament scholars Birger Gerhardsson and Harald Riesenfeld, spring to mind here, but also in more recent times, with modifications, Rainer Riesner (Jesus, esp. 490–54, 70–9 [with lit. and history of scholarship], 440– 53, 502; ‘Jesus’, esp. 203–8), followed by Barnett, Jesus, 138–42 (but cf. the important qualification of this on pp. 145–6). 33 Assmann, Gedächtnis, 283. 34 Kelber, ‘Force’, 16. He agrees with Assmann that memorization was the exception in antiquity, ‘confined largely to the pedagogics of school education and to certain rabbinic study techniques’ (17). 35 Gerhardsson, ‘Secret’, 6.

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It would seem, to judge from Dunn’s later article on ‘social memory’ that there has been some measure of reconciliation between Dunn and Gerhardsson, in that Dunn goes out of his way to stress that Jesus deliberately sought to implant important elements of his teaching ‘in the memory of individuals motivated to listen, to absorb and to live accordingly’.36 Yet he still goes on to argue that ‘memorization’ will not do justice to the ‘flexibility’ of the Jesus tradition. Furthermore, commenting on the striking reticence of Paul and other early Christians in citing teachings of Jesus as such, he suggests that Jesus’ legacy was not memorized as teachings of Jesus but ‘was absorbed into the consciousness and life-manual of the first churches to become a resource on which they could draw almost instinctively and without having to engage in an act of “remembering” what Jesus taught’.37 That may be plausible, but at the same time it would surely contrast with rabbinic tradition which sought, rightly or wrongly, to attribute particular items of teaching to particular, named rabbis. (One cannot speculate whether Jesus envisaged or intended such a transcending of his attempts to inculcate his teaching, but even if he had not it would not greatly matter.)

This view of the Jesus traditions defended by Gerhardsson has, however, been sharply criticized by many:38 the nature of the Jesus traditions which we find in the gospels does not manifest this slavish faithfulness, but rather shows clear signs of the formative and creative influence of the later Christian community.39 And that later community shows, in the judgement of Kelber, arguing from the evidence of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, little evidence of ‘the school setting and its pedagogical principle of teaching by repetition, learning by heart, and scribal exercises’.40 It shows, in other words, more likeness to that phenomenon that Assmann describes as ‘hypolepsis’, ‘a continuity in which the earlier is expanded and supplemented by the later’.41 In the view of Jürgen Becker, once one has recognized the living process of adaptation which the Jesus tradition of the Gospels attests, one must ‘incline to the view that the synoptic tradition can in no 36

Dunn, ‘Social Memory’, 186. Dunn, ‘Social Memory’, 188. 38 Keck, ‘Literature’, 166, comments, somewhat brusquely, on the position defended by Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson: ‘Virtually no one has accepted this argument.’ Cf. the more nuanced verdict on Gerhardsson’s work and that of Riesner in Kelber, ‘Case’, 59–62, 66 (‘one may ask whether the scribally accessible sayings materials should not look different if indeed they were rooted in mnemotechnical procedures that were committed to the principle of verbatim reproduction and retention’); ‘Works’, 231–5. Also Mournet, Oral Tradition, 63–6, 161–3; Patterson, ‘Can You Trust a Gospel?’, 208–9. 39 So Meyer, Aims, 73, points to the ‘creativity’ evidenced by the earliest ‘bearers and shapers of the tradition’ and the consciousness expressed therein ‘that they lived under the ascendancy of the Spirit and taught with the authority of the Spirit. The inadequacy of the parallel with rabbinic tradition lies chiefly here.’ See, however, Meyer’s ‘Consequences’, where, rather surprisingly, he writes as if Gerhardsson’s thesis were unquestionably correct and welcome, with little sign of any doubts about its validity. For Kirk/Thatcher, ‘Jesus Tradition’, 35, Gerhardsson underestimates the formative effects of ‘social settings of reception’. 40 Kelber, ‘Force’, 17. 41 Assmann, Gedächtnis, 281, in part quoting Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 11–12. 37

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way be interpreted as an essentially word for word reproduction of Jesus material; rather one is confronted with a truly vital process of transformation’.42 That is even the case with the two forms of the Lord’s Prayer in Matt 6.7–15 and Luke 11.1–4, even though they could most easily be learnt by heart, and even though, as material used in a liturgical context, one would have expected that they above all would have belonged to that traditional material that one preserved particularly carefully in its original form; in fact they show that those who transmitted it interpreted and shaped it differently and Kelber even argues, apropos of this prayer and Jesus’ teaching on marriage, divorce and remarriage, that ‘It was precisely the great importance attributed to these traditions that accounts for their variability’.43 With some justification, therefore, Werner Georg Kümmel criticized this approach to the Jesus material on the analogy of rabbinic traditions as based on ‘two completely false assumptions’.44 On the one hand, he maintains that the techniques of the rabbis to which these scholars appeal did not exist before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E. (although how one can be so sure of that is not clear to me) and, on the other, a more important point is that ‘earliest Christianity was a movement led by the Spirit, in which the twelve apostles in Jerusalem had the function of providing an obligatory and normative form of teaching, and in which there was no mention of the tradition of a school and its techniques’.45 Nevertheless, it may be appropriate to speak of the formation of schools such as a Pauline school at this early stage, even if Paul and his followers never spoke of it as such; it may be the easiest way to account for the existence of, and the self-understanding reflected in, the deutero-Pauline literature. Such a school, however, was far from demonstrating the slavish reproduction of transmitted material, at least not in all its manifestations, as the differences between those of the Pauline letters whose authenticity is generally acknowledged and the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians and the Pastoral Epistles show. At this point James Dunn seeks to adopt a mediating position between those who claim a conservative role for the oral transmission of Jesus material and those who stress the formative and creative role of the early Christian community. For Dunn recognizes the vital role that oral transmission played in the tradition of Jesus material, but sees in this orality a mixture of continuity and stability on the one hand, and freedom, flexibility and diversity on the other. For, in the collective memory of the various early Christian communities a certain control was exercised, in that these communities wanted to hold fast to what had been handed down to them and to preserve it. On the other hand, it belongs to 42

Becker, Jesus, 15 Kelber, ‘Force’, 20. 44 Kümmel, Vierzig Jahre, 11. 45 Kümmel, Vierzig Jahre, 12; a somewhat similar critique appears in Perrin, Rediscovering, 31, appealing to W. D. Davies. 43

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the nature of oral tradition that what has been handed down is continually brought up to date and ‘performed’, and in these repeated new performances the flexibility of the tradition manifests itself. Now, it is true that there are performances and performances: in a traditional performance on a stage one expects that each evening the actors and actresses will use the same text, as long as no one forgets their lines. As soon, however, as an element of improvisation enters into the performances it is likely that no one performance will be exactly like another. And even if the text used is exactly the same a performance of any sort, if the performers are worth their salt, will impart something new, a new perspective on the work performed. Here, too, Gadamer’s observation about ‘performances’ in general holds good: All performance is primarily interpretation and seeks, as such, to be correct. In this sense it, too, is ‘understanding’.46

Presumably, at any rate, Dunn is here thinking of something lying between the two theatrical possibilities that I have just mentioned, between a professional company putting on a traditional production of a piece on the one hand, at least one that sticks scrupulously to the traditional text, and free and perhaps even spontaneous improvisations on the other. Consequently he explicitly rejects a fixed and wooden view of the process of transmission such as Gerhardsson and Riesenfeld assume. For him the Lord’s Prayer is a prime example of that freedom and flexibility that one would expect in an oral tradition – a prayer that the evangelists would certainly not only have known as a text fixed in a written form, but also as something living, which was part of the worship of several early Christian communities, like the tradition of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. Yet, as I have indicated, Dunn here occupies a mediating position, for there are other scholars for whom continuity and stability seem to count little. That is true, above all, for those who stress the dominant influence of early Christian prophetesses and prophets on the formation of the Jesus traditions. For, more or less diametrically opposed to the views of those who postulate as the rule a more or less faithful, word for word reproduction of the sayings of Jesus, other scholars maintain that the rule was far more that Christian prophets and prophetesses, speaking in the name of the risen Jesus and not the earthly, played a dominant role in the formation of Jesus traditions, so much so that genuine recollections of the sayings of the earthly Jesus become the exception and the onus of proof is placed upon those who think that they have discovered such sayings. For, it is maintained, the early Christian community either could not distinguish such prophetic utterances from sayings of the earthly Jesus or had no particular interest in doing so. This view is clearly discernible in Norman Perrin’s Redis46 Gadamer, Truth, xxxi. But what constitutes ‘correctness’ (Ger. p. xvii of the 2nd ed., 1965: ‘richtig’) here?

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covering the Teaching of Jesus. For he maintained that the earliest Christian community made no attempt to distinguish between sayings spoken by the earthly Jesus and those which the risen Lord had addressed to the community through a prophetic utterance, and that they made no distinction between Jesus’ original message and the new understanding and formulation of this message which had gained currency in the teaching or paraenesis of the community under the leading of its heavenly Lord. The newly formed Christian community identified completely the risen Lord whom it now experienced in the present with the earthly Jesus of Nazareth (15, 26) and created the literary form of the gospel in order to serve its own purposes, which it was convinced were also those of its Lord. In this literary form words and deeds that the early Christians believed should be attributed both to the earthly Jesus and to the risen Lord were nevertheless written down as words of the earthly Jesus (15).47 This basic assumption of Perrin’s is, however, one that has been sharply criticized.48 For it is by no means certain that the earliest Christians did not distinguish between sayings of the earthly Jesus and sayings of the risen Lord. Paul, for instance, seems to make precisely this distinction in 1 Corinthians 7 when he contrasts the Lord’s prohibition of divorce (7.10) and his own instructions regarding the question of marriages between believers and non-believers (7.12); in other words, this would have been a question with which, in all probability, the earthly Jesus had never had to deal, particularly if he never set foot in those cities where there was a mixed Jewish and non-Jewish population, where at least the analogous problem of mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews might have presented itself.49 Paul made this distinction between the Lord’s instructions and his own even when he remarks at the close of the chapter (7.40) that he had the Spirit of God.50 Furthermore, it can be argued that much in the Synoptic Gospels reflects little of those issues that, to judge from Paul’s letters, exercised at least some early Christian communities: questions of glossolalia or circumcision are not discussed or illuminated by a word of Jesus.51 This is an argument that Craig Evans 47 It is perhaps ironic that Gerhardsson, in his argument with Dunn, should stress that Jesus was not ‘a link in a chain of tradition, presenting wisdom from others’, but spoke in his own name and on his own authority (‘Secret’, 7). But at issue is Jesus’ followers’ handling of his teaching. Did they imitate him and show a similar freedom? Yet that would go far beyond the freedom of the Christian prophets and prophetesses, for they at least claimed to be speaking in Jesus’ name and not on their own authority. 48 Cf., e.g., Meyer, Aims, 74; Riesner, Jesus, 8–11 (and further lit. cited there). 49 Cf., e.g., Bauckham, Jesus, 268. 50 So the reading in NA; the variant reading ‘spirit of Christ’ in a couple of witnesses (š15, 33) may be due to the influence of 1 Cor 2.16. On the other hand, Paul does not use the word ‘spirit’ there, despite the MT rûah. , but follows the LXX reading (QRX Q). He more frequently refers to the spirit of God (Rom 8.9; Phil 1.19), but would his more customary usage be a sufficient reason to account for ‘spirit of God’ in the vast majority of witnesses? 51 Cf. Riesner, Jesus, 37, quoting Hengel, Acts, 25.

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stresses as a counter to the influence of early Christian prophets postulated by Eugene Boring: they offered no word of Jesus on ‘various difficult divisive issues, such as office and leadership in the church, the role of women in ministry, the purpose and use of spiritual gifts, Jew–Gentile relations, whether Gentile converts needed to become Jewish proselytes, and the like’.52 And on the other hand the ‘Präventivzensur’ of which Theissen speaks, 53 that is the elimination of material that had no further relevance for the early Christian communities that transmitted it, by no means always seems to have applied.54 Certainly some issues raised in the Jesus traditions sometimes continued to have some relevance, as can be seen in the case of divorce.55 However, more damaging for the validity of this principle is the presence of material in the Jesus traditions that clearly bears the marks of the time of Jesus’ ministry rather than that of a later period. In reminding us that all the evangelists, even the Fourth Evangelist, show their awareness of the difference between these times,56 Hengel and Schwemer criticize the application of this principle of the form-critics to the gospel materials. 57 Among the examples of this awareness of the difference that they cite are the following: Mark names James, the son of Zebedee, before his brother John although he possessed no more significance for the early church after his execution in 43 C.E. In contrast, James, the brother of Jesus, who was so influential in the Jerusalem church plays no part in the gospels’ accounts (253–4, 263, 291). Only in Matthew, for these authors the latest of the Synoptics, has the devoutly law-observant strand of Jewish Christianity left its mark on the material. Yet neither, for 52 C. A. Evans, ‘Implications’, 213, over against M. E. Boring, Sayings of the Risen Jesus: Christian Prophecy in the Synoptic Tradition (SNTSMS 46; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and The Continuing Voice of Jesus (Louisville KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991). 53 Cf. Theissen, ‘Wanderradikalismus’, 81 n. 8 (drawing on P. G. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson, ‘Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens’, in Donum natalicium Schrijnen [ed. J. Schrijnen, W. J. Stephan; Nijmwegen/Utrecht, 1929] 900–13, here 903); Jesusbewegung, 22, 80–1 (it is for him a presupposition of his study that in oral ethical traditions nothing can for long be preserved that in no way corresponds to practice; only once it is written down can the traditions achieve a relative independence from the communities’ practice). See also Fried, Schleier, 270; Horsley/Draper, Whoever Hears, 8; Kelber, Gospel, 29 (a ‘fundamental fact’ or ‘rule’ of ‘preventive censorship’); Ong, Orality, 46–9 (on ‘homeostasis’). 54 On Theissen’s use of this principle see also Byrskog, ‘Century’, 14–16; Schmeller, Brechungen, 63–6 (Theissen counters in Jesusbewegung, 81 n. 128, but the criticism of the principle of Präventivzensur may still hold good even if Schmeller is wrong in criticizing Theissen for assigning to the settled communities only a marginal role). Cf. Vansina, Tradition, 121–2: ‘The presence of archaisms in various traditions gives homeostasis the lie. … Social change often leads to additions not to suppression, leaving older variants intact. Items that tend to be suppressed leave traces. … A body of tradition … reflects both the past and the present.’ 55 Cf. 1 Cor 7.10–16. 56 Cf., e.g., Matt 10.5–6 with 28.19 (Wedderburn, History, 5–6 and 199 n. 11). 57 Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 244.

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that matter, have typically gentile Christian teachings and rites nor, apart from the commissioning of the disciples after Easter or the Synoptic apocalypses, the active gentile mission made any more impact. A high christology with pre-existence and a role for Jesus in the creation, the Christian rite of baptism, a developed ecclesiology and later ecclesiastical offices are not mentioned. Or there is the matter of christological titles: while the Synoptics set the phrase ‘son of man’ on Jesus’ lips, and ‘Christ’ and ‘son of God’ are applied there to him by others, it is titles like the latter two that were current in the early Christian community, whereas ‘son of man’ was not used by his followers either in preaching or in credal formulations (esp. 529, 542). The traditions of these gospels are those of rural Galilean communities rather than those of the cities where Christianity later established itself (263–4). Mark’s picture of Jesus hardly served the ‘missionary needs’ of the later Christian communities (295).58 Dunn is also one of those who have questioned the legitimacy of Perrin’s assumption, arguing that the collective responsibility of the Christian community placed certain limits on the creative freedom of the prophets and prophetesses, in that it would scrutinize the utterances of those so inspired in relation to its own received and acknowledged tradition. But does that not then raise the question what the community would do once it was satisfied that a given utterance was in continuity with that tradition? Would it then allow it to circulate freely as if it were a saying that it had received from the earthly Jesus? And, moreover, if the judgement of the community were here at fault and it let through sayings which were in fact at variance with the Jesus tradition, would this not in practice come to the same as Perrin’s position? For the yardstick applied by the community would presumably be its understanding of the Jesus tradition, and who is to say that this was unerring? A final consideration is the existence of problematic material that seems also to have created considerable difficulties for the evangelists and their predecessors in the transmission of the traditions. For scholars like Gnilka and John P. Meier and A. E. Harvey one criterion by means of which one may sift out authentic Jesus material from inauthentic is the difficulty or offensiveness of a piece of tradition,59 but the existence of such material at all at the same time also places limits on the extent to which the interests and perspectives of the later Christian 58

Further indications are the lists of the Twelve and indeed the institution of the circle of the Twelve, whose significance probably faded away in the time after Agrippa I’s persecution of the Christian leadership (Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 369; cf. Wedderburn, History, 21–4) as well as the instructions given by Jesus to his disciples as he sent them out, whose character points to ‘a single demonstrative act of commissioning by Jesus in Galilee’ (Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 373). 59 E.g. Gnilka, Jesus, 30–1. Niemand, Jesus, 27, expands on this: besides ‘offensiveness’ there are elements that could hardly have been invented, that run counter to the Tendenz of the tradition, that have not been made to conform to the views of those that have handed them down.

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community was allowed free rein in the creation and shaping of the traditions about Jesus. A body of material has survived that can hardly be traced back to the creativity of this community. An example of this is the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16.1–13), which to this day remains problematic, particularly since the steward’s master praises his unfaithful steward (16.8), and the following verses in all probability show that the early Christianity community found the original parable just as puzzling. At any rate Joachim Jeremias and others have treated vv. 8–13 or 9–13 as a series of attempts to find a suitable interpretation for the parable.60 Perhaps already the saying in v. 8b, that the children of this world are cleverer in their dealings with their kind than the children of light, is an example of this process of interpretation, but it is even easier to see secondary additions in the following instruction to make friends for oneself with the help of unrighteous mammon, or in the statement that those who have been faithful or unjust with regard to small matters will also be faithful or unjust when weightier ones are involved, or in the basic impossibility of serving two masters; as Hans Weder remarks, ‘the variety of the applications in vv. 9–13 shows the difficulties that the original parable caused the Christian community.’61 The preservation of such passages despite their obvious difficulties can be regarded as a strong argument, not just for the authenticity of the parable itself, but also for a more widely attested, though by no means universal, tendency in the transmission of the Jesus traditions in general to preserve and conserve what had been transmitted, despite its difficulties. This observation only shows, however, that the early Christian community was loath to discard material that it already possessed, however awkward it was to handle, but not that it was reluctant to add or create new material. (That corresponds to a general tendency in the transmission of the text of the New Testament as well: scribes were readier to expand the text that they had received than to shorten it; they found it easier to add to the text than to excise something from it.)62 At any rate, Perrin’s understanding of the nature of the gospels and of the Synoptic tradition led him to the conclusion that it was more fitting that those who upheld the authenticity of a particular saying of Jesus should bear the burden of proof for its authenticity.63 Opposed to him are naturally those more conservative scholars who treat the inauthenticity of of a saying of Jesus that has been handed down to us (at least in the canonical gospels) rather as the exception and therefore demand that the burden of proof must rest on those who ar60

Jeremias, Parables, 45–8. Weder, Gleichnisse, 263. 62 Hence the text-critical rule of thumb that the shorter reading in a given case is generally to be preferred. 63 Cf. Käsemann, ‘Problem’, 34: ‘the obligation now laid upon us is to investigate and make credible not the possible unauthenticity of the individual unit of material but, on the contrary, its genuineness.’ 61

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gue for the inauthenticity of a piece of tradition. Becker points to an example of this more conservative approach in Peter Stuhlmacher’s Biblische Theologie,64 although, to be fair, Stuhlmacher aligns himself not only with the views of those Scandinavian scholars and Rainer Riesner noted above, but also with the seemingly more open approach of Werner Georg Kümmel. For Kümmel, even though he is not to be reckoned amongst the most conservative, warns us against too great a scepticism: If … it is true that the entire tradition that is deployed in the gospels is the product of the beliefs and the proclamation of the Christian community, then only a critical examination of the individual pieces of tradition can decide whether and to what extent this tradition goes back to the time before Easter and gives a reliable impression of the historical reality of Jesus and his teaching. If that is true, then it is, on the other hand, wrong to approach this task with the demand that is often made today, namely that the ‘authenticity’ of every individual saying of Jesus and the historicity of each individual account must be demonstrated. For there is no basis for the opinion that the historical trustworthiness of a piece of tradition can of course only be something exceptional.65

Gnilka’s view is similar, but he is inclined to adopt a more clearly mediating position: since we know that the Jesus tradition was developed further and expounded and since this development needed to be seen to be plausible, both that which stems from Jesus and the later new interpretation of it must be rendered intelligible.66

5.2. A Question of Criteria Nevertheless, because the question of the reliability of the tradition has been raised and a whiff of doubt therefore hangs in the air, methodological rigour perhaps calls us to reckon with the at least theoretical possibility that each and every 64 Stuhlmacher, Theologie, 1,44–6. A more recent example would be Klaus Berger’s Jesus, 51; Berger claims that his approach is ‘postmodern’ (e.g. 14) but, if so, then his work is very much an example of a use of ‘postmodernism’ invoked in support of an anti-critical conservatism (cf. ch. 4 n. 92 above). 65 Kümmel, Theologie, 23–4. In the work of Richard Bauckham we find an attempt to replace ‘fundamental skepticism’ with ‘fundamental trust’ (e.g. Jesus, 486; he quotes more than once Ricoeur’s dictum, ‘First, trust the word of others, then doubt if there are good reasons for doing so’ [Memory, 165], but is either a ‘fundamental skepticism’ or a ‘fundamental trust’ the ideal starting-point for the historian as opposed to an open mind or at least one as open as humanly possible?) 66 Gnilka, Jesus, 33–4. Arnal, Jesus, 41–2, comments that, while a sceptical posture with regard to the authenticity of Jesus material was characteristic of the ‘new quest’, representatives of the ‘third quest’ tended to espouse a far more positive attitude towards its reliability. And, moreover, ‘the key criteria for isolating and interpreting “authentic” material are diametrically opposed, one seeking precisely a lack of fit between traditions and their context, the other seeking precisely a good fit between tradition and context’ (his italics).

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individual piece of tradition might be a later creation of the Christian community after Easter. Even if one says that the tradition is by and large trustworthy, once one grants that there may be exceptions one is forced to say which pieces of tradition are those exceptions and in turn to look critically at each. Though the critical and the conservative approaches may seem to differ widely from one another, and do indeed approach the material with markedly different expectations, the task of rigorous scrutiny of the individual items is incumbent upon both. Equally both must seek to convince the other on the basis of the probabilities of the individual units of the tradition and not on the basis of general hypotheses about the nature of the process of tradition. For those hypotheses are only convincing in so far as they explain the nature of the concrete individual pieces of tradition and that can only be done on the basis of a similar rigorous scrutiny of those pieces of tradition. That means that, in order to be rigorous rather than making generous assumptions about the traditions, we need to adopt those methods and controls that more sceptical researchers have adopted as a means of establishing the authenticity of individual pieces of tradition with a fairly high degree of probability, and as a means of establishing which of those individual pieces have the best claims to being trustworthy. That holds good however much we are disposed to regard those sceptics as overly pessimistic, and that is the only possible basis of entering into discussion with them regarding the nature and value of the Jesus tradition. And yet the means that these more sceptical scholars have adopted are fraught with a considerable number of problems. Norman Perrin, it is well known, advocated above all three criteria as valid and useful, those of dissimilarity, coherence and multiple attestation.67 Rightly he questioned the usefulness of criteria such as the presence of features showing Aramaic influence, despite the importance attached to this criterion by his own teacher, Joachim Jeremias, for these features could just as easily stem from Aramaic-speaking circles in earliest Christianity as from Jesus himself.68 Or at least in the case of individual sayings the evidence 67

See further below. Cf. also Dahl, ‘Jesus’, 116; Marguerat, Mann, 21; Sanders, Tendencies, 196, 203–7. Porter, Criteria, 89–99, 189–90, calls attention to the difficulty of establishing an Aramaic original on the basis of the Greek texts that we have, but the problem mentioned here, the possibility that an Aramaic original might still be post-Easter (and potentially quite long after Easter according to Walker, ‘Quest’, 43–4), which Porter also briefly mentions, is surely far more damaging to the usefulness of this criterion for recovering the ipssima verba Jesu. But if it is possible that an Aramaic original stems from the time after Easter, this is even more plausible in the case of a saying that originated in Greek. Nonetheless, Porter goes to considerable lengths to make out a case for Jesus having spoken in Greek in some contexts, but it is hard to see how, even if that were proven, such an attempt could lead to a criterion or criteria offering us any better prospects of success than the recovery of an Aramaic original. Before Pilate it is plausible to argue that Jesus spoke in Greek, as Porter argues, but his followers may well have formulated his reply as they thought appropriate; in contrast to the hearing before the high priest it is not claimed that any of his followers were present at the 68

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of such features is inconclusive. Whether one can so easily dismiss all examples of a particular phenomenon is less certain. There is, for instance, the striking use of ‘amen’ to introduce a saying. Only when one is prepared to grant that for some reason this usage was viewed as a characteristic of Jesus’ teaching can one more easily explain why sayings should have later been attributed to him which contained this feature. On the other hand, when one has granted this this usage was regarded as characteristic of Jesus’ way of speaking, then one can argue that sayings containing this usage are nevertheless later imitations of his style. The usage may recall the ipsissima vox Jesu, Jesus’ characteristic way of speaking, but one cannot claim that therefore any surviving saying containing this usage is the ipsissima verba Jesu and reproduces his actual words, although one may grant that it would perhaps be surprising if no authentic examples of Jesus’ own use of this way of introducing a saying had survived.69 Nevertheless, Aramaisms may still be important, in that they indicate that the material containing them probably goes back to a relatively early stage of the tradition or is at least one factor which is to be borne in mind in judging the age of this piece of tradition. For in judging the authenticity of a piece of tradition one must of course first attempt to recover the earliest form of this piece of tradition and then ask how likely it is that this form is to be traced back to Jesus himself. And in the light of the criticism of the search for an ‘original form’ that we have noted above and will see again in ch. 7, it should be stressed that this is not the same, either in textual or in tradition criticism, as the search for an earlier form or the earliest recoverable form.70 Roman trial. (It should also be noted that Porter’s further ‘criterion of discourse features’ may have difficulty in showing more than that an evangelist is not using his own style at a particular point; the words of Jesus in question may be preserved ‘in an earlier form, ostensibly a form that could be authentic’ [217], but ‘could be’ does not entail that they are, and in fact Porter’s conclusion from his sample examination of Mark 13 is merely that the evangelist did not compose Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse here; to suppose that it goes back to Jesus himself would go far beyond the available evidence.) 69 Similar arguments may hold good in the case of other unusual linguistic features of Jesus’ sayings. Many of the individual ‘son of man’ sayings may, for instance, be regarded as secondary creations, but, as we shall see (ch. 8), it is puzzling how one could argue that Jesus never spoke of the ‘son of man’ and thus have to explain why his followers regarded this phrase as so characteristic of his teaching. 70 In some ways the use of analogies from Yugoslavian songs may have led New Testament critics astray here: when Lord, Singer, 101, asserts that ‘In a sense each performance [of a song] is “an” original if not “the” original. … In oral tradition the idea of an original is illogical’, this may make sense in the context of a tradition reaching back into the mists of antiquity and where one is investigating, and only has access to, a number of more recent performances of this song. It is potentially another matter when we are dealing with a written text that itself goes back to a time that may be, relatively, not that much later in its composition than the utterance or the event described, even if, at least in the case of the utterance, it may be hard to be certain that what the text and the tradition have preserved is the form of the utterance as it was first delivered, rather than on some slightly later occasion.

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The former may be questionable in view of the possibility of variation in the text and of the multiplicity of ‘performances’ of the tradition, but the latter is certainly still possible if one can plausibly argue, in some cases at least, but by no means in all, that one form is likely to be a subsequent variation on another, improving it or correcting it in the eyes of the one who copies the text or transmits the tradition.71 As already mentioned, in making such judgements about the authenticity of a particular piece of Jesus tradition, Perrin advocated that use be made, instead, of three criteria, the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’, the ‘criterion of cohence’ and the ‘criterion of multiple attestation’.72 The first of these, which states that ‘the earliest form of a saying we can reach may be regarded as authentic if it can be shown to be dissimilar to characteristic emphases both of ancient Judaism and of the early Church, and [that] this will particularly be the case where Christian tradition oriented towards Judaism can be shown to have modified the saying away from its original emphasis’,73 is, of course, not Perrin’s invention but has rather a long tradition, even if one must take with a pinch of salt the listing by Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter of a quotation from Martin Luther in their collection of quotations giving expression to, or commenting on, this criterion;74 for the criterion can first operate as a criterion once the possibility has been admitted that not everything that the gospels attribute to Jesus in fact stems from him. In more recent times its use, even without the use of such a name, has been prominent, as Perrin documents, in the work of such scholars as Bultmann,75

71

I would not, however, want to abandon too quickly the talk of an ‘original form’ of the text in cases where the author wrote down or had written down a version of the text, even if later hands introduced variations into it. It only becomes more questionable when the author himself revised the text over a period of time; would his initial draft then be the ‘original form’ or rather his revised text? 72 Perrin, Rediscovering, 39–49. 73 This last part of the statement reflects his view that certain circles in earliest Christianity (above all he was thinking of certain parts of the Gospel of Matthew) tended to tone down elements in the teaching of Jesus that would be offensive to Jews, and also ‘to develop new traditions specifically related to emphases in Judaism’ (Perrin, Rediscovering, 39–40). 74 Theissen/Winter, Kriterienfrage, 270. More relevant is perhaps the observation that H. S. Reimarus, who ushered in the critical study of the life of Jesus, on the one hand stressed the gulf between Jesus’ teaching and that of the apostles while, on the other, and in contrast to the criterion of double dissimilaity advocated by Perrin, locating Jesus squarely within contemporary Judaism (cf. Fragments, 64, 66; see also on Holmén below). Rightly Theissen and Merz see this as blazing the trail for insights that still hold good today (Jesus, 23). 75 E.g. Bultmann, Geschichte, 222 (with reference to the parables of Jesus): ‘Where the contrast to Jewish ethics and piety und the specific eschatological mood that are characteristic of Jesus’ preaching, and where, on the other hand, no specifically Christian traits are discernible, there one can most readily decide that one has a genuine parable of Jesus.’

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Käsemann76 and Conzelmann,77 and Perrin also sees it at work implicitly in Joachim Jeremias’ handling of Jesus’ use of ‘amen’ and ‘abba’. Perrin himself was aware of the limitations of this criterion, for ‘by definition it will exclude all teaching in which Jesus may have been at one with Judaism or the early Church at one with him’ (43). In the light of that Leander Keck warns against ‘the tyranny of the negative criteria’.78 Nevertheless, Perrin feels that the ‘radical view of the nature of the sources’ forces us to adopt this starting-point, even though, as befits a former pupil of Joachim Jeremias, he knows only too well that Jesus delivered his message within the context of early Judaism and that his message must therefore have been in many respects an adaptation of themes familiar in the religious life of Judaism at that time. It will show what is ‘most characteristic of Jesus’ (39), and by this he presumably means what is most distinctive about his teaching and life, that which sets him apart from his contemporaries (and also his immediate followers).79 This search for a ‘characteristic’ Jesus is taken up by Dunn, who appeals for support here to Leander Keck, 80 but not to Perrin, and indeed the latter’s search for a ‘distinctive’ Jesus, using the criterion of double dissimilarity, involved distancing Jesus from Judaism, and Dunn will have none of that. But what is ‘characteristic’ may not be enough, for John Riches rightly notes that what one comes up with must be ‘sufficiently distinct either in form or in content from other contemporary religious thought to account for the importance attributed to him in the religious developments of the time, but not so as to separate him entirely from such developments’.81 By this means, at any rate, Perrin presumably sought to identify a certain assured minimum, which can serve as a basis for further study of Jesus’ life and teaching, but that at a high cost.82 That which is dissimilar to Judaism in the Jesus traditions is no more than 76 E.g. Käsemann, ‘Problem’, 37 (German 205): ‘In only one case do we have more or less safe ground under our feet: when there are no grounds either for deriving a tradition from Judaism or for ascribing it to primitive Christianity, and especially when Jewish Christianity has mitigated or modified the received tradition, as having found it too bold for its taste.’ 77 E.g. Conzelmann, Jesus, 16: ‘For the reconstruction of Jesus’ teaching … , the following methodological principle is valid: whatever fits neither into Jewish thought nor the views of the later church can be regarded as authentic.’ 78 Keck, Future, 33. 79 At this point, Becker, Jesus, 18, speaks of the ‘Unverwechselbarkeit’ of Jesus which is, however, in principle of the same order as the uniqueness of all women and men as individuals. More to the point are those features of Jesus’ ministry and message that, as far as we know, were not typical or characteristic of Judaism in the time of Jesus, such as those which, e.g., Jacques Schlosser cites with regard to the God of Jesus, although he does not go as far as Joseph Klausner in speaking of ‘Gegensätze’ between Judaism and the teaching of Jesus (‘Gott’, esp. 71–2). 80 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 83, citing Keck, Future, 33: ‘Instead of the distinctive Jesus we ought rather to seek the characteristic Jesus, not merely a Jesus rigorously consistent with elements peculiar to him’ (cf. 24–5). 81 Riches, Jesus, 53. 82 Miller, Seminar, 75, admits that a ‘criterion of distinctiveness’ also ‘produces mini-

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an abstraction from a larger whole. For, as Dunn and others have noted, 83 such a starting-point reinforces a propensity of the ‘Liberal’ research into the life of Jesus to distance Jesus as far as possible from contemporary Judaism and to depict the latter in an as unfavourable light as possible, in order to show the superiority of the religion of Jesus. Moreover, it must be asked how far this minimum is really ‘assured’. For, if one considers how little we really know about the Judaism of Jesus’ day or the history of the earliest church, is it not difficult to assert with any great confidence that any particular element in Jesus’ teaching is dissimilar to both of these?84 Consider what we would not have known of early Judaism had it not been for the discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and consider, too, what light scholars have been able to throw or, in some cases, thought that they could throw on the life of Jesus from these sources. There are many gaps in our knowledge of the Judaism of that time and what has helped to fill some of those gaps in the past is more than a little fortuitous by nature. Moreover, as Richard Horsley points out,85 most of our surviving textual evidence for the Judaism of the time stems from what he terms the ‘elite’ cultural traditions of the time, not from the popular traditions, from which hardly any sources survive; yet it is the latter that would have been the setting for Jesus’ teaching. Similarly, our knowledge of the early church is relatively well documented for the career and teaching of Paul, although there is still much that we would like to know there, but painfully scanty with regard to other areas of the early church’s life.86 It may be important to recognize that which is characteristic or distinctive in the ministry of Jesus, but it is important to know more than this. For, if one excised all that Jesus had in common with his Jewish contemporaries and with the Christian community after Easter, one would be left with a Jesus who was a loner and a maverick and has remained so, a foreign body in the Judaism of the first century C.E. 87 Were it the case that he had nothing in common with his Jewish contemporaries, then it would be hard to see how he could have communicated effectively with them, since communication always presupposes something commalist results’. Walker, ‘Quest’, 48, puts it starkly: ‘if everything “Jewish” and everything “Christian” is eliminated from the Jesus tradition, then nothing is left.’ 83 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 86. Arnal, Jesus, 12–15, suggests that often the motivation for the use of this ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ was a christological one, to reinforce the uniqueness of Jesus by distancing him from ‘his religious, social, and cultural context’ (which could easily be combined with a denigration of that context). (It is true that he later denies that he wishes to attribute motives to scholars now engaged in discussing the Jewishness of Jesus [39–40], but he does speak of the emphasis on the contrast between Jesus and his environment as serving ‘the interests of Jesus’ unique genius’ [12–13].) 84 Cf., e.g., R. S. Barbour, Criticism, 7; de Jonge, Envoy, 6; Downing, Church, e.g. 114; Miller, Seminar, 75. 85 Horsley, ‘Oral Performance’, 58. 86 Cf. Wedderburn, History, 4–7. 87 Cf. Charlesworth, Jesus, 167, who faults this criterion as beginning ‘with a tendency to portray Jesus as a non-Jew and as a leader without followers’.

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mon, something shared. Gnilka is therefore right to comment that ‘if Jesus had always been original, he would have been like a missionary in China who refused to speak Chinese’.88 And if one did not allow for the after-effects of Jesus’ ministry in the Christian community after Easter, then one could easily get the impression that Jesus had achieved nothing in his earthly ministry. It would be as if this community had come into being independently of the earthly life of its founder and as if its history remained untouched by that life. 89 That is all very hard to believe. Tom Holmén, however, has more recently espoused the view that the criterion of double dissimilarity, dissimilarity over against both Judaism and early Christianity, is unnecessary: dissimilarity with regard to the latter alone will do.90 Nonetheless, even in this modified form, this criterion is still problematic in its ignoring any continuity between Jesus and the early church. Moreover, it highlights even more acutely a problem that also presents itself with the double version of the criterion: this single version argues that Jewish elements would not have been incorporated into the Jesus tradition unless they were compatible with the interests of the early Christians. That must be qualified by saying ‘some early Christians’, for we here run up against the diversity of early Christianity, some of it strongly Jewish in character,91 some of it sloughing off much of its Jewish heritage. All in all, it is, therefore, not surprising that Perrin seeks to augment the astonishingly one-sided picture yielded by the criterion of double dissimilarity by means of the use of other criteria. For a start there is, as we have seen, the ‘criterion of coherence’: this allows ‘material from the earliest strata of the tradition’ to be ‘accepted as authentic if it can be shown to cohere with material established as authentic by means of the criterion of dissimilarity’ (43). Perrin is able to show how this criterion was used by both Bultmann and by Jeremias in his work on the ‘unknown sayings’ of Jesus.92 However, if the results of the application of the criterion of dissimilarity were too restricted and meagre to provide a credible picture, those yielded by this further criterion threaten to be too generous. For was Jesus the only one who could see what would ‘cohere’ with the distinctive part of his message and ministry? Jesus’ contemporaries or near-contemporaries were, indeed, arguably better able to see what would ‘cohere’ with it in firstcentury terms than we are. Were his followers not also able to gauge what say88

Gnilka, Jesus, 30. Cf. R. S. Barbour, Criticism, 8. Cf. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 4: an account of Jesus’ ministry cannot but suffer if it is divorced from the history of incipient early Christianity. 90 Holmén, ‘Doubts’ (cf. his Jesus, 4). Here he follows Meyer, Aims, 86; ‘Objectivity’, 547–8. 91 Perrin, Rediscovering, 41, refers to Matthew’s tendency to modify Jesus traditions in order to make them ‘more acceptable to Jewish ears’. 92 Jeremias, Jesusworte. 89

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ings, for instance, were in continuity with what Jesus had said? And if not, what are we to make of Paul’s claim to have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2.16)? Would one not expect those Christian prophets and prophetesses whose role Perrin so greatly emphasizes to have been particularly prepared to produce new sayings in Jesus’ name and in the power of the Spirit, sayings that they believed were in conformity with the ‘mind of Christ’? At any rate, it is noteworthy that Jeremias regarded Gospel of Thomas § 82 (‘He that is near me is near the fire; he that is far from me is far from the kingdom’) as one of those sayings ‘whose attestation and subject matter do not give rise to objections of weight, which are perfectly compatible with the genuine teachings of our Lord, and which have as high a claim to authenticity as the sayings recorded in our four gospels’.93 Yet is it so inconceivable that an early Christian prophetess or prophet could have formulated this? In other words, does this criterion allow us to say more than that such a saying might be authentic? The converse is also plausible: material that does not ‘cohere’ with the rest of the Jesus material is less likely to be authentic, although that is not to be ruled out completely. (Perhaps the last logion of the Gospel of Thomas, § 114, might be seen as an example of this; for on the face of it this seems to say, although some have interpreted it differently, that women must become male in order to enter God’s kingdom.) That is plausible, yet Dunn has attempted to turn this criterion on its head, giving us a ‘reverse criterion of coherence’: given that prophetic claims to speak for Jesus would be subject to scrutiny, any ‘distinctive’ saying or motif that was allowed to stand ‘is likely to have come from the original teaching of Jesus, since otherwise, if it originated as a prophetic utterance, it is unlikely to have been accepted as a saying of Jesus by the church in which it was first uttered’.94 Yet the fact that a saying might be authentic is far from proving that it actually is authentic and the negative form of this criterion may thus be of more use: the authenticity of material that does not ‘cohere’ with the rest of the Jesus material must be regarded as questionable. And, finally, there is Perrin’s third criterion, that of ‘multiple attestation’,95 a criterion upon which Crossan has more recently placed great weight, but about which Perrin himself expresses certain reservations. This criterion is ‘a proposal to accept as authentic material which is attested in all, or most, of the sources which can be discerned behind the synoptic gospels’ (45), and it is a criterion, in his eyes, that is more useful when it is a matter of

93 Quoted from Jeremias, Unknown Sayings, 30 (=Jesusworte, 44–5), according to Perrin, Rediscovering, 44. 94 Dunn, ‘Third Quest’, 39. 95 Or a ‘quantitative criterion’ in Becker, Jesus, 18.

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establishing the authenticity of motifs from the ministry of Jesus, although rarely that of specific sayings … a motif which can be detected in a multiplicity of strands of tradition and in various forms (pronouncement stories, parables, sayings, etc.) will have a high claim to authenticity, always provided that it is not characteristic of an activity, interest or emphasis of the earliest Church (46).96

The other side of this last proviso appears in the work of E. P. Sanders when he pleads for the authenticity of the tradition that Jesus welcomed sinners, which is attested more than once, and backs up this contention with the observation that the attitude of early Christianity towards sinners was not conspicuously positive.97 In other words, one aspect of the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ is operative here. It is also important to note that Perrin does not talk only of a multiple attestation in more than one document, be it an extant one or one that must be reconstructed, as is the case with the hypothetical ‘Q’, but of multiple attestation in different forms of the tradition. Nor does he speak primarily of the multiple attestation of sayings, but rather of motifs.98 In both respects his use of this criterion differs from Crossan’s. Käsemann, too, may implicitly have applied a similar criterion to certain motifs which he describes as ‘pivotal points’ (Schwerpunkte) in Jesus’ message, even though he does not expressly say that the frequency of their occurrence assures him of their authenticity: Jesus’ message of a gracious God, his critique of the Jewish law and its interpretation, his radical demand for obedience and love, and his death as the logical culmination of his ministry.99 But Käsemann’s earlier article on ‘The Problem of the Historical Jesus’ had in fact argued for many of these ‘pivotal points’, ‘the distinctive element in the mission of Jesus’, on the basis of their repeated occurrence in the gospel traditions (37–45). In other words, we have here an argument based on the cumulative effect of the various sources. If a motif crops up time after time, and particularly in sources and strands of tradition that are to be treated as independent of one another, then it becomes increasingly difficult to question the reliability of the impression gained from these sources, without having to abandon the whole Jesus tradition as contaminated and corrupted.100 So, for instance, Jürgen Becker is of 96

In this formulation Perrin seems to combine two criteria that Walker, ‘Quest’, 41–4, distinguishes, a criterion of multiple attestation in different sources and a criterion of multiple attestation in different forms. (He finds the latter exemplified in the work of C. H. Dodd, but cf. also the ref. to Trocmé below.) 97 Sanders, Jesus, 174. 98 On both these points cf. Porter, Criteria, 82–9. 99 Käsemann, ‘Blind Alleys’, 64. 100 For a similar cumulative argument cf. Allison, ‘Historians’ Jesus’, 84–93. Schwartz, ‘Origins’, 52–3, cites a parallel from the life of Abraham Lincoln, the widespread memory that he had courted Ann Rutledge until her death and had planned to marry her, a belief so widespread that most now regard it as true, particularly since it is unclear why such a belief should have been so tenaciously held, and argues against the presumption ‘that a state-

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the opinion that, despite the vagaries of the tradition, no one would wish to call Jesus’ death, his activity as a wonder-worker or his practice of table-fellowship in question.101 Similarly, he would be at a loss to account for Jesus’ recurrent references to himself as ‘the son of man’ if this were not a phrase that Jesus himself had used,102 and here, too, one might reinforce this by noting that the phrase seemingly found little echo in the teaching of the first Christians, with the exception of Acts 7.56. One might also make out a similar case for the frequent references to God’s ‘kingly reign’ or ‘kingdom’.103 That, too, was, from the point of view of methodology, the argument of Etienne Trocmé’s Jesus and His Contemporaries: the various forms of the gospel tradition, narratives, parables, miracle stories and the like, which, in his view, in many cases had been handed down by very diverse circles,104 nevertheless offer a series of pictures of Jesus in which, despite all differences, certain things remain constant.105 Trocmé then goes on to argue, more questionably, that the pictures stem from Jesus’ own initiative and decision, and that he had wished to be so depicted, adopting the roles that various groups of people had assigned to him. In the light of the scene at Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus quite plainly refuses to conform to even his disciples‘ expectations (Mark 8.29–33 parr.), this aspect of Trocmé’s argument can hardly carry conviction, but his cumulative argument that the various strands of tradition present us with a series of pictures that complement one another and that help to fill out a unitary image of Jesus carries more weight. Along the same lines is Nils Dahl’s argument that from a cross-section of the tradition various characteristics of Jesus’ words and deeds emerge, and that ‘Words and reports of differing form and genre … mutually illuminate each other and yield a total picture in which there appears something that is characteristic of Jesus’; the survival of sayings or stories of Jesus shows that they fitted into the disciples’ general picture of him.106 In a similar vein, John Riches picks up a suggestion of Rudolf Bultmann’s to the effect that, while there may be doubt about the authenticity of individual sayings, ‘still one may point to a whole series of words found in the oldest stratum of tradition which do give us a consistent representation of the historical message of Jesus’, and this leads Riches on to look for ‘a group of sayings sufficiently distinctive that, although one cannot be sure of the authenticity of any one of them, one can say with confidence that, taken as a group they present ment is wrong until proven right beyond a reasonable doubt’, for that would rule out ‘most knowledge of Jesus and what his contemporaries believed about him’. 101 Becker, Jesus, 6. 102 Becker, Jesus, 253. 103 Theissen/Merz, Jesus, 118 – again they employ one side of the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ as well: a specifically Christian slant is not recognizable in the use of this phrase. 104 Cf. also Wischmeyer, ‘Lukas 22,41–44’, 105–8. 105 Cf. Polkow’s ref. to the criterion of ‘multiple form attestation’ (‘Method’, 338). 106 Dahl, ‘Problem’, 153–4.

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characteristic features of Jesus’ teaching’.107 It would, at any rate, be hard to believe that so many different witnesses should be similarly mistaken. And, if we dispute these motifs or themes that are best attested, can we know anything at all about Jesus or say anything about him? Theoretically it is possible that in fact we cannot, but is this really more than a theoretical possibility? Nonetheless, while these methods may yield a small collection of individual sayings and episodes and motifs, they do not provide us with an overall account of Jesus’ life, ministry and teaching, with the possible exception that the criterion of coherence assumes that the material that it allows us to accept hangs together with material selected by the criterion of dissimilarity. Yet this criterion does little more than add to the pile of still isolated sayings, episodes and motifs so that this pile is further enlarged. It does little, if anything, to fit them together into a coherent and intelligible whole. To do that one needs perhaps a criterion or a principle of coherence of another sort. The same weakness, that they only yield us isolated units or aspects of reliable Jesus tradition, besets a whole gallery of other criteria that various scholars have suggested.108 So John P. Meier adds to Perrin’s three criteria as a first ‘primary criterion’ (as opposed to others listed by him that are ‘secondary (or dubious)’) a ‘criterion of embarrassment’,109 which draws attention to the sort of difficulties that we have already seen arising in the case of the Parable of the Unjust Steward, as well as a ‘criterion of rejection and execution’.110 Wright also makes extensive use of the riddling nature of many of Jesus’ sayings, particularly those relating to his messianic claims and his destiny of suffering, in order to argue that Jesus is more likely to have spoken in this way rather than the early church.111 The first of Meier’s suggestions as well as Wright’s appeal to riddles will, by themselves, again only lend support to isolated pieces of tradition, but the latter criterion, the 107

Riches, Jesus, 49 (quoting Bultmann, Erforschung, 42), 53 (his italics). Polkow, ‘Method’, identifies 25 in all that he finds listed in the works of a small selection of scholars. 109 Cf. Gnilka, Jesus, 30–1; Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 267; Marguerat, Mann, 21–2. Porter, Criteria, 107, finds this foreshadowed in Käsemann, ‘Problem’, 37, there as a matter of removing the embarrassment from the received tradition. However, Meier, Marginal Jew 1, 170–1, recognizes that it may at times be difficult for us to gauge what might have been embarrassing to Christians in the first century (e.g. in the case of the ‘cry of dereliction’ [Mark 15.34 par.]; and yet Craig Evans supplies one possible control on the use of this criterion here and elesewhere: it may explain why Luke and John have left this cry out and replaced it with other ‘much more reassuring utterances’: ‘Developments’, 18–19). Powell, Jesus, 47, relates this criterion to that of dissimilarity, but his example of John’s baptism of Jesus should suffice to show the difference: despite their embarrassment the early Christians asserted that Jesus had been baptized by John and that with a Jewish rite, however distinctive it may have been in the Judaism of the time. 110 Meier, Marginal Jew, 1.167–95. For this second criterion cf. Gnilka, Jesus, 31, citing N. A. Dahl, ‘Jesus’, 120–2; Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 97. 111 Wright, Jesus, 493–510, 565–74, 631–45. 108

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‘criterion of rejection and execution’, is more interesting in that Meier’s very brief description of this criterion notes that it differs from the others, in that it ‘does not directly indicate whether an individual saying or deed of Jesus is authentic’ (177); rather it notes how Jesus’ life ended and asks what in that life can have led to such an end. That is a step in the right direction, but it does not go far enough. For an account of Jesus’ life that is historically satisfactory does not only need to correlate it with the rejection of Jesus and his violent death, but needs to take into account further factors that are the presuppositions of that rejection and the further outworkings of that life and death.112 In other words, it needs to be part of a coherent account of Judaism at that time and of Palestinian society under Roman rule and of the further developments in the practice and teaching of Jesus’ followers after his death.113 Moreover, the criterion needs to be more sharply defined in another way, in that it not only takes account of the fate of Jesus, but also the facts that this fate did not befall him earlier and that it eventually befell him and him only. In other words, Jesus’ movement remained physically unscathed until he reached Jerusalem and it was eventually only Jesus who was arrested, and none of his adherents, at least until a later stage. For, in the first place, although Herod Antipas had intervened to put a violent end to the activities of John the Baptist, he had not thought it necessary to arrest Jesus, despite Jesus’ connections to the Baptist’s movement and despite the fact that Jesus was more often active in inhabited areas. Is that a further sign that the difference between the messages and the movements of the two men was readily perceptible or is the explanation to be sought, more specifically and at the same time more plausibly, in the fact that Jesus had not attacked the morality of Antipas’ conduct and thus indirectly the legitimacy of his claim to rule. And, secondly, when Jesus was eventually arrested in Jerusalem, his followers who were with him were not.114 112

Cf. Dahl, ‘Problem’, 158: ‘Historical research must begin with the death of Jesus if it will inquire not only into the preaching but also into the life of Jesus’ (similarly in KuD 1, 121). (This is differently formulated in Jesus the Christ, 98: ‘Historical research must begin with the death of Jesus if it wishes to illumine the life of Jesus and the preaching that followed’ – i.e. it is now not a matter of Jesus’ preaching but that of his followers later. But Jesus’ end is to be kept in mind in seeking to understand Jesus’ teaching as well: 99.) 113 This has much in common with the ‘continuum approach’ which Tom Holmén advocates (Jesus, esp. 1–2), although that term is, in my view, not a particularly felicitous one in that Holmén must immediately insist that it is not a matter of continuity between Jesus and Judaism and early Christianity alone but also of discontinuity. 114 That point has been correctly noted by Paula Fredriksen (Jesus, esp. 234, 240–1), but her solution of the problem rests on questionable foundations: she argues that Pilate was only too well informed about Jesus, because the latter had been teaching openly in Jerusalem ‘for years’ and Pilate knew that the message of his movement ‘posed no threat to Roman power’ (243), for the kingdom of which he taught would not be established by any human activity, but God’s. The danger, which Pilate could remove by eliminating Jesus, lay in others’ belief that Jesus was the Messiah, a belief evoked by Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Implicitly Wayne Meeks seems to solve the problem thar Fredriksen has raised by insisting that time after time the Roman governor would send out troops to arrest the ringleader of

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Nor is it enough to place Jesus’ life in a general (eastern) Mediterranean context while ignoring features of Jewish life and culture that distinguished it from so many of the cultures surrounding it; that is a criticism that has, with some justice, been levelled at the work of scholars such as Crossan.115 For it has been noted how anomalous many features of the Roman administration of the province of Judea were in comparison with the other areas of the Mediterranean world that were included in the Roman Empire, features such as the garrisoning of a provincial city like Jerusalem or the role of the Roman prefects in appointing and dismissing the Jewish high priests and even guarding their vestments.116 It is true that some features of Mediterranean culture that social anthropologists have observed may be equally applicable to the society of Judea, but in other respects devout Jews both in this part of Palestine and in other predominantly Jewish areas such as Galilee differed in their ethos from their non-Jewish neighbours in ways of which they and their neighbours were very much aware. And that awareness tended to surface in violent forms at moments such as the outbreak of hostilities in the Jewish revolt of 66 C.E.117 And such differences render it, for instance, less likely that plausible analogies to the Graeco–Roman Cynic movement are to be found in Jesus’ Galilean surroundings. Such an integrative principle of coherence is surely an essential part of historical-critical work in general, and has no mere supplementary role such as that played by Perrin’s ‘criterion of coherence’, but enjoys a major role as a controlling factor in the whole undertaking of historical criticism.118 For a primary goal of an uprising and have him executed to discourage others and disperse his followers (Christ, 76), but in fact that dispersal all too often cost many of the followers their lives as well (in the case of ‘the Egyptian’ the ringleader and a few others escaped: Jos., Bell. 2.263). That the disciples were not arrested could perhaps be more easily explained by their flight from the scene of Jesus’ arrest. 115 Cf., e.g., Horsley, ‘Patterns’, 69–70; Keck, Who Is Jesus?, 29–31; Meier, Jew 3, 3–4; Moxnes, ‘Jesus’, 145; Wright, Jesus, 58. That is a criticism that may still hold good despite the defence of Crossan and others found in Arnal, Jesus, 20–38. That the distinctively Jewish character of Jesus’ ministry and its setting has received insufficient attention is not the same as denying Jesus’ Jewishness. Nonetheless, to label Jesus a ‘Cynic’ as opposed to simply comparing certain aspects of his ministry with the characteristic emphases of the Graeco–Roman Cynic movement shifts the focus away from what is characteristically Jewish in that ministry, and to label him a ‘peasant’ does not underline his Jewishness either. The cause for this lack of Jewish specificity is most likely to be found primarily in the application of the methods of the social sciences in that these seek for patterns common to different cultures and groups, rather than for features that are the distinctive marks of a single culture or group. 116 Millar, Roman Near East, 45–6, quoting, on the last point, Jos. Ant. 18.93–4; cf. also Fredriksen, Jesus, 169. 117 Cf. Wedderburn, History, 187–8. 118 Denton, Historiography, 162, also emphasizes that what he describes as ‘a coherence theory of historical truth’ is ‘not to be confused with the ‘criterion of coherence’ as Perrin understood it. What is less certain is whether Denton is right to oppose this so starkly to a ‘correspondence theory’ of truth. For one reason why an account is coherent may well be

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historical criticism is to provide a coherent account of the events in question so that the connections and relations of these events with one another and with their pre-history and with their post-history and their context are as clear and intelligible as possible. And in practice such a principle can be seen operating in Sanders’ work on Jesus when he demands that our account of Jesus’ teaching should render intelligible the various attitudes of the later Christians to the Jewish law and the necessity of obeying it,119 and, like Meier, that our account of Jesus’ life should explain the manner of his death.120 There is operative here, particularly with regard to the matter of the status of the Jewish law, what Crossan pregnantly formulates as a ‘criterion of adequacy’, namely the originality of that ‘which best explains the multiplicity engendered in the tradition’: he pleads for the originality of sayings and actions of Jesus ‘that could have been, plausibly and persuasively, sincerely and honestly, interpreted in both directions by different followers at the same time’.121 And, like J. Klausner, Sanders also argued that Jesus must be located credibly in contemporary Judaism, and that, on the other hand, it must be explained why the movement that Jesus had initiated ultimately distanced itself from Judaism.122 Kümmel, too, formulates a similar principle with regard to our ascertaining the oldest stratum of tradition in the Gospels: the decisive criterion that it corresponds to what actually happened – assuming that there was some sort of coherence and cohesion in what happened. Nonetheless, we have immediate access to the account, but not to what happened in the past, so that the correspondence of the account to what happened must remain an inference; yet the ‘truth’, if we still want to talk of ‘truth’ rather than more modestly of ‘plausibility’ or ‘probability’ does not just lie in the coherence, but also in the inferred correspondence. It is significant, too, that Craig Evans selects as the first and most important of his ‘authenticity criteria’ ‘historical coherence’, although he perhaps intends this in a less comprehensive sense than I am advocating, if it is but one ‘criterion’ among others (‘Developments’, 13: ‘Material that coheres with what we know of Jesus’ historical circumstances and the principal features of his life should be given priority’; it is to be noted that the last of his six criteria is also ‘coherence’ or ‘similarity’, in the sense of Perrin’s ‘criterion of coherence’). 119 Cf. Sanders, Jesus, 246, 268; also Holmén, Jesus, 4–11 (as well as, to varying degrees, the articles in the volume that he has edited); Marguerat, Mann, 68–70. John P. Meier’s discussion of Mark 7.15 is instructive here: noting that scholars like Käsemann and Perrin had argued for the authenticity of this saying on the grounds of its ‘discontinuity from the Judaism of Jesus’ day’ while representatives of the ‘third quest’ had rejected it as incompatible with the Jewishness of Jesus, he turns to an argument that is based on the failure of Jesus’ disciples to apply any such principle later to controversies in the early church over the question whether gentile converts had to obey such food laws (Jew 4, 385–6, 394), as well as noting that such a saying has left no trace in accounts of the eating habits of Jesus and his disciples. 120 Cf. Sanders, Jesus, e.g. 22; also Meier, Jew, 1.177. What is involved here is a certain explanatory power inherent in proposed reconstructions, although Powell’s ‘criterion of explanation’ (Jesus, 49, 169) is perhaps not the best choice of words. 121 Crossan, ‘Materials’, 11. 122 Sanders, Jesus, 3, 18–19.

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can only be the demonstration that from the combination of the pieces of tradition that we have identified … a historically intelligible, unified picture of Jesus and his message emerges, and one that renders the further development of earliest Christianity intelligible.123

That is correct, for W. R. Farmer rightly refers to the ‘common-sense assumptions of continuity between Jesus and the community which bears and cherishes his memory’.124 Similarly Jürgen Becker demands at the beginning of his book on Jesus that Whoever writes a book on Jesus must … not only present us with as convincing a general picture as possible, but also at indicate how he or she visualizes the history of earliest Christianity and how Jesus is the starting-point of this development.

As a result the use of such a criterion or principle of coherence in a qualitative and quantitative sense leads to an outline of an overview of Jesus’ preaching in which this also fits together with Jesus’ way of life and as far as possible also with his fate, his death as a criminal. This coherence therefore relates to Jesus‘ ministry in word and deed as well as to his fate. 125

And, we should add, to his post-history as well, in the words and deeds of his followers. Or Hengel and Schwemer, after reviewing various criteria, conclude that A coherent network of Jesus traditions that relate to one another should be created through the interaction of all the criteria, by means of which [network] the outlines of his striking, indeed to a certain extent ‘unparalleled’ work become more tangible, and one is enabled to explain adequately the astonishing developments in Jesus’ community after Easter, above all christological developments. One could speak here of the criterion of coherence.126

Or, to avoid the risk that this might be thought to be one criterion on the same level as all the others or that this might be confused with Perrin’s ‘criterion of coherence’, one might name this a ‘principle of coherence’. A last example is to be found in Cilliers Breytenbach’s survey of Jesus research: one should reflect that the traces that the historical Jesus has left behind in the sources should be interpreted in the context of his ministry. A fully non-eschatological view of God’s kingly reign in Jesus’ message could hardly, for instance, have provided the impetus for a clearly futuristic interpretation of this message in Mark’s Gospel. Reconstruc123

Kümmel, Theologie, 24. Farmer, ‘Reflections’, 60. Cf. also Barnett, Jesus, passim (this acount, however, seems at times to carry this line of argument to undifferentiating excess; to argue, for instance, that the Romans, in using the term ‘Christiani’, thought of the movement as ‘messiahpeople’ [29–30, 159] overlooks the fact that they would in all probability have treated &ULVWRY as a proper name as in other forms ending in -iani, including the ‘Herodians’ of Mark 3.6; 12.13 par., and not as a title of a king rivalling Caesar). 125 Becker, Jesus, 5, 18. 126 Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 267 (their italics). 124

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tions of the historical Jesus should be intelligible in the light of the process of their use and interpretation by earliest Christianity as evidenced in our texts.127

For not only the emergence of the Christian community, but also that of its texts are to be counted among the events that belong to Jesus’ post-history. In fact the discerning of the connections between Jesus’ history and that of his followers and the recognition of the connections between his teaching and deeds and the appropriation and handing on of these in early Christian literature are all closely connected. Scholars have often, for instance, identified a re-Judaizing in the written tradition, i.e. texts that one can regard as reverting to a more conventional Jewish position, texts in which that element of ‘dissimilarity’ that the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ employs is then lacking. One can see a counterpart to these texts in a later form of Christianity that had taken up again the ways of Judaism. An alleged saying of Jesus like ‘unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’(Matt 5.20 NRSV) may well presuppose a form of early Christianity that sought to realize such a greater righteousness. That is probable, but not inevitable, for it would be precipitate simply to assume that the content of a transmitted saying always matched fully the way of life of those who had transmitted it. Nevertheless it is intrinsically probable, if no more than that, that the community that had transmitted this saying had so interpreted it that it matched their aims and goals. Such a principle as I have just outlined also has much in common with that criterion of ‘plausibility’ or ‘contextual plausibility’ advocated by Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter,128 although the name ‘criterion of plausibility’ itself leaves 127

Breytenbach, ‘Jesusforschung’, 248. Theissen/Merz, Der historische Jesus, 117–20; Theissen/Winter, Kriterienfrage, passim: the criterion is divided more precisely into ‘Kontextplausibilität’, referring to Jesus’ relation to contemporary Judaism, and ‘Wirkungsplausibilität’, meaning his relation to his followers in the subsequent history of the church (esp. Theissen/Winter, Kriterienfrage, 209–14). The somewhat slighting reference of Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 28, to ‘“plausibility” arguments’ jars: for one person Jesus may seem to justify domination, for another, emancipation. The question is then: which of them may more plausibly appeal to Jesus and who has the more plausible reading of the Jesus traditions? To decide in favour of domination might then rather be an argument for dispensing with any appeal to Jesus, rather than manipulating the traditions to make the emancipatory case that one prefers. Schüssler Fiorenza suggests replacing ‘plausibility’ with ‘possibility’ (51–5; cf. also her ‘Re-Visioning’, 245), but this seems to me a very dangerous move, not because it might reveal women having more power than has hitherto been thought to be the case, but because it could amount to little more than wish-fulfilment. Might it not be just as emancipatory to recognize that women were (unjustly) deprived of power then, particularly if one thought that to be a perversion of what Jesus had set in motion? That would involve the recognition of a possibility, but of one that exists now rather than existing then. In her earlier Jesus: Miriam’s Child, 86, she wrote as if the voting methods of the Jesus Seminar served to replace the criteria adopted by the ‘New Quest’, but presumably the members of the Seminar employed various criteria, more or less rigorously, before casting their votes. (Funk et 128

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something to be desired, since the key question is surely what makes the authenticity of a particular piece of tradition ‘plausible’ and all the various other criteria have surely been suggesting various answers to that question, be it in terms of ‘dissimilarity’ or ‘multiple attestation‘ or the like. But the principle is similar, for this ‘criterion of plausibility’ reckons both with a creative interaction between Jesus and the Jewish world in which he lived and with the early Christian community being influenced and affected by Jesus: information or material in the sources is possibly or even probably historical or at least ‘historically plausible’, if it can be interpreted as caused by, or emanating from, Jesus and at the same time is only intelligible in a Jewish context.129 It is true that Theissen and Merz dwell more on the continuity between Jesus and contemporary Judaism than on that between him and earliest Christianity, maintaining that, according to this criterion, ‘Jesus can only have said and done what a Jewish charismatic of the first century could have said and done.’130 However, in the work that Theissen wrote later with Dagmar Winter, a criterion of ‘Wirkungsplausibilität’ (over against that of ‘Kontextplausibilität’) comes more into play, even if the description of this criterion and its application would merit a fuller treatment than they offer. It is, at any rate, significant that they assign to ‘coherence’ a determinative role in establishing what is plausible.131 And yet a point made by Scot McKnight is worth noting, that this ‘criterion’ is more a more general orientation than a criterion,132 and I have accordingly spoken rather of a ‘principle’ of coherence. B. F. Meyer prefers to speak of ‘indices’ instead of ‘criteria’, 133 but again that is a matter of assessing individual items of tradition. I have spoken of a ‘principle’, in the sense of an overarching methodological framework within which a historial., Gospels, 16–34, sets out the ‘rules of evidence’, both written and oral, that were supposed to govern their decisions.) 129 Funk, Honest, 223–4, speaks of ‘plausibility’ as ‘little more than a negative criterion’ (in the sense of ‘implausibility’ being a reason to reject the historicity of the account); by ‘plausibility’ he means ‘verisimilitude’, but obviously Theissen and Winter mean something more, a whole network of causal relations (cf. also D. Brown’s reference, over against the aspirations of ‘modernism’, to ‘plausibility as the norm and not certainty’: Tradition, 32); nonetheless Funk’s judgement may be a good reason to choose another term to describe this criterion. 130 Theissen/Merz, Jesus, 119. 131 Theissen/Winter, Kriterienfrage, 214; ‘plausibility’ is ‘basically evoked by coherence’. 132 S. McKnight, Jesus, 44. 133 Meyer, Aims, 86; Realism, 130; ‘Objectivity’, 547; Reality, 102–3; cf. also Riesner, Jesus, 86–7 (although he continues to speak of ‘criteria’). Meyer also argues that these ‘indices’, when present, argue for authenticity, but their absence is not an argument against authenticity (Aims, 87; Realism, 131). Denton, Historiography, 138, 140, identifies two factors that seem in Meyer’s eyes to cast doubt on the authenticity of material, namely traces of redaction and material that ‘does not fit a coherent picture in light of historical parallels’, although he notes that Meyer does not expressly acknowledge that he bases his judgements on these factors. Denton is also critical of Meyer’s attitude to redaction: ‘He seems to treat as self-evident that redactional material is without value for historical study’ (146).

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cal reconstruction can take place. In this task of historical reconstruction, however, various factors will need to be taken into account and balanced against one another. It is perhaps better to speak of these various factors as ‘criteria’ rather than ‘indices’ but then not in the sense that they, either singly or together, will offer a final verdict, but in the sense of aspects of the question that help one in coming to a judgement on historical probability.134 At any rate, in speaking of balancing the one against the other I seek to avoid assigning to any one factor or criterion a position of dominance, let alone exclusive dominance, such as used to be granted to the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’. Despite the widespread appeal to ‘plausibility’ it seems to me, nonetheless, in many ways more satisfactory to talk rather in terms of ‘coherence’.135 For one thing, ‘coherence’ helps to explain why what is plausible is in fact plausible: the account given hangs together, the sequence of events makes sense, and we can see the logic of the actions of the various participants in these events. Edward Schillebeeckx seems to be speaking of this sort of ‘coherence’ when he talks of ‘consistency of content’, meaning by that the total picture which as a historical end-result gradually arises out of the detailed analysis and then in turn leads to further analysis in detail; and then the fact that a detail slips or does not slip into the total framework of the picture of Jesus already achieved, historically speaking, and into that of his basic intentions, has a quite definite function.136

More than that, though, speaking of ‘coherence’ is in some ways more comprehensive than ‘plausibility’, encompassing not only the question whether a particular account of Jesus fits into the picture of contemporary Judaism as far as we know it, particularly with regard to the spectrum of beliefs then current, as well as the links between Jesus and the story of his later followers, but also other elements as well, for instance the links between both Jesus’ story and that of his followers, on the one hand, and other events in their world on the other. It is, in other words, not just a matter of asking, say, how well Jesus’ message can be placed within the context of the varied beliefs of contemporary Judaism, but also of factors like the actions and policies of the Romans and of the princes whom they had installed in positions of power and, in the case of the history of the early church, how much their social and political world, both Jewish and non-Jewish, influenced and modified what they had inherited from Jesus. For, after all, these ‘criteria’ may all play a part, complementing one another, in the attempt to come to a decision about, and offer a plausible and coherent ac134

And Meyer, Reality, 103, speaks of looking for ‘convergent and cumulative evidence’. The sort of ‘coherence’ that I have been talking about could also plausibly be described as that ‘narrative intelligibility’ for which Donald Denton pleads (Historiography, 9, 168–92). It may also amount in effect to what Wright terms a ‘criterion of double similarity and double dissimilarity’ (Jesus, 489; cf. 132, 226). 136 Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 96. 135

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count of what happened in the past. 137 An element in the Jesus traditions that seems to be out of keeping with the rest of those traditions, but very much at home in either early Judaism or early Christianity militates against such an account if one tries to fit it into an account of Jesus’ life. Elements like the idea of ‘covenant’ or an atoning death are historically suspect precisely because they have so little place elsewhere in the bulk of the Jesus traditions, but play an important role in both contemporary Judaism and early Christianity; moreover, there is the argument that Jesus’ call to repentance seems to presuppose a different way to salvation rather than through his atoning death.138 If, on the other hand, one felt that the whole account lacked coherence without the assumption that one or other or both of these elements was, however inconspicuously, at work in Jesus’ thinking and acting, then one might feel compelled nevertheless to introduce them as an interpretative clue to his life and his intentions. For if it was the goal of the original ‘quest’ ‘to form, on purely historical grounds, a comprehensive, consistent, and convincing picture of the historical Jesus’, as William Walker claims,139 then this goal may either render such elements suspect or suggest that they are indeed necessary. At any rate, both ‘plausibility’ and ‘coherence’ have long played and still play an important role in modern discussions of historical methods. Out of the increasing stock of historical information one seeks a coherent historical know137 Perhaps in the light of that it is easier to understand the phenomenon to which Gerd Häfner draws attention, namely that under the mantle of the ‘Plausibilitätskriterium’ are concealed most of those criteria that have been long known and used, even if they are now given new names: he points, for instance, to the similarity between the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ and ‘Tendenzwidrigkeit’ and between the ‘criterion of multiple attestation’ and ‘Quellenkohärenz’: Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 118–19, 126. Rightly, too, Häfner resists David du Toit’s attempt to throw all criteria overboard in the attempt, instead, to offer ‘a historically plausible account of Jesus by means of rationally responsible, critically reflective and creatively constructive interpretation of the sources’ (‘Jesus’, 123); one needs some control over the historical reconstruction offered and du Toit does not seem able to free himself from this need (Häfner, 124–6; e.g. in the statement that traditions that cannot be integrated into the Judaism of the time should be regarded as originating after Easter: ‘Jesus’, 124; what is this but an ‘Ausschlusskriterium’?). On the other hand, if Häfner still wishes to argue that ‘Jesus can only have said and done what fits into our knowledge of Judaism’ (126), then that seems to overlook the fragmentary nature of our knowledge of that Judaism (116). If, on the other hand, one operates with a ‘softer’ principle of coherence then one will turn this exclusive criterion round and say that, to the extent that purported sayings and actions of Jesus are in keeping with our knowledge of contemporary Judaism, these are therefore more plausible and offer a more coherent picture of Jesus in the world of his day, a picture that coheres more easily with the world in which he lived. 138 On ‘covenant’ cf., e.g., Becker, Jesus, 159–60; Schlosser, Jésus, 289–90; ‘Gott’, 62; on his death as atoning e.g. Hick, ‘Christology’, 10; Vögtle, ‘Todesankündigungen’, esp. 57, 75; Zager, Jesus, 38. 139 Walker, ‘Quest’, 51. He is disposed to endorse this goal of the old ‘quest’ and to fault it only on its neglect of the necessary preliminaries of appropriate literary, form-critical and tradition-historical work.

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ledge and a ‘consistent continuity’.140 Or there is the telling observation of a historian of an older generation, R. G. Collingwood, that he prefers Tacitus’ account of Nero’s intentions with regard to Britannia rather than Suetonius’ assertion that he wanted at one time to evacuate the island; he does so because he finds himself ‘able to incorporate what Tacitus tells [him] into a coherent and continuous picture of [his] own, and cannot do this for Suetonius’ and the aim of the historian is to make her or his picture of events and situations ‘a coherent whole’.141 And ‘plausibility’ in many forms is a criterion for assessing the value of historical research and theories – explicatory plausibility, informative or factual plausibility, explanatory plausibility, or empirical, normative and narrative plausibility.142 Inherent in the use of this principle is, at any rate, the presupposition of a network of causal connections such as Troeltsch presupposed in his analysis of the historical-critical method, and the plausibility of any historical reconstruction is enhanced the more it can demonstrate this interconnected web of causal connections, so that the events described do not just happen, but happen because A and B happened or were the case and, because the events described happened, then X and Y followed on from them.143 The historian of the life of Jesus has to ask, accordingly, how this element or the other, this aspect or another of the traditions related, on the one hand, to the situation in Palestine at that time, as far as we know it, and they in turn are to be correlated with the further developments of the Jesus movement in earliest Christianity.144 It should, however, be noted that this ‘principle’ in fact describes the historian’s goal – a coherent picture of the web of connections between the events of the past, together with the agents who played their part in those events. Yet it is still a ‘principle’ in the sense that, having this goal, the historian seeks, and seeks to apply, methods of historical research that are appropriate to this goal. And obviously, for instance, if historical research into Jesus were to divorce him from his historical context in Judaism as far as we can know it, an element of discontinuity and incoherence would be introduced. On the other hand, if it is true that the Jewish establishment of Jesus’ day violently rejected him, then some measure of discontinuity or disruption is also to be expected and indeed preferred, if a coherent picture of the events leading to Jesus’ death are to be understood and explained. Thus the goal set by the historian will inform and shape the questions 140

Cf. Rüsen, Rekonstruktion, 102; ‘Typen’, 601–2. Collingwood, Idea, 244–5, quoted in part by Meyer, Aims, 84–5; Realism, 132; ‘Objectivity’, 549–50. 142 So Rüsen, Rekonstruktion, 105–13, 124–5; ‘Typen’, 604. 143 Cf. Farmer, ‘Reflections’, 60: ‘what happened to [Jesus’] people and what happened to Jesus as a consequence of what he did and said stands in some consequential relationship to the Church which from the earliest period has served as the custodian of his oracles, and the perpetuator of his purposes.’ 144 Cf. Riesner’s criterion of ‘historische Einordnung’: Jesus, 95. 141

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that she or he ask and determine the worth and probability ascribed to the various possible answers that present themselves. In this way what I have described as a ‘principle’ indeed provides an overarching methodological framework for historical research. And yet it should not be thought that ‘coherence’ by itself is enough.145 For a large question mark must be set against the all too frequent dictotomy of ‘coherence’ and ‘correspondence’ as alternative criteria of truth or plausibility in historical enquiry.146 In fact historiography must be both coherent and measure itself against those data that come from the past, thus ‘corresponding’ to them in this sense of the word.147 In this, at least, Hayden White was correct when he asserted that ‘Every history must meet standards of coherence no less than those of correspondence if it is to pass as a plausible account of “the way things really were”.’148 (Again, it is an unfortunate use of terminology to speak as if data or evidence ‘corresponded’ to the past reality, rather than pointing to it. 149 It should 145 Cf., e.g., Gertrude Himmelfarb’s summary of Michael Oakeshott’s views which she regards as an anticipation of ‘the latest and most modish of literary theories’: History, 176. 146 Here I must register considerable unease with regard to Jörn Rüsen’s assertion (Vernunft, 77) that ‘(hi)stories (Geschichten) are true if those to whom they are addressed believe them’, for many stories or ostensibly historical accounts have been believed to be true in the past which we now know to have been false; that will not do in a section dealing with the criteria of truth in historical thought (and sometimes it is clear that Rüsen is talking about ‘historical statements’ in particular – e.g. 83), however much it may pass as a pragmatic description of the influence and effectiveness of ‘stories’ in general or ‘truth’ in a colloquial sense (78). Rüsen then turns to the credibility of ‘stories’ and the possibility that this may be questioned, but surely the commonest causes of such a questioning are that they do not seem to fit the known facts (‘correspondence’; cf. 82: ‘Tatsachengehalt’, ‘empirische Triftigkeit’) or are inconsistent with themselves (‘coherence’; cf. 83 on ‘narrative Triftigkeit’, though this seems to involve more than internal coherence, e.g. the ‘Einheit von Tatsachen und Normen’, 84). Whether it is necessary that a story should always have a meaning for one’s life in the present (82, ‘normative Triftigkeit’) to be true seems more doubtful. Can sheer curiosity not also motivate the historian? (But cf. Rüsen’s concession here on p. 96; yet for him ‘historical facts’ are not ‘historical’ in their pure facticity – perhaps a distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘historic’ might help here.) At least, however, Rüsen reckons with the interplay of several factors and warns against assigning sufficiency to any single one. 147 To be noted here is Peter Winch’s distinction between ‘correspondence’ in the sense of the relation between a statement and that which makes it true (the sense in which I am using it here) and ‘correspondence’ as the relation between a narrative and the literary form that it embodies (‘Darstellung’, 284). 148 White, Tropics, 122. 149 Cf., e.g., Munslow’s mention of Foucault’s rejection of such a correspondence (Deconstructing, 126). The rejection of empiricism by Mark Bevir (‘Objectivity’) on the grounds that we have no ‘given past’ seems to miss the point that it is ‘traces’ of the past, not the past itself, that are ‘given’ (data) to the historian and which are the reference point for historical reconstructions. And some such reference point seems to be presupposed when Bevir speaks of ‘accuracy’ as a criterion for ‘objectivity’ (328), although it is true that in his case this involves ‘a close fit to the facts supporting it’ (336), where ‘facts’ are not just any data but pieces of evidence ‘which nearly anyone in a given community would accept as true’

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not be forgotten that the past reality is past, and we cannot measure directly whether the evidence or data on which historical accounts are based ‘correspond’ to that past reality; the confirmation that we seek and that we can hope to attain is far more indirect, a matter of inference, looking at what the evidence and data suggest. Nor should we speak, more than a little loosely, of historical accounts ‘corresponding’ to the past reality or realities; the relation between the two is also more indirect than that, involving a series of inferences and an evaluation of the degree to which this or that proposed account fits the available evidence, as well as asking how coherent the account is.) We must recall again the historian’s responsibility to do justice to the present ‘traces’ of the past that we saw in the previous chapter or, as Ricoeur put it, historians’ role as ‘debtors to the dead’ and historiography as ‘an act of sepulcher’,150 speaking for the past and respecting the past. Those offering a historical account of Jesus’ life and work must, in other words, seek to offer a coherent account that at the same time does justice to the ‘traces’ of the past that survive in our texts, both canonical and extracanonical, as well as in non-literary ‘traces’, including archaeological evidence and the very existence and nature of the early Christian movement and the Christian church that grew out of it. Historians of the life of Jesus will be constrained by the ‘traces’ of the past that lie before them and will feel themselves responsible to do justice to them. It is very far from the case, here as in all other historiography worthy of the name, that just any coherent account will do. At the same time one must ask which past has, in each case, left its ‘traces’ behind today. For, if the words and work of Jesus have, in some cases at least, been taken up and fitted to the purposes of the later situations and needs of his followers, then we can expect to find in our texts and other evidence ‘traces’ not only of the past of Jesus’ own lifetime, but also of the past of his followers. These ‘pasts’ still need to be carefully distinguished from one another, and it is part of the task of presenting a coherent account that one will separate the one past from the other, and offer a coherent account of how the traces of the one have been joined to the traces of the other as well as of how the one past has led to the other. In short, it will still be a matter of tracing the variegated formation of the tradition and the correspondingly variegated history of the early Christian movement, both diachronically in the course of their development and synchronically at various points in their history. That will be part and parcel of the ‘coherence’ of the coherent account.

(333). Yet that in turn raises the question why, on what basis they are accepted as true. (And the sum total of facts that ‘nearly anyone’ in the broader ‘Jesus community’ today would accept as true is unfortunately rather meagre.) 150 See p. 138–9 above.

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5.3. The Ambiguity of Traditions There is, however, another aspect of the handling of traditions that relates not so much to the sifting of traditions to recover information about the past as to the use of traditions in the present. For Barbara Misztal points to an important distinction in their use that is in some ways comparable to the conservative and radical uses of ‘postmodernism’ that we noted in the last chapter: on the one hand traditions can ‘serve as a source of support for the exercise of power and authority, and therefore have an overtly political character and are nothing more than a set of sociotechniques of integration or projects of social engineering’; on the other hand, ‘traditions can also be responsible for change because they can offer a uniquely external viewpoint, illuminating the limitations of our own era.’151 Unfortunately, this second use of traditions does not seem to be one that Misztal explores much further, but she does quote from an article by David Gross in a journal providing ‘an international forum for discussion of political, social, and cultural change’.152 There Gross speaks of ‘the critical possibilities of tradition’ and ‘the critical role that even “superseded” traditions can still play in modern life’. Indeed, the ones that are ‘superseded’ become forms of alterity which, if approached correctly, can help challenge quotidian existence. By juxtaposing rather than integrating the past and the present, the non-synchronous and the synchronous, it may become possible not only to see the present from an entirely new perspective but to raise questions about some of the otherwise hardly noticed clichés of contemporary life. … By tapping into this non-contemporaneous material and holding it up to the ‘normality’ of the present, not only can we gain access to forgotten ways of being but the limitations of our own era can be seen from a uniquely external viewpoint.153

Tradition therefore has for him a ‘shock value, particularly its ability to provoke contradictions and open up new ways of thinking about “what is” in light of “what was”’ (9). So, too, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka points out how the traditions preserved in small ‘communities of memory’ may well conflict with official versions of the past or publicly available accounts of it and may pose a challenge to the unity of a state (one need look no further than the challenges to the United Kingdom’s unity posed by the traditions of its northern and western regions).154 151

Misztal, Theories, 92. Gross, ‘Rethinking Tradition’ (the statement of the journal’s aims comes from the website of the Telos Press). This article opens a discussion on Gross’s earlier book, The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). 153 Gross, ‘Rethinking Tradition’, 6–7 (his italics). 154 Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, e.g. 56, 61, 73, 136–7. The chapter on ‘Conflicts’ (67–85) gives a number of examples of controversies arising over contested memories. 152

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The history of the Christian church illustrates both uses of traditions that Misztal mentions, the potentially conservative and the potentially subversive. Church tradition has been used, and still is used, to undergird the status quo and the authority of a denomination’s hierarchy which is able to declare what is Christian and what is not. With the rise of reforming groups has often come a return to the roots of the Christian movement and to the texts of the New Testament as witness to its origins; the status quo and the practices and beliefs current in the Christian religious establishment have then been challenged in the light of the witness of the New Testament. That was so at the time of the Protestant Reformation and both before and after it. And yet that Reformation in turn engendered its own version of the Christian tradition or traditions and has developed its own hierarchy and authorities, and this development has constantly threatened to become ossified and an obstacle to reforming movements both practical and theoretical.155 Thus these reforming movements can often again use the founding events of Christianity and the scriptural witness to them to call in question what has allegedly been based upon them in Protestant tradition. That challenge to the status quo may reflect a view of the scriptural traditions that is uncritical of the nature of those traditions and accepts what they say at face value and without demur. For those more critical of those statements in the New Testament the matter is more complicated: then both the ancient witnesses and the modern traditions must be subjected to a critical appraisal. The ancient witnesses may already distort the historical reality of that to which they bear witness and, even if they do not, the words or deeds of Jesus or his followers may be such that we today may take exception to them and find them inadequate. Our questions and objections today may find their support in the traditions that have reached us or at least in parts of them, particularly if we identify tensions and inconsistencies in those traditions. Or else our questions and objections may arise from other traditions at work in our culture that we hold to be valid or at least in part valid. At any rate, the dialogue between the present and the past then becomes a more complex process: the ancient witnesses and traditions cannot then simply be set over against the present as, for instance, the Reformers in the sixteenth century did, but it must first be determined as far as is practicable how faithful the ancient witnesses and their traditions were to their origins, to that which (allegedly) called them into being. ‘Scripture says’ is no longer in itself a valid counter-argument to set against the authorities of the present, but we must first ask whether what it says is correct. Or were those ancient witnesses and traditions already unfaithful or a distortion, whether intentionally or unintentionally?

155 Cf. ch. 1 n. 120 again! In Käsemann’s comparable story the suspicion is voiced that Jesus might be (horror of horrors!) a ‘liberal’ (Jesus, 16).

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One of the clearest examples of the use of tradition to challenge the traditional is to be found in Ernst Käsemann’s Jesus Means Freedom, written in response to the attacks upon him by the conservative ‘No other gospel’ movement in German Protestantism.156 With withering scorn he remarks that one might almost think that ‘faith consisted in hearing what one hoped to hear and expected in advance from a church service and what we ourselves , if not the world, find to some degree tolerable’.157 Over against his contention that ‘freedom’ is central to the message of Jesus and the New Testament, Käsemann remarks that ‘there are always traditions to which one can appeal so as to protect oneself from present freedom’ (8). The church, on the other hand, ‘is constantly being called on to break camp, and it has to leave behind what was once its gain; otherwise it is ruled, not by the Spirit, but by its own tradition’ (115–16). The challenges that the church must face today are for it ‘a matter of not being bound by a centuriesold tradition, and of being ready for exodus’ (138). Jesus’ uncompromising loyalty to his God allowed no toleration for other gods, ‘not even the gods of the theologians and the religious people, not even those gods of the Old Testament, wrongly imagined, and of the orthodox tradition’ (31). Yet Käsemann grants that Even an appeal back to earliest Christianity and the New Testament remains problematic, because differing interpretations emerge immediately; yet without the attempt to reach back to them the importance attached to particular traditions would become excessive.158

He appeals to the life and message of Jesus, and above all to the crucified Jesus: ‘Order has been for many centuries the framework to which one nailed all life and thought in the church’, but ‘the message of the cross is and will always be explosive’.159 The Jesus that meets us in the New Testament is ‘liberal’ when measured by the standards of those around him, and in all probability was crucified for this. ‘He repeatedly violated what was regarded as God’s will, and in so 156 The ET is based on the third ed. of the German, brought out a few months after the first ed.; although the English subtitle, ‘A Polemical Survey of the New Testament’, is lacking in the German, and Käsemann remarks that he has taken the opportunity to moderate his polemic in the new ed. (Where Ruf is quoted below, this is taken from the first ed.; when Ruf is not specified the ref. is to the ET based on the 3rd ed.) 157 Käsemann, Ruf, 25. 158 Käsemann, Ruf, 26. Käsemann may here be thinking of the different interpretations of scholars today, but the ‘heterogeneous’ nature of the church’s tradition from earliest days (cf. Jesus, 98) would and should mean that the different interpretations of the work and legacy of Jesus arose already then, at the beginning. 159 Käsemann, Ruf, 19; cf. 45 (=Jesus, 29): having commented on Jesus’ critique of the mighty and the rulers of his day and the subsequent interest of revolutionaries in his message, Käsemann then remarks that this had escaped the notice of German Christians who fashioned Jesus into a bourgeois figure after their own image and failed to take seriously what Jesus said about the church and theologians of his time. It is only ‘a small circle’ that realizes that ‘we no longer have anything in common with the ideals and conclusions that we took for granted when we were young’ (Jesus, 33).

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doing seemed to attack God the Father himself’ (28). He revealed ‘a God whom people always felt to be alien to them’, and he interpreted the first commandment, ‘against both the usual understanding of the Old Testament and the rabbinic tradition and the religious views of the Pharisees or Zealots’ (36). This Jesus may be called ‘“liberal” because he broke through the piety and theology of his contemporaries, and brought God’s promise and love in place of the Mosaic law, his own endowment with the Spirit in place of the Jewish tradition, clarity about God’s will in place of casuistry, and grace in place of good works’ (40; cf. also, e.g., 80, 148). Yet it was not only his zealous compatriots that found ‘the “liberal” Jesus … a cause of offence’, but his disciples and their successors in the church to this day also show ‘a like annoyance at his peculiar freedom’ (17; cf. 43). The gospels, too, must be handled critically: they were written when the need arose for a ‘doctrinal framework’ to counter the misuse of isolated elements of Jesus’ life, but that in turn justifies the critic ‘in breaking off the historical process and going back to the initial usage (Praxis), so as to loosen the doctrinal element that has grown rigid and difficult to understand readily’ (22). Similarly, he detects the first disciples falling back into a casuistry foreign to Jesus’ own teaching (24), and naturally this has left its mark on the New Testament writings. Of the Lukan double work Käsemann also complains that it ‘is not a preaching of the cross. It is not even exclusively the gospel of Jesus; otherwise Acts would not fit in so smoothly’ (125). Thus Käsemann implies that, just as Jesus’ use of Old Testament traditions was a critical one, questioning many aspects of its use by his contemporaries, so the historical scholar today must criticize not only the use of Jesus traditions today, but also their use by New Testament writers. May one not have to add, however, that if one takes the humanity of Jesus seriously then even Jesus himself may be open to critical evaluation? For one must ask: what if Jesus’ life and message already contained within them tensions and dissonances, which would be an alternative explanation for tensions and dissonances within the traditions? The tensions and dissonances may not have first begun with his followers. Might the historian not also have to be prepared to recognize that? Here we see clearly in Käsemann’s work, at any rate, a sharply formulated critique of those who regarded themselves as faithful guardians of the true tradition, a critique levelled at them in the name of the one who is claimed to be the source of that tradition. But more important for our present purposes is the recognition that, whereas for some the whole New Testament is treated as the foundation for subsequent traditions, for Käsemann these writings, even the gospels that tell of Jesus, are themselves subject to criticism in the name of the man Jesus of Nazareth. That in turn presupposes that one can already within the gospels sift out true and reliable witness to Jesus from false or distorted testimony. It must be granted that this at first sight may seem to be a process dependent upon the investigator’s whim, but, if dissonances can be recognized within the

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accounts, then one legitimate way to explain them is through the hypothesis that different voices can be heard there, voices that are not at all points in full agreement with one another. It is true that what is dissonant to some may not disturb others so greatly, particularly if they have an interest in excluding the possibility of such dissonances or are determined that all should be harmonious. In other words, there is no way of avoiding the role of the scholar’s or historian’s subjective judgements at this point, but the nature of the sources and the traditions contained within them demands the exercising of such acts of judgement, one way or the other. 160

160 Cf. Käsemann, Jesus, 115: historical criticism reveals the diversity and the riches of scripture, helping ‘us to separate what is necessary and significant from what is open to question. There is bound to be some risk in the use of this method, but there is risk in all methods, and in life itself.’

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6. Memory Hesiod tells how the nine Muses were the offspring of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory) and amongst them was Kleio (Clio) (Theogony 53–62, 77), who was later, at least from the time of Pindar on, to be identified as the muse responsible for ‘works depicting those deeds in the social history of humankind and cities that are worth recounting’,1 in short, the muse of history. History, in the sense of the narrative account of past events (i.e. historiography, according to the definition advocated above), as a creative, artistic human activity, is thus, along with other creative and performative arts, depicted symbolically and mythologically as the product of memory,2 and time and time again modern analyses of the nature of historiography link it closely to memory and remembering. 3 Two dissenting voices are nevertheless to be noted, those of Jan Assmann and, following him, Werner Kelber, with the assertion that ‘memory has nothing to do with historiography’.4 Put thus starkly, this statement is problematic and misleading. For, as we shall see, historiography has at least a great deal to do with memory, as Kelber seems to grant when he goes on to refer to ‘reconstructions of the past that are being pursued under the influence of memory’. 5 Is not historiography one form of such reconstructions? However, lest ambiguities creep in, it should be noted at the outset that the relation of memory and remembering to ‘history’ is a twofold one, depending on the sense of ‘history’ intended: ‘history’ in the sense of past events is what is remembered or believed to be remembered, while 1 C. Walde in DNP 6, 569. At the same time, as Werner Kelber rightly notes (‘Works’, 222), the fact that Mnemosyne was also mother of eight other Muses ‘articulates the centrality of memory in human culture’, and not just in historiography. 2 Ricoeur, Memory, 87, speaks of ‘memory as the womb of history’, as ‘guardian of the entire problem of the representative relation of the present to the past’. In contrast, Cicero speaks of historia (unusually in the sense of an activity of the orator rather than as the source of exempla, according to the commentary of Leeman, Pinkster and Nelson, 2.228) as the life of memory, i.e. giving life to recollection (so the translation of Sutton and Rackham): De oratore 2.9.36. 3 Cf. Wilson, History, 5–6: ‘History is to a society what memory is to an individual. Our collective memory of the past allows us to understand ourselves as part of a society formed through time.’ However, the precise relationship between history and memory is not easy to determine and has been the subject of considerable discussion: cf. the survey in Misztal, Theories, esp. 99–108. 4 Assmann, Gedächtnis, 77; Kelber, ‘Arts’, 253. 5 Kelber, ‘Arts’, 259.

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memories are one of the sources with which ‘history’ in the sense of historiography works in the hope of gaining knowledge of the past. Furthermore, Peter Burke points out that ‘history’ in the latter sense is in fact concerned with ‘memory’ in two ways: in the first place there is the sense just mentioned, in which ‘memory’ is studied critically as a historical source, to be criticized just as we criticize historical documents. The second way of examining it, however, focusses on ‘memory as a historical phenomenon’, yielding a ‘social history of remembering’ that takes account of the malleability of memories and seeks to understand ‘how they are shaped and by whom’.6

6.1. Remembering If the evangelists and those responsible for handing down traditions about Jesus had had their own muse, then she would doubtless have been able to claim to be Mnemosyne’s daughter too. For often we read of the central role of ‘remembering’ in the formation of those traditions, and it is stressed how much this aspect must be borne in mind.7 Repeatedly in the work of Jens Schröter, as we saw (ch. 1), the role of remembering is mentioned and this is hardly surprising in view of the title of his earlier monograph on the sayings tradition in ‘Q’ and in the gospels, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte. ‘Remembering’ is, however, if anything even more prominent in the work of James Dunn, as the title of his major study, Remembering Jesus, indicates, although Samuel Byrskog complains that he ‘nowhere defines memory and the act of remembering more precisely’.8 Dunn argues, very plausibly, that Jesus’ followers needed a foundation story or stories for their own self-identity and selfunderstanding as they identified themselves as his followers and took their name from him (175–6). Passing on traditions about him would have been their practice from the first (and not just after Easter) and this would have been a crucial aspect of the work of teachers in this community as in other ancient communities, and it is in the light of this that the recurrent emphasis of ‘bearing witness’ and ‘hearing’ in the gospel traditions is to be understood. The language of ‘remembering’ is important for Paul in relation to his converts, but the specific re6

Burke, ‘History’, 99–100 E.g. Dahl, ‘Problem’, 153=94: ‘We do not escape the fact that we know Jesus only as the disciples remembered him.’ 8 Byrskog, ‘Perspective’, 463. He also remarks that ‘Dunn’s way of using the label “remembered” is, in fact, hard to distinguish from “interpreted”’ (464). Also to be noted is the fact that, as Jakob Tanner notes (‘Erinnern/Vergessen’, in Jordan, Lexikon, 77), English usage mostly treats ‘remembering’ and ‘memory’ as synonyms (although the present chapter may be seen as highlighting some of the anomalies that then arise), whereas in German ‘memory’ can be translated as either ‘Erinnerung’, a process in which the past is actualized, or ‘Gedächtnis’, passed on via ‘Speichermedien’. 7

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membering of Jesus’ words is important, too, in Luke–Acts and John and this theme is echoed in 2 Peter and 1 Clement as well as in Polycarp, Papias and Justin. He notes particularly that John mostly speaks of remembering in the context of sayings whose affinity to Synoptic sayings of Jesus is clear.9 These memories of Jesus exercised, he believes, a controlling influence over further developments in the Jesus traditions. However, not all scholars react so positively to ‘memory’ and ‘remembering’.10 Crossan warns us, at the start of a brief chapter entitled ‘Does Memory Remember?’, that Almost everything that common sense tells us about memory is wrong. … Memory is as much or more creative reconstruction as accurate recollection, and, unfortunately, it is often impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. We usually work from either or both with the same serene and implacable confidence.11

It is true that Crossan is primarily thinking of individuals’ remembering,12 rather than of collective remembering, where one could expect a greater measure of intersubjectivity, but nonetheless his warning highlights the contentiousness of Dunn’s claims, and Samuel Byrskog’s summary of Dunn's position is so formulated that the remembering involved here becomes highly questionable if one is interested in historical reliability: ‘What is of significance to Dunn is that memory makes the subject matter of the past serviceable to the image that the community wishes to promote of itself’.13 That seems at first sight to put the remembering fully at the disposal of propaganda and wishful thinking, and Birger Gerhardsson goes so far as to compare here Durkheim’s appeal to ‘the creativity of the collective’,14 but Dunn gives the distinct impression that the collective remembering is for him something conservative, a protection against too free a creativity.15 This impression is confirmed by him when, in his later article deal9

He cites John 2.19–20; 12.14–16; 15.20, but notes as an exception 16.4. Even Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 258, remind us that ‘oral traditions based on memories, even those of eyewitnesses, are often fallible’ (cf. also their ref to Droysen, Historik, ed. Hübner 134, on p. 261), and Kirk and Thatcher, ‘Jesus Tradition’, 40, assert that ‘social memory theory expressly denies that lines connecting past and present are unproblematic, and highlights the effects of present social realities upon constructions of the past.’ 11 Crossan, Birth, 59. His warning finds support in, e.g., a report in the Guardian Weekly of 19–25 September 2008 (p. 15) that ‘Four out of 10 people have false memories of the 7/7 London bombings’, claiming ‘to have seen non-existent CCTV footage of the bus exploding in Tavistock Square in July 2005, while others gave detailed descriptions of non-existent footage’; the researcher in question, Dr James Ost, argues, accordingly, that memory alone is inadequate as ‘the basis of legal decisions’. On Crossan’s views cf. further Baum, Faktor, 72–3, 75–6. 12 Cf. Kirk/Thatcher, ‘Jesus Tradition’, 37–8. 13 Byrskog, ‘Quest’, 319. 14 Gerhardsson, ‘Secret’ 8–9; cf. Bauckham, Jesus, 291. But this is rebutted in Dunn, ‘Eyewitnesses’, 92–3. 15 Häfner finds in Schröter’s work, too, a stress on the continuity involved in remem10

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ing with ‘social memory’, he states that, whereas the ‘“social memory” school … is characterized by an emphasis on the creative, rather than the retentive function of memory’, his thesis has a ‘contrasting emphasis … on the retentiveness of the form and substance of the Jesus tradition’.16 However, Robert Funk’s brief comments on the rise of folklore (and legend) indicate that sometimes collective memories may function no better than individual ones: ‘undoubtedly’ memory can play considerable tricks on us ‘when intrigued by a mystery and fired by the imagination’.17 It is then readily intelligible that Werner Kelber speaks of the ‘inventive’ role of memory in ‘reconstructing’ the past.18 A further challenge comes from Willi Braun’s reminder, appealing to the work of M.-R. Trouillot, of the role played by amnesia, a deliberate or involuntary forgetting, at all levels of historical work, from the establishing of the relevant data to the evaluation of the meaning of the facts.19 It is also to be noted that Paul Ricoeur, in similar vein, turns to this last theme, amongst others, particularly in the last part of his major work on Memory, History, Forgetting. Moreover, the distinction to which he bering so that, however much the role of interpretation in the remembering may be stressed, there is a strong inclination here to focus on the conservative element of the reference back to the past: Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 107. It is then ironic that Schröter himself criticizes Dunn for seeming to paint a picture of a continuous development from Jesus to the Christ of Christian faith (‘Der erinnerte Jesus’, 48). A similar conservative tendency is found in Richard Bauckham’s appeal to the testimony of eyewitnesses, but the degree to which interpretation may then be involved here is apparent from his readiness to accept (‘very unfashionably’) the author of the Fourth Gospel as an eyewitness to the events described (Jesus, 6, 358–83). If the contents of the Synoptic Gospels are to be trusted to any degree, what the Fourth Gospel offers us can only be described as a highly imaginative construction. And, while Bauckham grants that testimony should not be accepted uncritically, the analogy with legal processes may suggest that, while testimony may, as he says (5), ask to be trusted, that request may need to be carefully scrutinized (e.g. was the witness in a position to know, was the witness a trustworthy person, and was the witness’s testimony addressing our questions or sharing our concerns with the truth?). 16 Dunn, ‘Social Memory’, 180 (his italics). 17 Funk, Acts, 5–6, recalling how stories about aliens visiting New Mexico in the 1950s arose, in the opinion of the U.S. Air Force through the conflation of the crash of a surveillance balloon with aerial experiments involving dummies. Note, too, Claussen’s caution (‘Jesus’, 6) when he sets against Bauckham’s confidence the bon mot of historians who have studied the recent past, to the effect that living witnesses are enemies of the historian, for the memories of the former are also subject to change and interpretation. 18 See above p. 189. 19 Braun, ‘“Wir haben doch den amerikanischen Jesus”’, 32; cf. Lewis A. Coser in Halbwachs, Memory, 22; Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, 115–31. The frequent unreliability of what is claimed to be remembered and thus ‘the indispensability of radical and critical scepticism with regard to what is remembered’ (32) is amply documented by Fried, Schleier; thus he argues that ‘everything that comes to us through remembering alone should be treated in principle as false’ (48); for the analysis of forgetting cf., e.g., 112–15. Cf. also Baberowski, Sinn, 21. For an example of deliberate ‘amnesia’ at work in historical documents (e.g. Augustus’ Res Gestae) cf. Kelber, ‘Case’, 79–80; Mendels, Memory, 37, 39; ‘Societies’, 149.

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draws attention at the beginning of this work, between PQKYPK and DMQDYPQKVL, between ‘memory as appearing, ultimately passive’ and ‘memory as the object of a search ordinarily named recall, recollection’ may be helpful here.20 For it will then be necessary, in other words, to ask how much ‘Jesus remembered’ is something given and how much it is something recalled, sought after and perhaps even, we may add, refashioned and reshaped. And, even before he turned to the question of forgetting, Ricoeur had also paid attention to what he calls the ‘abuses’ of memory – ‘blocked memory’, ‘manipulated memory’ (manipulated by ideology) and ‘on the ethico-political level … memory abusively summoned’ or ‘forced memory’.21 And, strikingly, it seems to be above all ‘collective memory’ that he has particularly in mind, rather than, as one might at first expect, individuals’ memory.22 To those ‘abuses’ might be added a further one mentioned by Doron Mendels, ‘contamination’, in which a memory is ‘contaminated’ by other memories from the past. The memory of one event is superimposed on that of another and ‘in fact results in the creation of a new, third, memory’. (He cites as examples Pausanias’ account of the Aetolians’ defeat of the Gauls in 279 BCE, which is ‘contaminated’ with the memory of Thermopylae two centuries earlier, and Eusebius’ account of the battle on the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE, which shows the influence of the Exodus tradition.)23 The title of Dunn’s study Remembering Jesus is thus a thoroughly evocative one, and yet, as Crossan’s claims warn us, behind the term ‘remembering’ lurk certain problems, above all the truth-claims which may be implicit in the language of ‘remembering’;24 as Ricoeur remarks, ‘To memory is tied an ambition, a claim – that of being faithful to the past’.25 That can be illustrated by three examples: 20 Ricoeur, Memory, 4; cf. 15, 17, 26–30. The active role of the person recalling is underlined for him by the French expression, faire mémoire de. 21 Ricoeur, Memory, 57, 68–92, 443–56. 22 Ricoeur, Memory, e.g. 69. This is the more surprising considering his use here of two essays by Freud that at first sight deal with individual cases, yet Ricoeur notes (78) that these involve ‘situations that go far beyond the psychoanalytic scene’. See also the string of examples cited by Margaret MacMillan, Uses, esp. 127–52, introduced by the comment that ‘History is about remembering the past but it is also about what we choose to forget’, where it is very much a matter of ‘collective memory’. 23 Mendels, Memory, xiv–xv (cf. ‘Societies’, 150, 158); Paus. 1.4.4; Euseb., Hist. eccl. 9.9.4–8. 24 And that these claims are very much present in Dunn’s work is already hinted at when, in dealing with C. H. Dodd’s claim for reliable historical tradition behind many of the details mentioned in the Fourth Gospel, Dunn describes these as ‘remembered details’ (Jesus, 166). There also seems to be a strong disinclination to allow such memories to be questioned, for, after suggesting that the ‘Q’ material is remembered by the communities that handed it down ‘as teaching given by Jesus’, he adds that ‘we should respect the claim implicit in that memory’ (328). 25 Ricoeur, Memory, 21; cf. 229, 497–8. Cf. also Holmberg, ‘Questions’, 446: ‘the term “memory” includes a statement or claim concerning a notable correspondence or “fit” be-

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1. ‘I remember the New Testament conference in Durham in August 2002.’ 2. ‘I remember the splendid weather during the New Testament conference in Durham in August 2002.’ 3. ‘I remember the stimulating presidential address at the New Testament conference in Durham in August 2002.’

Now the first these statements is undoubtedly true: I was there and I have not forgotten it. What Ricoeur says of ‘testimony’ applies to ‘remembering’ as usually understood: ‘What is attested to is indivisibly the reality of the past thing and the presence of the narrator at the place of its occurrence.’26 However, perhaps Sydney Shoemaker may be allowed to qualify this somewhat: normally it may be implied that the person in question witnessed the event, ‘or otherwise came to know of it, at the time of its occurrence’.27 (Whether the latter alternative would still count as ‘autobiographical memory’ apart from the event of coming to know it is a question that need not occupy us here.) The second statement is, however, more difficult, for the weather was (if I in fact remember aright), to say the least, mixed or indifferent, and at times very wet indeed. It is more likely that, if I said that, fellow participants would say here that my memory was deceiving me; one way of putting their objection might be to say that I remembered no such thing. In this example one sees clearly the truth-claim that may be implicit in the talk of ‘remembering’.28 The facts of the case mean that what I thought was a memory was no memory, but a delusion, a mistake. To that extent I would hesitate to assent to Jörg Baberowski’s claim that one can remember events that never occurred;29 one may think that one remembers them, but it seems doubtful whether this can be more than a ‘remembering’ in inverted commas, or what Shoemaker calls an ‘ostensible’ memory as opposed to a ‘veridical’ one.30 The third statement is less objectionable, but nonetheless contains an element of personal evaluation and perception. It might be conceivable (perish the thought!) that another participant at the conference had not found the address tween the event and memory’s mental image of it’; also Warnock, Memory, 37–8. Miller, Seminar, 94–5, appeals to the same feature of ‘memory’ when he argues that L. T. Johnson’s reference to ‘the earliest Christian experience and memory faithfully mirrored in the Gospel narrative’ (Jesus, 152) implies a reference to the ‘historical Jesus’ and a desire for a historically accurate portrait of Jesus despite Johnson’s insistence that any quest for him is ‘misguided’. 26 Ricoeur, Memory, 163; cf. 278. 27 Shoemaker, ‘Memory’, 265. 28 Cf. Rubin, Remembering, 2: one characteristic of ‘autobiographical memory’ is ‘the belief that the remembered episode is a veridical record of the original event’. Cf. also E. S. Casey, Remembering, esp. 283; Misztal, Theories, 118, quoting P. Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (London: Methuen, 1972) 210, for whom imagination concerns the unreal, memory the real, the past. 29 Baberowski, Sinn, 162. 30 Shoemaker, ‘Memory’, 267.

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stimulating and might even have dozed off. Nonetheless it would be inappropriate for that participant to call my memory of the address in question; rather he or she would have to take issue with my evaluation of the address – they had formed a different impression.31

6.2. Individual and Collective Remembering Now it is true that, as we have just seen, Dunn is thinking primarily of the dynamics of a collective remembering, not an individual one like the very personal memories or non-memories that I have just mentioned, and that this factor may mitigate some of the problems that beset the individual’s remembering.32 There is, as we shall see, a very important difference indeed between individual remembering and collective memories.33 Had I not myself been at the conference referred to above, it would be odd to say that I remembered it, as opposed, say, to stating that I remembered that there had been a conference; in the latter case I might simply have been told about it by someone else or have read a report of it. At this point the distinction that Richard Bauckham makes between ‘personal’ or ‘recollective’ remembering and ‘memory of/for information’ is applicable.34 31 The choice of this address is not fortuitous – it was delivered by James Dunn and foreshadowed many of the points in his monograph: ‘Altering the Default Setting’, also published as an appendix in his Perspective. 32 Bird, ‘Tradition’, 131, writes as if his stress on ‘corporate memory’ were somehow a development of, and improvement on, Dunn’s thesis, but I find it hard to see how his position differs from Dunn’s. Furthermore, in contrast to the confidence that collective memory is more reliable than individual, it should be noted than Jan Vansina sees the former as more exposed to the input of new items and at all times ‘more dynamic’ than the latter: Tradition, 161. That ‘collective memory’ is just as likely to be mistaken as individual memory or perhaps even more so is also maintained by Fried, Schleier, 47: ‘collective and cultural memory … easily allows itself to be led astray’. 33 Byrskog, ‘Quest’, 325, seeks to distinguish ‘social memory’ and ‘collective memory’ but, if the former is ‘that part of the mental act of remembering which is socially conditioned’, then perhaps it might be better to speak of it as ‘social(ly conditioned) remembering’, keeping the word ‘memory’ for the content of the remembering. It is true that Mendels, Memory, also distinguishes ‘comprehensive, imposed, collective or public’ memory (xv), in addition (presumably) to ‘individual’ memory, but it may be sufficient here to draw a distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘collective’, although the latter term by no means covers these four categories. (Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War is for Mendels ‘comprehensive’ in that it is ‘a synthesis made up of many memories collected from many sources (oral and written)’ [xi], and in describing so recent a series of events many of these sources will have been dependent on individuals’ memories. And, as Mendels points out [x], memory of ‘“common events”, “common matters” or even “common experiences” … is not necessarily collective, although the objects or events that were common to the society may be so.’) 34 Bauckham, Jesus, 312. See further below § 6.3.

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But in the case of collective memories or remembering, as Dunn would put it, there is not the same presumption of actual personal participation in the event or events remembered. Indeed, the further one moves out from the circle of Jesus’ original followers, the less likely it becomes that the group that remembers includes participants in the original events. In that case questions like the accuracy of the memory or the truth of what is remembered have, at first sight, to be posed and answered in a quite different way. And yet, if one raises questions about the accuracy of the memory of an individual, one way to answer them, indeed perhaps often the most obvious way, is to appeal to the memories of other participants: do they, for instance, remember the weather as being like that or did the address make the same impression on them? In other words, a collective dimension also plays a role here, although it is still a collective, it is to be noted, consisting of those who actually participated in the event in question. At the same time, it needs to be asked whether, in view of the truth-claims and the suggestion of actual personal participation implicit in remembering, it might be wiser to speak of a collective belief that is connected, in some way or another, with the memories held by certain individuals, who may no longer belong to the collective body, e.g. if they have died since the events remembered. It is at this point that Richard Bauckham’s arguments for the involvement of eyewitnesses in the formation of Jesus traditions are relevant. Noting that ‘Folklorists themselves have abandoned the “romantic” idea of the folk as collectively the creator of folk traditions in favor of recognizing the roles of authoritative individuals in interaction with the community’,35 he finds fault with Dunn for not paying sufficient attention to the role of eyewitnesses in exercising control over the tradition and in particular for neglecting the control exercised by the Jerusalem community, which Bailey too had overlooked. For, in his eyes, Dunn remained indebted to the form-critical view that, though there may have been eyewitnesses at the start of the formation of the Jesus traditions, they played no part subsequently (and here Bauckham regards it as axiomatic for the form critics that such traditions as those in the gospels were anonymous).36 Here, however, Bauckham maintains, both Dunn and Wright have misunderstood Bailey’s contention: ‘According to Bailey, informal controlled tradition operated only with eyewitnesses as the qualified reciters’.37 Nonetheless, Dunn persisted in maintaining that ‘it is not really 35 Bauckham, Jesus, 247, appealing to R. Blank, Analyse, 200–1, who in turn cites in support E. Hoffmann-Krayer; cf. also Botha’s appeal to A. B. Lord’s verdict that ‘Recounting traditions is done by dynamic, thriving, and unique narrations by specific and talented individuals, not by nameless tradents’ (‘Story’, 307; cf. 323; see also Lord’s insistence, in Singer, 102, that ‘A performance is unique, it is a creation, not a reproduction, and it can therefore have only one author’), as well as Boman, Jesus-Überlieferung, 10, 112–13; Byrskog, ‘Eyewitnesses’, 159; Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 4, 7, 490; Kelber, Gospel, 28; Riesner, Jesus, 13 (the assumption of creative collectives as a ‘legacy of romanticism’); Sanders, Tendencies, 12. 36 Bauckham, Jesus, 245, 290; cf. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 249, 252, 256–7; Riesner, Jesus, 19–20, 69; also R. Thomas, Literacy, 106. 37 Bauckham, Jesus, 261 n. 64. (He points to what is apparently a contradiction in Bailey’s account as it stands [‘Informal Controlled Oral Tradition’, 10] and argues plausibly

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possible to speak of tradition except as community tradition’, 38 leaving one to wonder how one would then describe, for instance, that chain of individuals listed in M. Abot ch. 1 if what they have received and in turn handed down is not ‘tradition’.39 And Dunn’s pupil, Terence Mournet, refers to the ‘stabilizing, self-corrective force’ of eyewitnesses within a tradition.40

Yet some of the difficulties inherent in individual remembering recur with collective remembering.41 Wright notes that in the Mishnaic period earlier Pharisees were ‘remembered’ – and he uses inverted commas here – ‘as great teachers of purity, even though several of them, including the great Akiba himself, were quite clearly political and revolutionary leaders of the first rank’.42 In the context, reinforced by the inverted commas around ‘remembered’, it is clear that Wright sees that only part of the picture has been retained in the collective memory of Mishnaic Judaism and that a very important part of the original picture has been sloughed off, in order to bring the earlier Pharisees more into tune with the needs of the later situation and more suited to the aspirations and priorities of Torah scholars of that day. This would be an example of that ‘amnesia’ to which Willi Braun refers. Similarly, whereas scholars have viewed the Christian church in the centuries up to the time of Constantine as ‘a persecuted, silent faith, virtually an underground religion’, Mendels points out that this impression ‘contradicts the almost uniform collective memory of the Church as formulated by Eusebius and echoed even by the pagan Celsus, however negatively presented’. For ‘Eusebius preserves all the memories that contained the notion that the Church rose to greatness not only because of its inspired theology, but also because it operated from the very beginning as a colossal media machine.’43 that Bailey meant that to be a reciter of the tradition one must have been aged at least 20 at the time of Jesus’ death.) 38 Dunn, ‘History’, 482. And in his ‘Social Memory’, 179. he acknowledges the continuity of his position with the concerns of early form critics before their practice of this discipline ‘went off at a tangent to focus more on the character of the communities which maintained the tradition’. 39 Ed. Neusner, 672–4 (Moses; Joshua; ‘the men of the great assembly’, including Simeon the Righteous; Antigonos of Sokho; Yose b. Yoezer of Seredah and Yose b. Yohanan of Jerusalem; Joshua b. Perahiah and Nittai the Arbelite; Judah b. Tabbai and Simeon b. Shatah; Shemaiah and Abtalion; Hillel and Shammai). 40 Mournet, Oral Tradition, 185–6. 41 Kirk, ‘Memory’, 5, notes that social and individual memory have analogous roles. 42 Wright, New Testament, 183. A concern for purity could, however, be a strong motivation for political and revolutionary action; the point would then be that only the one aspect of the teaching of these leaders had been remembered and not the other. 43 Mendels, Memory, 107; cf. 111; he also notes on p. 112 a counterpart to this, the ‘impression’ that Eusebius gives ‘that Jews were a discontinued affair in human history’. Mendels also notes how Christians ‘recycled’ the collective memory of the Jews to make the Jewish past a Christian one (115). Cf. Halbwachs, Memory, 196: inasmuch as the collective memory of the Christian group ‘grew more distant from the events, this group is likely to have burnished, remodeled, and completed the image that it preserved of them’.

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Moreover, it is clear that on other grounds, too, it is difficult to keep individual remembering and collective remembering (or collective belief about something in the past)44 completely separate from one another. That is shown, for instance, in an article by W. R. Farmer in which he regards as ‘intrinsically probable’ the existence in the primitive church of those who had known Jesus and remembered him, but also assumes ‘that within the tradition preserved in the gospels, the memory of Jesus is preserved’. The first assertion clearly refers to the memories of certain individuals, the second to the sort of collective remembering that Dunn envisages.45 But when Farmer goes on to remark that it is possible to ‘distinguish between what was remembered about Jesus and what has been added’, it seems that the memories of those individuals has fed into the collective memory of the early church, but has there been elaborated upon and augmented. If, then, we read in the gospels of ‘Jesus as he was remembered and worshipped in certain Christian communities a generation after the beginning of the church’, then this remembered Jesus is not just that Jesus whom certain eyewitnesses remembered, but this embellished and interpreted Jesus of memory.46 Again, Jan Assmann insists that the subject who remembers is the individual, even if the individual is dependent upon the social, collective, cultural ‘framework’ that organizes his or her memory, so that the latter remains a social phenomenon.47 Assmann’s emphasis is the more necessary if, as Anna Green argues in an admirably balanced article, the stress on ‘collective memory’ by oral and cultural historians has tended to lose sight of the role of the individual’s memory and ‘mem44 Misztal, Theories, 133, seems to endorse the identification of ‘collective memory’ with ‘collective belief’ when she writes that ‘Memory, as a collective belief in some vision of the past as being “the true” one in a specific moment of the group’s life, is assumed to be the the essential anchor of particularistic identities.’ 45 It is, however, clear that Dunn also wishes to leave room, alongside the collective remembering of the early Christian community, for the continuing role of the ‘individual figure of authority respected for his or her own association with Jesus during the days of his mission’ (Jesus, 243). 46 Farmer, ‘Reflections’, 61–2, 64. Kirk and Thatcher, ‘Jesus Tradition’, 26, point out how it was usual to reserve ‘memory’ for eyewitnesses and to speak of ‘tradition’ as what was handed on in the second generation after the eyewitnesses had had their say. This distinction they regard as outmoded (e.g. 32). 47 Assmann, Gedächtnis, 36; cf. 47; also L. A. Coser in Halbwachs, Memory, 22, quoting Halbwachs, Mémoire, 33 (cf. also Halbwachs, Memory, 40, as well as the critique of Halbwachs’ position in Misztal, Theories, 54–5); Fried, Schleier, 293; Thompson, Voice, 133. Marwick, too, insists that ‘the whole notion of “collective” or “popular” memory is a highly dubious one; at best, that notion is metaphorical, since “memory”, properly defined, is a faculty possessed by individual human beings’ (New Nature, 31–2, his italics; cf. 147); cf. Gedi– Elam, ‘Memory’, e.g. 43: ‘the only legitimate use of the term “collective memory” is … a metaphorical one, namely as some property attached to some generalized entity such as “society”.’ Buller, Geschichtstheorien, 128, 141, goes a step further in his treatment of memory, maintaining that, as a collective history feeds on memory, there can be no collective history independent of individuals.

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ory has become detached from the individual’. Yet, she points out, ‘individual and collective memories are often in tension, and the recollections of individuals frequently challenge the construction of partial accounts designed primarily to achieve collective unity. … Oral historians need to re-assert the value of individual remembering, and the capacity of the conscious self to contest and critique cultural scripts or discourses.’48 It is, however, the cultural ‘framework’ that, as Jörg Baberowski insists, Maurice Halbwachs meant when he spoke of ‘collective memory’, and not the memory held by a collective, even though the latter seems to be what Dunn intends.49 And it is arguable that it might make for greater clarity if the phrase ‘collective memory’ were reserved for the memory held by a collective, rather than being applied to the intersubjective social and cultural influences that play a part in the formation and retention of individual memories. Indeed, much of the discussion does indeed involve ‘collective memory’ in the narrower sense just suggested, in that the memories of groups or even whole nations are what is being considered. And, despite the misgivings of scholars like Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam noted earlier,50 it is still legitimate to speak of ‘collective memory’, as, for instance, Barbara Misztal’s survey of studies of ‘generational memory’ suggests:51 a generation, in the sense of the collective entity consisting of those alive at a particular time, above all those of a certain age at the time, shares together their own individual impressions of particular events, although perhaps there is also more to be said in this case for a phrase like ‘shared memory’ or ‘shared memories’. I can, for instance, recall from my student days the circumstances under which I learnt of the oft cited event of Kennedy’s assassination but also something of my feelings at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. And those Londoners who lived through the Blitz doubtless shared memories that, taken together, might be de48 Green, ‘Remembering’, 37, 41–2 (citing the example of Alessandro Portelli’s analysis of Italian partisans’ accounts of the battle at Poggio Bustone vis-à-vis the official discourse concerning the Italian Resistance). 49 Cf. Baberowski, Sinn, 166: it is ‘the culture within which one finds oneself that shapes the memories that one can have’. On the other hand, when he later (171) appeals to Reinhard Koselleck, to the effect that ‘the frame of reference of the collective memory includes our personal memories and links them with one another’, it is not so clear that the ‘collective memory’ that is meant simply has the function of shaping individual memories and is not itself a memory held by a collective, particularly as Baberowski then goes on to speak of what a society can or cannot remember. (Dennis Duling notes that ‘collective memory’ is now often replaced by ‘social memory (usually in reference to smaller social units) or cultural memory (usually in reference to larger social units)’: ‘Social Memory’, 2, his italics; nonetheless, I have continued to speak of ‘collective memory’.) 50 Cf. also Gedi–Elam, ‘Memory’, 34: ‘All “collective” terms are problematic – and “collective memory” is no exception – because they are conceived of as having capacities that are in fact actualized only on an individual level, that is, they can only be performed by individuals.’ 51 Misztal, Theories, 83–91; cf. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, 53–4.

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scribed as ‘collective’, just as Germans from old and new Bundesländer share their memories of the actual events surrounding the fall of the Berlin wall. Yet, when it is a matter of the memories of a few individuals that are then passed on to, and appropriated by, a wider group, as was the case with the memories of eyewitnesses relating to Jesus’ life, then perhaps a phrase like ‘imparted’ or ‘appropriated memory/memories’ might be apter (‘imparted’ from the viewpoint of the eyewitnesses, ‘appropriated’ from that of the recipients). For many followers of Jesus, even during his lifetime, learnt of what others remembered of his words and deeds, and it would be misleading to say that they ‘remembered’ those words and deeds themselves. Others had shared their memories of them with them, however, and they had made these accounts their own in that they had incorporated them into their own ‘remembering’ of Jesus. Nonetheless, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka is prepared to grant such a community the status of a ‘community of memory’ even though its basis may be ‘the telling …, the ongoing articulation of the “reality of the past” that forms and informs’ such a community.52 A later generation or a wider circle might have no personal memories of Jesus themselves and be wholly dependent on what others had imparted to them; here talk of ‘Jesus traditions’ may be more fitting. And yet it may be asked in passing whether there are not also memories that the individual may possess whose social dimension is minimal, if it exists at all? The individual may remember things that she or he did, thought, experienced or even dreamt without being at the time in interaction with others, and may not have mentioned these memories to others. It is hard to see quite what the role of a social or cultural framework is or how one can meaningfully speak of ‘intersubjectivity’ here apart from the fact that the individual concerned lives in a society and a culture, and that may be all that is meant here.53 However, the memories of Jesus are not of this kind and there is therefore no need to go more deeply into this issue here; they were not private experiences of individuals or at least, if they sometimes were that initially, they did not remain so. Even when the remembered experience seems to have been that of an individual, as when we read of Maria of Magdala’s encounter with the risen Jesus in John 20.14–17, yet the existence of this account in the New Testament narratives shows that this memory was communicated to others and no doubt discussed and further interpreted by others.54 Nonetheless, Richard Bauckham, who rec52 Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, 57. She expressly mentions ‘the Jewish and the Christian tradition’ as examples of such ‘communities of memory’ in this sense. 53 ‘Intersubjectivity’ or its cognates are terms that play a prominent part in Barbara Misztal’s account of ‘social remembering’ and ‘new sociological theories of memory’ (e.g. Theories, 6, 10–11, etc.). She also defends the claim that ‘Memory is social because every memory exists through its relation with what has been shared with others: language, symbols, events, and social and cultural contexts’ and ‘because remembering does not take place in a social vacuum’ (11–12). 54 Similarly, however private Paul’s experience on the way to Damascus may have been

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ognizes the ‘social dimension of individual remembering’,55 is also concerned to defend the role of the individual in the community’s remembering: ‘the existence of a collective memory produced by frequent recitation of traditions in a communal context does not at all exclude the role of particular individuals who are especially competent to perform the tradition.’56 However, once one passes beyond the circle of the eyewitnesses, the memories are not, strictly speaking, ‘shared’ in the sense that all have their individual memories of the events witnessed; for an increasingly large proportion of the collective group what they remember are no longer the events of Jesus’ life but the recitation of traditions about them, so that one would be tempted, as I suggested, to replace the phrase ‘collective memory’ here with ‘traditions’, although, it may be granted, ‘traditions’ of what some members of the group, increasingly deceased ones, actually ‘remembered’ in the strict sense of the word. What is important to note here is that the analogies between collective and individual ‘remembering’ and the blurring of the distinction between the two sorts of ‘remembering’ have important implications for those who seek to use the theme of ‘Jesus remembered’ conservatively. That is the case whether we see the role of the collective as a safeguard against the vagaries of the individual as Dunn does, or whether we look for such a safeguard in the memories preserved by certain key, mediating figures acting as a control upon the collective memory of the Christian community or communities as Bauckham does. Because the two, the individual and the collective, are linked together and are mutually dependent upon one another, neither of them can guarantee the reliability of the memory in question and either or both of them may be deficient, mistaken or misleading. At any rate, one needs to ask what or how much is one implying when one speaks of the early church’s ‘remembering’ Jesus? Initially, as we have already seen, some members of it will have ‘remembered’ Jesus, having actually known him personally, but is one confining this ‘remembering’ to that rather limited circle? Or does one allow the ‘remembering’ to be expanded to include a larger collective entity embracing many that had not personally known Jesus? Does one, then, approach a sense of ‘remembering’ such as that invoked in an institution like that of the British Remembrance Day, in which those who have died in the country’s wars are recalled, by a nation the number of whose members able to remember those dead personally diminishes year by year? That ‘remember(and Acts’ three accounts of this experience vary with regard to the degree to which this experience was also shared by those travelling with him), he undoubtedly told others something of this experience, as his references to it in his letters, albeit allusive, show. 55 Bauckham, Jesus, 313. 56 Bauckham, Jesus, 33–4. He stresses in the case of Papias that the latter was not interested in collective memories but in the testimony of certain named, pivotal witnesses. Cf. also Byrskog, ‘Perspective’, 464–8; Reicke, ‘Entstehungsverhältnisse’, 1779.

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ing’, though, increasingly becomes a simple ‘remembering that’ these people once existed and died in combat, a ‘memory of information’; one remembers nothing more about them than that.57 And, moreover, the remembering is increasingly a being made mindful of the fact that they existed; it carries, then, no connotations of recalling the dead to memory as if all the individuals involved in the remembering had actual experience of those remembered.58 It is at this point that I feel most uncomfortable with the continual talk of ‘memory-images’ in some circles,59 as if all remembering consisted of ‘images’. The sort of ‘remembering’ involved on Remembrance Day may include ‘images’, but increasingly these are the product of imagination or recall what those present have seen in old newsreel films or other films re-enacting past wars. A further complication that arises with ‘remembering’ is that it is often thought to involve words, sayings, stories. Are we to suppose that, when we remember how a Greek verb is conjugated, we see ‘in our mind’s eye’ the printed table of forms in a grammar book? Or does remembering the teachings of Jesus involve ‘seeing’ before oneself (collectively?) those scenes in which Jesus so taught? There are, it seems, a whole range of sorts of ‘remembering’ where the language of ‘seeing’ is most misleading. Equally misleading, for similar reasons, may be the assumption that one always remembers ‘events’;60 Paul Ricoeur seems to assume this, distinguishing ‘remembering’ from ‘memorization’, which he apparently labels an ‘abuse’ of memory, although ‘memorization’ is related primarily to what he earlier, following Henri Bergson, described as ‘habit-memory’, without, however, any hint of such disparagement. 61 It is, 57 Cf. E. S. Casey, Remembering, 216–18, who reflects that at the ‘Memorial Day’ ceremonies that he attended ‘I was not remembering any of the war dead … I was not recollecting them in discrete scenic form. Indeed I was not think of them at all during most of the ceremony.’ He stresses the importance of the others participating in the ceremony: such ceremonies are ‘something thoroughly communal’, and commemoration is only achieved ‘via an interpolated ritual and text in the co-presence of others’. 58 Here Assmann uses the phrase ‘communicative’ memory, as opposed to ‘cultural’ memory, to express this recalling of actual experience (Gedächtnis, e.g. 50). The phrase ‘autobiographical memory’ is perhaps more widely used (as opposed to ‘historical’ memory according to Coser in Halbwachs, Memory, 23–4). 59 E.g. Ricoeur, Memory, 44–55. Warnock, Memory, 15–36, highlights. too, the difficulties experienced by philosophers in distinguishing memory’s images from those of the imagination, difficulties that have led some (she mentions Thomas Reid and Gilbert Ryle, as well as Wittgenstein and also Husserl) to deny that images are involved in memory at all. Cf. Misztal, Theories, 119, who at least acknowledges that ‘imagination is perhaps not essential to all types of memory’. W. F. Brewer goes further and distinguishes ‘imaginal’ from ‘nonimaginal’ forms of representation of personal memories (not to mention other forms, e.g. those that C. D. Broad had distinguished from ‘recollective memory’, namely ‘skill/rote memory, and propositional memory’ – so Brewer, ‘What Is Recollective Memory?’, 21), although he notes that ‘Essentially all the philosophical treatments of recollective memory assume that imagery occurs during the recollective process’: ‘What Is Autobiographical Memory?’, 26, 29–32, 46; cf. ‘What Is Recollective Memory?’, 19, 23, 38, 60–1; also Shoemaker, ‘Memory’, 269. 60 Contrast Warnock, Memory, 11–12: ‘it seems wrong … to think of conscious remembering as always a remembering of events’; cf. also Shoemaker, ‘Memory’, 266. 61 Cf. Ricoeur, Memory, 23, 25, 58. It is true that Ricoeur may not wish to imply that all ‘memorization’ is an ‘abuse’, although he sees ‘opportunities for misuse’ coupled with that

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again, noteworthy how Bauckham’s otherwise thorough and laudable account of remembering concentrates almost exclusively on stories about Jesus and on events in his life. It is true that Vernon Robbins reminds us that ‘situations and actions are as important as speech in the tradition’ and that often ‘one’s memory of a situation and of action in that situation is more precise than one’s memory of words that were spoken’.62 But that means for him finding a place for all three, situations, actions and speech. Moreover, ‘Jesus remembered’ indeed seems to combine elements of both ‘events’ from Jesus’ life as well as things that he said, perhaps over and over again, and not just in the context of any remembered events. Indeed, we have seen how one problem of the Jesus traditions is the way in which sayings may have circulated in detachment from any context that the memory of an ‘event’ might provide.

And yet it is implicit in the ceremonies of Remembrance Day that those remembered have indeed existed; those remembering take that for granted and the names inscribed on war memorials serve as a record of it. A contact with a past reality is assumed – the lives of those that died in war – and the concept of ‘remembering’ thus retains its claim to the facticity of the remembered. That facticity is only questioned when something like the eery and sinister phenomenon of ‘Holocaust denial’ occurs and the memory of the victims and their fate is called in question. An early Christian usage that invites comparison with the sort of collective remembering involved in modern Remembrance Days is contained in the phrase found in the Lukan and Pauline versions of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, ‘Do this HLMWKQHMPKQDMQDYPQKVLQ’ (Luke 22.19; 1 Cor 11.24–5).63 Yet few of those called upon to do this, especially in a place like Corinth, can have been in any position to ‘remember’ Jesus in the sense of recalling their own personal experience of him in the way that an eyewitness of his life might have done. And, even if Jesus’ last meal with his disciples was no Passover meal,64 his last days are set within the context of a Passover festival. Like other great Jewish festivals (cf. ‘ambition of mastery exerted over the entire process of memorization’ (58–9). And it is perhaps only ‘dancers, actors, musicians’ who ‘represent the only indisputable witnesses to a use without abuse of memory’ as their perfect mastery of their arts enables them to give the impression of ‘a happy improvisation’ (61). The practice of the ars memoriae he condemns as ‘an outrageous denial of forgetfulness’ (66)! And yet, in the last analysis, the distinction between ‘habit-memory’ and ‘event-memory’ disappears ‘at the deep level of storing in reserve’ (441). But cf. Misztal, Theories, 10: ‘Habit-memory differs from other types of memory because it brings the past into the present by acting, while other kinds of memory retrieve the past in the present by summoning the past as past – that is, by remembering it’ (her italics). 62 Robbins, ‘Composition’, 134. 63 Chiefly only in the longer version of the Lukan text, but also in the Syriac textual tradition (cf. Metzger, Commentary, 175, mostly following Kenyon and Legg). 64 Quite apart from the Johannine chronology of the passion and the legal problems that arise if Jesus was tried and crucified on the first day of the festival, the distinctive elements of the passover meal, that distinguish it from other meals, are lacking in the accounts of Jesus’ meal.

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Deut 16.12 apropos of Pentecost), this festival was a festival of remembering (Deut 16.3), but a remembering of events in which one had oneself participated came even less in question here than in the case of early Christian celebrations of the Lord’s Supper. The ‘remembering’ involved here was a calling to mind, a re-presentation of what was narrated in the nation’s traditions, traditions constitutive of their identity and their sense of identity. Yet we earlier noted the emphasis on the ‘constructive’ element in historiography that was stressed by some theorists, and this emphasis has its parallel in sociological studies of collective memory, for Alan Kirk points out the presence there of a ‘“radical social constructionist” view of social memory’. According to this view the present is determinative of what is remembered: ‘“tradition” and “pastness” are symbolic entities constructed wholly in orientation to the present’, and ‘the analysis of a given tradition is exhausted upon exposure of its social positioning and symbolic utilization in the present.’65 This is, however, an assessment that Kirk himself questions, appealing particularly to the work of Barry Schwartz. For it excludes ‘the diachronic question, namely, how the depth of the past might inform, shape, support, not to say constrain the dispositions, interests, and actions of those situated in the present’.66 That makes it difficult to de65 Kirk, ‘Memory’, 13, quoting Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic, 1992) 54–5, and summarizing the thesis of Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Tradition, Genuine or Spurious’, in Journal of American Folklore 97 (1984), here 285–6. Maurice Halbwachs, Memory, 39–40, 224, is more circumspect when he stresses that the past is not preserved in memory but reconstructed on the basis of the present, i.e. ‘contemporary ideas and preoccupations’ (cf. Rubin, Remembering, 4, 6 – he speaks of ‘construction’, not ‘reconstruction’); that is true, too, of religious memory which reconstructs the past ‘with the aid of the material traces, rites, texts, and traditions left behind by that past, and with the aid moreover of recent psychological and social data, that is to say, with the present’ (119). Schwartz, ‘Origins’, 44, commenting on this ‘presentist’, ‘constructionist’ model of social memory theory (he also labels Bultmann’s form criticism ‘presentist’; 47), remarks that it is eclipsing the other alternative, a model that he labels ‘culture system’, according to which society may change, but ‘social memory endures because new beliefs are superimposed upon – rather than replace – old ones’ (he here cites the work of Durkheim and Shils). An example of such a ‘constructionist’ approach to memory might at first sight seem be the work of Burton L. Mack, e.g. when he speaks of the ‘pre-Markan materials of memory’ being ‘full of hostility’ against the synagogue, but concludes that Mark’s story here ‘is most probably Mark’s fiction’ (Myth, 11). Yet shortly afterwards he speaks of ‘the creative replication of the memory of Jesus … articulating not only how it was in the beginning, but how it was or should be at the several junctures of social history through which a memory tradition traveled’ (16); here an interest in ‘how it was at the beginning’ is not excluded, but set alongside various other stages in the transmission of the tradition, even though Mack immediately goes on to suggest regarding later social circumstances as the ‘generative matrix for a recasting of the memory tradition’. 66 Schwartz himself gives the example of the attribution to Jesus of sayings promising that he would return: ‘Their felt obligation to record what they believed Jesus said (because Jesus said it) reflects the past’s resistance to efforts to make it over, even when those efforts might resolve a great dilemma of faith’ (‘Jesus’, 256, his italics).

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liver ‘a satisfactory account of how a society establishes the continuity indispensable to its cohesion and survival as it traverses time’.67 It is true that the ‘semiotizing dynamic of memory is energized by the present realities and crises of the commemorating community’, and that ‘this hermeneutical responsiveness of commemorative symbols’ has given ‘rise to the sentiment that salient pasts are little more than ideological projections of the present’,68 but Kirk nevertheless wants to argue that the past cannot simply be manipulated at will to suit present interests. He wishes to espouse what one might perhaps call an interactive relationship, or ‘interplay’,69 between past and present, with the past exercising a real influence on present perceptions as well as our perception of the past being influenced by present circumstances. He appeals again to Schwartz’s work on Abraham Lincoln, where Schwartz argues that ‘Lincoln was a credible model for the [Progressive] era because his life, as it was imagined, was rooted in his life as it was actually lived.’70 Here Kelber remarks that, if ‘we can acknowledge that in memory’s work the past sets limits and defines the scope of what is to be remembered, while the present is inclined to reactivate the past, we have actually moved beyond a strictly constructionist model.’71 Furthermore, Kirk argues that a complexity in the nature of what is remembered allows what is remembered to be invested with a plurality of meanings as it is commemorated. (This is very much borne out by the whole complex and troubled history of the interpretation of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples.) Yet there remains the question: how far is what is remembered in this case and in others really remembered? May it not be that from the very first memories are distorted and shaped by other factors than the impact of that which is remembered? For Barry Schwartz’s concluding comments on the collection of essays on ‘social memory’ edited by Kirk and Thatcher are telling in that he notes how most contributors to the volume bracket the issue of historical veracity, refusing to worry … whether Jesus and his achievements might be a figment of the collective imagination rather than a real man doing real things. Reality, however, makes a difference. If we cannot estimate authenticity, we can reach no understanding of how commemoration selectively celebrates the historical record. Lacking historical benchmarks, we can only say that social memory varies; we can never know how much or in what direction.72 67

Kirk, ‘Memory’, 13–14, his italics. Kirk, ‘Memory’, 20. 69 Kelber, ‘Works’, 234. He then goes on to speak of ‘social memory’ as ‘bridging the demands of the past with the needs of the present’, and of ‘mnemohistory’ as a ‘negotiation between what for the moment we shall call a constitutive past and the contingencies of an ever-shifting present’ (239). 70 Kirk, ‘Memory’, 21, referring to B. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) 187. 71 Kelber, ‘Works’, 234. 72 Schwartz, ‘Jesus’, 259. Cf. also Halbwachs, Memory, who, after referring to the frequency with which groups distort the past ‘in the act of reconstructing it’ (182; cf. 223), then 68

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6.3. Memory – Trustworthy or Not? It is a considerable merit and service of Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that, where Schröter and Dunn had spoken simply of ‘remembering’ and had left it rather vague who had remembered and what this remembering involved, he goes into considerable detail as to the nature of remembering and what it involves, drawing upon various attempts to deal with the subject from a psychological perspective;73 many of these come to the conclusion that under certain circumstances memory can function better than many suppose. I have already noted that he (1) distinguishes ‘personal, recollective remembering’ from ‘memory of information’ and it is particularly with the latter that he associates ‘collective memory’ in the sense of ‘oral tradition’, where, according to his definition, the presence of eyewitnesses is no longer involved (314). And (2) he concentrates on reports of events in Jesus’ life rather than the contents of his teaching. As the title of his work already hints, he is concerned to make out a case for the continuing influence of (often named) eyewitnesses on the transmission of Jesus traditions up to, and including, the writing of our gospels, over against what he sees as the anonymity of those transmitting them according to Dunn’s account, which he views as an unfortunate legacy of form criticism.74 And if what these eyewitnesses have remembered is basically reliable, and if the written accounts have by and large preserved their witness faithfully and conservatively, then that of course speaks for the general trustworthiness of the gospels’ accounts (at least those of the canonical gospels, presumably). Over against Crossan and Funk’s scepticism regarding the trustworthiness of memory, Bauckham argues for its basic reliabilty when a number of criteria are satisfied, and holds that these criteria are largely met in the case of accounts of Jesus’ life found in the gospels.75 For, drawing on William F. takes the instance of Peter’s remembering what occurred during Jesus’ appearance before Caiaphas to argue that the confusion in the minds of the other disciples led Peter to modify his account, so that 'after a while he was no longer able to distinguish what he had actually seen from what the others claimed’ (196). (On the introduction of ‘misinformation’ into the memory of witnesses cf. the literature cited by Belli and Loftus, ‘Pliability’, 157–8, and elsewhere in the article.) 73 He draws especially on W. F. Brewer’s articles on ‘recollective memory’ and ‘autobiographical memory’. 74 That is a criticism to which Dunn responds in his ‘Eyewitnesses’, 98–9, 105, where he questions how extensively the leadership of the Jerusalem church would have been able to monitor the new movement’s traditions as it spread out. 75 It is to be noted that these ‘criteria’ function in very different ways in relation to one’s verdict on what is remembered (and hence I go on to speak of them as ‘factors’ instead of ‘criteria’): some create the expectation that the memories in question are reliable (e.g. if the events remembered were unusual), some are, in contrast, such that they are no argument against the reliability of what is remembered (e.g. lack of dating or an account’s being written from the point of view of an external observer rather than a participant).

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Brewer’s listing of factors that are relevant (or sometimes irrelevant in the sense that they are not a counter-argument) to a reliable remembering of events, he concludes that many of these are applicable to the gospels’ accounts and that ‘the memories of eyewitnesses of the history of Jesus score highly by the criteria for likely reliability that have been established by the psychological study of recollective memory’ (346). For these accounts deal, in the main, with unique or unusual events, even if some accounts are sufficiently non-specific to allow one to suspect that they are drawing on ‘generic memory’.76 These events were ‘salient or consequential’ in their influence on, and implications for, the lives of the participants and were ones in which they were, as a result, ‘emotionally involved’. On the other hand there is little ‘vivid imagery’, apart from occasional glimpses of it in Mark, although Bauckham asks whether oral performances of Jesus traditions might have been longer and have included more of these vivid touches. There are likewise few ‘irrelevant details’ to be found and Bauckham surmises that the traditions had already been ‘honed for ease of remembering’ (343).77 Taking up Brewer’s distinction between ‘field memories’ and ‘observer memories’,78 he argues that a consistently ‘participant point of view’ is not to be expected in remembered stories. Negatively, the gospels confirm the view that ‘recollective memories “exclude absolute time information for most events”’ (333). And, whereas some psychologists had distinguished the more often reliable ‘gist’ of the account of a remembered event from the details given, 79 Bauckham holds it ‘better to distinguish between details essential to the gist of the story and inessential details’ (344, using this as an argument against treating the feeding of 4000 and 5000 as ‘variants of a single story’). Finally, ‘frequent rehearsal’ enhances the reliability of memories,80 and Bauckham plausibly argues that the Jesus traditions were recounted from a very early stage indeed, with eyewitnesses’s accounts probably acquiring ‘a fairly fixed form quite soon’ and some ‘key words of Jesus’ being ‘remembered precisely’ (345) – one of his few references here to Jesus‘ teaching. He concludes, accordTo be noted is, however, April DeConick’s severe criticism of Bauckham’s confidence that ‘false memories’ were not involved in the case of the eyewitnesses behind the gospel accounts (‘Memory’, 179). 76 A ‘personal memory (with mental imagery) of repeated occurrences or circumstances but not of any specific instance’ (Bauckham, Jesus, 324). 77 In other words, in the case of both ‘vivid imagery’ and ‘irrelevant details’ these marks of reliable remembering are missing in the gospels. 78 The former reflecting the point of view of the one who originally experienced an event (presumably in the sense of directly particpating in it – Bauckham refers to this, more intelligibly, as a ‘participant point of view’: 343), the latter that of an external observer. 79 On ‘accuracy’ as getting the ‘gist’ right in ancient authors cf. Small, Tablets, 191–6. 80 However, Brewer, ‘What Is Autobiographical Memory?’, 42, notes William James’s contention (The Principles of Psychology 1 [New York: Macmillan, 1890] 373–4) that ‘the most frequent source of false memory is distortion introduced through the process of giving successive accounts of a particular personal memory episode.’

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ingly, that ‘frequent rehearsal would have the effect of preserving an eyewitness’s story very much as he or she remembered it and reported it’ (346). And yet the more recent examples cited by Johannes Fried of how eyewitnesses’ testimonies may be suspect gives one cause to wonder how far this confidence of Bauckham’s is justified; for Fried notes how with each repetition of the story in question new offshoots from the stream of remembrance appear.81 Bauckham also recognizes the element of interpretation involved in remembering and, drawing on the work of the psychologist J. A. Robinson, lists four factors affecting the meaning ascribed to memories: (1) some events are ambiguous and have several potential meanings; (2) an initial interpretation of an event may have been inadequate and may have to be revised in the light of later information or insights; (3) new information or a new perspective ‘may prompt us to reinterpret specific experiences or entire segments of our personal history’;82 (4) the social context of remembering may ‘significantly shape the way remembered events are understood’. However, regardless of what changes in the perception of meaning occur, the ‘quest for meaning does not take leave of the objectivity of the remembered past’ (340), and here he sees a convergence between the views of Robinson and the earlier psychologist F. C. Bartlett and those of Paul Ricoeur when the latter asserts that in spite of the traps that imagination lays for memory, it can be affirmed that a specific search for truth is implied in the intending of the past ‘thing’, of what was formerly seen, heard, experienced, learned. This search for truth determines memory as a cognitive issue.83

Turning to the Jesus traditions, Bauckham reaffirms that to some degree all recollection entails reference to the real past. Interpretation is therefore the search for meaning adequate to the event as well as conforming to the values and expectations of the person remembering and the audience (351).

And he rightly points to the acknowledgements, above all in the Fourth Gospel, that Jesus’ disciples revised their memories in the light of later events and insights (cf. John 2.22; 7.37–9; 12.14–16; 20.9), but at the same time remarks how little subsequent interpretation is discernible in many Synoptic narratives. Yet the example that he gives, the absence of an eschatological perspective in the stories of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms, is perhaps not the best one in that, given 81

Fried, Schleier, 47; cf. also Schröter, ‘Gospels’ 205. J. A. Robinson, ‘Perspective’, 200–3 (‘The multiplicity of potential meanings … Deferred meaning … Changing meaning … Negotiating meaning’); the distinction between his ‘deferred meaning’ (2) and ‘changing meaning’ (3) seems to be that in the former one’s judgement is at first suspended (if the need to suspend it is not recognized then it shades over into a ‘changing meaning’ in response to ‘New information or an altered perspective’ of which one was not originally aware). 83 Ricoeur, Memory, 55 (his italics). 82

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the authenticity of a saying like Luke 11.20 par., an eschatological dimension could have been imparted to the events and stories from the first, and would not have had to wait for ‘subsequent’ insights. (One could perhaps refer instead to those few passages where Jesus is shown coming into contact with non-Jews and note how relatively little they reflect the interests of a Christian community that had to wrestle with the question of its attitude to non-Jews and of their right to belong to its fellowship.) This phenomenon he sees, at any rate, as a further reason for rejecting the insistence of the earlier form critics that the gospel stories were moulded by their communal use. More appositely, he points out that many pericopes preserve their pre-Easter character: the memories incorporated in them ‘already had a degree of stability that severely limited the degree to which they were changed by further interpretative insight’, even at the hands of eyewitnesses (355). On the other hand, Jens Schröter insists, against Bauckham, that the traditions as we have them in the gospels blend witness and interpretation so that the two are inseparable, whether the interpretation is to be traced to those handing down the tradition or to the creativity of the evangelists themselves.84 It is at this point that Bauckham’s argument that the Fourth Gospel, perhaps alone amongst all four canonical gospels, has been written by an eyewitness becomes problematic for his conservative and apologetic purposes. For, however much allowance we are prepared to make for subsequent interpretation of the remembered Jesus, it is notoriously hard at times to recognize the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel as the same Jesus attested in the Synoptics. Whereas psychological theories of memory are not agreed on whether a ‘recollective memory is a copy of the original experience or a reconstruction’ of it, the latter being of late the dominant theory (325), so high must the level of interpretative imagination have been in the case of the Fourth Gospel that one would be inclined to call it ‘constructive’ rather than ‘reconstructive’.85 This would certainly be at best what Hengel and Schwemer refer to as ‘“memory” selected and formed by theological and missionary considerations’. In the case of the evangelists these authors argue that

84 Schröter, ‘Gospels’. e.g. 204, 206–8 (on pp. 202–3 he illustrates this from the story of the healing of Bartimaeus in Mark 10.46–52; Bauckham replies to this in ‘Eyewitnesses’, 230–2, although it seems to go further than the evidence allows to infer that Bartimaeus himself must be the eyewitness source for this story). 85 And Bauckham, Jesus, 411, grants that ‘the finished Gospel has a high degree of highly reflective interpretation’, yet it ‘does not … assimilate the eyewitness reports beyond recognition into its own elaboration of the story, but is, as it stands, the way one eyewitness understood what he and others had seen. … in fact the high degree of interpretation is appropriate precisely because this is the only one of the canonical Gospels that claims eyewitness authorship.’ François Vouga, on the other hand, bluntly states that the remembering involved in the case of the Fourth Gospel is a ‘creative remembering’ (‘Erinnerung’, 33).

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Even an eyewitness, because of a deeper christological insight as a result of Easter and the experience of the Spirit, could paint a picture of Jesus that no longer matched the ‘historical reality’ as we understand it.86

For Bauckham argues ingeniously and persuasively that John 21.24 claims that ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ is the author of the work (although the ‘we know that his testimony is true’ would most naturally mean that others were claiming this for him, not the ‘beloved disciple’ himself, whereas Bauckham prefers to interpret the first person plural as a substitute for ‘I’, ‘the “we” of authoritative testimony’: 370).87 Were that the case, then it would follow that the Fourth Evangelist had been an eyewitness of at least some of the events of Jesus’ life. Yet, even if ‘the disciple Jesus loved’ were the unnamed disciple who heard the Baptist’s testimony in John 1.35–9,88 this figure only reappears in the narrative during Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, from 13.23 on. Bauckham’s comparison of Josephus’ claim that his qualification as a historian was that he ‘had been an actor in many, and an eyewitness of most, of the events’ in the Jewish revolt that Josephus recounts (Ap. 1.55),89 might therefore go further than anything that the ‘beloved disciple’ could claim if his contact with Jesus was limited to the time of the baptizing activity of John and Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem. For how can Bauckham be so sure that the ‘occasions where his presence is explicit certainly cannot be the sum total of his presence with Jesus’ (402).90 At any rate, to have been an eyewitness may doubtless have given considerable weight to one’s testimony in the eyes of contemporaries, but the historian today may well wonder what of historical, as opposed to theological, value is to be gleaned from an account that is so highly interpretative, as Bauckham grants that it is. Doubtless there may be a considerable number of historical details that are accurate, perhaps reflecting a greater familiarity with the circumstances in Jerusalem, but if the historian is interested in the general character of Jesus’ ministry or in such questions as the claims that he made for himself, then she or he 86 Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 220 (although perhaps in the case of the Fourth Gospel ‘apologetic’ might be more appropriate than ‘missionary’). 87 And yet, if, as Bauckham argues (364–9), John 21 functions as an epilogue balancing the prologue of 1.1–18 (which, incidentally, I would also count as an addition to an earlier form of the gospel, although the references to the Baptist may have found some place at the start of that earlier form, whereas Bauckham regards all 21 chapters as a unity), would one not expect the ‘we’ of 21.24 to function in a way parallel to its use in 1.14, 16? (And pace Bauckham, Jesus, 380–1, I would find it very difficult to treat the ‘we’ of those verses as equivalent to ‘I’; the problem is, in part, that a plurality of persons may also provide ‘authoritative witness’, so that the question of a statement’s function as ‘authoritative witness’ and that of ‘we’ representing a single person have to be treated as separate.) 88 Cf. Bauckham, Jesus, 127–9, 390–3. 89 Perhaps in Josephus’ case this claim ought to be taken with a pinch of salt, even if his attested involvement in the events in question may be more extensive than that attested in the case of ‘the disciple Jesus loved’. 90 Cf. Patterson, ‘Can You Trust a Gospel?’, 201.

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may have considerable doubts as to the extent to which the witness of this evangelist can be used.91 Despite the judicial imagery that many scholars have recognized in the Fourth Gospel, such a degree of interpretation would not be permissible in a court of law, certainly not today and probably not then.92 What this eyewitness claimed to ‘remember’ would rightly be subjected to severe scrutiny, and it is not hard to believe that some of the more rigorous and sceptical historians in antiquity might have failed to be impressed by the fact that it was an eyewitness that claimed this. (It should be noted that, historiographically, there are particular problems when the eyewitness and the historian are one and the same person: if the normal procedure was for the historian to cross-examine the eyewitness, then a more than usually scrupulous self-examination would now be called for. And the case of the historiography of someone like Josephus, writing in defence of his own role and reputation in the Jewish uprising against Rome, shows that such self-criticism can by no means be taken for granted.) And if such an eyewitness claimed to be describing Jesus as he remembered him, then he might well be asked to distinguish more carefully between what were actually memories of Jesus and what had been superimposed upon them. For here it is not just a matter of certain things being left out, forgotten, as in Wright’s reference to the selective memories of the Pharisees in the Mishnaic period mentioned above, but also of something being added to the memories, even if the stress on Jesus’ divinity also meant that his humanity was in danger of being lost from sight, if not forgotten. Could one then legitimately claim to have ‘remembered’ Jesus as such a person as the Fourth Gospel portrays? And what control would there be over what was claimed to be the ‘remembered Jesus’ if these claims could be advanced with all the authority of an eyewitness when all other eyewitnesses were probably dead? Was the early Christian community, or at least the Johannine strand in it, completely at the mercy of the Fourth Evangelist’s inventive and interpretative imagination? Fortunately there were other traditions at hand, even if the eyewitnesses that lay behind them were now dead. What they had remembered of Jesus and handed on to their followers could be set against 91 This is very clearly put by Catchpole, ‘Proving’, esp. 178–80; cf. also Patterson, ‘Can You Trust a Gospel?’, 200. 92 Bauckham, Jesus, 502, asserts that ‘In all cases, including even the law courts, testimony can be checked and assessed in appropriate ways, but nevertheless has to be trusted.’ But is this not misleadingly rhetorical? Even if there should be a trusting attitude towards a certain testimony to start with, this can easily evaporate if that testimony is, e.g., shown to conflict with other testimony or to be incoherent. More apposite is a slightly later and more balanced passage (506, his italics): ‘Testimony asks to be trusted. This does not mean that historians must trust testimony uncritically, but rather that testimony is to be assessed as testimony. [As opposed to what?] The question is whether it is trustworthy, and this is open to tests of internal consistency and coherence, and consistency and coherence with what other relevant historical evidence we have and whatever else we know about the historical context.’

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the claims of the Fourth Evangelist as a counterbalance and, if need be, a corrective. To that extent, the testimony of the Fourth Evangelist may be criticized on a basis of which even Bauckham approves, namely the conflicting witness of other testimony.93 Moreover, reference has already been made to the work of Johannes Fried, and his findings relating to the reliability of eyewitnesses and their memories must make disturbing reading for those disposed to place considerable weight on the trustworthiness of early Christians’ memories of Jesus. For it is to be noted that he focusses much of his attention on the Middle Ages and the question of the reliability of memory in a culture where orality was pervasive; there were, as in the New Testament world, some who could and did write, but they were in the minority. Furthermore, in the light of the more recent examples with which he begins his study he fears that some of his fellow historians have been over-optimistic regarding the time-span within which memories may be expected to be reliable. Instead of estimates of up to sixty or more years it should be recognized that divergent memories can emerge in a far shorter time. It is true that the medieval materials with which Fried is primarily concerned often seem to presuppose a far longer process of the transmission of tradition than is the case with potential memories of Jesus found in the New Testament, but the examples that Fried has cited from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show the vagaries of memory that can arise over a shorter time-span.94 And, over against Bauckham’s confidence in the role played by authoritative figures like the leaders of the Jerusalem church in faithfully preserving Jesus traditions, Fried, while acknowledging the role of such authoritative memories, nonetheless argues that they are no more reliable in taking us back to the reality of what has happened in the past than the memories of other individuals. On the contrary, it is precisely the authoritative memory that tends to be canonized, that is consciously or unconsciously selective and is particularly susceptible to later distortion, either because it constructs from the individual elements remembered a self-contained history, indeed the definitive history, or because it accommodates the past ‘teleskopisch’ to each new present or over-emphasizes the significance of the elements of what has happened that have a bearing on its own present.95 The church’s selection and preservation of its authoritative documents is, in other words, comparable to the prob93

Bauckham, Jesus, 485. The examples that he cites are Richard Nixon’s adviser John Dean, the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the philosopher Karl Löwith, and Philipp von Eulenberg’s recollections of the circumstances of the death of Ludwig II of Bavaria (Fried, Schleier, 22– 46). Later he adds the case of the historian Hartmut Zwahr writing in 2000 of his memories of the events of 1989 (358–9). He also detects the same ‘strategies’ of memory in force in the work of Thucydides (329). Further examples are cited by MacMillan, Uses, 47–53, including ones involving the role of ‘collective memory’: it is, in other words, not only individuals whose memories may be open to question. 95 Fried, Schleier, 301. 94

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lem in the nature and extent of all archives recognized by many historians, even if the factors involved in the formation of the church’s canon may be to some extent distinctive. So Bernadine Dodge comments that ‘It is common now for archivists to acknowledge that they are as much the creators of the historical record as the preservers. It is the archivist who decides what is to be acquired, and, once acquired, what is to be permanently preserved. It is the archivist who decides how to organize and arrange a collection of documents. It is the archivist who decides how to describe the materials in their holdings, and who decides what ranking, and hierarchization, and scheme of classification’ will make these holdings available to users. And, since all that costs money, behind these and other decisions of the archivist will lie those of a funding body and its awareness or estimate of the needs of the society to which it is more or less accountable, and this is presumably what Dodge refers to as ‘an apparatus of power which shapes social memory’. 96 And in the ancient world the copying and preservation of materials was a relatively far more costly business, so that the pressure to make the ‘right’ decisions would have been all the greater.

The unease that should be occasioned by such instances as cited by Fried can only be exacerbated when an element of theological interpretation and elaboration comes into play, as it manifestly does in the case of the Jesus traditions. And yet those who set great store by the memories of Jesus may perhaps find some comfort in the possibility that ‘semantic memory’ that preserves lessons learnt from experience lasts longer and is more reliable than ‘episodic memory’ that preserves the setting to which this knowledge is indebted.97 Nonetheless, the ‘semantic’ element in the memories of Jesus must often, even if not always, have arisen after Easter, although this observation of Fried’s might offer some hope that, e.g., the general character of Jesus’ ministry and teaching and what was typical of them and particularly impressed his followers might then have been more accurately remembered than any details of concrete instances and scenes. Nevertheless, Fried’s conclusions are sombre ones as far as the reliability of memory is concerned, and his call for a hermeneutic of suspicion towards that which is remembered seems every bit as rigorous and ruthless as the demands of those who place the onus of proof fairly and squarely on those wishing to maintain the authenticity of any particular piece of Jesus tradition.98 The scepticism that he advocates includes a thorough scrutiny of the available sources, sifted according to their relative chronology (one is here reminded of Crossan’s sorting of the Jesus traditions into four temporal strata);99 one is to look out for traces of 96 Dodge, ‘Re-imag(in)ing’, 349; cf. also 363, where she speaks of archivists as ‘complicit in power relations’. 97 Fried, Schleier, 146; cf. 198, 367–8. 98 Fried, Schleier, 367–9: one must have an ‘appropriate dose of mistrust towards cultural memory, at least as far as episodic memories are concerned’, and the criticism of one’s sources must be sceptical, ‘for each must be treated as false in each instance, … although it may also transmit correct information’. The onus of proof is on those who postulate that information contained in a source is correct and not vice versa. 99 Crossan, Jesus, xxxi and 434–50.

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primary and secondary distorting factors and ‘modulations’ of memory of every sort, in particular contradictions, and should pay attention to orality, to literacy and the way it is handled in the particular culture involved, to factors and techniques that stabilize memory and to the degree that they are successful in doing so.100 When it comes to the problem of overcoming the seemingly numbing effect of this hermeneutic of suspicion, Fried requires memories to be tested against counter-memories (e.g. those held by the other side in a dispute), parallel memories (held by other participants in the events in question or witnesses to them) and testimonies that can act as a neutral control.101 Yet, despite his emphasis on the influence of their present of those transmitting memories and of those historians recording them, Fried does not wish to argue that historical knowledge is purely a matter of the historian’s personal whim or viewpoint. Not for him is the ‘postmodern’ denial of ‘referentiality’.102 The most important goal of the historical study of memory is for him the criticism of, and the control over, the distortions that have arisen in the process of remembering and tracing them back to the original perception of the things in question and the real state of affairs that existed then, despite the extent of the ‘modulations’ to which memory is subject (380). Moreover, while he sees that the credibility of some sources may be destroyed in the process of this criticism and that established views of the historical events may thereby be undermined, he holds out the hope that new sources may be disclosed and with them the possibility of constructing anew a different, but just as plausible, view of the past.103 Yet he offers but a few examples of this positive outcome of the criticism of memory from the field of medieval history, and the New Testament scholar may be left wondering what is to be expected from such a criticism in her or his field. It is true that the talk of new sources and of a new view of the historical situation emerging again recalls the programme of Crossan and of the Jesus Seminar who have often preferred extra-canonical materials to the Jesus traditions of the canonical gospels. Those, on the other hand, who are more disposed to regard these extracanonical sources as largely secondary, relatively late and tendentious developments dependent in large measure on the canonical traditions, will be unable to see how calling the memories of Jesus contained in the canonical traditions in question has been compensated by the opening up of new sources that have a higher claim to be heard. The demand for ‘counter-memories’, parallel memories and neutral, controlling testimonies may also leave those studying the life of Jesus at a loss. For we 100

Fried, Schleier, 224–5; cf. also 374–5. Fried, Schleier, 330; cf. 378. 102 Cf. Fried, Schleier, 135: our construction of the world by no means lacks any element of reality; ‘every linguistic formulation, every message, every story, every picture of the past points … in the first instance to a … reality’. 103 Fried, Schleier, 385, 388. 101

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have almost exclusively Christian memories at our disposal. Even if the New Testament apocrypha contain documents like the Acts of Pilate, even this work claims to be by a Roman convert to Christianity drawing upon an account composed by Nicodemus.104 Or there is the Testimonium Flavianum (Jos., Ant. 18.63–4), which has been worked over by Christians, yet may contain some statements that can credibly be attributed to the Jewish historian himself. Whether Josephus is in that case to be regarded as a hostile witness or a neutral one may be a moot point; at any rate, having been born after Jesus’ death, he cannot have had any personal memories of Jesus but would have been dependent on traditions passed on by others. For hostile witnesses one has again to wait, this time even longer, for allusions such as that found in Tacitus’ Annals 15.44. The best that the New Testament scholar can do to satisfy Fried’s demands here may be to invoke as some sort of ‘parallel memories’ elements of the Jesus traditions that are attested in more than one independent source. Nevertheless, one may be left in very many cases with a scepticism and a suspicion that is a far cry from the optimism of those for whom memory is a guarantee of continuity from the time of Jesus’ ministry to that of the writing of our gospels. I am not a little puzzled by Anthony Le Donne’s argument that ‘memory distortion’ does not mean ‘non-historicity’. Granted that ‘distortion is used as a technical term referring to the difference between the memory of the past and ‘past actuality’,105 and need not be used in a negative sense, one needs to ask whether a neutral sense might be better conveyed by terms such as ‘shape’ or ‘form’ rather than ‘distort’. More important still is the consideration that if one is aware of a difference between the memory and the ‘past actuality’ then that implies some knowledge of the past other than the memory alone. Yet it is the ‘past actuality’ that interests the historian, and the critical study of memories serves as a means to that end.106 It is true that there is here a certain circularity, for it is only when one at least glimpses, or thinks that one glimpses, that ‘past actuality’ that one can judge that the memories in question differ from it. Otherwise one is left to judge the memories either in the light of ‘counter-memories’ or in terms of their internal coherence or credibility.

6.4. Remembering as The Jesus who was remembered in the earliest church, however, was a Jesus who had said and done certain things. If one asserts that it remembered that Jesus had said and done these things, then that might well be taken to imply that he had indeed said and done these things. Or is it rather that he was remembered as hav104 Acts of Pilate, Prologue: Schneemelcher, Apokryphen 1, 399–400; Elliott, Apocryphal NT, 169–70. 105 Le Donne, ‘Distortion’, 166. 106 I am also puzzled by the assertion that memory is ‘a metaphor for history’ (Le Donne, ‘Distortion’, 167); is ‘metaphor’ being used here in a somewhat unusual sense?

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ing said and done them, without implying that the form of this memory is necessarily veridical? One may, for instance, remember a former schoolteacher as a very old person, and so it may have seemed at a relatively early stage in one’s life. Only later does one come to realize that the teacher may not in fact have been so old then, but merely seemed so to his or her young pupils. This sort of ‘remembering as’ then says more about the manner in which the person in question was perceived and may still be conceived, rather than about that person in himself or herself. Applied to Jesus, does that mean that this ‘Jesus remembered’ is what might otherwise be described as the ‘faith image’ of Jesus? That is to say, this is how Jesus was and is remembered amongst his followers whether it corresponds to his actual words and deeds or not. This sort of ‘remembering as’ comes nearer to the third example given above in § 6.1, that of an evaluative memory, for it, too, is based upon the impression made by a person (or event) at the time. The degree to which this impression is open to question may vary. One may demur at the memory of the teacher as ‘very old’ on the grounds that his or her actual age at the time did not correspond to what would normally be designated as ‘very old’. Had I remembered the presidential address as very long, someone might retort and say that it was of the normal length for such addresses. But my memory of it as stimulating is harder to challenge. Only if, for instance, someone sitting nearby had noticed that I had, in fact, dozed off after the first few minutes and had only woken up with the sound of the final rousing applause, would that person be in a position to challenge that ‘remembering as‘ as incompatible with my observed behaviour at the time. Similarly a remembering it as ‘very good’ would only really be open to challenge if I had expressed a very different opinion immediately after the address or had sat there muttering ‘rubbish’ under my breath during the lecture. That there is this dimension to ‘remembering’ should not surprise us, for Samuel Byrskog has cogently reminded us of the interpretative element in the original ‘seeing’ itself and sees a recognition of this dimension already present in the ancient world.107 Here both the personal experience of the witness and, bound up with that, cultural elements or communal perceptions may play an important part in the observation which may or may not be remembered afterwards. What one person may see as a little brown bird is to the eye of the experienced ornithologist a rare and exotic migrant warbler. The latter is likely to remember the occasion vividly and for a long time, the former may think no more of it. And what does the foreigner see in a rite such as a Burns’ Supper? A group of people, some apparently transvestites, holding a meal accompanied by music of doubtful delight, particularly if a bagpipe is played in a confined space, and by recitations of incomprehensible poetry, as the prelude to the consumption of a 107 ‘Sight is not to be merely a matter of passive observation; it has to do with active understanding’ (Byrskog, Story, 147).

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dish about whose ingredients the foreign observer thinks it wiser not to speculate. How very different the perception of the native brought up to cherish this part of her or his national heritage. In this instance the remembering may be rather different. Those familiar with the tradition may not remember very much about this particular occasion, unless something unusual occurred (e.g. the haggis was off and everyone was taken ill with food poisoning), whereas the visitor to whom it was all so strange and unfamiliar may well remember it all too well. (It will be noted that in the one instance, that of the rare bird, the previous experience of the observer made the event memorable, in the other, the Burns’ Supper, his or her inexperience.) Some saw Jesus as a deluded and fanatical charlatan, others saw in him an authoritative messenger from his and their God, and those perceptions will doubtless have coloured and shaped their memories. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that ‘remembering as’ was simply the temporal continuation of ‘seeing as’, for the passage of time and the influence of other events and factors may affect our memories considerably. The memories may, of course, fade, but I am thinking also of the way in which other factors may cause us to see, and to remember, events of the past in a way different from the manner of our original perception. What difference does it make, say, to my memories of my schooldays if my attitude to private schools such as the one I attended has since then changed? What was then accepted as normal and, if need be, to be endured may now be remembered and regarded with a shudder, even with a sense of outrage. What effect, then, did it have upon James’s memories of his brother when he came to join the ranks of those who believed in that brother and venerated him? Had he, for instance, regarded him previously with disdain, perhaps even with resentment for taking up the life of an itinerant preacher when he could have been helping his family in Nazareth make ends meet, then surely the perceptions and memories of James as leader of the Jerusalem church would have been very different indeed. What he remembered of the life of Jesus would now have been seen in a totally different light. A further dimension is added to the problems of the talk of ‘remembering’ when Dunn tentatively introduces the idea of ‘half-remembering’ in an attempt to account for some of the stories of Jesus’ nature miracles coming into being, the notion of a ‘half-remembered experience which provided the basis and stimulus for the theological elaboration which gave the traditions their definitive character’.108 Following John P. Meier he wonders whether ‘behind our Gospel stories of Jesus feeding the multitudes lies some especially memorable communal meal of bread and fish, a meal with eschatological overtones celebrated by Jesus and his disciples with a large crowd by the Sea of Galilee’.109 And in the case of Jesus’ walking on the water and stilling of the storm Dunn asks whether be108 109

Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 688. Meier, Jew 2, 966, quoted by Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 687.

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hind them lay experiences of the disciples of ‘one or more dangerous journeys across the lake’ which they experienced ‘as a miracle of rescue or revelation’ (and then ‘remembered’ it ‘as’ such?) (688). At this point he seems to want to avoid the assumption of any originally non-miraculous account that was only later elaborated in a miraculous form and to reckon with the possibility of ‘traditions given the shape which still determines them more or less from the first telling, and by those reflecting on experiences which they interpreted in and by the telling’ (688–9). His ‘more or less’ does, however, open up (more or less) the possibility of being able to distinguish between the original experience and the later reflection, the latter being informed both by convictions about who Jesus was and by current expectations about the possibilities of a figure such as Jesus was believed to be. Later reflection is certainly suggested by Dunn’s seeing in the stilling of the storm ‘clear echoes of the Jonah story’ and in the feeding of the five thousand ‘the echo of 2 Kgs 4.42–44’ (686). Nonetheless, Dunn’s assessment differs from that of earlier (and also not so early) naturalistic explanations in that he does not let himself be drawn into the often detailed and entirely fanciful rationalizing speculations about the original nature of the events that he had earlier mentioned.110 The original events that are (only) ‘half-remembered’ are left deliberately vague and amount to no more than hints in the direction of thoroughly plausible occurrences that might have offered scope for elaboration and interpretation. These occurrences remain, however, essentially this-worldly and non-supernatural. In the light of these examples it is, perhaps, helpful to recall a point made by my Munich colleagues, Knut Backhaus and Gerd Häfner, most clearly expressed at the close of their book on Historiographie und fiktionales Erzählen.111 In their eyes the talk of ‘remembering’ threatens to distract from the historian’s task by simply perpetuating a memory-image and memories. The exegete, inasmuch as she or he is working as a historian, has the task of viewing the memory-image from a distance and assessing it historically. Where tendencies that can in principle be tested played a part in the construction of the memory-image, then criteria can be used to guide one’s reconstruction, leading to a second image to set alongside the sources but not to replace the first image. In other words, what is remembered remains constantly open to criticism and revision, and that criticism and revision involves going ‘behind’ the memory-image and assessing what has led to its construction in the light of what we have reason to suppose happened in the past that is remembered.

110 111

Dunn, Jesus, esp. 31. Backhaus/Häfner, Historiographie, 135–6.

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6.5. Memory and Identity That criticism and revision will, however, almost inevitably be an uncomfortable and controversial process, inasmuch as memory, especially collective memory, plays an important role in the creation of identity and the preservation of a sense of identity, both for the individual and for the group.112 As Barbara Misztal puts it, the ‘importance of memory lies in the identity that it shapes’.113 And yet is the connection between memory and identity not somewhat different in the cases of the individual and the collective? My awareness of my own identity may come through a series of memories of my past life and experiences, but a collective’s awareness of its identity is likely to come through an awareness of experiences the knowledge of which is mediated to the members of the collective by others, by tradition. I may remember myself as as a boy going to a certain school or as a young man going to a certain university, but in the case of a collective such as the Christian community, which would certainly qualify as an example of what Misztal refers to as ‘mnemonic communities’ or, more felicitously, ‘communities of memory’,114 what is remembered is mediated by tradition, by stories; this community receives its Christian identity through what it has heard and learnt from its predecessors in that community. One might here speak of a mediated sense of identity. Similarly, a nation may achieve a sense of identity through a shared, remembered history; yet, if the histories of different parts of a nation diverge from one another, may even be histories of opposition to one another, then this presents problems for the sense of that nation of being one and the same nation. With regard to nations one only has to look at the complex and troubled histories of the British Isles, the Balkans or the parts of the former USSR, but in the case of the Christian community is it not the case that a persistent problem in ecumenical relations lies in the different histories of different parts of that community, which lead in turn to a fragmentation of the sense of identity? Nevertheless, the Christian community seems to look back to a shared starting-point of its history, a starting-point that should serve to unite its different parts, except that that starting-point is open to different interpretations that militate against the unifying effects of that common origin. For some Christians the words of Jesus in Matt 16.18, ‘You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church’, have played a dominant role in the shaping of their version of the Chris112 On the individual’s memory and personal identity cf. Warnock, Memory, 53–74. And yet if, as she maintains, physiological continuity is integral to that personal identity (cf., e.g. 73–4), then it is hard to see just how one would apply that to the identity, and the awareness of identity, of a collective like a nation or a people that has existed over several generations. 113 Misztal, Theories, 14. 114 Misztal, Theories, 15; cf. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, 47–65.

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tian tradition, whereas others understand these words and their significance very differently. And were, for instance, the memory of a Jesus who set his face against violence to be successfully challenged, as S. G. F. Brandon attempted in his alignment of Jesus with the nationalist Zealots,115 or as Bruce Chilton seems to suggest in the extensive and violent operation that he sees lying behind the gospel accounts of Jesus’ action in the Jerusalem temple,116 then this should prove uncomfortable for those upholding the tradition of Christian pacifism. (On the other hand, it might offer some comfort to those whose view of Christianity allows them to ask for God’s blessing on weapons of mass destruction and other armaments.) And while Paul seemed able to develop a Christian tradition that stressed the Christian’s freedom, others, even within traditions that claimed this apostle’s authority for their version of the Christian life and faith, felt a greater need to lay down strict rules of behaviour and played down any talk of freedom. ‘Paul remembered’ seems, in other words, to have been just as much subject to interpretation and variation as ‘Jesus remembered’. At the same time, these examples indicate how selective Christian ‘memory’ has often been, one way or the other. Just as Doron Mendels points out how different political parties in ancient Athens ‘created (or recalled) different memories for their political agendas that were in certain instances a recycled version of the original image’, memories that ‘became part of a living community, a political party’,117 so too different Christian traditions have selected different memory-images of Jesus, at least inasmuch as they claim to find in Jesus’ way of life and teaching ethical guidance and a moral example. (Perhaps most would at least like to think, if pressed to reflect on the matter, that their attitudes and conduct were in continuity with those of Jesus, but in practice this ‘reference back’ has often been lost from sight and has been replaced by more recent traditions or even contemporary fashions of thought and behaviour.) For Dunn, in his earlier Jesus and the Spirit, concludes by noting ‘at least four different models’ of ‘the corporate dimension of religious experience’ within the first two generations of the Christian movement. He points to Luke’s ‘uncritical glorying in the vitality of the charismatic and ecstatic experience of the first generation’ of Christians, to ‘the Pauline vision of charismatic community’, to ‘the response of the Pastorals to the post-Pauline situation, where there is little place either for Lukan vitality or for the Pauline vision’ and all ‘seems to be subordinated to the preservation of the kerygmatic tradition’, with the ‘great risk that tradition will become a straitjacket with the Spirit imprisoned within office and institution’, and lastly to the Johannine writings, which he sees as reacting against this tendency.118 It is true that he does not link these four models to dif115 116 117 118

Brandon, Jesus. Chilton, Rabbi Jesus, 228–9. Mendels, Memory, 35; ‘Societies’, 148. Dunn, Jesus, 359.

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ferent memories of Jesus, although undoubtedly proponents of each would have believed that they were faithful heirs of Jesus’ legacy. For in his later Unity and Diversity Dunn also stressed (a) that the diverse writings of the New Testament all testify to the centrality of ‘Jesus-the-man-now-exalted’, and (b) that this legitimates (at least to some extent) the present diversity within Christianity, quoting with approval Käsemann’s dictum that the New Testament canon ‘provides the basis for the multiplicity of the confessions’ within the Christian church. It only legitimates the present diversity ‘to some extent’, however, in that Dunn also sees in the canon a limitation of ‘acceptable diversity’.119 In Dunn’s seeing the source of unity in ‘Jesus-the-man-now-exalted’ the link to memories of that man becomes clearer, but in endorsing the canon’s choice of the ‘limits of acceptable diversity’ Dunn seemingly sets his face against any questioning of the reliability or appropriateness of the various memories found in it or even any attempt to judge whether some of them were more faithful or appropriate than others. In that respect he parts company with Käsemann who was, as Dunn acknowledges, prepared to say that the canon ‘also legitimizes as such more or less all sects and false teaching’.120 Elsewhere Käsemann was most certainly prepared to engage in heated argument with certain manifestations of Christianity today, even and particularly within his own Lutheran denomination, believing that ‘theological controversy … has its dignity, its importance, and its right to be impassioned, because in it we discuss whether we really and rightly know Jesus.’121 And the church ‘must tremble in all its joints when it is confronted with his portrait’. For ‘what gives most trouble to Christianity of all epochs is neither lack of faith nor excess of criticism; it is Jesus himself, who bestows freedom so open-handedly and dangerously on those who do not know what to do with it’ (149). And that surely means that not all memory-images of Jesus, even canonized ones, are equally and indisputably valid, but must be critically evaluated. In contrast to Käsemann’s sharp criticisms, Dunn’s approach to the diversity of forms of Christianity today is markedly more tolerant and this is true, too, of his handling of the various traditions within earliest Christianity. This can be seen in his analysis of various spectra within the various strands of those traditions, spectra within which he detects a point at which each strand passes from the acceptable to the unacceptable. I have pointed out elsewhere, however, that it is necessary to ask ‘Acceptable to whom?’ and not to allow our answer to be determined for us in advance either by the canon or present-day orthodoxy. Then I took as an example the conduct of Peter and other Jewish Christians at Antioch in Gal 2.11–14, conduct that was unacceptable to Paul. On the other hand, James and the Jerusalem church apparently had, in turn, grave doubts as to whether 119 120 121

Dunn, Unity, 376–8, quoting Käsemann, ‘Canon’, 103 (Ger. 221). Käsemann, NT als Kanon, 402, quoted by Dunn, Unity, 419 n. 9. Käsemann, Jesus, 147.

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Paul’s conduct as a missionary was acceptable.122 Or, to take another example and to put it another way, would the Jesus ‘remembered’ by Matthew – or the Jesus implicitly ‘remembered’ by the Letter of James, despite its silence about Jesus traditions – have been welcome to Paul? Would that have been the sort of Jesus that he would have wanted to ‘remember’? For, after all, a Jesus who was ‘remembered’ as having taught that one who relaxed one of the commandments of the Jewish law and taught accordingly should be counted as least in God’s kingdom (Matt 5.19) would scarcely be seen as favouring Paul’s missionary strategy. In these cases a common element is a question of ‘identity’, the question how far Christian ‘identity’ was in continuity with Jewish ‘identity’ and how far the two were distinct. Thus, against the tendency to see ‘Jesus remembered’ as guaranteeing continuity and as a basis of unity, it must be asked how Jesus is remembered and due allowance must be made for the fact of an inevitable selection and forgetting as well as for the possibility of intentional or unintentional manipulation or distortion of the memory of him, as well as for differences in the memories preserved of him and correspondingly differing Christian traditions. It may, accordingly, be salutary to close this chapter with two references to Peter Burke’s article on ‘History as Social Memory’. In the first place, he suggests that we should ‘think in terms of different “memory communities” within a given society’, and ask ‘who wants whom to remember what, and why?’ and ‘Whose version of the past is recorded and preserved?’ (107). That is certainly true of the Christian church or churches, whether viewed diachronically or synchronically, and the synchronic diversity may well stretch back to earliest times if we bear in mind the differing portraits of Jesus, found not only in the four canonical gospels, but also in the New Testament apocrypha. The second point is his reference to the theme of amnesia, the suppression of memories, and his contention that historians should be regarded, not as ‘the guardians of memory, the memory of glorious deeds’, as Herodotus thought,123 but ‘as the guardians of awkward facts, the skeletons in the cupboard of social memory’, like that ‘Remembrancer’ whose title was actually a euphemism for a debt-collector who ‘reminded people of what they would have liked to forget’ (110).124 The historian who studies Jesus’ life critically may well find that questions and possible scenarios emerge which it would be more comfortable to forget or to ignore – perhaps nowhere more so than when handling the traditions of Jesus’ resurrection appearances. In this case 122

Cf. Wedderburn, History, 238–9 n. 1. Cf. Hdt. Book 1 Prooemion. 124 When I was a doctoral student a young schoolboy once asked me what I was studying, to which I replied ‘Theology’; that puzzled him for a moment, but then his face lit up and he said ‘That’s digging up monsters, isn’t it?’ On reflection that strikes me as quite an apt description of the more uncomfortable and disquieting aspects of exegesis and historical criticism. 123

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there are, e.g., the differences between the various accounts of the resurrection appearances (different memories?), Paul’s failure to mention the testimony of the women who went to the tomb (suppressed memory?), the clearly apologetic features of some of the accounts, stressing the bodily nature of Jesus’ resurrection in Luke and John, countering the charge that the disciples had stolen the body in Matthew (memories shaped by contemporary needs?) as well as disturbing elements such as the tension between a raising of the crucified body and the disciples’ initial failure to recognize Jesus or the question of the historical probability that under such circumstances Jesus’ body would have received such a privileged form of burial.125 In short, whereas in the last chapter, in the case of ‘traditions’, we saw a certain ‘ambivalence’ in that they could be used to bolster the traditional status quo but also to criticize or undercut it, we now also see in the case of ‘memory’ and ‘remembering’ a further ambivalence or set of ambivalences. And that is perhaps not surprising if, as was suggested, ‘tradition’ is the aptest term to describe what emerges from memories once those who can draw on their personal memories are no longer present. The theme of ‘Jesus remembered’ may serve for some as an argument for the trustworthiness of the resultant traditions, but we have seen how the needs and interests of those preserving and transmitting the memories may, intentionally or unintentionally, mould them anew, changing some things and blotting out others, even though personal memories may still sometimes arise to challenge the ‘memory’ or the tradition of the group, calling in question the accepted view of the past. Despite that, the creative and formative role of the group and its needs and interests may well be such that, although Le Donne wishes to locate ‘social memory’ between ‘historical positivism’, which glosses over the historian’s interpretative role, and the ‘new historicism’, which overemphasizes that role,126 in the case of those who transmitted a group’s ‘memory’ in the past the creative and formative and also interpretative role that that group played may be every bit as influential as the contribution of the interpreting historian today. In other words, even if that distinction might be appropriate in relation to the work of historians today, it does not protect us from the legacy of the creativity of those that have handed down the traditions in the past or the influence of their needs and perhaps all too fallible perceptions nor can it excuse us from treating those memories and traditions with the greatest of care and critical acumen and indeed, although some will not be pleased to hear that, with a measure of suspicion.

125 126

Cf. further Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection. Le Donne, ‘Distortion’, 165.

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7. Orality Again and again it is argued by those who stress the importance of oral tradition in early Christianity that the movement was born into a world where literacy was strictly limited, and all the more so in rural regions and amongst those not possessed of considerable means, for the possession of written texts was a costly matter, so that of necessity oral tradition and communication played a far greater role than it does today or even than it did after the invention of the printing press.1 It may not have been a purely oral world, but access to writing and written materials was severely limited, so that there is a strong presumption that the early Christian communities would have been heavily dependent on oral forms of communication and that literary activity would therefore be something rather exceptional.2 Even at a far later date Martin Jaffee can comment that ‘medieval Rabbinic intellectuals viewed the written copy of the memorized book – whether a Scriptural or a Rabbinic codex – as an almost accidental existant, a material 1 Cf., e.g., Harris , Literacy (initially he suggests a level of less than 10 % in general, and even less outside the ranks of the elite and in rural areas; later – p. 258 – he grants that 15 % or more of male Athenians may have been semi-literate or better, but then only 5 % or somewhat more of the total adult population; literacy may have increased in Attica up to the mid fourth century but was unlikely to be more than 10–15 %; moreover, the overall level of literacy may have declined in the Greek East after the Hellenistic period and ‘Small farmers and the poor will generally have been illiterate’ there – p. 330); Horsley/Draper, Whoever Hears, 123–44; Kelber, Gospel, e.g. 17. On the levels and distribution of literacy in Palestine at that time cf. Bar-Ilan, ‘Illiteracy’ (‘the total literacy rate in the Land of Israel at that time (of Jews only, of course), was probably less than 3 %’, with higher rates amongst the urban and ‘highly urban’ populations; followed by Jaffee, Torah, 15, 164 n. 7); Hezser, Literacy, esp. 496–504 (although it depends what one means by ‘literacy’, Bar-Ilan is probably correct to argue that the rate was lower than in the Graeco–Roman world in general); Horsley, ‘Oral Performance’, 50–7. 2 To that extent it is misleading to speak of the gospels being written in ‘a highly literate urban context’ (Henaut, Tradition, 90; cf. 117) and even to say that ‘literary sources abounded’ (Mournet, Oral Tradition, 194 – he seems to be thinking of an abundance within the early Christian community and its resources, for he speaks of the evangelists utilizing these sources). And if this assessment of the prevalence of orality is anywhere near the truth, then it borders on the grotesque when Burton L. Mack writes of Mark’s gospel being ‘composed at a desk in a scholar’s study lined with texts and open to discourse with other intellectuals’ (Myth, 322–3) – a no more plausible suggestion than the hint that Jesus may have been familiar with the writings of Meleager (64); contrast Derrenbacker, Practices, 37–9 (cf. Mattila, ‘Question’, 215); ‘“Conditions”’, 3: in those days the writer’s knee, thigh or lap had to suffice! Cf. also Small, Tablets, 150–5.

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object whose most authentic being resided as spiritual possession in the memory of its student’.3 In this chapter I would prefer to take this, the presumption of a dominantly oral environment, as my starting-point, rather than the to my mind rather questionable approach of identifying certain features of style, etc., that point to and are characteristic of orality and then seeking to identify the presence of these features in New Testament texts. For it is also apparent that the style of orality can influence one’s style of writing – one only needs to look at the writings of orators such as Cicero, not to mention the influence of rhetorical training on the literati of antiquity in general –, and the recognition of oral features in a text may thus point either to oral origins or else to a way of thinking and communicating indebted to orality. However, the investigation of these oral forms of communication is beset by many difficulties, not the least of these being the fact that we now have the Jesus traditions in writing and in writing alone, and studies such as that of Barry Henaut argue that this ‘textuality’ presents an insurmountable barrier in the way of any who would enquire into the oral forms of the tradition, even if he does not deny that there were oral traditions, not only before the written stage of the tradition, but also interacting and coexisting with it.4 Furthermore, the analogies to orality in the ancient world and in the modern are to be found predominantly in epic poems, whereas the Jesus traditions are contained in narratives and reports of Jesus’ teaching, so that features characteristic of the ancient poetry such as formulaic metrical forms are neither necessary nor to be expected in the gospel traditions.5 Yet, even if that means that a precise identification of oral tradition behind the written texts may be impossible, that does not mean that one must deny its existence or its influence and importance or that one need not reckon with its implications for our understanding of the Jesus traditions. After all, there are enough New Testament scholars who are happy to reckon with the existence of ‘Q’ in some form or other as a hypothesis that helps to explain various features of the gospel tradition, even though ‘Q’ no longer survives as an independent entity. In a similar way, perhaps, the outworkings of the oral transmission of Jesus traditions may serve as a hypothesis to explain other features of our written texts. 3 Jaffee, ‘Oral Tradition’, 9. He goes on (10) to refer to R. Yohanan’s prohibiting the study of Oral Torah from written copies (bGittin 60b; bTemurah 14b; cf. the discussion in Stemberger, Einleitung, 41–54) as well as to the practice of consulting professional memorizers (tannaim) rather than written editions. 4 Henaut, Tradition (on the interaction and coexistence of orality and textuality see esp. p. 96). See the critique of Henaut’s work in Mournet, Oral Tradition, 91–5. 5 A further difficulty mentioned by Lord, ‘Gospels’, 38, is his statement that ‘To be considered traditional, the story must be one that has persisted for several generations’, but he presumably means to disarm that objection in the case of the gospels by his following remark that the ‘story of a recent person can also be regarded as traditional if the essential story is one that has been used by storytellers in the given culture for a long time’.

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7.1. An Oral Tradition? It may almost be taken for granted, and was for long a basic assumption of form criticism, that traditions about Jesus passed through an initial phase that was exclusively oral, even if critical scholarship has often been slow to exploit this insight, voiced already at the end of the eighteenth century by Johann Gottfried Herder. That even during Jesus’ lifetime his followers or others were noting down his teaching in writing is an unproven and, to my mind, perhaps rather unlikely assumption.6 It would, at any rate, be most unwise to base any arguments on that assumption. Nor is it likely that Jesus traditions sprang up later de novo in a written form, as sometimes seems to be assumed, at least with regard to narrative material, even if it is left open whether sayings material circulated orally. At this point Walter Schmithals can, it is true, point to the absence of any traces of this oral tradition in earlier Christian documents, in particular the letters of Paul,7 and this is a problem that has long been recognized, even if never satisfactorily solved.8 To this Schmithals adds the observation that Paul’s letters and traditional material contained in them presuppose a pre-existence and a non-messianic earthly existence of Jesus that is hard to reconcile with the portrayal of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, let alone the overt christological claims of the Fourth Gospel; he cites as an example the adoptionist christology presupposed by Rom 1.3–4. Yet that argument seems to assume that one cannot differentiate between earlier and later forms of the Jesus traditions and to ignore the possibility that Christians later elaborated on earlier traditions so as to make the messianic character of Jesus’ earthly life far clearer and more explicit than it origi6

Pace A. R. Millard, who provides us with an imaginative scene showing ‘how the process [of committing accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching to writing] might have begun’: Reading, 225–6. Cf. also Bauckham, Jesus, 287–9; Casey, Aramaic Approach, 48–9; Gerhardsson, Memory, 105 (also 157–63); Riesner, Jesus, 491–8, 501; Roberts, ‘Books’, 55. Yet the peripatetic lifestyle of Jesus and his disciples does not seem to me conducive to much note-taking, especially if they had to ‘travel light’. However, Riesner, ‘Jesus’, 196, argues that the note-taking would have been done by ‘sedentary sympathizers’. 7 Cf. Schmithals, ‘Ursprung’; Einleitung, 246–335, esp. 313, 318. However, Schmithals in his commentary on Mark says merely that one cannot trace the history of the traditions from what Mark or the Markan Grundschrift has preserved of them (Markus 1, 44–5). His Einleitung goes further in claiming that this oral stage cannot be shown to have existed (313). (It should be noted that a similar resistance to the idea of an oral tradition behind the gospels can be found in the work of Christian Hermann Weisse, in opposition to the use of it made by David Friedrich Strauss: cf. Schröter, ‘Gospels’, 198.) 8 Goppelt, Theologie, 370–1. His argument is that the early church recognized that Jesus’ earthly activity related solely to his special eschatological situation and could not be taken over into the situation of the church after his death. Yet, even if some early Christians had seen it that way, it was evidently not the view of the evangelists, who were prepared to tell Jesus’ earthly story with an eye to the situation of the church of their day, even, in the case of Matthew, inserting references to the church, the HMNNOKVLYD, into the words of the earthly Jesus (Matt 16.18; 18.17). Cf. Walter, ‘Paul’, 53 n. 5.

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nally had been, and that it is these elaborations that we find, to a greater or lesser extent, in the traditions contained in our gospels. And that is a point that Schmithals in effect seems to concede when he leaves it open whether non-messianic ‘Q’ material was handed down orally. For he is concerned, rather, with the ‘christological traditions’ and maintains that the ‘christologically redacted sayings source that Matthew and Luke used did not receive its material orally, but had a longer literary pre-history’.9 In his Theologiegeschichte he is more specific: ‘Q’ was composed to complement Mark’s Gospel and presupposes it.10 Further, rather than assuming that the Jesus traditions found in the gospels simply came into existence with the composition of the gospels, it is better to suppose that they circulated in circles that were markedly different from the Christian communities in the wider Mediterranean world in which Paul operated.11 If it is hard to believe that the latter communities had no knowledge of the traditions circulating in the others – and the very few quotations of, or apparent allusions to, sayings of Jesus in Paul’s letters suggest that they had some knowledge of them –, then one possible explanation of Paul’s failure to refer to them more often, and then only in connection with relatively minor matters, and not with central themes of his message, may lie in the fact that others had the advantage over him in this area. (And Kenneth Bailey hints that Paul made no attempt to relate these traditions in the awareness that he was not qualified to do so according to the prevalent conventions, not having any claim to be an eyewitness of those events in Jesus’ life; to have tried to pass on those traditions in any detail would conflict with notions of who was qualified to transmit them.)12 At least once his relations with the Jerusalem church had broken down following 9

Schmithals, ‘Ursprung’, 309; on the ‘pre-kerygmatic and non-christological’ ‘Q’ tradition cf. also Theologiegeschichte, 47. 10 Schmithals, Theologiegeschichte, 51, and Einleitung, 403. Einleitung, 398–9, speaks of the christological redaction of ‘Q’ presupposing the Markan theory of the messianic secret, and points to other features suggesting knowledge of Mark. It is not to be ruled out that the authors of ‘Q’ and Mark’s Gospel are one and the same person (403). 11 Cf. Schröter, ‘Schmithals’, 794. Bauckham, Jesus, 278–9, speaks of the Jesus traditions as ‘isolated’, but does not really, as far as I can see, offer any explanation of this puzzling phenomenon. 12 Cf. Bailey, ‘Controlled Informal Oral Tradition’, 10. And it is to be noted that, when quoting tradition at any length, Paul makes it clear that he is passing on what he has received from others (1 Cor 11.23 is perhaps more relevant here than 1 Cor 15.3, to which Bailey appears to refer, in that the latter refers to early Christian credal material, whereas the former concerns a story from Jesus’ earthly life.) That line of argument seems to me more plausible than, e.g., what M. E. Boring advocates in setting up so drastic a dichotomy between an epiphany christology and a kenotic christology that Paul and his followers would have deneid that ‘Jesus’ life contained miraculous manifestations of the divine power’ (Truly Human, 77) and would thus have rejected the Jesus traditions found in the gospels with their miracle stories. Yet Paul and his churches were conscious of the miraculous in their own (nonetheless human) experience (e.g. Rom 15.19; 1 Cor 12.9–10, 28–9; 2 Cor 12.12; Gal 3.5) so why should they be so concerned to exclude it from the human life of Jesus?

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the confrontation with James’s emissaries in Antioch (Gal 2.11–14), Paul would have been ill-advised to resort to the tradition of Jesus’ sayings in support of his position, however much some of the sayings that we possess in the gospels might seem to provide him with serviceable material (e.g. Matt 20.1–16; Luke 18.9–14). For those opposing him were often better placed to be able to offer an apparently authoritative interpretation of these sayings and Jesus’ teaching in general, in that they either belonged to the original circle of Jesus’ followers or had had closer contact with members of that circle than Paul could ever claim.13 The more pressing problem is the silence of later documents in the New Testament with regard to Jesus traditions, particularly those documents that are to be dated to a time after the Jesus traditions had already begun to be written down, and that is a problem that applies just as much to the solution that Schmithals offers.14 For letters like 1 Peter, James and 1–3 John show even less traces of those Jesus traditions than Paul’s letters (although, as far as explicit quotations of sayings of the earthly Jesus are concerned, these are concentrated there in 1 Corinthians).15 Jens Schröter is critical of Dunn’s contention that for Paul and others it was enough simply to allude to the traditions of Jesus’ teaching and those who heard these allusions would know all too well the source of these allusions and the authority that rested in them.16 That leads Dunn to reject this criticism, appealing to Paul’s use of the Old Testament amongst other arguments;17 that seems to me, however, an unfortunate analogy, since, although there are undoubtedly many similarly allusive ‘echoes’ of the Old Testament in Paul’s letters, it is undoubtedly true that he very often appeals expressly to the text of the Old Testament with such phrases as ‘as it is written’,18 and the very few references to Jesus’ teaching in 1 Corinthians are hardly enough to show convincingly that Paul’s handling of Jesus traditions is really comparable with his use of the Old Testament in his arguments.

13 Cf. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 202 (the argument that is here used of Peter’s knowledge of Jesus traditions could surely also apply to some extent to James and many other members of the Jerusalem church). 14 These later epistles are surely also equally problematic for B. L. Mack’s suggestion of a sharp division between ‘Hellenistic Christ cults’ and the ‘Jesus movement’ (e.g. Myth, 11– 12, 78–123; with this distinction one may compare Crossan’s rural ‘Life Tradition’ and urban ‘Death Tradition’: Birth, 407–17). For if Mark’s work brings together materials from both traditions why has his synthesis, which was used by Matthew and Luke, left no trace in these letters that are at least probably to be dated later than the composition of Mark? 15 Surprisingly, for the Corinthian congregation is hardly the place where one would expect a particular familiarity with Jesus traditions. But cf. Kuhn, ‘Jesus’. 16 Schröter, ‘Der erinnerte Jesus’, 48–51 (he also refers to Dunn’s article on ‘Jesus Tradition in Paul’; cf. also Jesus Remembered, 181–4; Theology, 651–3). 17 Dunn, ‘Remembering Jesus’, 54–56. He even goes so far as to claim that an explicit appeal to the authoritative Jesus traditions would offend against a code of conduct in the community that carefully cherished these traditions (56). 18 From Rom 1.17 onwards and 16 times in Romans alone.

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At any rate, Schmithals is prepared to reckon with the survival of biographical memories that could be used by the evangelists in the composition of their works,19 but one wonders what those who preserved those memories did with them in the intervening years. Did they keep them to themselves as Mary is depicted as having done with what she had seen and heard at the time of Jesus’ birth and twelve years later (Luke 2.19, 51b)? Did they see no reason to share these memories with others or, even if they did, did none of them see any relevance of those memories to the beliefs and practices of the early Christian communities? Schmithals is dismissive of the ‘a priori arguments’ that have been brought against his thesis, but does that thesis not strain our credulity almost beyond breaking point?20 Oral transmission was, at any rate, apparently a recognizable feature of the Jesus traditions which continued on until the end of the first century and perhaps beyond that, by then, of course, alongside written documents. That, at least, seems to be the clear message of the much quoted remarks of the second-century church father Papias: I also will not hesitate to draw up for you … an orderly account of all the things I carefully learned and have carefully recalled from the elders; for I have certified their truth. For unlike most people, I took no pleasure in hearing those who had a lot to say, but only those who recalled the commandments which had been given faithfully by the Lord and which proceed from the truth itself. But whenever someone arrived who had been a companion of one of the elders, I would carefully inquire after their words, what Andrew or Peter had said, or James or John or Matthew or any of the other disciples of the Lord, and what things Aristion and the elder John, disciples of the Lord were saying. For I did not suppose that what came out of books would benefit me as much as that which came from a living and abiding voice.21 19 20

E.g. Schmithals, ‘Ursprung’, 314. Cf. Schröter, ‘Schmithals’, 795–6, 799–800. Cf. also G. Strecker, ‘Schriftlichkeit’, esp.

166. 21 Frag. 3 in Ehrman’s LCL tr. (quoted here from 1.99), which is itself a quotation from Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History 3.39; the latter part also appears as his frag. 5 (1.107), drawing on a Latin version in Jerome’s Lives of Illustrious Men 18; to be noted is the variant version of the last clause, ‘a living voice that resounds through authorities still alive in our own day (usque hodie in suis auctoribus personans)’. The same fragments appear as frags. 5 and 7 in Körtner’s ed. (there ‘auctoribus’ is translated as ‘witnesses’: p. 61). Cf., too, the telling parallels from secular authors cited by Loveday Alexander, ‘Voice’, particularly from Galen (p. 224–5) and Seneca (p. 232). Bauckham, Jesus, 14 (cf. ‘Eyewitnesses’, 34), emphasizes that Papias is here talking about an earlier period in his life (the tenses used by Papias are aorists or imperfects, with the exception of the OHYJRXVLQ used of Aristion and the elder John, which Bauckham plausibly treats as evidence that these two were still alive at that earlier stage in Papias’ life – theirs was the ‘living and abiding voice’ to which he refers: 28) which he dates to ‘c. 80 CE’ or to the decade 80–90 (19). Papias seems to indicate that ‘books’, ELYEOLD, were already an option available to him at that time, but that could be an option whose availability had only later become apparent to him.

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Even if Richard Bauckham is correct in stressing that ‘what Papias thinks preferable to books is not oral tradition as such but access, while they are still alive, to those who were direct participants in the historical events’,22 it remains true that this ‘direct access’ was by word of mouth and not by reading the written memoirs of others. In the light of that opinion it is hard to understand how Ferdinand Hahn can claim that with the setting down in writing of Jesus traditions in the gospels ‘all relevant Jesus tradition was here taken up and fixed in a binding form, so that there was no longer any valid oral Jesus tradition alongside it’. 23 It is true that Bauckham, too, by setting the period to which Papias is referring at an earlier point of time, can claim, more circumspectly, that written gospels were not yet ‘widely known’, this being a time ‘prior to the availability of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John’ – he thus passes in silence over the question of Mark.24 And yet what Matthew and Luke have added to Mark’s material would indicate that not ‘all relevant Jesus tradition’ had found a place already in Mark’s account and it would seem unwise to rule out the possibility that what was added was in some cases culled from oral tradition or that there was other material that might have reasonably been deemed ‘relevant’, but was, for one reason or another, not included in our written (canonical) gospels. And one should not assume too speedy a distribution throughout the Christian communities of that day of whatever gospels had been written nor too automatic an acceptance of them, let alone as the exclusive ‘binding form’ of the Jesus traditions. In other words, oral traditions may have circulated for quite a time after the appearance of written gospels and it would be gratuitous to suppose that, even where the lat-

22

Bauckham, Jesus, 24. He sets Papias within a historiographical tradition that involved the interrogation (DMQDNULYQHLQ) of eyewitnesses (cf. Polyb. 12.4c.4–5; Lucian, Hist. conscr. 47) and inclines to take Papias’ use of PQKPRQHXYHLQ as referring not so much to his remembering as to his recording things in X-SRPQKYPDWD (25–6). 23 Hahn, ‘Verschriftlichung’, 314. Contrast Dewey, ‘‘Survival’, 505: ‘there is no reason for oral transmission … to stop just because a written version exists’; also Andersen, ‘Oral Tradition’, 44, 51; Bovon, Lukas 1, 507; Dahl, ‘Problem’, 151=93; Kümmel, Einleitung, 52–3; R. Thomas, Literacy, 46–50; Vansina, Tradition, 156–7. In defence of Hahn it must be noted that a dictum of A. B. Lord that ‘once the oral technique is lost, it is never regained’ (Singer, 129) would seem to support his view (but see the critique by R. Thomas, Literacy, 29–51). In the context it would, however, seem that Lord is talking only of the individual singer, not of the tradition handed on by a community or a number of individuals. (Earlier Lord had insisted that ‘oral’ for him meant not only oral presentation, but rather ‘composition during oral performance’ and not just before it: 5, his italics. And yet can one not envisage a situation where a speaker has heard what has been written, but, not having access to the written text at the time, must perform orally on the basis of what has been remembered? Cf. Lord’s examples on pp. 19, 23, where songbooks play a role.) Yet those who plead for continued orality would maintain that setting down a tradition in writing does not mean the disappearance of oral technique and practice. 24 Bauckham, Jesus, 30. This distinction between the time of hearing the reports of eyewitnesses and the time of writing is ignored by Dunn, ‘History’, 484.

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ter were known, they could immediately suppress material that had been circulating in oral form.25 How far it is legitimate to link ‘autopsy’ and ‘orality’ together in the ancient world, as Byrskog does,26 may be open to question. For, when a historian had himself participated in events that he described, then there was nothing inherently ‘oral’ in the process by which he recorded these events, except in so far as he may have discussed his recollections with others, or uttered the words as he wrote them or dictated them to a secretary, or his text may have subsequently been read aloud to others. Byrskog is presumably here thinking of the process of gathering information from others, who may themselves have been eyewitnesses, or else custodians of traditions which their community had preserved (which is what is normally meant by ‘oral history’ in a more recent context).27 In the an25 Cf. Bauckham’s admission that ‘it remains probable that oral traditions did not immediately die out’ once written gospels were widely known. ‘Rather, the Gospels took their place within a still predominantly oral context, and will have operated in relation to orality, as written texts do in predominantly oral societies, rather than as a complete alternative to it’ (Jesus, 309; ‘in relation to’ is rather imprecise; presumably something like ‘alongside’ is meant). 26 Byrskog, Story, e.g. 199 et passim. 27 Sanders/Davies, Studying, 142–3, make the valid point that ‘oral history’ is an apt description of Papias’ gathering of information (as well as that of Irenaeus and Polycarp according to Eus. Hist. eccl. 5.20.5–7). Yet the traditions might surely reach so far back in time that their ultimate dependence on eyewitnesses might be fully lost from sight and become irrelevant to the status or value of the traditions. Bauckham, Jesus, 32–3, also wishes to distinguish ‘oral tradition’ from ‘oral history’, following Jan Vansina in adopting a temporal distinction: ‘oral history’ gathers information from informants during their lifetime, whereas ‘oral tradition’ relates to events extending back beyond the lifetime of witnesses (cf. Vansina, Tradition, e.g. 27; Henige, Historiography, 2, goes further: ‘tradition’ ‘must have been handed down for at least a few generations’ – a definition that would exclude all talk of tradition from the period with which we are dealing! Yet Henige also recognizes that ‘oral history’ is an activity – ‘oral historiography’, the title of his book, might be apter so as to make it clear that it is the activity of historical research that is meant –, whereas ‘oral tradition’ is a ‘genre of source’; cf. also Shils, Tradition, 15: to qualify as a ‘tradition’ a belief or practice must have been passed down over at least three generations, although he recognizes the imprecision of ‘generation’ – and a colleague at the University of St Andrews once remarked that it sufficed for a practice to last there for a student generation of 3 or 4 years for it to count as ‘traditional’); what Papias has learnt from disciples of Aristion and the elder John would then be ‘oral history’, whereas the information gained more indirectly from the other authorities might be ‘oral tradition’ (or was it ‘oral history’ around 80 CE, but ‘oral tradition’ by the time Papias was writing?). (I would question the usefulness of this distinction: for one thing, ‘tradition’ in this phrase refers to the transmission of information, even if it may be granted that, if one has access to eyewitnesses, ‘transmission’ may not be needed – Bauckham rightly draws attention to the different connotations of the word SDUDYGRVL in ancient usage where it could be used of an eyewitness’s own account of past events [36–7, quoting Jos., Vita 361; Ap. 1.49–50] –, but ‘history’ seems to be used here to refer to something different, a process of gathering and evaluating information, and such a gathering and evaluating is necessary, regardless of how much time has elapsed since the events to which witness is borne; it is true that the mode of questioning, the questions posed, may differ in the two cases, but the lapse of time is by no means the only factor involved; it would make a difference, for instance, whether one could, like Papias, draw on

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cient world this gathering of information would, of course, have been largely oral in nature, given the relative paucity of written sources, but the phenomena of ‘autopsy’ and ‘orality’ should nevertheless be distinguished from one another and not treated as inseparable.28

Although the aspect of ‘orality’ in the sense of material handed down by word of mouth is perhaps the one most relevant in this case, it is, at the same time, to be noted that it also comes into play with regard to written documents in the sense that these were also often not ‘read’ but ‘heard’ by the majority of those whom they reached. Someone did read them and also read them aloud, either to herself or himself or in the presence of others, but many did not and could not read them for themselves. That dimension of the dissemination of such writings has important implications. For one thing the prevalence of scriptio continua, that is a text written without most of the aids to understanding with which we are familiar, such as word-divisions or punctuation, placed more weight on verbal signals such as connecting particles or literary devices such as inclusio, picking up at the end of a section words or themes that had been prominent at its beginning, and without such aids the text would be far harder for the reader to understand. The same is equally true for those who heard it read by another. For them the means used by an orator to structure a speech and to make its sequence of thought and its course of argument intelligible to hearers would be equally useful in helping hearers to understand the text that they were hearing read to them. That is a factor which naturally applies, too, to letters that were designed to be read aloud in church gatherings, so that, however legitimate it may be to protest one’s own earlier enquiries or had to start from scratch with the testimonies of others.) Again, Aune, ‘Prolegomena’, 64, seems to recognize no such temporal limitation for ‘oral history’, although it may be granted that he is at this point distinguishing it from ‘oral literature’, not from ‘oral tradition’; yet on p. 77 he seems to recognize that it may be extended back beyond the present generation and belong to ‘oral tradition’. However, it is important to note that Wright, New Testament, 423, distinguishes ‘oral history’ from ‘oral tradition’ in a very different sense to that of Byrskog (whose distinction is rather that of Sanders/Davies, Studying, 141): the latter phrase refers, for him, to the sort of management of tradition in which a teacher has his pupils commit his words to memory, the former to a situation in which the teacher’s utterances, in this case Jesus’, are passed on by his disciples without the teacher’s managing them or trying to ensure that they were remembered correctly. This is undoubtedly a valid distinction, but this terminology is hardly the best, or most readily intelligible, way to make it. 28 By speaking of ‘autopsy, as a kind of orality’ Byrskog (Story, 199) implicitly recognizes that there is more to ‘orality’ than ‘autopsy’, but the same is true of ‘autopsy’: it need not always be bound up with ‘orality’. But is it not going too far when Bauckham, summarizing Byrskog’s position, concludes that for ancient historians a close relationship to eyewitness testimony ‘required that good history be contemporary history, written in the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses’ (Jesus, 310). That would seem to imply that attempts to write about earlier times were doomed to be less than ‘good’, yet many ancient historians did attempt this, more or less aware of the limitations placed upon their success by their distance from the events in question.

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at attempts to press the New Testament letters into the categories applicable to speeches in the ancient world, it is undeniable that many of the devices and conventions of speeches would be relevant, too, to letters that were to be read aloud to an audience. More apposite is perhaps the objection that letters such as those written by Paul often served a variety of purposes at one and the same time, and might well therefore cross the boundaries separating the different categories of ancient speeches from one another. To press the letters into these categories would therefore be inappropriate. The element of orality does, however, at least call into question the extent to which we tend today to think always in terms of written documents, and in this respect Dunn’s protest is a thoroughly legitimate one when he calls upon his colleagues to alter their literary ‘default setting’ for their interpretation of the New Testament.29 For, despite occasional voices that have spoken out for the oral nature of the Jesus traditions, particularly in its earliest phase,30 but also well on into the second century,31 even after written accounts were already in circulation, the dominant models have been literary ones assuming various layers of tradition produced by successive editing. Again and again, however, Dunn finds evidence of a stable core of tradition accompanied by wide variation in the details of the framework in which this core is set, and he argues that this phenomenon is more easily intelligible on the basis of an oral tradition and the retelling of these traditions than is possible on the basis of a literary model.32 He finds a particularly apt analogy in the accounts by Kenneth Bailey of his experiences of Middle East village life and the preservation of traditions there.33 Here Ger29 This, too, is something that he and Wright have in common, for the latter also stresses, far more briefly (New Testament, 422–4), the role played by the oral transmission of sayings and stories of Jesus. Support is also to be found in an ally whom Dunn, for some reason, does not cite, R. W. Funk, whose diagram in his New Gospel Parallels (1.109) presupposes, as Sanders and Davies put it (Studying, 103), that ‘the transmission of gospel’ is ‘a process in which a continuing oral tradition could influence the written gospel at any point’ (their emended version of the diagram has been endorsed by Funk, who confirmed that the emendations represent his original intention: 347). Perhaps Dunn had been put off by Funk’s likening the transmission of oral material to ‘telling and retelling a joke’ (Gospels, 27), but a similar mode of transmission does not necessarily imply a similar content. 30 Dunn mentions here the contribution of Herder as well as form criticism’s assumption of an oral tradition behind the gospels (Jesus, 193). Nonetheless Bultmann spoke in terms of a number of layers of the tradition (Bultmann, Jesus, 17–18 [12–13 in the ed. used by Dunn]), and that suggests more a literary model. 31 He cites here Koester, Überlieferung (also endorsed by Kelber, Gospel, 93), also ‘Gospels’. 32 Cf. Kelber, ‘Jesus’, 151. 33 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 205–9; ‘Jesus’, 294–6. Wright, Jesus, 40 and n. 56, also refers to Bailey’s work, as well as that of Kelber and Ong (cf. also 170–1). Cf. Bailey, ‘Informal Controlled Oral Tradition’ and ‘Middle Eastern Oral Tradition’. Fried, Schleier, 74–5, draws attention to a comparable case, Hanna Vollrath’s application of her experience of African cultures and orality to German medieval history.

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hardsson retorts that Jewish society was better used to working with sacred texts than Bailey’s village communities were, 34 but the question is rather how far the communities of Jesus’ disciples operated with written texts and, as I suggested above, there is little evidence for that, at least initially.35 There one finds, Dunn maintains, ample evidence of an ‘informal controlled tradition’ which he contrasts with Bultmann’s ‘informal, uncontrolled tradition’ and Birger Gerhardsson’s ‘formal controlled tradition’ (206). The Jesus traditions, too, are above all communal traditions, traditions that are, in this case too, formative and constitutive of this community or these communities. It is the communities that pass on these traditions, rather than wandering charismatics, or, Byrskog would insist, ‘certain people within the community’, persons that ‘cared for the Jesus tradition in a special way and performed and narrated it’.36 In each retelling, each ‘performance’ of these traditions, the hearers were in a position to supplement what was told from their shared knowledge of the traditions; in so doing they would be in a position to exercise some measure of control over the traditions. That confidence must be set alongside, and qualified by, the conviction of HansGeorg Gadamer that ‘Essential to dramatic or musical works … is that their performance at different times and on different occasions is, and must be, different’ and that all performance involves interpretation.37 Does that not apply, too, to performances of the oral traditions about Jesus? Yet Bailey’s ‘informal controlled tradition’ has been subjected to searching criticism by Theodore Weeden, a critique to which Dunn has offered a robust response.38 It is true that Weeden is, as Dunn repeatedly complains, basically unsympathetic towards Bailey’s thesis, but, on the other hand, Dunn himself insists that we should not be looking for ‘the ideal of a pure original, capable of being reconstructed from the less than satisfactory later versions’.39 That may be true of sayings if they were uttered more than once in different settings, but is more questionable if specific incidents are meant or sayings that were probably uttered only on one specific occasion – Jesus’ words at his last meal with his disciples are presumably one example of the latter unless Jesus had been in the habit of saying something similar at other meals with his disciples. And very often it is with re34

Gerhardsson, ‘Secret’, 13, 17. Cf. Dunn, ‘Eyewitnesses’, 94–5. 36 Byrskog, ‘Century’, 21, 23 (his italics), picking up Hermann Gunkel’s emphasis on the role of certain groups of people within the community (4). This is similar to the qualifications of Dunn’s position espoused by Bauckham, Jesus, with his emphasis on the controlling influence of the ‘eyewitnesses’ or those like the ‘teachers’ in the Pauline communities. Yet Bauckham seems to assume that variations in the Jesus traditions could only stem from ‘authorized’ tradents or the writers of the gospels (‘Eyewitnesses’, 229). Could no variation occur when such ‘authorized’ tradents were absent? Later (233) he maintains that it would have been ‘teachers’ who could engage ‘in explicitly re-formulating the sayings of Jesus to accommodate them to specific social contexts’ (his italics), but could no one else then implicitly alter them? 37 Gadamer, Truth, 148, 400. 38 Weeden, ‘Kenneth Bailey’s Theory’; Dunn, ‘Kenneth Bailey’s Theory’. 39 Dunn, ‘Kenneth Bailey’s Theory’, 51 (his italics). 35

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ports of specific incidents that Bailey is concerned, and Weeden is right to point out that very often factors other than a concern with what actually happened played a highly formative role in the transmission of the traditions regarding these events. There is, for instance, the incident of an accident at a village wedding in which the groom is killed when a friend’s gun goes off accidentally. One may view sympathetically the community’s versions of the incident when they told the police that a camel had stepped on the groom (even without the assistence of a pathologist one might have thought that the police could have distinguished between gunshot wounds and the results of a close encounter with a camel) and when they subsequently claimed that God had fired the gun, thus removing the need for blood-vengeance. That is all very understandable even if the theology of the latter version leaves something to be desired.40 And Weeden’s point is surely that ‘informal controlled tradition’ of a sort may be at work in a way that is not conducive to preserving the memory of what originally happened, but may rather even be concerned to hide it. Yet is the desire to know what originally happened so reprehensible? Is it not basic to historical enquiry? Or is one simply to content oneself with a multiplicity of stories without enquiring which one most closely represents the original events or how and why the various stories have shaped the events?41 It would be surprising if Dunn means that in the light of his criticism of ‘the flight from history’, for to fail to allow us to ask these sorts of questions looks very much just like such a ‘flight’.

It is striking that the first example of such a stable core with variation in the narrative framework that Dunn cites are the three accounts of Paul’s conversion to be found in the Book of Acts, where verbatim agreement is limited almost entirely to the exchange of words between the risen Jesus and Paul: ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ … ‘Who are you, Lord? … ‘I am Jesus (…) whom you are persecuting.’ Dunn can then point to examples, first, of narratives in the gospel traditions where there is a core, usually above all words of Jesus together with words attributed to other participants in the story,42 and then, secondly, traditions of Jesus’ teaching, either found in all three Synoptic Gospels or only in Matthew and Luke;43 here certain key words and phrases provide the main element of continuity and stability amidst the variations. All the narratives that Dunn mentions are more naturally explained by the evangelists’ knowledge of 40 And it may here be granted that Weeden’s ‘falsified and fictionalized’ (‘Kenneth Bailey’s Theory’, 29) may be rather hard on the well-meaning wedding guests. 41 Weeden’s analysis of the stories about the Scots missionary John Hogg and his daughter’s subsequent wonder at the ease and speed with which the events of his life were embellished with the legendary (‘Kenneth Bailey’s Theory’, 19) is a telling one. 42 So Matt 8.5–13 par. (the words of the centurion and Jesus’ response; John 4.46–54 may be a version of the same episode, but differs widely); Mark 4.35–41 parr. (unusually the similarities are mostly in the disciples’ words, together with Jesus’ rising to rebuke the wind); Matt 15.21–8 par. (Jesus’ word to the woman and her response); Mark 9.14–27 (esp. the words of Jesus’ rebuke in 9.19 parr.); 9.33–7 (esp. Jesus’ word in 9.37a); Mark 12.41–4 par. (esp. Jesus’ comment on the widow’s action). 43 Dunn cites Matt 6.7–15 par.; Mark 14.22–5 parr. (and also 1 Cor 11.23–6); Matt 5.13, 25–6, 39b–42 par.; 6.19–21 par.; 7.13–14, 24–7 par.; 10.34–8 par.; 18.19, 21–2 par.; 22.1–14 par.

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the retelling of oral tradition or by their own retelling of the story in question rather than by literary dependence. At the same time, however, it should be noted that Bauckham, following Jan Vansina, argues that the blend of stability and variation differed in different types of material: teaching might be preserved word for word, whereas narrative traditions allowed for greater variation while preserving the basic structure of the story in question.44

7.2. Orality and the Nature of ‘Q’ And yet, legitimate as this protest of Dunn’s and his plea for the orality of the Jesus traditions may be, the application of his insight to the texts that we have is not without problems. One problem that surfaces again and again, at least implicitly, in his discussion is the nature of the ‘Q’ tradition. It is true that, particularly in the English-speaking world, the case for ‘dispensing with Q’ still has its advocates, but Dunn is not one of them. Neither he nor his pupil, Terence Mournet, who accepts as a starting-point Dunn’s identification of a number of passages where Matthew and Luke’s relationship is a ‘literary’ one and agrees with Dunn that ‘Q’ is a written source used by the evangelists, wish to deny the existence of such a document or to call it in question with their findings, for ‘there are passages where the wording is so close that a literary dependence is the most obvious explanation’.45 John Kloppenborg, however, remarks, in criticism of the thesis of T. Bergemann, that there is also a strong argument for ‘Q’ as a written document in Matthew and Luke’s agreement ‘in placing the double tradition in the same position relative to other bits of the double tradition, notwithstanding the fact that they do not agree in placing it at the same Markan location’, at least 44

Cf., e.g., Bauckham, Jesus, 273, 284, citing Vansina, Tradition, 51, 53–4, 161. So Dunn lists (Jesus, 147 and n. 29; cf. also his ‘Q1’, 63) as examples of passages that ‘are difficult to explain otherwise than on the hypothesis of literary dependence when the tradition had already been put into Greek’, on account of their ‘close verbal similarities’, Matt 3.7–10 par.; 6.24–33 par.; 7.1–5, 7–11 par.; 8.19–22 par.; 11.2–11, 16–19, 21–7 par.; 12.39–45 par.; 13.33 par.; 24.45–51 par. Cf. also Hultgren, Elements, 336–8, for a slightly different and slightly longer list. Robert Morgenthaler, too, argues that ‘in the light of the numerous “Q”-texts in Matthew and Luke that show a large measure of identity there can be no question of a purely oral existence of “Q”’ (Synopse, 290; the passages that Dunn lists score between 100 %, or 98 % in the case of Luke, and 60 % for him [258]; on the other hand the text segments that he analyses do not always coincide with Dunn’s division of passages, but one should also note Matt 3.12 par.; 9.37–8 par.; 12.27–32 par.; 21.44 par.; 23.37–9, which all score more than 80 % for Morgenthaler). Cf. also Kelber, ‘Jesus’, 148: ‘The striking verbal agreements of the relevant Matthean and Lukan versions [are] only intelligible on the assumption of Q’s textual identity’ (on the other hand, p. 160 sounds more non-committal: ‘Such are the agreements of wording and sequence that the hands and voices of chirography cannot entirely be ruled out, especially as regards the relation of Matthew and Luke vis-à-vis Mark’, and p. 161 refers to ‘the fundamentally oral disposition of the sayings gospel’). Also Wiefel, Lukas, 7. 45

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after Luke 4.13 par.46 And that particular argument for a written document would not just apply to passages where the verbal agreement is strong; as Alan Kirk reminds us, referring to an article by Ulrich Luz, ‘It is the exasperating characteristic of the double tradition … that the criteria of verbatim agreement and agreement in order do not often coincide’. 47 Nor, still less, does Dunn wish to deny the existence of a common tradition used both by Matthew and by Luke.48 Yet he recognizes that ‘the boundaries between oral Q and written Q seem to be rather fluid’.49 (And that conclusion is perhaps inevitable if Kirk is right to put his finger on the absence of any definition of the threshold ‘at which the level of variation is determined to be such that a given passage must be categorized as oral instead of written or redacted tradition’.)50 Even though Dunn regards the differences between Matthew and Luke as often more easily intelligible on the basis of oral traditions, he still holds on to the existence of ‘Q’ as a written document, although it may be, he maintains, that the reading of this document was regarded as a form of oral retelling so that the further retelling of this tradition retained the characteristics of an oral process (237).51 Or there is the possibility, as Kloppenborg formulates it, of a ‘re-oralization’ of ‘Q’ texts.52 (This suggestion of the possibility of an oral history of a text even after it has been written down is an issue that will concern us both in the rest of this section and in the 46 Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, 60 (his italics). At first sight this claim may seem rather puzzling in view of the distribution of ‘Q’ material in Matthew, particularly of Matthew’s parallels to the ‘Q’ material from Luke 11.33–52 and 12.49–17.6; if Luke’s order reflects that of ‘Q’, then Matthew seems to place this material at various points throughout his gospel. Yet Kloppenborg’s claim is more intelligible in the light of Vincent Taylor’s contention that one should rather consider the order of ‘Q’ material within each of Matthew’s five blocks of teaching material separately (‘Order’ and ‘Original Order’); however, Kloppenborg is sceptical about the cogency of Taylor’s arguments (Formation, 69). Kirk, ‘Memory’, 25, speaks of Matthew’s ‘random access to Q’, a phenomenon that he attributes to this evangelist’s ‘memory control of Q’; Luz, on the other hand, argues that he had his ‘Q’ material on single sheets that could be laid side by side, so that he could either cite whole blocks of material or could excerpt sections and fit the sections into a fresh context: ‘Matthäus’, 209; Matthäus 1, 48; however, Derrenbacker, Practices, 37, 225, 253–4; ‘“Conditions”’, 9, argues that the normal codex format, as opposed to a roll, could also allow such a random access. 47 Kirk, ‘Reflections’, 4 (cf. also ‘Memory’, 15), quoting Luz, ‘Matthäus’, 202. 48 E.g. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 234, 237. The extent to which he remains committed to the ‘Q’ hypothesis surfaces, for instance, in the remark that Matthew and Luke agree with ‘Q’ in placing the ‘kingdom beatitude’ first in their lists of beatitudes (Jesus Remembered, 412). 49 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 210=‘Jesus’, 296–7. 50 Kirk, ‘Reflections’, 6. 51 Yet Werner Kelber seizes on Dunn’s SBL Seminar Paper of 2000 (‘Jesus’) to interpret Dunn as saying that ‘where Matthew and Luke are close, almost verbatim, … these are actually the symptoms of oral tradition’ (‘It’s Not Easy’, 40) – the reference is presumably to Dunn’s handling of the pericope of the centurion’s servant (298–300). 52 Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, 61.

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next.) Nonetheless, this ‘fluidity’ of which Dunn speaks confronts us with the problem of what sort of entity it was of which Matthew and Luke made use. How are we to conceive of something that is apparently simultaneously in part written and in part unwritten?53 Or are the variations within this body of material better explained by a more thoroughgoing hypothesis of oral tradition such as Armin Baum suggests?54 It is, however, striking that when Dunn focuses on the nature of ‘Q1’, arguing for its oral character,55 he, at least initially, seems to accept John Kloppenborg’s identification of this stage or level of the ‘Q’-material in the form of six ‘wisdom speeches’.56 For that identification seems to be based on the nature of the content of this ‘Q’-material and not on that degree of variation between its two witnesses that Dunn considered to be an argument for the presence of oral tradition in contrast to the high level of agreement that he considered to be an indication of a common written text. Now it is true that much of Kloppenborg’s ‘Q1’-material in fact displays considerable variation between the Matthaean and Lukan versions, but not all: Luke 9.57–8 par.; 10.2 par.; 11.9–13 par.; 12.7, 22–31.57 And does this supposed oral ‘Q1’ cover all the ‘Q’-material that shows such a high degree of variation? Morgenthaler lists other passages, often with an even greater variation: e.g. Q 17.4 par. (6/11 %); 12.51–3 (11/14 %); 12.54–6 (17/22 %),58 but their character is presumably not regarded as fitting that of ‘wisdom speeches’. Talk of ‘Q1’ is in danger of assuming and endorsing the ‘archaeological’ notion of superimposed layers that Dunn so criticizes in the literary ‘default setting’ for synoptic studies, as well as the theological deve53 To be noted is the judgement of Hultgren, Elements, 60, that ‘The term “double tradition” is neutral with respect to the origin of the material, and is therefore to be preferred to the symbol Q, which tends to imply the existence of a single, written document’; he here endorses Dunn’s advocacy of ‘q’ for the material common to Matthew and Luke, leaving ‘Q’ for the hypothetical document (Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 148 n. 31; cf. ‘Jesus’, 298 n. 69). Or was the tradition only a written one, as Casey seems to suggest, but one in which Matthew and Luke sometimes used a common Greek translation and sometimes two separate translations (e.g. Aramaic Approach, 103)? That would be one way to account for the variation between nearly identical wording and widely divergent versions, although it is to be noted that the double tradition does not fall into two clearly demarcated categories of the nearly identical and the (widely) divergent, but embraces a whole spectrum ranging from the one to the other. 54 Baum, Faktor, esp. e.g. 242, 257. 55 Dunn, ‘Q1’. 56 Cf. Kloppenborg, Formation, 171–245: (1) Q 6.20b–23b, 27–35, 36–45, 46–9; (2) 9.57– 60, (61–2); 10.2–11, 16, (23–4); (3) 11.2–4, 9–13; (4) 12.2–7, 11–12; (5) 12.22b–31, 33–4; (13.18–19, 20–1); ?(6) 13.24; 14.26–7; 17.33; 14.34–5. 57 According to Morgenthaler, Statistik, 258–61, the degrees of correspondence are as follows: Luke 9.57–60 81 %//Matt 8.19–23 75 %; Luke 10.2 84 %//Matt 9.37–8 81 %; Luke 11.9–13 71 %//Matt 7.7–11 72 %; Luke 12.2–9 46 %//Matt 10.30–1 50 % (but Luke 12.7 and Matt 10.30–1 are far closer to one another in wording than the rest of the passage); Luke 12.22–31 66 %//Matt 6.25–33 60 %. 58 Again Morgenthaler, Statistik, 258–61 (in brackets are given his percentage for Luke and then Matthew). Only the two passages in Luke 12 feature in Kloppenborg’s account, although both Neirynck’s Q-Synopsis and The Critical Edition of Q also count Luke 17.4 as a ‘Q’ text.

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lopment of ‘Q’ material in which the original and earlier wisdom material was ‘subsequently augmented by the addition and interpolation of apophthegms and prophetic words which pronounced doom over impenitent Israel’.59 And in fact Dunn closes his article by questioning the whole hypothesis of treating this material as ‘a discrete compositional unit or stratum’.60

Over against the thesis of Dunn (and also his student Terence Mournet),61 Kloppenborg makes the interesting and perhaps surprising point that it is rather the passages showing relatively little verbal agreement between the versions in Matthew and Luke that are easier to explain on the basis of ancient literary practice – an argument that is perhaps all the more surprising in that he had earlier argued for ‘Q’ as a written document on the basis of those passages where one finds ‘strong agreements’ between Matthew and Luke.62 For, on the one hand, there was the practice in ancient rhetoric of emulating earlier texts, a practice that ‘could involve modest verbal transformation, or complete paraphrase, expansion, contraction, or elaboration’.63 Besides this possibility, there was the practice followed by some authors of reading the draft of a work to a group of friends and then revising the draft in the light of their criticisms and reactions. He emphasizes, however, that this ‘is not “oral tradition” as the term has been used by New Testament critics, as a way of preserving avenues of access to Jesus, but rather “composition in performance” and re-oralization’ (63). He points, too, to the freedom of ancient authors in using their written sources, citing Diodorus Siculus’ use of Ephorus, Josephus’ use of Pseudo-Aristeas and the Old Testament, the Genesis Apocryphon’s use of Genesis, and the use of 1 Samuel and Numbers in Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum.64 There are cases where ancient authors have remained relatively close to the texts that they used as sources (here Kloppenborg cites 4Q22, the various versions of the Qumran Community Rule, and the agreements between the Doctrina Apostolorum and parts of the Didache). Yet it is the parallels with a similar ‘high verbatim repetition’ in the double tradition that are a greater problem in his eyes; as a consequence he suggests that we locate the authors of Matthew and Luke between the ancient ‘librarius-copyist’ and the genuine historian or biographer’ (80). 59

Kloppenborg, Formation, 244. Dunn, ‘Q1’, 69. 61 Mournet, Oral Tradition (Kloppenborg also remarks that the position of Dunn and Mournet is essentially that of J. C. Hawkins, Horae: ‘Variation’, 56). 62 Kloppenborg, Formation, 44. 63 Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, 61. 64 Cf. also Mattila, ‘Question’, esp. 206–13. Approaching the matter from a rather different angle to Kloppenborg’s and stressing the role of memory and orality in ancient scribal practice (cf. also Mattila, ‘Question’, 213–16), Alan Kirk argues that ‘Differential variability therefore emerges as a core property of scribal tradition … as emblematic of its life as tradition’ (‘Memory’, 10, his italics). 60

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However, this solution seems to be but another approach to a problem that has long been recognized, namely the difficulty in the case of the ‘Q’ hypothesis that texts in Matthew and Luke assigned to this source vary drastically in the extent to which their wording agrees – from 8 % to 100 % according to Thomas Bergemann.65 Inasmuch as the influence of oral traditions has often been invoked in order to explain cases where the two versions differ from one another, in contrast to the argument of Kloppenborg just mentioned, it is apparent that the factor of orality has long played a role in this debate, but Dunn’s thesis makes it unavoidable that the role of orality must be taken into account. At the same time, it is clear that his proposal is only one among many attempts at solving the problem of this variation between close verbal agreement and relatively little agreement between the witnesses to this double tradition. Kloppenborg, drawing on a paper by Alan Kirk,66 lists five models to account for the phenomenon of high variation in the double tradition: the interference or influence of oral tradition (Hawkins; Dunn; Mournet); purely scribal accounts which trace variation either to the copyist’s decision to vary wording (Streeter),67 or to memory, whether conceived as a source of copyists’ errors (Sanday) or as part of the necessary mechanics of composition (Pelling; Derrenbacker); the existence of two recensions of Q (Patton; Sato); the interference/influence of documents overlapping Q (Manson); and the partitioning of the double tradition into Greek and Aramaic sub-documents, the latter available in multiple and divergent versions (Bussmann; Bergemann).68

To these Kloppenborg adds a further possibility, noted above, that Matthew and/ or Luke may sometimes have been influenced by ‘re-oralizations’ of ‘Q’ texts.

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Bergemann, Q, 56 (or, according to Morgenthaler, Synopse, 259, 261, the lower limit is 0 % in the case of Matt 12.11b par. and the higher 98 % if viewed from the perspective of the Lukan text); Bergemann’s own argument that, where a higher level of verbal agreement is absent, a text should not be assigned to ‘Q’ (e.g. p. 60), carries with it the problem that he recognizes that there is no obvious cut-off point such that one could say that material with a higher percentage agreement belongs to ‘Q’ and material with a lower does not (57). A. Denaux, in his critical essay on Bergemann’s work, points out, too, that Matthew and Luke show a similar variation in verbal agreement when the works of each are compared with Mark (‘Criteria’, 120; cf. Morgenthaler, Synopse, 293). Or, more precisely, Morgenthaler’s figures give a range of 100 % to 7 % in the case of Markan material in Matthew, but only 89 % to 4 % in Markan material in Luke (Synopse, 239–43). 66 Professor Kirk very kindly made available to me his paper ‘‘Critical Reflections on the Revival of Oral Q’ as well as drawing my attention to the presence in draft form on the internet of his ‘Memory, Scribal Media, and the Synoptic Problem’. 67 Kirk, ‘Reflections’, notes that Streeter’s position shifted between 1911 (‘Extent’), and The Four Gospels (1924): in the former variation was accounted for by editorial activity related to written sources (although already reference is made, in the ‘syllabus’ on p. 184, to the ‘probability that Matthew and Luke did not know the original Q, but used two differently expanded versions of the original document’), in the latter by oral versions that had come separately to the evangelists. Kloppenborg here refers to Streeter’s earlier view. 68 Kloppenborg, ‘Variation’, 61.

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Bergemann’s own insistence that one must differentiate within the double tradition and that not all that is, in one way or another, common to Matthew and Luke over against Mark is to be ascribed to ‘Q’, opens up new possibilities. Bergemann defines ‘Q’ as a document, and correspondingly limits the material of the double tradition that can be assigned to it to passages whose versions in Matthew and Luke have a very high verbal agreement or whose divergence can be plausibly ascribed to redactional activity on the part of those two evangelists.69 The passages of the originally Aramaic ‘Grundrede’ of the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain that he has identified and investigated manifest none of that convergence that serves as his criterion and accordingly he does not assign them to ‘Q’.70 They stem rather from a strand of tradition that from the time that it was translated circulated in two variant versions.71 If strong verbal convergence is a mark of the document ‘Q’ and this convergence is lacking in the case of this material, then it would seem to follow that the ‘Grundrede’ is not a document, at least not a single document, and may indeed have still circulated orally at the time when it came to be used by one or both of these evangelists, yet Bergemann disputes this on the basis of the order of the material in these two gospels and the combination of great differences in wording and astonishing similarity of structure (256–7). The criteria necessary for belonging to the written ‘Q’ thus seem to have been relaxed in this case.72 Morgenthaler eschews hypotheses that, e.g., involve splitting ‘Q’ into two parts, even if he fully grants the degree of variation in verbal agreement both within ‘Q’ and between Matthew and Mark and Luke and Mark as well, and this variation is not to be accounted for by the type of material, although the Synoptic tradition in general handles the logia and other sayings more carefully (i.e. more conservatively) than narratives. Nevertheless, he regards it as legitimate to ask whether we do not have in the texts that show the highest level of agreement, above all in Luke 10–13, traces of the earliest form of ‘Q’: ‘we cannot simply reject out of hand the suggestion that we have here an essential part of the “Q”text.’ On the other hand it will not do to deny that passages showing a lesser degree of agreement belong to ‘Q’. In other words, Morgenthaler does not regard these variations in the level of agreement as grounds for doubting the existence 69

Bergemann, Q, 234. Bergemann’s ‘Grundrede’ is found in Luke 6.20b–23, 27–42, 45–9 par.: Q, 229 n. 1. But on p. 249 he denies that 6.41–5 belong to the ‘Grundrede’, although a passage of similar content belonging to it may lie behind them (262 n. 2). 71 Bergemann, Q, 236. 72 Denaux, ‘Criteria’, 121, also questions Bergemann’s consistency in reconstructing the tradition-history of his ‘Grundrede’ and ‘Q’. It should also be noted that Hultgren describes as a ‘recurring problem’ of work on ‘Q’ the fact that ‘some of the double-tradition material appears in a fixed order and stands within a narrative framework, and that the rest of the double-tradition material lacks such order’ (Elements, 8; cf. 56). That, again, is hard to reconcile with a unified ‘Q’. 70

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of ‘Q’. Yet, on the other hand, this phenomenon does raise ineluctably the question of the nature of ‘Q’, for Morgenthaler seems to hint at a gradual development of ‘Q’ when he speaks of the ‘earliest witnesses to Q’ in passages like those of Luke 10–13. 73 Were one ready, on the other hand, to abandon the definition of ‘Q’ as a single written document, then it would be possible to use the siglum ‘Q’ in a looser sense to indicate a more variegated stream of material shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by Matthew and Luke, material available to them in either a written or an oral form.74 A greater degree of convergence could point to common material in a written form, but it is unlikely that both evangelists used the same copy of the document and, as Christopher Tuckett has pointed out,75 even copies of the same archetype probably differed at some point or other, such being the vagaries of the transmission of texts in the days before printing presses. Correspondingly, a lesser degree of convergence would point to this tradition existing either in an oral form or having been taken down in writing after differences had arisen in the oral transmission of the material. Suppose for a moment that it were possible to quantify the degree of divergence that results from oral tradition in comparison with the degree that is compatible with the use of writing. Were one in a position to postulate, say, that on average x ‘performances’ of oral tradition in two different communities would reduce the convergence between the two versions of the tradition to only y %, then one could calculate how often an item of tradition had been ‘performed’ by the two groups of tradents since it had come into their hands. (That presupposes many things, of course, quite apart from the assumption that both groups had ‘performed’ it equally often: it would also assume that both groups had received an identical form of the tradition at the start which had then taken different forms in the two circles of tradents, or that one could make allowance for the differing propensity of different types of traditional material to be changed as they were ‘performed’ – a liturgical item like a prayer or a pithy and memorable saying would be more resistant to change than the details of a story.76 And doubt73 Morgenthaler, Synopse, 293 (‘die ursprünglichsten Q-Zeugnisse’). The suggestion is reminiscent of theories that identify successive layers or stages of redaction in ‘Q’ (cf., e.g., Schnelle, Einleitung § 3.3.5, 202–5), but these are usually based on the content of the material in question (e.g. presence or absence of expectation of an imminent parousia, Palestinian Jewish or hellenistic, ‘wisdom’ traditions or condemnation of Israel, etc.) or its form (e.g. pairs or groups of sayings or ‘structured compositions’ or whole speeches), not on statistical arguments. 74 Cf. Dibelius, Formgeschichte, 67 (266 in later edd.); Martin Hengel, too, argues that ‘Q’ took the form of several sources (Gospels, esp. 173–4, 185; cf. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 187, 225 n. 149, 226), but his explanation still seems to presuppose literary relationships (and Hengel and Schwemer’s reference to memories of Jesus being preserved in ‘Notizenform’, 248, would seem to support that). 75 Tuckett, Q, 97. Cf. also Derrenbacker, Practices, 48, 216–18. 76 Cf. Lord, ‘Gospels’, 37: ‘it is possible for short forms in oral tradition, such as incan-

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less different groups of people or different individuals would vary with respect to the faithfulness or freedom of their transmission of material.)77 Yet if all that could be granted, one should theoretically be able to say of material where one item of the double tradition showed only 8 % (or even 0 %) convergence and another 100 % that the former represented the fruit of a certain number of oral ‘performances’ of the material in separate circles, whereas the latter had been set down in writing and preserved in an identical, written form in both circles. This is, as I have said, something that is only in theory quantifiable, but would point, at any rate, to a stream of tradition that is in flux, with some of its material committed to writing early on or from the very start, although it might nevertheless still continue to circulate orally, while other elements continued to be handed down in oral form only with corresponding variation and divergence. Only gradually would the latter have taken on a written form or, better, forms, for that which was then written down were the versions of the tradition by then current in the different circles that were responsible for their transmission. Talk of ‘Q’ as a document in the singular had, however, already been rendered questionable by the widespread practice of referring to ‘QMatthew’ and ‘QLuke’ or the like:78 even if this were all written down, there would be two different versions of the material being used. And Alexander Sand seems to go yet further when, referring to the tradition of Jesus’ sayings used by Matthew and Luke, he states that the two evangelists work with ‘sources’ that both in scope and content were relatively distinct from one another.79 (Maurice Casey criticizes in scathing terms the assumption that ‘Q’ was a single document, let alone a single Greek document, proposing instead that ‘Q’ is ‘a convenient label for the sources of passages which are found in both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, and which have not been taken from Mark’s Gospel’, although he still speaks of a plurality of documents.)80 And, once one has taken such a step of distinguishtations, riddles, proverbs, or sayings, to be comparatively stable, if not actually “fixed”’, in contrast to narratives. 77 Kenneth Bailey introduces a similar theoretical quantification of the extent to which a story might be altered in each telling – 15 % –, which could, again theoretically, mean that after seven tellings the whole story would have been changed; yet he recognizes that his observations on continuity and flexibility mean that ‘the main lines of the story cannot be changed at all’ (‘Informal Controlled Oral Tradition’, 7–8). But one could and should also add that it is not just ‘the main lines of the story’ but also some other features such as memorable or pivotal phrases that are more resistent to variation than others. 78 Cf., e.g., Luz, ‘Matthäus’, 205–7; Matthäus 1, 48. 79 Sand, Matthäus, 27. Meyer, Reality, 187, observes, following Hans-Theo Wrege, that the double tradition ‘betrays diverse histories of specifically oral transmission’. 80 Casey, Aramaic Approach, 2. Repeatedly he expresses his support for what he calls a ‘chaotic model of Q’. In discussing the work of Horsley and Draper he at least states that ‘in some parts the Q source was a written text’ (47), which leaves it open that other parts were not; he is not, however, ready to concede that a high ‘level of verbal agreement’ might also be possible in oral tradition and thinks in terms of units of tradition written down on ‘wax

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ing ‘QMatthew’ and ‘QLuke’, one has to ask why one should separate ‘QMatthew’ from the rest of Matthew’s special material and ‘QLuke’ from the rest of Luke’s.81 Or should one rather speak of a tradition or bundle of traditions available to each of these two evangelists, some with a more or less parallel item in the other’s material, others not, in addition to a text of Mark? At any rate, the distinction between ‘QMatthew’ and ‘QLuke’ was and is a thoroughly legitimate one. For even a single example like Matthew’s and Luke’s differing versions of the Lord’s Prayer points to a bifurcation in the tradition, be it written or oral, one community or some communities using Matthew’s version, another or others that of Luke. Dunn is, however, correct in thinking that such a divergence is likelier at an oral stage than at a written one:82 when I am reading from a written text of such a prayer or even when I have once read it, divergences are less likely than when I am repeating it solely from memory. The committing of such forms of words to memory is, moreover, particularly likely in the case of such a prayer. 83 However, the variation between, on the one hand, parts of this tradition common to Matthew and Luke that are so close to another in wording that a literary relationship is plausible or even probable and, on the other, passages where the variation is considerable does present problems in identifying the nature of this common tradition or these common traditions. How can one explain this variation? It is, I think, not enough to argue that this tradition is ‘an oral-derived text that calls for interpretation as it was performed orally before groups of people’, for that does not yet explain the variation in the extent of agreement between the two versions. 84 That variation is equally a problem for Kloppenborg’s argument, tablets and the like’ (190). (An irony of this position is that very much the same sort of cumulative argument that Casey uses for the likelihood of Jesus having taught in Aramaic and thus for an Aramaic basis for the traditions of his teaching also points in the direction of the likelihood of an originally oral tradition, as we saw at the start of this chapter.) 81 The complications can be seen when one compares Bovon, Lukas 1, 21, where he says that Luke 14.15–24; 15.3–7 are either taken from ‘Q’ or from Luke’s special material which had been handed down in a form that differed from ‘Q’. As for Matthew, Streeter, Gospels, 249, had already found ‘illuminating’ ‘the hypothesis that there is an overlapping beween Q and M’. 82 Cf. Dunn, ‘Q1’, 58. 83 Aune, ‘Prolegomena’, 65, argues that ‘memorized forms of speech, such as the Lord’s Prayer, are more stable in literate societies’, but it is unclear why that should be unless they have been committed to writing. Ong, Orality, 65, comments on the variation in the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper in the different accounts of this meal and on the variation of what was, accordingly, remembered. 84 Horsley/Draper, Whoever Hears, 3; cf. also 145, where the presence of ‘verbatim parallels’ is cited as evidence that Matthew and Luke knew ‘Q’ as a written document (sing.) (or, if not ‘the same transcribed text of Q’, ‘very similar ones’: 167), but with no attempt to explain the larger number of cases where these two gospels diverge to a greater or lesser extent. That is particularly true if one presupposes that Matthew and Luke had access to a manuscript or manuscripts in which this tradition had been transcribed, as these authors apparently do (8).

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for, even if a relatively low level of verbal agreement is no argument against treating ‘Q’ as a written text, it still remains unclear why different pieces of ‘Q’ traditions were handled differently. Rightly, therefore, Kirk suggests that Kloppenborg has ‘difficulties … bringing the scribal and performative-tradent functions together, hence in accounting satisfactorily for how the rhetorical transformations of a text actually come to be incorporated in transmission’.85 There seems, at any rate, to be little in the nature of the units of ‘Q’ tradition that could explain the variation between relative freedom and close verbal agreement. The problem for ‘Q’ as a written document is neither the high verbal agreement of some passages nor the low level of agreement of others, but the presence of both as well as a whole spectrum of intermediate possibilities side by side with one another. To some extent one might be able to explain that, as Derrenbacker does, by postulating that, where Matthew agrees closely with Luke in wording and order, he has a written text before him, but diverges from Luke’s wording and order when he is quoting from memory.86 (The role of remembered texts is one that looms ever larger in Derrenbacker’s account as he progresses,87 and yet one could also remember an oral tradition that one had heard or a written tradition that one had heard read.) Yet, if one is sceptical about Matthew’s use of a writing desk or some such piece of furniture, which, as we have seen, Derrenbacker rightly thinks anachronistic, one must raise the question how such ‘visual contact’ as he postulates was possible at all. That would, however, be possible if, e.g., the evangelist held a text of ‘Q’ material in his hand and dictated his own text to another, but this suggestion still leaves open the question why he sometimes read from the ‘Q’ text but sometimes did not. Does it, then, make more sense to think here, not in the first instance of a ‘text’, even an ‘oral-derived text’, but rather of a body of fairly similar material that found its way into the possession of at least two groups or circles of early Christians? (And, of course, quite possibly into many more, but we only have access to this material through the work of two evangelists who were able to draw upon this material to fill out their versions of the story of Jesus.) This material would then have been a mixture of written (or written as well as oral) and purely oral traditions or at least oral traditions that had been committed to writing at a considerably later stage than the former and had thus assumed very different forms before being written down.88 The former would then have been trans85

Kirk, ‘Memory’, 18. Derrenbacker, Practices, 238–9. 87 See now Derrenbacker, ‘“Conditions”’, § 3, where the role of memory is further explored. 88 Cf. Schröter, ‘Logienquelle’, in RGG4, 485: ‘Since … one must still reckon with the influence of oral tradition after the Jesus tradition had been set down in writing, one has to take into account the possibility that Matthew and Luke were also influenced by this and were thus not tied exclusively to already existing written documents.’ 86

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mitted with relatively little variation, if both circles possessed it and kept it in written form; yet some variation is possible inasmuch as the mechanics of copying left scope for that.89 Other material in oral form would then have been developed and altered as it was passed down within the two groups, either remaining in oral form or eventually being written down, in one instance only or in both. Perhaps somewhere between these two cases one would also have to allow for material possessed in written form by one or the other group or by both that also circulated orally and would thus be developed and altered, but to a lesser degree, constrained by the knowledge of the written form. For it is to be noted that Alan Kirk finds fault with Dunn’s proposals for his failure ‘to move towards an interactive, interfacial model adequate to the realities of orality and writing in the Roman world’.90 Symptomatic of that is the correlation of high verbal agreement and literary forms and techniques, but also the tendency to talk in terms of either literary or oral. Now Armin Baum has attempted to show that oral tradition alone could account both for the relatively high verbal agreement in some passages as well as the variation in the level of agreement, depending on such factors as the form of the passages in question (e.g. some being easier to remember due to forms like parallelism or the succinctness of the formulation), or on whether the material consists of narrative or sayings. And it must be granted that the various parallels cited make out a strong case for the possibility that this is the explanation of this phenomenon in the Jesus traditions. And yet those traditions do present problems for his thesis. One is the Lord’s Prayer, for one would have thought that in its form it was a tradition that could have been remembered very accurately, with its brief requests, and it is one which even today with our diminished capabilities for memorizing we can usually remember word for word, at least in one of its versions.91 Yet Matthew and Luke represent markedly different versions of the same prayer (58/63 % agreement), despite Jan Vansina’s comment that this prayer is ‘very well remembered’.92 Yet even that could be encompassed within an oral tradition if one makes more allowance for another aspect of oral tradition to which Baum does not perhaps devote enough attention, namely the free creativity of the persons transmitting the tradition. He does, it is true, devote a short section to the possible lapses of memory that may occur,93 but what is meant here is probably not something that the early Christian tradition would regard as a lapse, bur rather as a thoroughly legitimate and desirable improvement and ad89

Tuckett, Q, 96–7; also ‘Current State’, 9. Kirk, ‘Perspectives’, 5. 91 Assuming, that is, that we are not thrown out by divergent practices like the Scottish oscillation between ‘debts’ and ‘trespasses’ or the German division over ‘Vater unser’ and ‘Unser Vater’ (the latter a shibboleth of the Reformed tradition). 92 Vansina, Tradition, 14. 93 Baum, Faktor, 428 (similarly Morgenthaler, Synopse, 258, 260). 90

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aptation of the tradition. Yet if one concentrates too much on the question whether the early Christians could have remembered all this material word for word, then there is the danger that one loses sight of the possibility that this may not have been their top priority and that they may have been content to allow variations within the tradition, perhaps even more variation than more conservative scholars today find congenial. If one makes that concession to the creativity of the early Christian communities then it may well be that one can postpone till the composition of our gospels that point in time at which the oral traditions were committed to writing. That would mean that the ‘Q’-material may well have remained in purely oral form,94 but, as we shall see, we may also have to reckon with the formation of the gospels initially in an oral form as well. However, before we leave ‘Q’, it is worth placing a question-mark against the repeated references to ‘Q’ as an ‘oral-derived text’.95 For we have no ‘Q’ text, only the texts of Matthew and Luke from which we draw inferences about the content of ‘Q’. Unless we use the word ‘text’ in an inadvisably broad sense, it may well be that there never was a ‘Q’ text, only oral ‘Q’ traditions. Much seems to depend here on the contention that the coherence of ‘Q’ is only comprehensible if one postulates ‘scribal influence’,96 but that presupposes not only a certain level of coherence in this material, but also that such coherence would only be attainable through scribal activity. For that reason, I am a little puzzled that J. M. Foley, in his comment on the opinions expressed by Kelber, Horsley and Draper on ‘Q’, begins by stating that ‘Comparative studies … point toward, at the maximum, a non-textual, oral traditional precursor [of the ‘Q’ material in Matthew and Luke], which we may choose to call Q.’ Despite that, he goes on to endorse talk of it as an ‘oralderived text’, dismissing ‘the unsustainable hypothesis that Q (or any other work) emerged from the multi-media world of early Christianity as pure oral performance, transcribed from an event and converted to an artifact’.97 Yet what if the author of Matthew or of Luke or both of them had heard, each separately, the materials of the ‘Q’ tradition recited or ‘performed’ and then, in setting their stories of Jesus into written form, recalled, creatively, something of what they had had heard, incorporating it in various ways into their accounts?

94

But cf. DeConick, ‘Memory’, 178–9. E.g. in Kelber, ‘Art’, 35–7, summarizing Horsley and Draper’s Whoever Hears You Hears Me. And Horsley’s own article that follows also uses this phrase, although sometimes, but not always, placing ‘text’ in inverted commas (’Performance’, esp. 45–6). 96 Cf. Dewey, ‘Response’, 106. (She regards it as likely that Matthew and Luke each had access to written versions of ‘Q’.) 97 Foley, ‘Riddle’, 125, 130. 95

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7.3. Orality and the Markan Tradition A comparable problem is presented by the relationship of Mark to the other two Synoptic Gospels. For there, too, the traditional ‘two-document’ solution runs into difficulties as soon as one attempts to explain those cases where Matthew and Luke agree with one another over against Mark, either in adding material, or omitting it, or in altering it – the so-called ‘minor agreements’, even if some are not that ‘minor’.98 Such problems have led a number of scholars to resort to further refinements of the relationships between these three gospels, above all the suggestion that Matthew and Luke used, not the Gospel of Mark that we know, but a later revision of Mark, a deutero-Mark.99 It is true that another possibility would be that Matthew and Luke knew an earlier version, either in the form of an Ur-Markus (in the sense of an account used by the author of our Mark, but not written by him) or a proto-Mark (in the sense of an earlier draft by the same author as our Mark).100 However, this variant has found less favour re98

On the problem of defining what constitutes a ‘minor agreement’ (let alone quantifying how many there are!) see, e.g., Boring, ‘“Minor Agreements”’, 1–13; Tuckett, ‘Minor Agreements’, 121–5. Cf. the survey of the history of the study of this phenomenon by Neirynck, Minor Agreements (1974) 11–48. It is to be noted that various attempts have been made to explain it by appeal to an Urmarkus or a proto-Mark or even an intermediate Mark (Boismard) known to Matthew and Luke, or by a deutero-Mark used by them, as well as by invoking oral tradition. Also to be noted is the suggestion of Martin Hengel and Anna Maria Schwemer that the ‘minor agreements’ can be explained by the hypothesis that the later Matthew knew and used Luke (e.g. in Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 226, 234; cf. also Hengel, Evangelien, 301–20). (To regard Matthew’s birth narrative as correcting and supplementing Luke’s – Hengel, Evangelien, 304; cf. 342 – seems a tendentious way to describe what at first sight is a completely different tradition; but if it were that, then Matthew would seem not to have known at least those two chapters of Luke. The same might be said of the last chapters of Matthew and Luke where they diverge sharply after the point reached in Mark 16.8.) Hengel and Schwemer also regard ‘Q’ as a multiplicity of ‘sources’ (187, 225–6) and are (rightly) wary of too sharp a separation between ‘Q’ and the special material of Luke and Matthew (225), but in that case, if ‘Q’ is not dispensed with, it at least becomes a body of tradition upon which Luke and Matthew drew, and ‘Luke becomes the main source of the preaching of Jesus contained in fragmentary form in the tradition of his sayings’ (227). At any rate, the question still remains, which version of Mark the two later evangelists knew. 99 Cf. Schnelle, Einleitung, 190. So Ennulat, ‘Minor Agreements’, and Albert Fuchs, in a series of studies, e.g. the several volumes of Spuren von Deuteromarkus, and more recently his Defizite der Zweiquellentheorie (a deutero-Mark extensive enough to enable us to dispense with ‘Q’?), followed by Klein, Lukasevangelium, 45 (although Fuchs is by no means satisfied with his only partial endorsement of the deutero-Markan solution: Defizite, 22–3). 100 However, Schmithals prefers the term ‘Grundschrift’ for the first of these senses and warns of the ambiguity of ‘Ur-Markus’ (Einleitung, 202; for his treatment of the Markan Grundschrift cf. his Markus 1, 35, 44–51). He considers it conceivable that some of the ‘minor agreements’ can be explained by Matthew and Luke’s knowledge of such a Grundschrift in addition to our Mark (Einleitung, 215). Sanders, Tendencies, 6, notes that Bultmann (e.g. in Geschichte, 7, 18) left open the pos-

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cently, despite the fact that it is easier to explain why we know a revised version of proto-Mark or the Gospel of Mark that used Urmarkus, but not the predecessors of our Mark which this gospel has superseded. It is harder to see why a deutero-Mark no longer survives, for one would have thought that it was meant to be an improvement on our Mark and that one would have preserved and transmitted the improved version.101 These are, however, theories of the relationships between the first three gospels that are basically literary theories, and it should then in theory be possible to test them to see which best accounts for the data. For one should be able to show why the version that was supposed to be the revision, either deutero-Mark or else Urmarkus or proto-Mark if our Mark is thought to be the revision or to have worked up an earlier text, was thought to be an improvement. Once the possibility of oral tradition comes into play, however, the situation becomes potentially more complicated, and it might well be that it is mistaken to pose the possibilities in terms, say, of a single written text of Mark known to Matthew and Luke that was either earlier or later than our Mark. Indeed, would the simplest explanation of the problem that our Mark has survived as a written text and not the supposedly improved deutero-Mark not be to deny that deutero-Mark ever existed as a written document? The ‘minor agreements’ that seem to point to a later form of Mark would then point to an oral tradition that flowed out from and beyond our Mark (a case of ‘secondary orality’?). For Gerald Downing has reminded us how often seemingly thoroughly literary enterprises in the ancient world did not involve the consultation of written sources: there are many cases where apparently writers did not work from written sources that they had before them as they wrote, but rather quoted or used them from memory or from notes.102 And if our Mark spawned an oral tradition after it, one may equally ask whether some of the traditions that flowed into our Mark were not oral also. sibility of an earlier version of Mark used by Matthew and Luke and in n. 3 names other scholars who have appealed to this theory to explain what they consider secondary features in Mark. A further complication has been introduced by Delbert Burkett, who argued that protoMark (here used in the sense of Ur-Markus or Schmithals’ Grundschrift as described above) subsequently underwent two revisions: one was used by Matthew, the second by Luke, and Mark knew and conflated both (Rethinking). 101 Cf. Broer, Einleitung 1, 50; Hengel, Evangelien, 302–3; Lindemann, ‘Literaturbericht 1978–1983’, 256. Klein, Lukasevangelium, 45 n. 8. offers an explanation: as interest in Mark grew some colleagues of Mark or the author himself prepared a revised version; as the latter was taken up into the longer gospels of Matthew and Luke, the circles in which our Mark arose remained true to ‘Ur-Markus’ (here used in the sense of our Mark!). 102 Downing, ‘Conventions’, quoting D. S. Russell on Plutarch’s Coriolanus and C. B. R. Pelling on Plutarch’s methods more generally, and appealing to work by A. Pelletier on Josephus’ use of the Letter of Aristeas. Nonetheless he regards ‘the frequent verbatim and near-verbatim identity that obtains’ at times between the Synoptic Gospels as pointing to dependence on written documents (at least at some points presumably) rather than on

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This is a possibility with which Werner Kelber very much reckons, despite his thesis in his The Oral and the Written Gospel that Mark’s setting his account in writing signalled a decisive break with orality, ‘the breakdown of the authentic act of live communication’ and the substitution of the ‘written gospel as a counterform to, rather than extension of, oral hermeutics’;103 not for him the suggestion of an ‘oral gospel’ proposed by Herder.104 Consequently he devotes a whole chapter to ‘Mark’s oral legacy’ (in the sense of what Mark inherited rather than what he bequeathed), arguing that ‘Without the contribution of orality the gospel might not even be conceivable’ (44). Mark has woven together ‘single tales whose oral profile is far from being erased’ (64).105 The healing stories, for instance, are numerous and possess a uniform compositional structure as well as narrative variations, and these features find their explanation ‘in the oral technique of communication’ (46). They are to be viewed ‘as products of the oral medium and of oral mentality’ (50), depicting a ‘simplified and heroized Jesus’, ‘a genuine manifestation of oral christology’.106 Accounts of exorcisms, which Kelber gives the name of ‘polarization stories’, again show a common pattern, this time of ‘confrontation, expulsion, and acclamation’, as well as ‘variability in narrative performance’; here we see ‘the same oral principle of “variation within the same”’ as in the healing stories (54). For oral remembering is aided by the polarization between Jesus and the evil powers. A third type of stories is found in didactic controversy stories, each culminating in a saying of Jesus, stories which again show a similar structure either of a single exchange of question and response or a double one, together with minor deviations within this framework. These stories are ‘rich in imaginative quality’, for ‘the oral process’ seeks ‘to make the information virtually present in the mind’ (57). A last group of stories is ‘parabolic’. Here there is, however, no ‘single story line’ and it is not characterized ‘by a formulaic, compositional stability’ as the other three groups of stories are. Features like contrasts or doubling or trebling are nevertheless typical of ‘oral memory alone (75). Cf. also his ‘Paradigm’, esp. 17. (In view of the practical difficulties that he then goes on to describe in conflating two written texts in those days, there is much to be said for the use of memory for at least one of the sources. 103 Kelber, Gospel, 92, 185; for him Mark’s Gospel ‘arises not from orality per se, but out of the debris of deconstructed orality’ (95; cf. also xvi). Cf. the critical summary in Dewey, ‘The Gospel of Mark as Oral Hermeneutic’. The most problematic part of Kelber’s thesis for me is not so much the sharpness of the break between orality and writing that he postulates, questionable though that may be, but rather that Mark was conscious of this break and its concomitant hermeneutical shift and deliberately initiated it (e.g. 130: ‘Mark, the writer, chose the written medium, not to recapitulate oral messages, but to transform them’). 104 On the legacy of Herder cf. Kelber, Gospel, 77–80. 105 Contrast Sellin, ‘“Gattung”’, 318, who warns that the detection of ‘oral genres’ and ‘laws of narrative’ in Mark do not mean that the passages in question must have at some point belonged to oral tradition, for authors may avail themselves of these genres and ‘laws’. 106 Kelber, Gospel, 52, his italics; cf. also 71.

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strategy’.107 In these stories ‘the element of excess and irregularity … eases remembering. The trivial facilitates identification, but oddness makes these stories memorable.’ Yet in Mark this ‘extravagance’ is only ‘moderately developed or even nonexistent’. 108 At this point Kelber appeals to the open-ended nature of parabolic language, appropriate to a particular social context and dependent on the interaction between the speaker and the hearers; it is thus ‘a quintessential oral form of speech’ (62, his italics), although ‘the paradoxical and metaphorical aspects of parabolic speech may have corrosive effects on the oral unity of speaker, message, and hearers’ (75). And parabolic speech lacks not only an original form but also an original meaning: each time a parable is told it is different and is heard differently in different social contexts. As regards the language of Mark, Kelber draws attention to the ‘stereotypical connective devices’ that link these stories together, ‘connectives that are for the most part derived from the oral repertoire of the gospel’s primary building blocks’ (65).109 Again, the lack of development of the characterization of the persons mentioned in this work, even of those whose role in the narrative is important, even of Jesus himself, is typical of ‘stories rooted in orality’.110 ‘Such is the dramatic power of Mark’s action stories that they almost make us forget that it is not the characters who generate the story, but the stories that shape characters’ (69–70). And finally, with regard to the question regarding this work as a source of historical knowledge, we should also particularly note Kelber’s contention that ‘orality’s principal concern is not to preserve historical actuality, but to shape and break it into memorable, applicable speech’ (71). Some scholars have, however, gone further than what Kelber proposes and have suggested a yet more basic orality of Mark and other early gospel traditions: (1) It has been the contention of Joanna Dewey in a series of articles written over a period of fifteen years that the composition of Mark owes much to the conventions of oral composition: the Gospel as a whole ‘shows the legacy of orality’ and ‘its methods of composition are primarily oral ones’. She argued that oral techniques of composition were to be expected even if the work had been composed in writing, for it was part of ‘a manuscript culture with high residual orality’.111 She remained diffident at first about the question whether Mark was 107

Cf. Kelber, Gospel, 67: ‘Above all else duality is a concession to oral needs.’ Kelber, Gospel, 61. He here picks up Ricoeur’s ‘concept of extravagance’ as characteristic of the parables; this ‘extravagance’ he also finds in a number of ‘parabolic sayings’ (73–4). Mark’s restraint here is a problem to which Kelber then returns, as he promised, in a later chapter, arguing that ‘Mark employs few and relatively tame parables because he has invested parabolic dynamics in the inclusive gospel composition’ (219); however, the use of ‘parable’ and ‘parabolic’ here remains somewhat enigmatic. 109 Yet at this point it would be appropriate to note R. Thomas’s criticism of talk of an ‘oral style’ (Literacy, 101–4). 110 Cf. Ong, Orality, 151–5. 111 Dewey, ‘Methods’, 33; cf. Botha, ‘Story’, 307: ‘a scribal culture, heavily oriented to108

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in fact composed orally: that might have been the case,112 ‘but there also seem to be indications of writing’, although she does not specify which these are.113 Three years later, however, although she seems at first still to leave it open whether Mark was ‘initially composed in writing … or … initially composed and transmitted orally and only eventually put into writing’, she then argues that it is ‘likely that the original written text of Mark was dependent on a pre-existing connected oral narrative, a narrative that already was being performed in various versions by various people. If this is the case, then we have in writing just one textual rendition of a living tradition, one that at the time may have had little if any impact on the ongoing narrative tradition.’114 And that, she adds, means that it makes little sense of speak of an ‘authentic version’ of Mark.115 And as far as our text of Mark today is concerned, with all its many textual variants,116 she concludes that its ‘textual transmission is likely to have been heavily influenced both by oral performance traditions and by the preferences of the literate people who were using manuscripts.’117 And a decade later Dewey was, if anything, still more firmly convinced that Mark had primarily been composed and transmitted orally, but was prepared to allow for the possibility of both ‘earlier and later written versions’.118 The context in which Mark arose was, at any rate, one in which wards orality’. Alternatively, Vernon Robbins prefers the designation ‘rhetorical culture’, i.e. one that ‘is aware of written documents, uses written and oral language interactively, and composes both orally and scribally in a rhetorical manner’ (‘Composition’, 118; cf., however, the critique of Robbins by Kirk, ‘Manuscript Tradition’, 230–1). And yet one has to ask what written documents played a role in the early Christian culture relating the Jesus traditions prior to the writing of Mark apart from the Jewish scriptures; it is hard to detect, for instance, any influence of the letters of Paul there, and the existence in a written form of such traditions as those contained in ‘Q’ is problematic, as we have just seen. 112 As argued, e.g., by Botha, ‘Story’, 324. 113 Dewey, ‘Mark’, 235. On the other hand, Vernon Robbins sees in Mark 15 a ‘reconfiguration’ of Ps 22, in that an account of a suffering person who hopes to be saved becomes a crucified person expressing despair just before dying, and doubts whether that would occur in oral, as opposed to ‘scribal’, composition (‘Cultures’, 86–7). 114 Dewey, ‘Gospel’, 147, 158; cf. Botha, ‘Story’, 307: ‘the text as we now have it is but an instance, a reflection of one performance of that traditional process’ (his italics); Horsley/ Draper, Whoever Hears, 156. In the light of all the talk of the oral nature of the Homeric tradition, we could note in passing that something similar must have happened in its case: one particular version happened to get written down. However, Rosalind Thomas is somewhat sceptical about the interpretation of the Homeric epics wholly on the analogy of Yugoslavian oral poetry with its ‘composition in performance’ (Literacy, 29–51). 115 Cf. Kelber, ‘Jesus’, 148, 150–1. 116 Cf. Dewey, ‘Survival’, 505–6, on the high percentage of textual variants in Mark, which she regards as an indication of an ongoing oral tradition. 117 Dewey, ‘Gospel’, 159. 118 Here she may well have in mind the discussion in Koester, Gospels, ch. 4, who seeks to explain the ‘minor agreements’ by means of postulating a later redaction or redactions of Mark (see esp. 275–86; seemingly our Mark is for Koester a sort of ‘deutero-Mark’), although his talk of an ‘original text’ as well as redaction may it clear that he is still thinking far more in terms of a literary process than Dewey would wish.

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oral performance without the aid of a written text would be normal – a storyteller could learn Mark’s story simply from hearing it performed.119 What the author of Mark had done was probably to build on, refine and develop ‘an oral tradition that had already created a continuous, more-or-less coherent narrative’. As for Matthew and Luke’s relation to Mark, she regarded it as likely that these evangelists had access to a written copy or written copies of Mark. 120 (2) Whitney Shiner’s Proclaiming the Gospel surveys the evidence for the oral performance of texts in the ancient world as well as the techniques used for doing so, and argues that the Gospel of Mark, too, would have been read or recited to listening audiences, first of all perhaps by its author but then by others who either read its text aloud or, more likely, memorized it either verbatim or in outline and then recited it.121 The wording would not at first have been felt to be sacrosanct, so that alteration and adaptation of the text in subsequent performances would not be surprising (27). Now Shiner is not so much talking about the oral transmission of traditions that have been used by Mark, as Dewey had, but more about the oral ‘life’ of that Gospel once it had been written down, and that has important implications for knowledge of the text subsequently: differing from Dewey but in keeping with a suggestion of Dunn’s, he suggests that the evangelists responsible for Matthew and Luke, for instance, may not have had access to a written text of Mark but to a tradition of oral performances of Mark from memory.122 Shiner also points to the habit of some authors of first trying out 119 In her earlier ‘Gospel’, 145, Dewey had merely, appealing to Brian Stock, maintained that a written text was often unnecessary. 120 Dewey, ‘Survival’, 498, 503. In contrast, Henaut, Tradition, 115, 120, sets his face against the view that the gospels were ‘transcribed orality’: they belong instead to ‘textuality’. 121 In contrast to Lord, ‘Gospels’, e.g. 79, 82, who disputes whether the complex relationships between the Synoptics can be explained on a literary basis, although he later grants (90) that ‘on occasion the texts are so close that one should not rule out manuscript transmission; hence it may be that oral tradition sometimes had written sources affecting the text, not merely in respect to content but also as text’ (his italics). On the other hand, Dewey, ‘Gospel’, 157, had argued that no fixed text would be used in oral performances: the outline of the story would remain unchanged but the wording always varied. In this she falls into line with the judgement of Bernard Brandon Scott that ‘In oral cultures what is remembered is the structure or outline’ (Hear, 40), rather than the actual words. Shiner’s distinction of two types of oral tradition may here be preferable. And between the two may lie a considerable spectrum that ranges from the completely verbatim through various degrees of verbal variation (and some degree of variation is inevitable as soon as translation from one language to another is involved) to a complete freedom with regard to wording. 122 Cf. Dunn, ‘Jesus’, 302–3 (cf. Jesus Remembered, 217–18; also Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 222): ‘It is surely more plausible [than postulating this to be the work of literary redaction] to deduce that Matthew and Luke knew their own (oral) versions of the story [of the stilling of the storm] and drew on them primarily or as well. Alternatively, it could be that they followed Mark in oral mode …; that is, they did not slavishly copy Mark (as they did elsewhere), but having taken the point of Mark’s story they retold it as a storyteller would, retaining the constant points which gave the story its identity, and building round the core

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their works on an audience and inviting criticisms and suggestions that they could then incorporate in their text (38) and he thinks it likely that our Mark was first written down after ‘repeated oral performance’, perhaps after ‘twenty or thirty performances in which to test out different approaches’ (121).123 That in turn implies, one might add, that such a text was not just written down and then published, but that there would have been a period of time during which the text went through a process of revision and modification. And, of course, it would then be possible that those who heard it at an early stage in this process might have in turn passed it on to others, in a form that did not correspond to that which the author finally decided to adopt.124 In such a manner an earlier version of the written text of Mark might also have become available to a wider public. Indeed, Shiner goes so far as to entertain the possibility that ‘If our Gospel is a “published” version of an existing semistandardized performance in the same way that the written Ciceronian speeches were adapted versions of the actual orations, it is quite possible that our text corresponds to no actual performance in antiquity’, and that ‘Mark may have “improved” the Gospel for “publication”’ (112).125 One can then all the more easily see how others might have carried out their own subsequent ‘improvements’ and Shiner, inclining to the view that the to bring out their own distinctive emphases.’ What is puzzling here is that these two evangelists elsewhere followed Mark slavishly, but not here. Were they then operating in literary mode or was the slavish following also possible in oral mode? And if they sometimes followed Mark in written form, sometimes in oral, does one not then have a similar problem to the one that we noted in the ‘Q’ tradition(s), except that alternation between oral and written is perhaps more easily conceivable in the case of ‘Q’, depending on one’s view of the nature of the ‘Q’ tradition(s)? The suggestion that Matthew and Luke may have worked with an oral tradition of Mark, either sometimes or always (Shiner gives the impression of being more consistent in support of orality here than Dunn) is, at any rate, a significant deviation from the usual view that assumes that Matthew and Luke worked with a written text of Mark. (Cf. also C. Strecker, ‘Der erinnerte Jesus’, 25.) And if this is correct one cannot argue (as, e.g., Henaut, Tradition, 62, does) that what is supposedly a result of the literary redaction of Mark by Matthew and Luke means that similar phenomena in the text of Mark must be similarly explained as the result of a literary process. 123 In ‘Technology’, 154, Shiner also regards it as possible that Mark ‘could have been fully composed in the writer’s head before being committed to writing’; that and the suggestion of repeated oral performances before the writing down, however, suggest a rather different scenario from that of the trial runs where the analogies from ancient authors that he cites are reading from their works or from draft versions of them. On the mixture of oral performance and written work cf. also Small, Tablets, 40, 166–7, 209–10 (citing inter alia Plin., Ep. 7.21.7; 8.21.2). 124 Cf. Small, Tablets, 28. 125 In his ‘Technology’, 149, Shiner refers to Pieter J. J. Botha’s suggestion that ‘it is quite possible that the Gospel of Mark is a casual transcription of what has been performed orally’ (‘Story’, 322) , but it should be noted that Shiner’s own earlier (and likelier?) suggestion that the written version of Mark was an ‘improvement’ does not quite fit Botha’s suggestion that it was ‘casual’.

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memorization of Mark was more of the kind that committed the rough content to memory, appeals also to ‘the treatment of Markan episodes in Matthew and Luke’ as evidence for the kind of ‘free development of the material’ presupposed by this method of memorization, even if its audiences’ expectations set certain parameters for such developments (112–13).126 In this approach, it seems, the importance attaching to the writing down of Jesus traditions is very much relativized and this writing down is reduced to the crystallization in writing of a particular stage in an otherwise oral process of the transmission of materials.127 Unlike Dewey, however, he does not seem to entertain the possibility of both earlier and later written versions of Mark, but consistently speaks of a single writing down of the performed narrative. (3) Armin Baum does not just focus on Mark,128 but on all three Synoptic Gospels, and seeks to show how a comparison with oral poetry and with psychological experiments with memory suggests that the phenomenon of the ‘minor agreements’ can be explained if one assumes the oral transmission of tradition.129 On the one hand three versions of a Serbo-Croatian song entitled ‘The 126 Although Dunn’s work is not mentioned by Shiner nor Shiner’s by Dunn, it is striking how similar the continuity or stability combined with flexibility presupposed by both authors is, even though the one is talking about the oral transmission of traditions before the writing of our gospels and the other about their transmission after the composition of one of those gospels. In both cases the stability of the traditions is vouchsafed collectively by the Christian community or the evangelist’s audience. It should be noted that in his later ‘Technology’ Shiner seems inclined to distinguish between a more literary use of Mark by Luke and Matthew’s use of it from memory (155–6). 127 That is in contrast at least to the earlier writings of Werner Kelber with his stress on the differences between the written and the oral (cf. also Dewey, ‘Gospel’, 148 n. 8: in 1983 Kelber had greatly overestimated the separation of oral and written; cf. again Dewey, ‘The Gospel of Mark as Oral Hermeneutic’, and her critique of the handling of Mark in Kelber, Gospel, as well as Hezser’s survey of reactions to the theses of Jack Goody and Ian Watt and also Eric Havelock: Literacy, 2–26, and Georg Strecker’s stress on the continuity between the oral and the written tradition: ‘Schriftlichkeit’, 164–5), and although Shiner recognizes (in the Festschrift for Kelber) that Kelber had in his later writings had ‘explored the complex interrelationship between the two in rhetorical cultures’ (cf. Kelber’s own comments in ‘Jesus’, 159–60, as well as ‘Modalities’, passim; and ‘Force’, 20; and ‘Arts’, e.g. 246, ‘Clearly, orality–scribality studies have moved from a unilateral to an interactive model’), yet feels that he himself, rather than placing Mark so firmly in the category of the written, would assign that work to ‘that grey area of uncertainty’ arising ‘in the complex mix of orality and writing found in rhetorical cultures’, with its ‘composition types that could be produced for either medium’ (‘Technology’, 147–8). 128 Baum, Faktor, 1, gives the impression that his study is only relevant to Matthew and Luke. (It may also be asked what difference it makes when the material in question is not a poem or song with some sort of rhythm or metre as is the case with the Yugoslavian examples that he uses as a comparison, but a variety of sayings and short stories with different forms and in prose form. Günter Stemberger, Einleitung, 48, has similar reservations about the applicability of such analogies to rabbinic traditions.) 129 In this he is by no means alone: Guelich, Mark, xxxiii, suggests that the ‘minor agreements’ could be explained as coincidental or ‘attributable to the living, oral tradition’

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Singer of Bagdad’ manifest a selection of agreements between the first two versions over against the third as well as agreements between the first and the third over against the second and even more agreements between the second and the third in comparison with the first.130 And the results of tests on the remembering of a story by someone who had been educated in an environment where schoolbooks were in short supply and pupils were therefore dependent on memorizing are comparable. It is true that Baum immediately and rightly grants that these parallels differ from the situation in the case of the gospels, in that here alterations in what is remembered or performed are found when the one who remembers or performs is one and the same person, although in his later monograph he also cites as an example two versions of a song performed by two different singers and argues that the example of ‘Marko Kraljević and Musa the Highwayman’ shows that ‘there is no basic difference between two versions [of a single song] stemming from a single singer and two versions produced by different singers’.131 It would not, however, be so plausible to suppose that a single person had been responsible for the first three gospels at different stages of his (or her) life. The comparison would therefore have to be with a collective ‘self’ of the early Christian community or communities as it or they remembered and retold the story of Jesus and his teaching. The three evangelists would then have set down in writing the tradition as it was being remembered and performed at different stages – or in different places? For the collective ‘self’ differs from individuals who remember and perform in that it can exist in different places at one and the same time. Nonetheless, the three performances of the Serbo-Croatian song that Baum cites are dated (the first two on consecutive days) and the sequence of the psychological experiments is recorded, even if it is not clear whether there is any particular rhyme or reason in the variations, so that one could say that one version was consistently an improvement on, or a development of, another.132 In the (picked up by Evans, Mark, liii), and Donahue/Harrington, Mark, 5, that ‘Due to the persistence and even preference for the oral tradition among certain early Christian groups, Matthew and/or Luke may conceivably have had an earlier version of a particular narrative or saying found in Mark, which they retained even as they edited and incorporated Mark’s Gospel’. Baum perhaps goes further, however, in presenting a more thoroughgoing case for orality as an explanation of this phenomenon (see esp. his monograph, Faktor). 130 Baum, ‘Faktor’, 268–9. 131 Baum, Faktor, 278–9, 282. He goes on to note that A. B. Lord thought the degree of verbal agreement so exceptionally high that a written source should be assumed. Baum does, however, also repeat the distinction between the Synoptic Gospels written by different persons and the different versions of the same work being performed by one speaker in the case of a further example from West Africa (297) as well as in his handling of the same analogies to the phenomenon of the ‘Minor Agreements’ as in his article (380). 132 Nevertheless, in an example that Baum gives, from the North American folk-tale ‘The War of the Ghosts’ (‘Faktor’, 270–1; Faktor, 262–5 – here he only cites two versions, the original, which was not quoted in the article, and its reproduction after a year, omitting the

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case of the first three gospels, however, it may frequently be conjectured as to why certain changes in the account might have been made, and that in turn presupposes a certain temporal relation between the (later) changes and the account containing the item that has been changed. Given the nature of the early Christian communities and the culture in which they lived, a culture in which literacy was the exception rather than the norm and in which the oral reading or reciting of stories and other material was commonplace – and it seems to me that these authors and others have made a strong case for this reorientation of our thinking on the world in which the Jesus traditions were transmitted –, is there not a basic plausibility in asking whether some of the problems that still beset attempts to solve the synoptic problem could not be more satisfactorily handled by altering our ‘default setting’ as Dunn suggests and by making more allowance for the role of oral transmission? At the same time, before one goes too far in postulating an early Christianity adrift in a sea of almost total orality, it is worth recalling Martin Hengel’s observation that Luke’s prologue seems to presuppose written sources. For DMQDWDY[DVTDLGLKYJKVLQ (Luke 1.1) would surely be an odd phrase to use of orally performed traditions, although Hengel ‘cannot exclude the possibility that Luke also goes back to oral narratives which he was then himself the first to write down’.133 So, assuming either a literary relationship alone or the place of all three texts within a common tradition and using some of the so-called ‘minor agreements’ between Matthew and Luke as a guide to the text or version of the tradition that predates our Mark or the one that improves upon it and comparing them with our Mark, one should be able to show, one would have thought, a consistent tendency either on the part of our Mark to ‘improve’ an earlier text or version of the tradition, used by Matthew and Luke, or on the part of a later text or version of the tradition, also used by the other two evangelists, to ‘improve’ our Mark. In other words, one needs to ask whether someone, knowing version A, would have reproductions after an hour and after six weeks, but cites the full story; see also 285–7, where he appeals to two performances of the same tale by the same speaker in 1891 and 1894; the comparison between the use of the tale in psychological memory tests and two performances of the tale in an oral culture is instructive) there are cases where an improvement is clear: in the earliest version a canoe seems to speak whereas the two later versions make it clear that it is an occupant of one of the canoes that speaks, but it is hard to assess other changes, such as the sequence in which the various events are narrated. In the first and third versions, for instance, the two young men in the story land and hide; it is the second version in which they only hide when they hear canoes approaching and fear that it may be a war party. Their fear, unmentioned in the first version, seems in the third and last version to be attributed to the foggy stillness on the river. 133 Hengel, Gospels, 175. However, Reicke, ‘Entstehungsverhältnisse’, 1775–6, questions whether ‘Luke’ expressly says that other written texts already existed, yet continues: ‘He knew that other evangelists had begun to collect traditions and amongst them conceivably the redactors of Matthew and Mark.’ An oral collection might well be conceivable, but then one should avoid talk of ‘redaction’ which surely suggests the literary editing of texts.

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been likely to alter it to version B; or is it likelier that, knowing B, one would change it to A? If, on the other hand, there seem to be traces of both tendencies, both ‘improvements’ by Mark and ‘improvements’ on Mark, it would need to be asked whether these competing tendencies cannot be most easily accommodated by postulating a Markan tradition that is in large measure oral, both before the composition of our written gospel and also after it. It is true that, as the likes of David Parker and Christopher Tuckett have reminded us,134 a written text in those days was by no means an unalterable, unchangeable entity, being subject as it was to the vagaries of manual copying, but nevertheless the establishment of a written text and the subsequent use of that text inevitably reduces the scope for the modification of the tradition contained in it, whereas oral transmission increases the likelihood of it.135 Andreas Ennulat, in his thorough study of the ‘minor agreements’, makes two decisions that seem to me questionable. The first is his sifting out of viable explanations of this phenomenon before turning to the evidence of the relevant texts; there is then the danger that the options for explaining the diverse phenomena are then narrowed down prematurely. The second is his setting aside the greater part of the material in probable Mark–‘Q’ overlaps, however hard it may be to decide what constitutes such an overlap and what does not.136 That seems to me regrettable in that it might be expected that it would be precisely at these points where Mark and ‘Q’ seem to be based on roughly the same traditions, yet diverge at certain points, that one might hope to discover valuable clues as to the nature of those traditions and how they developed. That is particularly relevant in the case of the possibility that Matthew and Luke sometimes preserve an earlier form of the tradition found in our Mark.137

134 Parker, Text; Tuckett, Q, 96–7 quoted above. Also to be noted is the observation of Jaffee, Torah, 18–19, that textual variations in rabbinic traditions suggests that scribes assumed that a faithful copy might include interpretative material clarifying the author’s thought, so that the scribe’s judgement about the author’s intention found its place alongside what the author had originally written. Would those copying the gospels have thought differently? And if that applies to the copying of texts, how much more would it apply to oral traditions and oral performances? 135 However, Alan Kirk, ‘Manuscript Tradition’, 233–4, criticizes the views of Parker and Bard Ehrman for failing to free themselves from ‘print assumptions’ and failing to treat the scribes producing the manuscript tradition as tradents ‘physically transforming their texts’ rather than mere copyists. 136 Cf. Ennulat, ‘“Minor Agreements”’, 23–4. 137 So Schnelle, Einleitung, 209–10 (§ 3.3.8), remarks that one of the chief arguments for Mark’s knowledge of ‘Q’ in the Mark–‘Q’ overlaps is that ‘the Q-versions are traditio-historically older and were taken over and edited by Mark’. That hypothesis cannot, in his view, explain why the two do not then overlap more often, but he does not wish to exclude all contact between the two at a pre-redactional stage.

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And that he can so set the Mark–‘Q’ overlaps aside is surely implicitly a further recognition that one must differentiate within ‘Q’. Passages in Matthew and Luke that contain, inter alia, material with a quantitatively high level of correspondence can count as ‘Q’; accordingly, the section relating to the Baptist is assigned by him to this ‘overlap‘, particularly in the light of Matt 3.7–12 but, unlike the editors of some versions of ‘Q’ that only recognize this section as ‘Q’ material,138 Ennulat treats Mark 1.2–8 parr. as also belonging to the double tradition, although he recognizes the uncertainties regarding Mark 1.2–6 (36). Other ‘minor agreements’ are, however, not treated as evidence of an overlap, presumably because this high level of verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke is not found in the context of these agreements over against Mark, and in these cases he seeks instead an explanation in a redaction of Mark that took place before that gospel was used by Matthew and Luke. Yet there are many passages usually assigned to ‘Q’ that show just as low a level of verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke.

For, even if the ‘agreements’ here can be ascribed to ‘Q’, two evangelists have nevertheless, ostensibly with both Mark and ‘Q’ before them – or at least with knowledge of them both, if the word ‘before’ here presupposes a too literary model –, independently opted for the ‘Q’ version instead of the Markan, and it is often far from clear why they should both have done so. One could, of course, suggest that they had simply decided to follow ‘Q’ in this case and to ignore the evidence of Mark, but that leaves aside the question whether they in fact knew our Mark. Moreover, as soon as one ceases to talk of ‘Q’ as one document and allows for the possibility that the strands of tradition designated by ’Q’ may not be homogeneous, then the question of the relation of Mark to these traditions has to be posed in a way that allows for greater differentiation. But the main question here is whether a purely literary account will suffice.139 Samuel Byrskog talks of Mark’s being available as ‘a flexible written manuscript’, a rather curious expression that could perhaps simply refer to the implicit assumption behind talk of proto- or deutero-Mark, namely that the text of Mark was not fixed once and for all, but passed through a process of revision and editing.140 But Byrskog may mean more than that, for he refers to Matthew’s relationship to Mark as a reshaping of ‘a remembered and internalized narrative’.141 Whether Luke’s use of Mark was a literary one or also ‘remembered and internalized’, it would be unlikely that his Mark was identical with that ‘remembered 138 Cf., e.g., Neirynck, Q-Synopsis, 6–7; contrast J. M. Robinson/Hoffmann/Kloppenborg, Edition, 4–8. 139 It seems to me significant that François Bovon, having set out, it would at first sight seem, with a thoroughly literary model of the gospel relationships, nevertheless concludes his introduction to his commentary on Luke with a reference to the need to allow for the continuance of oral traditions (Lukas 1, 22) and in section after section brings these into play to account for instances of ‘minor agreements’ (e.g. 245 on Luke 5.17–26; 268 on 6.1– 5; 421 on 8.22–5; 443 on 8.40–56, etc.) 140 Cf. Schröter’s reference (Jesus von Nazaret, 46 n. 36) to ‘verschiedene Abschriften der Evangelien’. 141 Byrskog, ‘Quest’, 328.

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and internalized’ by Matthew, and the differences between Matthew and Luke in their use of Mark would serve to confirm that. Where, however, Matthew and Luke agree with one another over against Mark the problem still remains: even if we grant that Mark’s text was not static or fixed but underwent a process of revision and editing, these agreements seem to presuppose that at those points both Matthew and Luke either share knowledge of one and the same text of Mark, but one that differs from that of our Mark, or, as a further possibility, both had access to a revision of Mark that might represent an offshoot from the Markan textual tradition with a life of its own, whether that life be a written or an oral one. Yet, were it a written one, then the problem mentioned above still presents itself, namely the question why the earlier written version has survived rather than the later one. And, if it is a matter of an oral version of Mark, then that is surely easier to conceive of before Mark was written down than afterwards, unless one is prepared to grant that Matthew and Luke had often ‘remembered and internalized’ the same version of the Markan tradition with many of the same variations in each case from the written text of our Mark. While Leander Keck observes that A. B. Lord’s treatment of the gospels as ‘oral tradition literature’ ‘has opened the door for a reconsideration of Ur-Markus, not in the sense of one diverging antecedent of our Mark but as the possibility of multiple “Marks”, none of which was exactly identical with another’,142 it is worth asking whether both possibilities may not be applicable, an oral tradition both before and after Mark was written down. However, what seems to me less likely is that one should think in terms of such a plethora of written copies and slightly varying recensions of Mark (and of ‘Q’) as is seemingly envisaged by Eugene Boring;143 that so many should have been produced at so early a stage seems unlikely in view of what we have seen of the prevalence of orality over against written texts, particularly amongst those circles from whom the majority of the earliest Christians were drawn. In many cases it is hard to be sure whether Matthew and Luke or the common tradition that they contain have embellished Mark’s version or vice versa,144 but 142

Keck, ‘Literature’, 120. Boring, ‘“Minor Agreements”’, 24–5. His preference for ‘revised Mark’ rather than ‘deutero-Mark’ (a ‘major redaction’ rather than a ‘slightly-revised recension’: p. 23 n. 42) seems a minor improvement. And if one must operate in a literary mode could one not allow for one or more ‘draft Marks’? (Dion. Hal., Comp. refers to the protracted labours of Isocrates and Plato in trying to perfect their texts: Small, Tablets, 211, citing the LCL ed. 2.224–5.) 144 In many cases it seems to me that the evidence is ambivalent and a case could be made for both alternatives. In matters of style, such as Mark’s use of the historic present (cf. Neirynck, Minor Agreements [1974], 223–9) or periphrastic tenses (cf. Neirynck, Minor Agreements [1974], 240–2) or the aorist of D>UFRPDL (‘frequently almost superfluous as an auxiliary’, BDAG s.v. 2aE; cf. Neirynck, Minor Agreements [1974], 242–4), it could be argued that Matthew and Luke’s tradition has ‘improved’ the style of Mark’s or that Mark reshaped the older tradition in line with his stylistic preferences. Apart from such general consider143

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in a considerable number of cases one could argue that Matthew and Luke may well have preserved an earlier version of the tradition.145 It is presumably such instances that led Rudolf Bultmann to the conclusion that it is ‘probable that the text of Mark that [Matthew and Luke] used had an earlier form than the text of

ations, there are numerous texts where one could argue both ways: e.g. are the shorter versions of the call of the sons of Zebedee in Matthew (4.21–2) and Luke (5.10–11) improvements of the somewhat clumsy formulation of Mark 1.20? On the other hand, they also omit additional information in the reference to the hired servants. In Mark 1.31 Jesus hoists Peter’s mother-in-law to her feet (cf. also 9.27 – and Secret Gospel of Mark fol. 2r, 3–4 in Lührmann, Fragmente, 185): is that a further, added detail or did Matthew and Luke feel it unnecessary? Or Matt 9.2 and Luke 5.18 have the phrase HMSL NOLYQK, which Luke later describes as a NOLQLYGLRQ (5.19), perhaps emphasizing that it was less unwieldy than a NOLYQK; has Mark 2.4 later replaced the couch with a NUDYEDWWR or do Matthew and Luke reflect a tradition that held NOLYQK to be more easily intelligible? Mark 2.21 has HMSLYEOKPD … HMSLUDYSWHL, whereas Matthew and Luke use the cognate verb, HMSLEDYOOHL; has Mark sought for variation, or Matthew and Luke’s version for stylistic effect? Two verses later Matthew and Luke agree in omitting Mark’s R-GRQSRLHL Q, which some regard as a Latinism (but cf. BDR §  523), but do they do so in order to avoid the phrase or has Mark added it? (Where Mark 15.39 has the loan-word NHQWXULYZQ, the other two have H-NDWRQWDYUFK.) Mark 3.22 attributes the charge of possession by Beelzebul to scribes that have come down to Jerusalem, whereas Matthew ascribes this to Pharisees, Luke to ‘some of them’. Has Mark corrected an earlier version or (more likely?) have the other two evangelists avoided this identification of Jesus’ accusers? In Mark 4.11 Koester, Gospels, 279, argues that Matthew and Luke have preserved ‘the original Markan text’, but could it not be argued that they have simplified a somewhat enigmatic Markan formulation? (Correspondingly, Luz, Matthäus 2, 301, argues here for Matthew’s dependence on a deutero-Markan text, although for him the motivation is rather theological: the motif of the disciples’ lack of understanding is played down. In contrast Bovon, Lukas 1, 413, attributes the plural WDPXVWKYULD to oral tradition known to Matthew and Luke.) And in Mark 6.33 parr. Mark has the crowds (‘many’) arrive before Jesus and his disciples, whereas in Matthew and Luke they follow them. It has also been noted that Mark’s version of miracle stories is often considerably longer than the corresponding passage in Matthew and Luke, but has Mark then embellished shorter stories or have the other two gospels abbreviated them? (Koester, Gospels, 281–2, sees in Mark 9.14–29 ‘a deliberate redaction of an older exorcism story which Matthew and Luke still read in their text of Mark’. Collins, Mark, 434, on the other hand, considers it likelier that Matthew and Luke have independently shortened Mark’s version in much the same way, but is that likely in view of the similarities to which Koester draws attention, especially in Mark 9.25–9 parr.? Luz finds a decision here particularly difficult and asks whether it might not be a matter of a redacted text of Mark and the influence of oral tradition: Matthäus 2, 520. Cf., too, the many additions in Mark 5.1–43; 6.32–44.) Sometimes one could argue that they might have been embarrassed by quasi-magical features like the use of anointing with oil in Mark 6.13 (would they have been as easily embarrassed in the first century as we might today?), but could one not also argue that, as with the transmission of the NT text, expansion was likelier than abbreviation? And it is not only in miracle stories that Mark has a longer text: cf. Mark 12.28–34 (which Koester, Gospels, 277, following Bornkamm, takes as containing in vv. 32–4 a later addition to Mark’s text) and 15.44–6. 145 Cf. Reicke, ‘Entstehungsverhältnisse’, 1781–2: at times (our) Mark presupposes the influence of parallel traditions attested in Matthew and Luke, so that (our) Mark is not always the source for those gospels.

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Mark that we have today’.146 Some instances may serve to show this, without any claim to finality or to completeness:147 In Mark 1.8 John announces that the coming stronger one ‘will baptize you with holy spirit’; in Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, he ‘will baptize with holy spirit and fire’. For early Christians, interpreting this as a promise relating to Jesus as mediating the Spirit, and as the one in whose name the rite of baptism was administered, a rite early associated with the gift of the Spirit, the reference to fire would have been a puzzle: baptism with spirit was seemingly something salvific, fire on the contrary threatening or at best purificatory (cf. 1 Cor 3.13–15; also 2 Thess 1.8). To use a term from textual criticism, Mark’s reading is a lectio facilior and therefore more likely to be a later version of the tradition.148 The difficulty of this pairing of spirit and fire is apparent in the interpretation of the passage by some scholars who have interpreted the baptism with spirit as salvific, the baptism with fire as destructive.149 In fact it seems likelier that SQHX PD here may originally have had the sense of ‘wind’ and that this verse is to be interpreted in the context of the imagery of winnowing, as mentioned in the following verse in both Matthew and Luke (Matt 3.12//Luke 3.17); this latter verse is not found in Mark. Yet 1.8 is part of the account of John’s ministry and Jesus’ baptism, which many regard as a Mark–‘Q’ overlap, and which Ennulat accordingly mentions only fleetingly. Nonetheless, it is significant that Matthew and Luke have followed what Joseph Fitzmyer describes as ‘an earlier tradition’, 146 Bultmann, Erforschung, 9. Tuckett, ‘Current State’, 24, is sceptical concerning Fuchs’ deutero-Mark in that it is not always clear ‘that the version presupposed by Matthew and Luke, especially in the “major” agreement (or “overlap”) texts, is always clearly secondary to the Markan version’. And indeed, if some agreements represent an earlier form of the tradition, then it is difficult to recognize, as Fuchs demands (Defizite, 23), that ‘all agreements, of whatever scope, are secondary in relation to Mark’, for in a number of cases it would be our Mark that is secondary. 147 Cf. Sanders, Tendencies, App. II (290–3) for a listing of passages where it has been suggested that Matthew or Luke or both of them preserve ‘a more original form of a certain passage than does Mark’. However, his listing only overlaps in part with the instances cited below. Delbert Burkett also provides a listing of examples where, in his opinion, our Mark was not the source or version of Mark that was used by Matthew and Luke (Rethinking, 7–42). 148 So Guelich, Mark, 26, holds that Mark 1.8 has here ‘truncated’ an older ‘Q’-tradition and has deleted ‘and with fire’. Cf. also Hoffmann, Studien, 19; Schulz, Q, 370; Schweizer in TDNT 6, 398–9. Collins (Mark, 146), on the other hand, follows H. T. Fleddermann (Mark and Q: A Study of the Overlap Texts [BETL 122; Leuven: University Press/Peeters, 1995] 31–9) in seeing here a three-stage tradition with ‘fire’ alone as the earliest stage, then ‘and spirit’ added, and lastly ‘spirit’ alone; again Mark would then represent a latter stage than Matthew and Luke. 149 Cf., e.g., Gnilka, ‘Johannes’, 123. The textual evidence for the omission of ‘holy’ in Luke 3.16 is weak (64; Tertullian), but it is easier to explain the addition of the adjective rather than its omission. Were the shorter reading earlier then it, too, would make it easier to interpret 3.16–17 as referring to a future winnowing.

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which they have preferred to the Marcan form’.150 Their preference would be the more intelligible if they did not know the simpler reading of our Mark.151 It should not be overlooked, however, that there are a number of further features of the beginning of Mark that could also be regarded as reflecting a later stage in the tradition – his opening in 1.1, the addition of ‘stooping’ in 1.7152 or of ‘from Nazareth’ and ‘in the Jordan’ in 1.9.153 Mark’s summary of Jesus’ message in 1.14–15 is fuller than Matthew’s, but Luke includes no summary of the message at this point. (Other features, on the other hand, seem to have been embellished or improved in Matthew and Luke’s versions, as when they add ‘of God’ or ‘holy’ to ‘the Spirit’ in Mark 1.10 or have the Spirit descending ‘upon’ Jesus like a dove rather than ‘into’ him,154 and ‘leading’ him rather than ‘driving’ him out in 1.12.) In many cases our Mark contains information and further details not found in Matthew or Luke. One such case is Mark 1.29, where only Mark says that the house in question belonged not only to Simon Peter but also to Andrew, and that James and John accompanied Jesus on this occasion.155 In most instances it is hard to see what would have led Matthew and Luke to leave out these pieces of information, particularly since both present considerably longer versions of the story of Jesus than Mark’s. Similarly it is hard to see why they would have omit150

Fitzmyer, Luke 1, 473. Cf. Walter, ‘Mk 1,1–8’, 468: would ‘Luke’ not rather have been reminded of his account of Pentecost by our Mark’s reference to ‘holy spirit’ and have left out any additions to that (as he indeed seems to have done in Acts 1.5, despite the fiery phenomena at Pentecost in 2.3)? 152 Cf. Laufen, Doppelüberlieferungen, 121. 153 Understandably they also handle the following quotations from Malachi and Isaiah differently, not specifying the source of the quotation from Malachi and separating that quotation from that of Isa 40.2, which they correctly attribute to Isaiah. They also add HMPSURVTHYQVRX to the prophecy as found in Mark 1.2b. 154 It is true that the Spirit entering into him makes good sense, but perhaps less so when this is something visible and ‘like a dove’. 155 Cf. Sanders, Tendencies, 290, referring to J. Weiss and Bultmann. (It should be noted that, whereas Sanders was concerned with the question whether as a general rule detail was added or removed in the course of the transmission of material, my question is a more modest one: if an evangelist knew of a version containing such information, is it likely that he would have omitted it? The estimate of the likelihood or not may, however, be undermined by ignorance of factors that influenced an evangelist’s choice, e.g. that he happened to know that a piece of information was false or did not understand something.) Other instances (e.g.) are Mark 1.33; 2.1 (the ref. to Capernaum; the following account of the healing includes a number of other added details); 2.13, 15–16; 3.6 (the ref. to the Herodians; cf. the ref. to the ‘leaven of Herod’ in 8.15), 9, 17 (the name ‘Boanerges’); 4.39 (Jesus’ forceful words of rebuke to the storm); 6.31; 9.3 (the comparison with a fuller); 10.30, 32; 11.16; 12.19, 21, 28, 31, 35; 13.3 (the same quartet of disciples as in 1.29); 14. 5, 51–2 (the mysterious account of the unnamed young man at Jesus’ arrest), 54 (Peter’s warming himself at the fire); 15.1, 7–8, 15 (Pilate’s desire to oblige the crowd), 21 (Simon as father of Alexander and Rufus), 22 (Mark’s fuller explanation of the name Golgotha), 24–5, 41–2; 16.1, 3–4, 6. 151

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ted the reference to Jesus’ pity in 1.41 (VSODJFQLVTHLY)156 or to David’s need in 2.25,157 had they known of them.158 In Mark 3.4 it is only Mark that mentions the silence of those present when Jesus poses the question of what is allowed on the sabbath.159 Likewise it is difficult to account for Matthew and Luke’s omission of a saying like Mark 2.27; as Helmut Koester remarks, ‘criticism of the Sabbath observation was pervasive at that time’, he therefore thinks it ‘more likely that the original text of Mark was later expanded by the addition of this saying’.160 He is also unable to explain otherwise why only Mark contains the parable of 4.26–9.161 The same could well be true of the addition of the reference to the ‘gospel’ in 8.35, al-

156 So Luz, Matthäus 2, 9, finds it ‘quite inexplicable’ why Matthew and Luke should have omitted this word and compares Matt 9.36. This induces him to ask whether various recensions of Mark were current at the time when Matthew wrote. If, however, this emotion is the lectio facilior, a secondary correction of the textually poorly attested RMUJLVTHLY (a so-called ‘Western’ reading), then Matthew and Luke’s omission is more easily intelligible (cf., e.g., Davies/Allison, Matthew 2, 13); the problem that they have solved by silence a Markan corrector solves by substituting a different emotion. 157 Ennulat, ‘Minor Agreements’, 81, grants that in particular Matthew’s omission here is surprising. 158 With the ref. to Jesus’ emotion in Mark 1.41 cf. 3.5; 8.12; 10.21. It is Mark, too, that adds the reproach of the disciples with regard to Jesus’ lack of caring in 4.38 and to his SDUUKVLYD in 8.32. And it is in Mark 12.37b that we have a reference to the crowd hearing Jesus ‘gladly’, and in Mark generally repeated references to the disciples’ and others’ amazement and fear (TDPEHL VTDL 3x in Mark, never in Matthew and Luke; with IREHL VTDL the difference is not at first so striking, but is nevertheless noticeable if one concentrates on the reaction of fear when confronted with Jesus’ words and deeds, as opposed, e.g., to commands not to fear). 159 Admittedly Matthew omits the question entirely, replacing it with a different argument, not in the form of a question (Matt 12.11–12). 160 Bovon, Lukas 1, 268, argues that Matthew and Luke knew a version without this saying from oral tradition. 161 Koester, Gospels, 276. It is to be noted that Mark has a fuller version of the ending of the parable of the four types of soil than Matthew and Luke (4.7–8), and that the latter have no equivalent to R>WHHMJHYQHWRNDWDPRYQD in Mark 4.10. On the other hand Mark 4.15 contains no ref. to the heart. Henaut, Tradition, 243, argues that Matthew and Luke omitted Mark 4.26–9 (a) to save space (‘given the limits of space inherent in ancient scrolls’), and (b) because, following the interpretation of the previous parable, a parable that seemed to encourage inaction jarred. The need to save space did not prevent Matthew from adding a further parable and its interpretation (Matt 13.24–30, 36–43), and activism would surely be unwelcome if it supplanted trust in, and reliance upon, God’s sovereign activity. Alternatively, Davies and Allison, Matthew 2, 407–8, explain Matthew’s omission by the structure of the chapter that, they allege, required only three parables in 13.24–43 (Luke’s reason for also omitting it is very different: ‘in chapter 13 he has long since left his Markan source’. Yet they note that the parable would have been in place in ch. 8 if only it had served Luke’s purpose of ‘presenting Jesus’s teaching on the importance of hearing the word of God aright’ – quoting Marshall, Luke, 330.)

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though Koester seems to think more of a deliberate omission by Matthew,162 as well as of that to the ‘adulterous and sinful generation’ in 8.38.163 Again, one has to explain why Matthew and Luke find no place for the saying of Mark 10.24b: ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!’164 Richard Bauckham points to the difficulties created for some exegetes by the fact that Mark’s text seems, in one instance, to have added an individual’s name which is omitted in the versions of Matthew and Luke:165 Mark 10.46 names the blind man in Jericho as Bartimaeus, whereas for Luke it is ‘a certain blind man’ (18.35) and for Matthew ‘two blind men’ (9.27; 20.30).166 What could have motivated Matthew and Luke to omit the name had they known it? If Bauckham scornfully rejects Bultmann’s suggestion that Matthew and Luke knew a completely hypothetical text of Mark without the name (and it is hard to see why it would have been revised by deleting the name), then one solution would be to postulate that they knew the still growing tradition upon which Mark had drawn, but not this detail added by Mark in his written account.167 All three Synoptics agree in having Jesus quote Isa 56.7 in support of his action in the temple (Mark 11.17 parr.), but it is only our Mark that adds that it is ‘for the gentiles’ that the place should be a ‘house of prayer’. Unless one argues that it is the earlier reading that holds out the hope of the fulfilment of this text, whereas the later ones realize that the temple, now destroyed, can no longer serve this purpose, then there is a prima facie case for Matthew and Luke not having this addition before them. And in fact the temple, once destroyed, could not serve as a ‘house of prayer’ for anyone, and both versions of the saying would be explanations why Jesus acted as he did because the place was not fulfilling its intended purpose.

162 Koester, Gospels, 11–12 (not fully clear is Luke’s reason for avoiding the term, especially since it is used twice in Acts). 163 Wolfgang Schenk, ‘Einfluss’, 143–4, selects this whole verse as an example of the priority of the ‘Q’ version (Matt 10.32–3//Luke 12.8–9 – not given as a parallel in Aland, Synopse, but contrast Huck/Greeven, Synopse, 134); cf. Pesch, Markusevangelium 2, 64. Bovon, Lukas 1, 481, regards the phrase ‘adulterous and sinful generation’ in Mark as secondary whereas Luke (and Matthew?) here follow an oral version. Cf. also the remark about the crowds being like sheep without a shepherd in 6.34, the addition in Mark 9.10 of the disciples’ wondering about the reference to resurrection from the dead (although admittedly only Matthew has here a ref. to the resurrection), in 11.10 to the coming kingdom of David, in 11.17 to ‘all nations’ (see further below), and in 12.14 the question GZ PHQK@ PK GZ PHQ; 164 But cf. Ennulat, ‘Minor Agreements’, 228–9. 165 Cf. Bauckham, Jesus, 41, referring to Bultmann, Geschichte, 228; Dibelius, Formgeschichte, 25–6 (49–50 in later edd.). Cf. also Riesner, Jesus, 16; Sanders, Tendencies, 24–5. 166 Ennulat, ‘Minor Agreements’, 238–9, remarks that the omission of the name is explicable in the case of Matthew who mentions two blind men, but hardly to be explained satisfactorily as redactional in Luke’s case. 167 Cf. Patterson, ‘Can You Trust a Gospel?’,199.

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Mark also differs from Matthew and Luke in the twofold prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane in 14.35–6; first he prays (in indirect speech) that this ‘hour’ might be taken from him, and then, acknowledging that all is possible with God, that the cup be taken from him. Matthew and Luke only have parallels to the latter prayer (although it is to be noted that Matt 26.39 differs from Mark and Luke in using SDUHYUFRPDL, not SDUDIHYUZ, although the former verb was that used by Mark in 14.35). Particularly striking is Jesus’ answer to the high priest in Mark 14.62: to the question whether he is the Christ, the son of the blessed One, he replies simply ‘I am’, whereas Matthew and Luke have two different but equally equivocating replies, ‘You have said (it)’ (Matt 26.64) or ‘If I tell you, you will not believe (it)’ (Luke 22.67). This text cannot simply count as a ‘minor agreement’, since Matthew and Luke’s texts are not identical, but both nevertheless seem to agree in reflecting a tradition where the secret of Jesus’ identity is better preserved or veiled than in Mark, for all the latter’s love of secrecy elsewhere. Is it really credible that the other two evangelists knew the explicit answer of Mark’s version and toned it down?168 In terms of methodology, these passages where our text of Mark seems to reflect a later elaboration or development of the tradition found in Matthew and Luke are highly significant. Whether they are to be explained as stemming from an overlap between Mark and ‘Q’ or from Matthew and Luke’s use of an earlier version of the Markan tradition, they call in question the all too frequent assumption that our Mark should enjoy a privileged position as our earliest extant, non-hypothetical witness to Jesus’ words and deeds. For, if these readings in fact reflect an earlier stage of the Markan tradition, then they are not quite as hypothetical as ‘Q’ and are at the same time prior to our Mark. That is not, however, to question the basic premiss of Markan priority, but merely to ask which version of Mark enjoys that priority.169 Yet, on the other hand, we have already noted one or two features in Matthew and Luke’s accounts that seem to reflect an embellishment of Mark’s version, 170 features that have led to the hypothesis of a deutero-Mark that was used by Matthew and Luke, and the list of such features could be lengthened considerably. The list could be even longer were one also add those passages where only one of the other two evangelists reflects an embellishment or further development of 168 However, Marcus, Mark, 1005, follows Streeter and Taylor in preferring here the relatively poorly attested longer reading ‘You have said that I am’, but a harmonization with Matthew’s version seems likelier as an explanation of this reading. 169 Thus Schenk, ‘Einfluss’, 145, explains cases of Markan priority over against ‘Q’ as in fact cases of the priority of what he calls ‘Prae-Markus’; cf. 161. Burkett, in claiming to have disproved Markan priority, in fact means that he has shown that what was prior to Matthew and Luke was not Mark as we know it (Rethinking). 170 See, e.g., on Mark 1.10, 12 above.

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the Markan text, but the following cases are restricted to instances where both the other two agree more or less in their alteration of Mark’s account: A number of these cases can be counted as stylistic improvements: Matthew and Luke simplify, for instance, the double negative in Mark 1.44 or the phrase for ‘in pairs’ in 6.7 (GXYR GXYR; cf. VXPSRYVLD VXPSRYVLD in 6.39 and SUDVLDL SUDVLDLY in 6.40).171 Again, while we noted many cases where Mark seemed more precise than Matthew and Luke or offered additional information, sometimes the reverse is true. In Mark 2.22 putting new wine into old wineskins has the single consequence of ruining the wine and the wineskins, but Matthew and Luke are more specific: the wineskins are ruined and the wine is spilt. In 2.23 these gospels also add that the disciples ate the ears of corn that they had plucked (and Matthew first explains that they were hungry and Luke mentions that they rubbed them with their hands). The woman with a haemorrhage touches Jesus’ garment in Mark 5.27 but the hem of it in Matthew and Luke.172 In Mark 6.11 the disciples are to shake off the dust that is under their feet; Matthew’s ‘the dust of your feet’, in the sense of ‘the dust on your feet’ or, better still, Luke’s ‘from your feet’ make better sense. Mark 6.14 refers to Herod as a ‘king’, but Matthew and Luke correct this to ‘tetrarch’. Mark 8.12 has no reference to this generation being ‘evil’ or ‘evil and adulterous’, although it is so described in 8.38.173 The Markan passion predictions in 8.31 and 10.34 refer to a resurrection ‘after three days’, while Matthew and Luke have ‘on the third day’, which corresponds better to the actual timing of the discovery of the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances.174 Matt 21.35, 38 specify who it was that took hold of the servant or servants and that the tenants saw the son and that this sparked off their deliberations. In Gethsemane it is in Mark 14.47 an unnamed ‘one of the bystanders’ who draws a sword and Cf. also the addition of VRX in Matt 12.13//Luke 6.10; the re-ordering of the list of the twelve as found in Mark 3.16–18 so that Andrew is named immediately after his brother; the replacement of the D>Q with a future indic. in Mark 8.35b with D>Q and an aor. subj.; the replacement of the PHWDY in Mark 9.4 with a NDLY; Mark 13.19, (lit.) ‘those days will be affliction’, could be considered awkward and Matthew and Luke rephrase it; Mark’s clumsy R- HL_ (14.10) is likewise rephrased by the other two evangelists; they also seem not to have known what to make of the enigmatic HMSLEDOZYQ in Mark 14.72 (cf. R. E. Brown, Death 1, 609–10), although Gnilka argues for oral tradition in the light of divergences between Matthew and Luke elsewhere in the pericope (Matthäusevangelium 2, 435; cf. Bovon, Lukas 4, 344). (Or has Luke 22.62 been added to the Lukan text? Cf. Tuckett, ‘Minor Agreements’, 132–4; contrast Hengel, Evangelien, 307, who argues rather that scribal error has led to the omission of v. 62 from the Lukan text.) 172 Neirynck, ‘Minor Agreements’ 37, comments that Mark 5.28 and 29 ‘clearly show the ineptness of any Deuteromarkan solution’ (contrast Luz, Matthäus 2, 51–2 on the ‘minor agreements’ in this whole passage; on the other hand, Bovon, Lukas 1, 443, argues for oral tradition here). 173 In Mark 9.19 this generation is ‘faithless’, while Matthew and Luke both add ‘and perverse’ 174 Luz, Matthäus 2, 487: perhaps a deutero-Markan recension of the text. 171

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cuts off the ear (ZMWDYULRQ in Mark, ZMWLYRQ or RX? in the other two) of the servant of the high priest, whereas in Matthew it is ‘one of those with Jesus’ and in Luke ‘one of them’, referring to those round about Jesus mentioned in the previous verse, who ask him whether they should use their swords.175 In the mocking tormenting of Jesus in Mark 14.65 he is challenged to prophesy, but it is Matt 26.68//Luke 22.64 that explain that he should declare who has struck him (although Matthew, unlike Mark and Luke, omits to mention that they have covered Jesus’ face).176 On Easter morning the women find a mysterious ‘young man’ sitting in the otherwise empty tomb in Mark 16.5, whereas in Luke they see two men and in Matthew ‘the angel of the Lord’.177 And, notoriously, Mark ends with the women fearfully fleeing from the tomb and saying nothing to anyone (16.8), but Matthew and Luke both portray the women and their reaction in a better light before they continue the story further.178 In Mark 1.40 the leper does not address Jesus with NXYULH as in Matthew and Luke; it is true that this address is relatively infrequent in Mark (perhaps only in 7.28 on the lips of the Syro-Phoenician woman),179 yet is that sufficient grounds for Mark to omit it here if he knew it? Again, Mark 9.5 has Peter address Jesus 175

Soards, ‘Oral Tradition’, 343–5, also points out that Matthew and Luke agree against Mark in having Jesus pose a question to Judas, even if the question is in both cases different, as well as having Jesus rebuke the disciple who used a sword; this he sees as evidence of the continued influence of oral tradition alongside and upon the work of the evangelists. 176 For Luz, Matthäus 4, 204, this is most likely due either to their dependence on a deutero-Markan redaction or oral tradition; R. E. Brown, Death 1, 579, comments that here as elsewhere ‘the oral approach … is the key to important agreements between Matt and Luke who scarcely worked on texts totally isolated from the way these stories continued to be narrated orally among Christians’, in keeping with his earlier judgement that ‘some of the positive agreements of Matt and Luke over against Mark force us to modify the thesis of Marcan priority through the introduction of orality’ (44; on the following page this is applied specifically to the mocking of Jesus); Hengel, in keeping with his argument that the ‘minor agreements’ are to be explained by Matthew’s use of Luke, argues that the former deleted the ‘prank’ of the covering of Jesus’ head as ‘unsuitable’ (Evangelien, 309). 177 In the following verse Mark 16.6 has the young man refer to ‘Jesus the Nazarene’; is the word ‘Nazarene’ a Markan addition or has Matthew and Luke’s tradition chosen to leave the term out? 178 Matt 22.36//Luke 10.25 also have a reference to the testing of Jesus that is lacking in Mark 12.28 (here Luz, Matthäus 3, 270–1, at first seems to want to explain the alterations from Mark as Matthaean redaction, but then grants that in the case of Luke it may be a matter of a special source and asks whether Matthew also knew this tradition, perhaps orally, adding: ‘The dispute as to whether this special tradition is more original than the Markan or later cannot be decided one way or the other [lässt sich nicht alternativ entscheiden]’; Davies/Allison, Matthew 3, 236, see so many ‘minor agreements’ in this pericope that for once they entertain the possibility of the influence of oral tradition as well as our Mark); Mark 14.10 simply refers to Judas Iscariot, while Matthew and Luke add a OHJRYPHQR or NDORXYPHQRQ; Matt 26.29//Luke 22.18 add a ‘from now on’ to Mark 14.25 (DMS¨D>UWL or DMSR WRX  QX Q). 179 Its occurrence in 10.51 is very poorly attested (D it) and can be easily explained as influenced by the parallels in Matthew and Luke.

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simply as ‘rabbi’, but Matthew has NXYULH and Luke HMSLVWDYWD.180 In Mark 8.29 Peter’s confession is ‘You are the Christ’, whereas Matthew (‘You are the Christ, the son of the living God’) and Luke (‘You are God’s Christ/anointed one’) are more elaborate. In other words, one can survey the cases where Matthew and Luke (more or less) agree with one another over against Mark and can ask in which direction it is likelier that the tradition has developed, from our Mark to Matthew and Luke’s version or vice versa. In many cases it is uncertain or the evidence is ambivalent, but in many other cases it seems more plausible that the tradition has developed in the one way rather than the other. However, these cases seem to be quite evenly balanced in support of both possibilities, development from Mark to Matthew and Luke or vice versa.181 That could be explained within a literary framework,182 although, as we have seen, if one postulates a plurality of written versions of Mark, then it becomes harder to explain why a later version has not supplanted an earlier one and indeed has not survived at all, with the possible, but highly disputed, exception of fragments of the Secret Gospel of Mark, 183 if there were indeed a written version of the text of Mark subsequent 180

Cf. Neirynck, Minor Agreements (1974), 280. Cf. Schenk, ‘Einfluss’, 142–3 (the combination within a single passage such as Mark 4.31–2 of examples of both Markan and ‘Q’ priority he explains by positing a Markan Vorlage or Prae-Markus: 145). It is perhaps significant that Rudolf Laufen, Doppelüberlieferungen, e.g. 75, 385–6, could come to the conclusion that neither the editor of ‘Q’ nor the author of Mark had before them each other’s work in a literary form, since sometimes ‘Q’, sometimes Mark preserves the earlier version of a saying, even if it may at times be questionable (e.g. in the case of Mark 1.8) whether he has rightly identified the earlier version. Both were drawing on the same oral and written tradition, a tradition that he regards as the common property of the entire church (although it is to be doubted whether the evidence of the three gospels warrants quite such a sweeping inference). Joachim Schüling, Studien, is in basic agreement with this assessment, although he criticizes Laufen’s talk of a ‘mediated relationship’ if by this is meant a literary relationship (182); for him both documents draw on common pre-literary oral traditions. Both authors, however, make no allowance for the possibility of the formation of Mark over a period of time, with earlier or later versions of Mark’s text. 182 When, e.g., Bultmann, Erforschung, 9, writes that ‘Q’ like Mark probably had not taken on a settled form but was ‘embellished here and there and was available to Matthew and Luke in somewhat different versions’, it seems that he is still thinking in predominantly literary terms. Parker, Text, 121, also suggests that such problems as the ‘minor agreements’ may be more satisfactorily solved by positing ‘a series of contacts between texts each of which may have changed since the previous contact’ and, inasmuch as he is discussing textual criticism and insists that he is ‘not … denying the existence of documents’, it would seem that his ‘texts’ are not simply a tradition of oral performances, but that he is thinking in terms of a series of editions of written texts. Similarly, the complex relationships proposed by Burkett, Rethinking, remain within a literary framework (cf., e.g., his reference to ‘an autograph copy of Proto-Mark’: 91), yet it seems questionable whether the complex interweaving of several written sources that he postulates is likely, given the editorial practices of the day (cf., e.g., Downing, ‘Conventions’). 183 See the discussion in Koester, Gospels, 293–303, or RGG4 5, 846, or Marvin Meyer in 181

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to the one we have. Such phenomena are easier to explain in terms of a basically oral tradition which has at a certain point or at certain points been set down in writing.184 What has been written down then remains for the most part unaltered, with exceptions like the various forms of ending added after Mark 16.8, but the Markan tradition continues to be handed down, performed and developed orally, and to exercise an influence on the Jesus traditions as they were taken up and written down by the other two Synoptic evangelists. Both these observations on Mark’s relation to Matthew and Luke and the preceding questions as to the nature of ‘Q’ encourage an approach to the interrelationship of these sources that is far from tidy and clearcut, far less tidy and clearcut, at any rate, than the neat diagrams of their interrelationship through which students are usually introduced to the ‘synoptic problem’. (At least E. P. Sanders and M. Davies in their Studying the Synoptic Gospels sought to alert Englishspeaking students to some of the potential complexities.) In other words, Martin Hengel was fully justified in his question, even if he confined it to Matthew and Luke: Is not the origin of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew essentially more complicated in terms of literary criticism and tradition history than we generally imagine on the basis of the predominant two- (Mark, ‘Q’) or four- (Mark, ‘Q’, Lukan special material, Matthaean special material) source theory?185

In the light of the questions raised above as to how Mark took shape it seems that there too the situation may be more complicated than we have been accustomed to think. Yet what has all this to do with the theme of this volume, namely Jesus in historical research, apart from the fact that orality has played such an important part in some recent works on Jesus? It might be enough to say that gauging the nature of the sources at our disposal and the way in which they have come into being and thus the question of the access of the authors of those sources to the events of which they tell are basic concerns of all historical research. Yet more is to be said in this instance, for the scenario envisaged by those who stress the orality of the traditions behind and alongside our written sources for the life of Jesus surely offers potentially far more scope for the creativity of those that have handed down those traditions. Now it is true that, as we have seen, some more conservative proponents of orality have sought to rein in that creativity, by postulating techniques of verbatim memorizing going back to Jesus himself or by ABD 4, 558–9, as well as the considerably more sceptical summary by Helmut Merkel in Schneemelcher, Apokryphen 1, 89–92, or by Lührmann, Fragmente, 182–3. 184 Cf. Telford’s verdict (‘Tradition’, 711) that there is, as he sees it, ‘a general agreement now … that the Gospel of Mark stands on the borderline between oral tradition and literary expression and that a significant process of literary activity preceding the construction of his Gospel has not been demonstrated’. 185 Hengel, Gospels, 173.

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stressing the control exercised by the Christian community or communities or by key figures who had been eyewitnesses of the events and had heard the sayings recorded. Nonetheless, one cannot simply assert in advance of any examination of the transmitted material that the latter has been handled either creatively or conservatively. That is surely a judgement to be reached on the basis of the material itself, and there, I would suggest, the evidence is not uniform: at times the sources show a marked degree of unanimity, at others considerable divergence. In other words, one would be unwise to make sweeping judgements here. It is necessary to differentiate between different items in the tradition, always allowing, too, for the possibility that, even where unanimity or near unanimity is found, this is not in itself a sure indication that the tradition in question goes back to Jesus himself. His followers might equally have decided upon a particular version of this piece of tradition. As with the whole question of relations between the first three gospels it would be wise to deal with each item from the tradition case by case rather than to fit a particular instance into some predetermined framework. However, let Marc Bloch’s account of the effects of the dependence on oral tradition for the spread of information amongst those in the trenches during the First World War serve to link together the theme of this chapter with that of the previous one. For there he shows how, due to ‘the role of propaganda and censorship’, the troops set little store then by the reliability of written, let alone printed, information, and this led to ‘a prodigious renewal of oral tradition’ (an observation that reminded me strongly of Papias’ preference for the spoken word). Behind the fronts there was what he refers to as ‘the myth-making zone’, from which there was passed forward to the front a ‘mass of intelligence true or false, almost always distorted in every circumstance and ready for further elaboration there’. This state of affairs he compares with the way in which so much information circulated in the Middle Ages;186 in this respect the world of first-century Palestine would have been no different, except that written sources of information would have been, if anything, even rarer, and printed ones were, of course, also non-existent.187 Earlier in this section, entitled ‘In Pursuit of Fraud and Error’, Bloch had also discussed the reliability of memory and one’s resultant testimony: no witness is absolutely reliable, only more or less reliable. And the accuracy of testimony can be affected by the condition at the time that the observation was made of the one testifying (was he or she, e.g., exhausted or under strong emotional stress at the time?) and ‘the degree of his attention’ and to what that attention was directed at the time.188 That all suggests that the role of mem186

Bloch, Craft, esp. 107–10. As they were, of course, during most, if not all, of the Middle Ages; on the (problematic) delimitation of this epoch cf., e.g., Ulrich Köpf in RGG4 5, 353, where Gutenberg’s invention is one sign of the beginning of a new epoch. 188 Bloch, Craft, 100–3. 187

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ory in the formation of traditions, including those concerning Jesus, needs to be assessed with considerable care, and that ‘Jesus remembered’ is far from a guarantee of the reliability of those memories. Furthermore, if Dunn and others are correct in emphasizing the role of oral tradition in earliest Christianity, then we must also allow for the possibility of a ‘myth-making zone’ there as well, a ‘zone’ propagating information ‘true or false, almost always distorted in every circumstance and ready for further elaboration’, and by no means preserved from those dangers by dependence on human powers of memory. Nonetheless, we may be comforted by Bloch’s reassuring words to the effect that such limitations ‘do not affect the fundamental structure of the past’ (103). Whereas his example is that of Caesar’s defeat of Pompey and the certainty of the existence of both these Roman leaders, we can assert with equal confidence that Jesus of Nazareth existed and was crucified under the Roman governor of the province of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus, and may indeed be able to go on to make a number of further statements about Jesus’ life and work with almost as great a confidence, despite our dependence on all too fallible human memories and the vagaries and perils of oral traditions.

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8. Who Did Jesus Think He Was? 8.1. A Legitimate Question? Perhaps the title of this chapter is a question that one should not ask, and one that falls outside the bounds of all legitimate historical investigation.1 Had not Bultmann roundly declared that we cannot know what was going on in Jesus’ 1 It is true that Gadamer (Truth, 292), speaking of the interpretation of texts (not historical events) criticizes Schleiermacher in insisting that ‘we do not try to transpose ourselves into the author’s mind’, but rather ‘to transpose ourselves into the perspective within which he has formed his views’. Whether or not that applies as well to the actions of persons in history, it is not clear to me that this distinction makes a great difference in practice (apart from avoiding charges of psychologizing). Do not both amount to trying to see things as the author (or historical actor or agent) saw them? Or, again, there is the suggestion of Wayne Meeks that there ‘is no self apart from community’ and that there ‘is no Jesus we can know apart from responses to him’ (‘Asking Back’. 49). Yet he grants that there may be some ‘ineffable center’ in persons that may be known only to themselves, although there is little sign of that concession in his Christ, 56– 8. Furthermore, in his concern for the ‘historic identity’ of Jesus (see further below n. 35) he is not talking simply of the interaction with other contemporaries that may have influenced Jesus’ personality and self-understanding (as suggested by the ‘no self apart from community’ as well as by his Christ, 58, where he refers to a ‘dialogical process by which … early followers of Jesus constructed their own identities at the very same time they were constructing Jesus’ identity’), but also of the responses found in later texts (only the New Testament or later ones as well?), which by definition could not affect Jesus’ self-understanding. That comes near to the memory or impact of Jesus of which Dunn speaks, but both contemporary and later responses may be mistaken, and Meeks grants that it is the job of historians ‘to pry behind the public visage of notable people’. It might be better not to talk of ‘identity’ here (is the choice of that word influenced by the history of christological dogma?), but of ‘personality’ (Meeks also speaks of persona: Christ, 59) or (better?) ‘self-understanding’ from the contemporary perspective and ‘significance’ from the later one. One may grant Meeks that Jesus’ ‘identity’ or ‘personality’ is (the product of/formed by means of) a process (in the sense that it was formed in interaction with persons and circumstances around him), but that ‘identity’ then was one of which Jesus could have been aware ('self-understanding’ or ‘self-awareness’?), whereas the interaction of persons with accounts of him after his death is something that could not have influenced his self-perception, however much it affected those who thus interacted with those accounts. If that interaction is to be seen in the questions posed with regard to Jesus, as Meeks suggests, then it is clear that Jesus can only have been influenced in his self-understanding by those questions that his contemporaries asked of him and the answers that he gave to them, either openly or to himself, but not by those posed by Meeks or others today.

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heart and that he himself did not want to know this?2 At least, though, Bultmann subsequently conceded that at least we can know that he was aware that God had commissioned him to proclaim the eschatological message of the arrival of God’s rule and the demands as well as the invitation that were God’s will.3 Nonetheless, many would suspect that this is an improper enquiry into the mind of Jesus and that that mind is inaccessible to us today, even if we do not make it even more inaccessible by invoking Jesus’ ‘sinlessness’.4 And in a sense that is true, although that has certainly not prevented historians from asking similar questions of other historical figures of the past, despite the danger that they may be applying psychological insights inappropriately; and even if they were to apply them expertly, Sir Lewis Namier warns us, ‘available psychological data yield at best a fragmentary picture’.5 Nevertheless, one aspect of historical enquiry that still plays a very important role is the question of the plans, hopes and intentions of the actors in history,6 even if Harvey and Ogden rightly warn us against believing ‘that the inner intention of an actor can be infallibly deduced from his sayings or actions’.7 (The ‘infallibly’ is important here; a person’s sayings or actions may nevertheless make a certain inference with regard to the intention lying behind them plausible or even probable.) This aspect of historical research seeks for the causal links between events in terms of the actors in history, their intentions and their actions, perhaps now in the present understanding what they were doing and why they did it better than the actors themselves could at the time.8 It is 2 Bultmann, ‘Question’=‘Frage’, 101. But cf. the critique of Young, History, 129–30. Marxsen noted, too, among some of Bultmann’s pupils, a marked change, in that, unless one was prepared to exclude historical questions as irrelevant for theology, one ‘will have to concern [oneself] in a historical way with the self-consciousness of Jesus, and he will have to do so for theological reasons’ (Beginnings, 33). 3 Bultmann, ‘Verhältnis’, 452. 4 Not, however, Wright, who considers the question of Jesus’ ‘mindset’ a thoroughly legitimate part of the ‘historical study of an individual such as Jesus, no different in principle from the historical study of other individuals’ (Jesus, 139). Contrast, however, C. Strecker, ‘Turn’, 37. On Kähler’s arguments against any ‘psychologizing’ on the grounds of Jesus’ sinlessness cf. above ch. 2 n. 89. 5 Namier, ‘Human Nature’, in Stern, Varieties, 383. 6 Despite the somewhat provocative quotation from Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Book XII ch. 2) with which Danto begins his Analytical Philosophy: ‘Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.’ At any rate, Neumann, Geburt, 161, stresses how, within the Annales-school, it was realized that ‘events’ could only be explained if one could understand the mentality of the actors involved – the structure of their motivation, their psychology, values and beliefs, their thoughts and feelings. 7 Harvey/Ogden, ‘How New?’, 240. 8 Cf. Rüsen, Rekonstruktion, 35: ‘in past actions that which cannot be explained by means of intentions is “historical”, namely a constellation of results that cannot be understood as stemming from some purpose that aimed precisely at what came to pass’; also

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certainly true that intentions and the actual results of human actions do not always coincide and that one frequently sees ‘the complex contrasts between what people say, plan, think, and hope, and the often hideous and unpredictable outcome of events’,9 and Jürgen Kocka sees in this a reason for a shift in historical work in general away from events, actions and experiences to an emphasis on structures and processes. Nonetheless he reminds us that we can only claim to have understood a historical reality when we have succeeded in understanding the connection between structures and processes on the one hand and experiences, intentions and actions on the other.10 Equally determined, J. L. Gaddis speaks of historians’ ‘obligation to get inside the mind of another person, or another age, but then to find [their] way out again’.11 Now Norman Perrin wishes at this point to distinguish between a person’s ‘understanding of existence’, i.e. of one’s own existence, and a person’s ‘self-consciousness’, referring to ‘the process of experience, reflection, decision, and so on, by means of which that understanding is reached’. 12 The former does not mean ‘the conscious decisions to which this understanding leads and in which it may be expressed; this, again, would be self-consciousness’.13 Yet the problem here is that it is the decisions and the actions to which they lead that are accessible to the p. 36: an ‘asymmetry’ between the intention of an action and its effect (cf. also 42 on the element of ‘contingency’). On p. 122 he spoke, too, of the role played by historical actors’ purposes, including unconscious ones, but the scope of the contingent goes beyond what can be ascribed to any sort of purposes entertained by the actors, consciously or unconsciously, and covers the role of those ‘Wirkungszusammenhänge’ that come under ‘Analytik’, not ‘Hermeneutik’ (128; cf. 130). 9 Williams, Truth, 153; he also warns against ‘over-rationalizing’ the past, by overestimating ‘the extent to which people knew what they were doing’ (248). Lonergan, too, reminds us that ‘the actual course of events results not only from what people intend but also from their oversights, mistakes, failures to act’ (Method, 179). It is therefore true that, as Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance’, 21, puts it, ‘there is no necessary relationship between the intentions of actors and the outcomes of their actions’; yet (fortunately) there often still is some relationship! Collingwood, Idea, 48, attributes to Christian influence, in particular the doctrines of original sin counterbalanced by divine grace, ‘the recognition that what happens in history need not happen through anyone’s deliberately wishing it to happen’ and this, he holds, ‘is an indispensable precondition of understanding any historical process’. Yet that is rather hard to reconcile with his contention that to discover the thought expressed in an event is already to understand it (p. 214). That holds good for an event that is intended by an agent, but only for such an event. (Collingwood’s emphasis on history as the history of thought leads him to some rather strange conclusions and to a questionable restriction on the scope of historiography.) Cf. also Bultmann, History, 2–4; E. H. Carr, What Is History?, 44–6; Meyer, Reality, 106. 10 Kocka, ‘Paradigmawechsel?’, 65–6, 75. 11 Gaddis, Landscape, 129–30. 12 Cf. here ch. 3 and the discussion there. 13 Perrin, Rediscovering, 223. Cf. Charlesworth, Jesus, 131–64, esp. 135–6, who avoids talking of Jesus’ ‘self-consciousness’ but is very happy to speak of his ‘self-understanding’.

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historian and from which he or she can then seek to infer what understanding lay behind the decisions and actions. Thus, to say that Jesus’ self-understanding is ‘a legitimate concern for the historian because it can be deduced from his teaching’ is only part of the truth. There are also actions and the decisions that led to them, and they also offer some hope that Jesus’ self-understanding can be deduced from them – without laying oneself open to the charge of psychologizing. It is true that R. G. Collingwood’s hope of ‘re-creating’ in our own minds the thoughts of figures of the past has been criticized, for instance by Paul Ricoeur when he comments that Collingwood’s ‘whole enterprise breaks down over [the] impossibility of passing from thought about the past as my thought to thought about the past as other than my own’.14 And yet is not this attempt to gauge what another’s thoughts might be, on the one hand, an experience that we also have when trying to interpret the actions of figures of the present and, on the other, an experience that makes us conscious both of a possible affinity as well as a possible distance? We could imagine ourselves thinking in such a way, too, and yet we are aware that the thoughts of the other are to a greater or lesser degree hidden and therefore perhaps different, even different in a decisive way.15 In the case of Jesus, however, this is a question which forces itself upon us again and again. It forces itself upon us whenever we read of Jesus' miraculous acts, for, even if we are disposed to regard with scepticism many of the more spectacular stories of his wonders, others are more difficult to dismiss. They are so firmly and persistently attested in the Jesus traditions that, if one were to dismiss them, one would have little reason to think that one could know anything about Jesus. At least Jesus’ work of healing and exorcizing is particularly well attested, and many are prepared to grant that a charismatic figure like Jesus could do such things, could have an impact of this sort on those with whom he came in contact; that is particularly true if such an impact admits of a this-worldly explanation or is paralleled by similar phenomena effected by other charismatic 14 Collingwood, Idea, 296, criticized by Ricoeur, Time 3, 147. The temporal distance between then and now looms very large for Ricoeur; he recognizes, too, the value of the comparison with understanding the mind of another (e.g. Reality, 16), but thinks that this comparison is also undermined by the temporal gap. Yet understanding the mind of another is, even in the present, sometimes far easier in some cases than others, e.g. if they belong to the same cultural milieu; it is true that the mind of figures in the past is a fortiori likely to be harder to understand than that of a contemporary but nevertheless, both in the present and in the past, there is a considerable spectrum of ease and difficulty in understanding the mind of others. As a whole the past spectrum may reflect a greater difficulty, all the greater the further in the past the minds in question are situated, but the point is that this is a difference of degree, not of kind, and the factor of separation in time should not be overestimated. 15 The thought of the other is hidden to a lesser degree if the person has given expression to his or her thought, not only in actions, but also in a commentary on those actions. It remains, nonetheless, hidden to the extent that the person may, for instance, have difficulty in formulating his or her thoughts or may be dissimulating.

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figures. In that case, though, it is unlikely that Jesus could have failed to notice that he was having this effect on others. On the contrary, he seems often to have sought to bring about these cures, and the case of the woman suffering from a haemorrhage who initiated the cure, at first without Jesus' being aware of it (Mark 5.25–34 parr.), is an exception. Willingly to adopt the role of a faithhealer, however, surely implies a certain awareness of one’s own powers on the part of the healer, however he or she explains them. (And if any of the so-called nature miracles were historical that would naturally imply an even greater awareness on the part of the wonder-worker of his or her powers – one could hardly just start walking on water and the like without noticing it, unless perhaps one were drunk.) Similarly, other events in Jesus’ life, if true, presumably imply a certain selfawareness of who he was or what role he should play in God’s plan. Letting himself be baptized by John the Baptist or venturing to go up to Jerusalem if he knew the risk he was taking are both actions that force us to ask what was going on in Jesus’ mind as he did those things, even if it is much easier to ask the question than to answer it, let alone to reach a consensus on the answer. That the question is, nevertheless, a legitimate one is suggested by the very fact that Ben F. Meyer could write an entire book with the somewhat unfashionable title, The Aims of Jesus,16 although W. R. Farmer grants that before Meyer wrote his book, this subject was generally regarded in higher circles of theological scholarship as off limits. One of the basic assumptions of mid-twentieth century critical reflection has been that the self-consciousness of Jesus is beyond recovery.17

Yet Meyer insists that the discovery of what historical agents intended and the mediation of this discovery to a given audience is what ‘historical interpretation’ is all about.18 Wright goes a step further: people’s ‘aims, objectives, motives and 16 It is perhaps no accident that Meyer starts his book with a reference to Hermann Samuel Reimarus, for the latter wrote ‘Concerning the Intention of Jesus and His Teaching’, asking ‘What sort of purpose did Jesus himself see in his teaching and deeds?’ (ed. Talbert, 64). Cf. Meyer, Aims, 19; Riches, Jesus, 4–6. 17 Farmer, ‘Reflections’, 59. Yet Farmer may be rather unguarded in talking here of ‘selfconsciousness’ unless it is in fact or in practice impossible to distinguish intentions and self-understanding from ‘self-consciousness’; Charlesworth, at any rate, confesses that he used to speak of Jesus’ self-consciousness, but came to drop this in favour of ‘Jesus’purpose or intent and his concomitant self-understanding’ (Jesus, 131, his italics; cf. also 135). Echoing Meyer’s title, Wright, Jesus, has a section devoted to, amongst the other historical questions raised by the ‘third quest’, the question ‘What were Jesus’ aims?’ (99–105; cf. also 479–81). 18 Meyer, Aims, 79; he distinguishes between ‘historical interpretation’ and ‘historical explanation’ in that the latter concerns itself with the ‘unpredictable interaction of these intentions’. However, to construe historical ‘meaning’ solely in terms of the intentions of historical agents would seem to be just as mistaken as limiting the ‘meaning’ of an utterance to the speaker’s intention (see ch. 1 n. 152); not only does that not take sufficient account of the unintended results of actions (like the misunderstanding of what someone wanted to

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beliefs’ are often linked together by what we may call ‘vocation’ or ‘ambition’. To enquire into these ‘is not to enquire about psychology, but about history’.19 Or at least to enquire about what lay behind the actions of certain agents in history – and in the case of Paul, whom Wright cites as an example, with the help of what the apostle wrote about his own motives. And the same applies to Wright’s other example, John the Baptist, as far as we can be reasonably sure that he said what has been attributed to him. Many of the sayings attributed to Jesus seem to reflect a consciousness that he was to play a special role in the divine plan and that what was happening in his life was something that surpassed all God’s previous dealings with the world and humanity.20 But are those sayings authentic? Here there might seem to be all too many reasons to doubt that, for here, if anywhere, one might expect the beliefs of Jesus’ followers concerning his status and identity to have coloured the tradition. As a consequence, particular care is required here before accepting that Jesus ever made any such statements. Nonetheless, Peter Stuhlmacher is surely justified in his comment that the common assumption that Jesus never mentioned the meaning and the purpose of his commission may be critical but historically thoroughly improbable for Jesus’s time and for the setting in which he worked. 21 Here the discussion has often centred on the question of a ‘messianic’ consciousness and yet there is a certain ambiguity in the use of this adjective. In a narrower sense it can be used with reference to a figure who was designated God’s ‘anointed one’ or messiah.22 In a somewhat weaker sense it could be used of a figure of the end-time who ushered in God’s salvation, even if that figure was not called the messiah.23 But in a yet broader sense it can be used of the endsay), but the ‘meaning’ of historical events can, and very often does, refer to a significance that first becomes apparent to a later observer. Denton, Historiography, 112, 149–51, is also rightly critical of this exclusive concentration on the intentions of historical agents: ‘Meyer allows that individual intentions are often not adequate historical explanations, but given this allowance, he nevertheless seems to avoid any category of explanation that goes beyond intentions.’ In particular, Denton faults Meyer’s neglect of the social sciences, for ‘there are social structures larger than the intentions of individuals, and … while human action has its sense primarily in light of individual intention, intention in turn has its sense in light of shared practices, beliefs, and attitudes that form its background’. 19 Wright, Jesus, 480. 20 It is to be noted that it is hard to avoid talking here of consciousness or awareness; the alternative would be to say that Jesus spoke and acted without thinking or considering what he was doing. 21 Stuhlmacher, Schriftauslegung, 155–6. 22 This would correspond to what Chester, Messiah, 193–6 calls the ‘minimalist’ definition of ‘messianism’ and cognate terms, as defended by Charlesworth and M. C. de Jonge. Yet Chester argues throughout (esp. in ch. 4) against ‘any fixation on the specific title “messiah”’ (326). 23 Theissen and Merz name three factors common to these messianic figures: (1) they usher in an eschatological change, i.e. a definitive new constitution for the world which surpasses all that has gone before; (2) they bring salvation; (3) they have charismatic qualities

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time, even when there is no mention of an agent who would usher in that endtime.24 A further complication is the view that a figure may be ‘messianic’ but not necessarily ‘eschatological’; Andrew Chester here quotes the view of William Horbury that such a person may be the ‘coming pre-eminent ruler – coming, whether at the end, as strictly implied by the word “eschatology”, or simply at some time in the future’.25 Yet that is to be distinguished from the question whether it is applied to a figure that is already present. That is possible, as Horbury sees, if the future is ‘conceived of as very near’ – or even if the awaited future is seen as already breaking in. Yet it would seem confusing to speak of such a present ruler as ‘messianic’, at least in early Jewish texts, if he were not connected with God’s final salvation; it would be a mistake to revert to Old Testament notions of the earthly king as God’s anointed one, with no reference to a coming or imminent end or, to use Chester’s phrase, ‘final deliverance’.26 Others carefully avoid introducing the question of a messianic consciousness too early and prefer to speak rather of Jesus’ claim to have been sent and commissioned by God. And perhaps one should not expect him to have claimed more, if Hengel and Schwemer are correct in arguing that true messiahship was always a matter of God’s appointing and that a true messiah would therefore never claim to be such.27Allied to that is that authority that was a mark of much of the Jesus tradition and that according to Mark was a feature of Jesus’ ministry which caught the attention of his contemporaries: And they were amazed at his teaching. For he taught as one with authority and and not like the scribes. … And they all wondered and so began to discuss it amongst themselves, saying, ‘What is this? A new authoritative teaching! He even gives commands to the unclean spirits and they obey him. (Mark 1.22, 27)

And yet this authority did not automatically bring respect and obedience, for some found it possible to attribute Jesus’ power over the spirits to his collusion with the prince of demons (Mark 3.22 parr.). But according to Mark the impact made on other witnesses was a more favourable one. That impression one could ascribe to Mark’s theology, but might that not be to carry historical scepticism too far? For doubtless Jesus did make a very considerable, favourable impression on many of his contemporaries and, equally plausibly, it was that which made

and status and are closer to God than other human beings (Jesus, 463). None the less it is to be noted that these figures themselves remain human. See also Chester, Messiah, 198– 201, and the literature cited there; he settles for the designation ‘agents of final deliverance’ (e.g. 326). 24 Repeatedly, however, Chester notes the concern of some scholars that ‘messianism’ may lapse ‘into every kind of eschatology’ (Messiah, 194: Charlesworth; 198: Schreiber). 25 Chester, Messiah, 202, quoting Horbury, Messianism, 7. 26 Cf. Chester, Messiah, 326. 27 Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, esp. 545.

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him such a threat to the Jewish authorities that eventually he had to be forcibly silenced and removed. Others, again, speak of Jesus’ consciousness of having been sent by God, but that is in the last analysis an inference from Jesus’ claims and from the things that Jesus said and did. It may well be a legitimate inference, however, for otherwise it would imply that Jesus never reflected on whether he could or should make such claims and why. And so some regard it as indubitable that Jesus was aware of his eschatological authority, 28 whereas for William Wrede, at least at the time when he wrote his famous work on the ‘messianic secret’ in Mark, Mark had inherited traditions of a wholly unmessianic Jesus, which he then sought to reconcile with his own conviction, and that of his community, that Jesus possessed messianic status.29 What is more doubtful, however, is whether this question of Jesus’ status and identity and role was one which either Jesus or his contemporaries could have ignored or overlooked. If he said or did even a fraction of the things ascribed to him, then the question that Jesus poses to his disciples in Mark 8.29 was surely inescapable and it would be unrealistic to suppose that it was not raised: ‘Who do you say that I am?’30 28

Theissen/Merz, Jesus, 447, 455. Schweitzer, Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis, vi, goes further and argues that, if Jesus did not regard himself as the messiah, this would be fatal for Christian faith; therefore Schweitzer argues that Jesus knew it, but kept it secret. (Yet it is a basic methodological problem here that we have no sure means of telling whether it would be likely or even possible that one could be God’s messiah or a messianic figure of some sort without knowing it – here the historian’s own experience is, to my knowledge, of no help and it is doubtful how far arguments from analogy could take us, unless we can find a comparative sample of other messiahs, at least ones whose messianic claims we are prepared to recognize.) A more modest claim is that of Mussner, ‘Wege’, 161, appealing to G. Ebeling, namely that a ‘christology is “left hanging in the air” if it does not have its basis in Jesus’ self-consciousness’. 29 Seven years earlier Wrede had been prepared to speak of Jesus’ claiming a ‘proleptic’ messianic status for himself (Rollmann/Zager, ‘Briefe’, 277, citing Wrede’s ‘Predigt’, delivered in Breslau in 1894; cf. esp. 96, 106–8, 124–5; the expression ‘proleptic’ is, however, not one that Wrede himself uses, although he speaks of Jesus as the one who had to prepare for the coming of God’s kingly rule and would some day usher it in: 124–5; nevertheless, ‘proleptic’ perhaps fits better the foretaste of that kingly rule in Jesus’ deeds and words, and Wrede sees that kingly rule and messiahship as closely linked to one another). That ‘proleptic messiahship’ is a possibility that Wrede mentioned in his Das Messiasgeheimnis der Evangelien, but only then to question whether it was psychologically probable (220–1). At any rate, he leaves the decision open as to whether Jesus really regarded himself as the messiah, being content to leave the question undecided (221–2; cf. also his own notice of the book in Die christliche Welt in 1901 quoted by Rollmann/Zager, ‘Briefe’, § 10, 305). However, Rollmann and Zager rightly note Wrede’s remark in a letter of 2 January 1905 to Adolf Harnack (their § 17) that he is now ‘more inclined than earlier to believe that Jesus saw himself as elected to be messiah’ (317) (i.e. more a messiah designate than an proleptic one?). Cf. Schweitzer, Beurteilung, 20–1, on Jesus’ relationship to the figure of the ‘son of man’. 30 It is therefore understandable that Conzelmann and Lindemann insist that the material that Mark used reveals no unmessianic picture of Jesus and that after Easter there was no unmessianic Jesus tradition (sc. amongst Jesus’ followers): Arbeitsbuch, 320.

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Richard Rohrbaugh warns us here, however, against too individualistic an understanding of the society of that time in which Jesus lived. There are societies and groups which are more or less individualistic and there are those which are more or less collectivistic. A self-awareness that presupposes the individual’s private self may be characteristic of individualistic societies, but has hardly any role to play in a collectivistic society, in which it is far more a matter of the public self and the ‘in-group-self’. There were individualists in the society of Jesus’ time, both in the urban elite and amongst those whom Rohrbaugh describes as ‘degraded’ and ‘dispensable’, marginalized individuals. It is accordingly symptomatic, in Rohrbaugh’s eyes, that Jesus asks: ‘Who do people say that I am?’ and ‘Who do you think that I am?’ In other words, it is a matter of Jesus’ public self (‘Who do people say that I am?’) and the ‘in-group-self’ (‘Who do you think that I am?’ posed as a question to his disciples). But is it really conceivable that one would simply adopt either the public self or the ‘in-group-self’? At any rate, that is not how Mark portrays it, for he shows us a Jesus who will not let his role be determined either by the public or by the ‘in-group’, but takes up Peter’s confession ‘You are the messiah’ and fills it with his own content and his own programme. And, at the same time, inasmuch as Jesus envisaged a characteristic role for his disciples and required it of them, a role that he himself adopted as their model, it is clear that his self-awareness is not solely individualistic either, for others share it, but that nevertheless it is not imposed upon him either by society or the ‘in-group’. Yet, if in the society of that time, in a predominantly collectivistic society, there were nevertheless individuals to be found amongst the marginalized, then it must be remembered that Jesus and his followers had marginalized themselves, in that they had left behind them so many aspects and structures of their society and had opted for an existence like those of itinerant beggars.

8.2. Did Jesus Know and Reveal the Answer? Nevertheless, another aspect of the problem requires to be handled with caution. For, even if the question of the goals and purposes of a historical figure is a thoroughly legitimate one and without doubt belongs to the historian’s task, answering it involves a step behind and beyond that which we know directly and that which is immediately accessible to us. That is true even when we have documents or sources which purport to lay bare the goals of the historical figure in question, since one must then ask whether what is disclosed matches up to the truth or whether it does not rather veil the real intentions of the author. In other words, in ancient sources as well as modern ones one has to reckon with the possibility of an intentional slant or propagandistic elements. That is above all true of politicians, but applies to other, more normal people. The impression that such

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people make on others is more public, in that more people share this impression, and it can therefore be more objectively judged. Such caution is even more appropriate when a person like Jesus is involved, who apparently wanted to say as little as possible about himself, but instead as much as possible about God and God’s kingly reign.31 Claims of Jesus about himself are relatively rare and those that do occur are, accordingly, all the more suspect, as possibly of post-Easter origin. So did Jesus deliberately hide his self and his identity and his self-understanding, as many suppose? (It is, for instance, often claimed that he was aware that he was the messiah, but suppressed this information, because it could too easily have been misunderstood, e.g. as a claim to political power.32 Or was it part of a deliberate communicative strategy, that he did not reveal all that he knew, as Ben Meyer suggests? It would have been counterproductive to impart that information.)33 Whether that is plausible or not, it must be granted that the fact of the impression that he made on others need not necessarily imply that he himself had reflected on this impression and the reasons for it. For often we remain unaware of the impression which we make on others, and it comes as a surprise when we discover how others regard us. It would be quite conceivable, therefore, that a charismatic figure like Jesus had never considered what impact he was having on others or what impression he was making on them. Yet, if the reactions are strong or extreme enough, then most charismatics are compelled to reflect on what they are trying to achieve. (If a lecturer’s audience react to the lecture by fainting or ecstatic manifestations that would give the lecturer in question cause for reflection, unless so carried away by her or his flow of charismatic lecturing as not to notice this reaction, but just as much, and more probably, if they all fall asleep.) It is another matter whether it is historically likely that Jesus never pondered this aspect of his work. However, the question whether Jesus had to reflect on the implications of his words and deeds is harder to answer. If, for instance, his utterances concerning the Mosaic law reveal an authority which seems, by implication, to surpass that of Moses, would that necessarily mean that he was aware that he was claiming such an authority for himself? Or was he in this matter simply so convinced of God’s will that he spoke like this, without reflecting on such implications for his own identity and role? Implications that may seem all too self-evident to us need not been so plain to Jesus. Similarly, we may think it 31 Cf. Chester, Messiah, 323: ‘the focus for [Jesus] should be above all on the kingdom of God, and on what God is bringing about (however much Jesus himself is the agent of this), … What really matters for Jesus, and is the driving force behind his words and actions, is the role he has been given by God (and therefore the role he plays) in all of this’ (his italics). Keck, too, refers to Jesus’ ‘total indifference to his own power, either to advance it or to preserve it’ (Who Is Jesus?, 172). 32 Cf., e.g., Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 546. 33 Cf. Meyer, Aims, 250. That seems to me a somewhat precarious argument which enables one to read almost anything into the teaching of Jesus.

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self-evident that Jesus’ miracles of healing would fittingly be ascribed to the workings of God’s spirit, but it is more probable that Jesus himself was less precise and spoke in less specific terms of God’s power. At any rate, the question of Jesus’ self-understanding should as far as possible be kept apart from dogmatic questions of christology. For the necessity that someone who is God’s messiah should be aware of being the messiah seems to me to me to be an unproven modern assumption. After all, how many of us have experience of being a messiah or even of meeting someone who really is a messiah, so that we can with confidence say that there is no messiahship without a corresponding messianic awareness?34 And rightly Wayne Meeks asks why we should ‘equate the historic identity of a person with that person’s self-awareness’. For it ‘is only in retrospect that historic identity becomes apparent’. And Meeks later goes on to ask whether ‘the identity of Jesus’ is ‘something that can intelligibly be separated from the sum of all knowable responses to him’.35 Yet historical identity would be another matter.

8.3. Jesus’ Claims and Self-Awareness This whole question therefore calls for more than usual care in formulating both the questions and the answers. In the light of the these problems, in the light of the reserve felt by many with regard to terms like ‘awareness’ and ‘consciousness’, on the grounds that they imply a psychological analysis of Jesus, it may be better to speak of Jesus’ claim to have been sent by God.36 For sayings are undoubtedly attributed to Jesus which imply the claim that God sent him, although Dunn, following C. H. Dodd, argues that 'I have come to …’ is yet more significant than ‘I have been sent …’, just as ‘I say to you’ claims more than the prophetic ‘Thus says the Lord’.37 Such claims seem to be just as much a public matter as Jesus’ powerful deeds. Nevertheless, I am not fully convinced that it is impossible or illegitimate to talk of Jesus’ consciousness or that such talk involves too much psychological knowledge of Jesus’ soul. For a certain self-awareness can be deduced from such claims. When I claim, ‘I am a Scot’, then one is not mistaken in inferring that I am aware that I am a Scot. It is, however, quite another matter what associations and connotations are bound up either with this 34

Cf. also n. 28 above. Meeks, ‘Asking Back’, 43–4, 49. It is significant that Meeks says ‘historic’, not ‘historical’, i.e. he is not talking about historical persons’ sense of identity or, better (because avoiding the suspect term ‘identity’), of who they are and what their role is. 36 Cf. Hahn, ‘Überlegungen’, 49. Gnilka, Jesus. 251–67, gives a chapter the title ‘Die Sendungsautorität Jesu’. 37 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 655, quoting Dodd, ‘Jesus as Teacher and Prophet’, in Mysterium Christi (ed. G. K. A. Bell, A. Deissmann; London: Longmans, 1930) 53–66, here 63. 35

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claim or those of Jesus. In order to know what Jesus’ claims meant for him one has to probe further, and here lies the danger of going too far, when one goes behind Jesus’ words to ask what he meant when he said that. At that point one can all too quickly assume that one knows what he must have meant. In short, Jesus made, according to the gospels, certain claims, both explicitly and implicitly. In all probability there lay behind these statements a certain understanding of himself, even a certain self-awareness. But to say exactly what this self-understanding and self-awareness was is much more difficult. It is to be recalled that the ‘teacher of righteousness’ played a most important role in the history of the Qumran community, but that it would be very hard to say where this figure fitted into their eschatological expectations, let alone into those of contemporary Judaism in general. If the ‘teacher’ were aware of that, he seemingly left his community rather in the dark. Seemingly one could often leave the answers to such questions vaguer than we today would find satisfactory. A first, prudent step ist, at any rate, the recognition that someone like Jesus would not have gone to face the dangers, in fact the near certainty of his death in Jerusalem, were he not convinced of something. This ‘something’ need not, however, have referred to his person, but could just as well have concerned his task or his mission. It was not necessary to ask: ‘Who am I, that such a task has been given to me? What sort of person is responsible for such a mission?’ For it is all too conceivable that it was above all the task itself which was the centre of Jesus’ attention. Yet was it not nevertheless unavoidable that Jesus himself went further and thought more about this question? For it must be asked whether it is historically realistic to expect Jesus not to have posed these questions. More than once they are raised in the gospels in various forms – ‘What is this?’ (Mark 1.27), ‘Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ (2.7, the question of the bystanders), and in 11.28 the question of the high priests, scribes and elders, ‘By what authority are you doing these things?’ Would it not have been more surprising if no one had posed such questions? Is it not rather to be expected that all sorts of speculations would be generated by the words and deeds of Jesus?38 It therefore seems to me historically more probable that Jesus would inevitably have been confronted with such questions, even if we cannot say with any certainty how he reacted to them. Or was his reaction a deliberate non-answer? Theissen and Merz venture to argue that both supporters and opponents ‘give voice to expectations or fears’ which suggest a connection with messianic expectations of some sort.39 However, Christians could subsequently 38 To that extent the view of H. J. de Jonge (‘View’, 24, 28) that some regarded Jesus as messiah already during his lifetime (over against the view of M. C. de Jonge that Jesus already understood himself as such) is thoroughly plausible, although it is less self-evident that no one would have had a motive for so identifying him after his death, e.g. as a JewishChristian reaction to the rejection of Jesus by the Jewish authorities. 39 Theissen/Merz, Jesus, 468.

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have assumed that Jesus’ contemporaries must have drawn some such conclusions. Nevertheless, it seems more probable that the possibility of such a messianic identity had also occurred to Jesus’ contemporaries.40 Theissen and Merz’s interesting further suggestion should also be noted, that such messianic expectations were more prominent in Judaea than in Galilee, and were associated with Jerusalem, the holy city, where it was expected that the messianic king would one day reign. It should, however, be remembered that there were then several different possible answers to questions about the identity and nature of a messianic figure.41 It will not do simply to speak of messianic expectations or expectations of the messiah. For Jews at that time looked forward to the coming of messianic figures of very different sorts, not only a messianic king, but sometimes, too, a priestly messiah or a prophet of the end-time, mostly an earthly figure, but, at least in the case of the apocalyptic ‘son of man’, a heavenly one; sometimes, on the other hand, they expected no messiah at all, but only the revelation and intervention of God in person. These expectations could all, however, be described as ‘messianic’ in a broader sense of the word, characterizing the time when God would intervene, either in person or through some earthly or celestial agent, to right the wrongs of a world devastated by human sin and injustice. But in all probability Jesus had never explicitly declared, ‘I am the messiah’, and a passage like Mark 14.62, where Jesus replies in the affirmative to the high priest’s question, ‘Are you the messiah?’, probably owes much to Mark’s christology and narrative art.42 What, then, did Jesus say about himself? One possible answer was to speak in terms of the purpose of his coming, and a small group of sayings speaks of Jesus’ awareness of having been sent with a particular purpose.43 Some of these may be secondary formulations, but others 40 So Theissen, Jesusbewegung, 202: ‘Messianic expectations were in fact applied to Jesus, partly by the disciples (Mark 8.27ff.; Luke 14.21; Acts 1.6), partly by others whom one thought crazy (Mark 1.24; 5.7).’ 41 Chester, Messiah, 325, insists that ‘there is only a limited number of categories within Jewish messianism: specifically, royal, priestly and prophetic, along with a few indications of a heavenly or pre-existent messiah. There are not, therefore, innumerable kinds of messiah; there are in fact very few indeed.’ Yet, once one starts to differentiate as to the way in which a messiah might be expected to exercise a royal, priestly or prophetic role, then the spectrum of expectations becomes more variegated – and Chester does refer to a ‘rich and fascinating spectrum of messianism’ (327). Cf. also Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 167 (three basic forms of messianic expectation – they here leave out Chester’s heavenly or pre-existent messiah, but contrast 467). 42 Kreplin, however, sees here a historical reminiscence in that the different situation of his trial meant that Jesus abandoned his reticence with regard to claims about his own person; a continued silence would amount to an attempt to save himself from what his enemies had in store for him (Selbstverständnis, 319). (Yet how well were early Christians informed about what went on in Jesus’ hearing before Caiaphas or Annas?) 43 Cf., e.g., Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 502–5.

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are probably original sayings of Jesus. When Jesus is represented as saying that he has come to call sinners and not the righteous (Mark 2.17b parr.), at least that corresponds to the circumstances of Jesus’ ministry.44 In its present context in all three Synoptic Gospels the saying does not, however, fit well,45 for Jesus is made to desert the image of the doctor whose help the sick need, and not the healthy, in order to speak of the righteous and the sinners; in other words he is made to switch to the world of religious realities, as seen from the perspective of his critics. One is, therefore, left with the impression of an independent saying that has been inserted into its present context. In addition the extension of the meaning of the word ‘sinner’ that is here presupposed gives us further reasons to doubt the authenticity of the saying.46 Then there is that somewhat enigmatic saying or sayings in Luke 12.49–50: I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish that it were already ignited. But I have a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my distress until it should be fulfilled.

Unless we have reason to suppose that the meaning and implications of these words were clearer to the first Christians than they are to us, the riddling, daringly metaphorical quality of the images used here is an argument for their originality.47 Or there is the saying of Luke 12.51 par., Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, rather dissension (GLDPHULVPRY)!

Matthew’s parallel (10.34) is more specific and concrete and at the same time politically more dangerous, and thus more likely original: ‘No, rather a sword!’48 Such sayings suggest, at any rate, certain reflections concerning the impact of his 44

And possibly also to Jesus’ reaction to those circumstances – cf. Ernst, Markus, 96: it is probable that ‘the “ I have come” saying … exhales the “spirit of Jesus”’. 45 Cf. Becker, Jesus, 207. 46 Bultmann was doubtful about such sayings relating to Jesus’ coming and this applies to Mark 2.17b parr. (Geschichte, e.g. 96, 166). Others are critical of this suspicion (e.g. Guelich, Mark, 104; Pesch, Markusevangelium 1, 166). 47 Bovon, Lukas 2, 350, sees such ‘parabolic and … enigmatic speech’ as characteristic of ‘the master’; V. 49, on the other hand, ‘cannot, at any rate, be Luke’s work’. With V. 49 cf. Gospel of Thomas 10: ‘Jesus said: “I have cast fire on the world and, behold, I guard it until it blazes”’ (Elliott, Apocryphal NT, 137), although this formulation lacks the ‘I have come’. V. 50 recalls Jesus’ question to the sons of Zebedee, whether they can drink the cup that he must drink or share the baptism which he must undergo (Mark 10.38; the cup saying is paralleled in Matt 20.22). Despite the lack of a direct parallel in Matthew Robinson et al., Edition, 376–7, treat Luke 12.49 as belonging to ‘Q’, but merely ask ‘Is Luke 12:50 in Q?’ (378). 48 Luz, Matthäus 2, 135, quotes Johannes Brenz’s commentary of 1566: this saying in its Matthean version is ‘dangerous and almost unbearable’; Luz himself notes that it does fit in well with Matt 10.13 or 5.9. Cf. also Mussner, ‘Wege’, 165–7. Bovon, Lukas 2, 347, speaks of Luke’s having ‘improved’ the ‘Q’ version; he sees a reason for the choice of GLDPHULVPRY in preparing the way for the following talk of dissension in families.

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ministry, and the language of having come with a particular purpose or having a certain effect may be regarded as pointing to an awareness that he had a task, a mission to fulfil; it was not to be expected, moreover, that he supposed that he had received this commission from any other source than God.49 Thus it is only a little step from saying ‘I have come’ to the more explicit ‘I have been sent’, and there this sense of commissioning and mission is clear and the one who has sent him is none other than God. But is a saying like ‘I was not sent to any but the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt 15.24) an authentic saying of Jesus? Its sentiments correspond to Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve in Matt 10.6 and most regard it therefore as Matthew’s addition to the Markan pericope about the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7.24–30)50 or as a pre-Matthean composition of a Jewish Christian community.51 It is, nevertheless, worth asking whether the lost sheep originally meant the whole house of Israel, as Matthew doubtless understood the saying, even though Jesus’ praise of the Syrophoenician woman (Matt 15.28) transcends the limitations set by this saying, or whether they meant only the lost ones, those within this house that had strayed (i.e. a partitive genitive).52 If the latter were the case the arguments for the authenticity of the saying would be considerably stronger. Jesus would be reaching out, not to Israel as opposed to non-Israelites, but to the lost Israelites as opposed to those who had not gone astray, just as he had been sent to the sick, not the healthy, to sinners, not the righteous. Nonetheless it is far from easy to be certain about the origin of this saying. Similarly, doubts must remain about a saying like Mark 9.37 par., ‘The one that receives me does not receive me but the one that sent me’, above all because this saying is lacking in the Matthean parallel, although much the same saying is found in Matt 10.40 with a negative version of the saying in Luke 10.16.53 Thus, although it would indeed seem to be but a small step from ‘I have come’ to ‘I have been sent’, it is hard to show conclusively that Jesus ever actually made that small step. Nonetheless, Scot McKnight can plausibly claim that, if Jesus compared himself with other prophets and regarded himself as standing in the line of the prophets, then such language as ‘I have come’ or ‘I have been sent’ would hardly be surprising.54 Unfortunately, however, 49

So Mussner, ‘Wege’, plausibly sees in Luke 12.51 par. Jesus’ awareness that the endtime had begun in his ministry and this was leading to an upheaval on earth: he saw himself as causing division within Israel. 50 E.g. Luz, Matthäus 2, 430; Schulz, Stunde, 206. 51 E.g. Bultmann, Geschichte, 176. 52 Cf. Davies/Allison, Matthew 2, 551, bringing its sense close to that of Mark 2.17 – particularly if Jesus said this (‘a possibility not to be excluded’). 53 Bovon, Lukas 2, 48, rightly considers it uncertain whether Matt 10.40 and Luke 10.16 are two versions of the same ‘Q’ saying (contrast Schmithals, Markus, 429). Nevertheless, it seems likely that some version of this Jewish principle (e.g. mBer 5.5) circulated in the Jesus tradition. 54 S. McKnight, Jesus, 163; more questionable is his lumping together with this ‘I’-lan-

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evidence of Old Testament prophets actually speaking of themselves and their mission in this way is hard to find.55 Yet perhaps a similar claim is nonetheless made, but only implicitly. For the motif of being sent is presumably a part of the original Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mark 12.1–12 parr.). And here the sending of the son to collect the dues from the vineyard that are owed to the owner, after the unsuccessful sending of the servants, is, to my mind, not a secondary addition, but rather the climax of the whole story.56 Without this element something essential is missing, and it is significant that the version in the Gospel of Thomas (§ 65), although considerably shorter, nevertheless contains the sending of the son. Nor should one insist on removing all allegorical elements in the parable.57 Just as the unsuccessful sending of the servants corresponds to the mission of the prophets of the Old Testament, so the sending of the son raises the claim that in Jesus one has come, has been sent, who is greater than the servants and is nearer to the one that sent him than they. Moreover, such an indirect claim would find an echo in other elements of Jesus’ message. For more than once we meet the claim that in Jesus’ work we are confronted with something, but not expressly someone, that is greater than anything encountered in the past. With considerable justification Theissen and Merz see the implications of the relationship between himself and John the Baptist that Jesus claims:58 for what is implied when Jesus asserts that John was greater than a prophet and inferior to no one born of woman, and yet claims that the least in God’s kingdom was greater than he (Matt 11.9–11 par.)?59 That kingdom was guage statements about the coming of the ‘son of man’. Prophets did not use that phrase as a self-designation as far as we know. 55 Nearest, perhaps, is an expression like ‘the Lord of hosts has sent me to you’, Zech 2.11; cf. 4.9. (Of an angel in Apoc. Sedrach 2.2.) 56 Cf., e.g., Luz, Matthäus 3, 219–20 (the ‘qualitative leap’ from the servants to the son ‘can only be satisfactorily accounted for, if one assumes that Jesus spoke indirectly here of his own mission, which surpassed that of the prophets’; yet it does not necessarily follow that he identified himself directly with the son); Weder, Gleichnisse, 154. Contrast, e.g., Conzelmann, Outline, 127 (cf. Ger 101) who sees here the work of the early Christian community (cf. Bultmann, Geschichte, 191; Kümmel. Promise, 83, followed, tentatively, by Fuller, Foundations, 114, 194, who treat the whole parable as a later Christian allegory; it is then all the more surprising that Crossan, Jesus, xv, includes it in his inventory of words actually going back to the historical Jesus and that the Jesus Seminar thought that a version of the parable, ‘without allegorical overtones, could be traced to Jesus’; this original version included ‘getting rid of the only heir’: Funk, Gospels, 101). 57 Rightly Theissen and Merz, Jesus, 293, point to the existence of ‘stehende Metaphern’ that are based on Judaism’s traditional arsenal of metaphors, including, as here, that of the vineyard representing Israel. 58 Theissen/Merz, Jesus, 461; cf. Riesner, Jesus, 301. 59 But Luz, Matthäus 2, 176, sees in V. 11b a formulation of the early church; Gnilka, Matthäus 1, 416, seems to have fewer reservations, and Becker, Jesus, 140, regards an origin in the early church as unlikely.

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there, present and realized (at least in part) in Jesus’ ministry. Does that not then mean that not just Jesus, but his disciples too, were greater than John? Similarly, Jesus compares his work with the wisdom of Solomon and his preaching with that of Jonah (Luke 11.31–2 par.) and asserts, in both cases, that in his ministry something was present that was greater than Solomon or Jonah. He does not say that he himself is greater than these two figures (SOHL RQ is a neuter), but the implications are scarcely affected by this, although the likelihood that we are dealing with authentic tradition is enhanced by the use of the neuter and the resulting avoidance of an explicit christological claim.60 The role that he plays and the work that he does is something greater than the proverbial wisdom of Solomon or Jonah’s call to repentance.61 Implicitly, then, Jesus surpasses his predecessors both as a teacher of wisdom and as a prophet. In the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount we can perhaps also detect a similar claim, to the effect that this is the teaching of one who is greater than Moses.62 For, even if not all six of these antitheses are authentic or were originally formulated as antitheses, there are, nevertheless, many who would maintain that at least two or three of them as well as the introductory formula, ‘You have heard … but I tell you …’ are probably to be traced back to Jesus.63 And even if all six antitheses are later formulations, Hengel and Schwemer argue that

60 Cf. Mussner, ‘Wege’, 170–1: in contrast to Bultmann he sees the vagueness of this saying’s reference to Jesus as an example of that ‘vague and open christology’ that he sees as characteristic of sayings that reflect Jesus’ own self-consciousness; this vagueness he sees above all in the ‘puzzling and obscure Z_GH’. Marshall, Luke, 486 (following Moulton, Grammar 3, 21): ‘the neuter can be used where the emphasis is less on the individual than on a general quality’ – in v. 31 Jesus’ wisdom. Vermes, however, still considers this claim to be too boastful to come from Jesus and attributes it to the early church (Gospel, 182). But cf. the rather different, positive evaluation of such veiled statements by Riesner, Jesus, 91. Schüssler Fiorenza, on the other hand, argues that the ‘more’ should not be regarded as a superlative (as, for instance, Richard Horsley treats it) but, more modestly, as a comparative, meaning that ‘this prophetic tradition is an open, ongoing tradition’ (Jesus: Miriam’s Child, 142). Grammatically that is quite correct and would be a further argument for the antiquity of these sayings. 61 And Jonah was, as Hengel notes, regarded as the most successful of all prophets (‘Jesus’, 173). 62 Cf. Wright, Jesus, 646: ‘not just the new Moses, bringing a new Torah from Mount Sinai, but one who gave new instructions on his own authority’; also Käsemann, ‘Problem’, 206 (ET 37); Jesus, 25. 63 Cf., e.g., Lohse, ‘Ich sage euch’. But Luz, Matthäus 1, 326–7, speaks of a growing popularity of the view that all six antitheses stem from Matthaean redaction (cf., e.g. G. Strecker, Sermon, 63), but regards this position as the least probable of those on offer; he himself thinks that Jesus so formulated the first two antitheses. Betz, on the other hand, traces the six antitheses back to the redactor of the Matthaean special material, but concedes that ‘one cannot rule out the possibility that the redactor had access to a tradition that reported more or less correctly what Jesus taught and how he presented it’ (Sermon, 212).

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this way of speaking accurately reflects Jesus’ authoritative way of teaching.64 They have heard what Moses taught in the law and now they should attend to the teaching of Jesus that surpasses and excels that of Moses. He teaches with a directness and an independence of other human authorities that is greater than that of Moses, let alone that of any rabbis.65 A further indication of this is, as Kreplin observes,66 that Jesus does not seem to have based his message on arguments; he differs from the Old Testament prophets and the Baptist in that he does not even appeal to the failings of Israel. His conviction with regard to the divine will is sufficient reason for his message. It is, to my mind, misleading to speak of Jesus as a rabbi or as a Pharisee.67 The direct and authoritative way in which he taught and argued is not dependent on the correctness of his interpretation of the opinions of others nor on his place in an established and recognized tradition of teaching, and that distinguishes him from what we know of the rabbis’ ways of teaching.68 That is, it may plausibly be argued, one factor that distinguishes him from the Pharisees if they shared this characteristic with the later rabbis. And, despite attempts to minimize or play down the differences between Jesus and the Pharisees,69 it seems appropriate to speak here of competing ‘visions’ of what God’s people should be.70 How much this competition is to be described in terms of differing interpretations of the Torah is open to question:71 there are sufficient passages (e.g. Matt 8.21–2 par.; Mark 2.23–8 parr.; Luke 10.7–8 [with no concern whether the proffered food and drink was clean or unclean?]; 14.26 par.) where Jesus’ teaching seems to presuppose that the claims of the Torah must give place to the superior claims of the presence of God’s kingly rule. Nor is it satisfactory to state Jesus’ aims in terms of either purity or holiness, for these seem to be themes that were rather, as it were, forced upon Jesus by their centrality in the visions of others such as the Pharisees, or, if relatively little of what purports to be Jesus’ teaching on purity in fact stems from Jesus, were rather the product of his later followers’ controversies with Jews or Judaizing Christians.72 To regard them as relatively marginal in Jesus’ message and ministry is more satisfactory than trying to adapt the themes of ‘purity’ or ‘holiness’ in such a way that they have a quite different sense and quite different implications to those that they had in the programme of

64

Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 504. Cf., e.g., Käsemann, ‘Problem’, 37–8; Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 253–4; Wright, Jesus, 646–7. Betz, however, does not see here any ‘messianic’ self-consciousness and argues that Jesus’ claim here ‘does not necessarily go beyond that of an authoritative teacher’ (Sermon, 210). 66 Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 219. 67 Pace Chilton, Rabbi Jesus (cf. Barnett, Jesus, 139, although he recognizes a greater authority in Jesus’ teaching that set him apart from the rabbis); Berger, ‘Jesus’. Contrast G. Strecker, Sermon, 62: ‘Jesus is not comparable to a Jewish rabbi.’ 68 Cf. Alexander, ‘Orality’, 183; Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 477; Riesner, ‘Jesus’, 208–9. 69 See, e.g., Sanders, Jesus, 271–92. 70 Cf. Borg, Conflict, e.g. 71: ‘alternative visions of what Israel should be’. 71 Pace Borg, Conflict, e.g. 143: ‘a struggle concerning the correct interpretation of Torah’. 72 Cf. Meier, Jew 4, 352–415. 65

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the Pharisees.73 A. F. Segal is perhaps guilty of over-generalizing in referring to Christianity as ‘almost hostile to purity rules’ – that may be true of Pauline Christianity, but hardly of Paul’s opponents in Gal 2.11–14; yet perhaps nearer the mark is Segal’s reference to ‘Jesus’ unique [contrasted with other ‘sectarian apocalypticism of the time’] lack of interest in purity rules’,74 which ties in with Meier’s reference to ‘Jesus’ studied indifference to ritual impurity’.75

The characteristic way in which Jesus seems to have prefaced statements with an ‘amen’ or ‘amen I say to you’, a usage that really is unparalleled in contemporary Judaism, may also point to this unusual claim to authority, even if the use of what is normally a response to a statement in order to introduce one remains unexplained, a thoroughly puzzling usage.76 Implicitly he is also perhaps greater than the priests and the cult in view of his pronouncing forgiveness of sins, even though he did this in God’s name, but apparently with a remarkable directness that was at the same time offensive for 73 Such attempts lead, for instance, Theissen and Merz to the notion of Jesus’ ‘offensive’ idea of purity in contrast to the ‘defensive’ one of the Pharisees’ that led them to set up barriers between themselves and others; or they led to the idea of an ‘infectious’ purity rather than an ‘infectious’ impurity (Theissen/Merz, Jesus, 211; cf. Berger, ‘Jesus’, esp. 238– 48) or that of an ‘infectious’ holiness (Borg, Conflict, e.g. 135, but contrast his Jesus, 131– 42, 157–60, where Jesus resists the Pharisees’ ‘politics of holiness’ and promotes a ‘politics of compassion’ instead; cf. Grappe, ‘Jésus’, e.g. 412). Kazen, Jesus, 339, warns against such expressions as ‘dynamic purity’ or ‘offensive holiness’ as not ‘warranted by the available evidence’, although he grants that Jesus’ attitude ‘should nevertheless be seen within the context of a power struggle, in which the force of bodily impurity was overruled by the power of the kingdom in a similar way to unclean spirits being overcome by exorcism’. (Cf. also 346: ‘The idea of a contagious type of holiness, stronger than impurity and thus overtaking it, is appealing and slightly more convincing [than what?], but not sufficiently so, since it lacks clear evidence. … I suggest that it was not the inherent holiness of his own person, but the power of the coming reign of God, which Jesus believed overpowered demons and impurities.’) 74 Segal, Rebecca’s Children, 82; cf. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 420. 75 Meier, Jew 4, 415. Kazen, Jesus, argues that Jesus lived in a time in which there were ‘expansionist interpretation and practice’ with regard to purity in Jewish tradition, increasing the sphere of purity, and that ‘Early Jesus tradition retained the memory of Jesus acting in ways which must have been considered unacceptable in contexts where expansionist ideals were influential’; yet we should go no further than to say that his practice would have been regarded as ‘seemingly indifferent’ to questions of purity (197–8, his italics; cf. also 346). For Kazen argues that Jesus’ laxity, e.g. with regard to ritual washings, stemmed from a conviction that inner purity was more important than outer (e.g. 261); he also attempts to set Jesus’ attitude in the context of a Galilean ‘little tradition of interpreting rules pragmatically’ while remaining faithful to one’s ancestral religion (295) and to set it within the context of a power struggle in which what some viewed as indifference was in fact ‘a paradoxical acceptance of the impurity concept, in which the power of the kingdom was understood as stronger than the threats associated with impurity, thus relativizing the need for conventional purification’ (339). Yet it remains true that Jesus spoke far more often of the power of God’s rule, and we find him speaking of inner purity primarily in contexts where he was confronted with others’ demand for external purity. 76 Cf. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 504–5; Meier, Jew 4, 415.

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many; his pronouncement was unqualified and unconditional, with no demands for a sacrifice and no requirement that the one forgiven should first give evidence of his penitence.77 Yet one text (Mark 2.5–7 parr.) in which this pronouncement of forgiveness and the offence that it caused is explicitly mentioned is a slender basis for any assertions about Jesus’ authority in this respect, even if one may see forgiveness implicit in other aspects of Jesus’ conduct, such as his fellowship with sinners. Anyway, is it clear that Jesus necessarily means more than that he is announcing God’s forgiveness of this man’s sins, however Mark and other early Christians may have understood this scene?78 However, some of the texts that point to the presence of God’s kingly rule also seem to betray a similar note of authority and an awareness of the immensity of what was happening in Jesus’ ministry. This is true of a text like Luke 10.23–4 par.: ‘Blessed are those whose eyes see what you see. … Many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see and did not see it, and wanted to hear what you hear and did not hear it.’79

8.4. But No Messianic Title? In all these passages that have just been mentioned Jesus compares himself with others. Apparently he fulfilled all these roles, prophet, teacher of wisdom and so on, and yet surpassed all his predecessors inasmuch as what his ministry was ushering in was greater than all that had happened hitherto. He could not therefore be appropriately described as simply this or that figure of the past redivivus or as their successor, nor did he fully match up to any one of the current expectations of contemporary Judaism. For, however plentiful and varied the expectations of that Judaism were, Jesus seems to have broken free of the constraints of what one had expected. Thus the question naturally and inevitably arose: ‘Who 77 Yet in other cases, e.g. of cleansing, he does still seem to have seen a need for offerings (Mark 1.44 parr.; yet in this case this act would presumably be necessary for the leper’s acceptance in Jewish society, and without this further step the healing would still leave him isolated). 78 Cf. Sanders, Jesus, 273, understanding ‘Your sins are forgiven’ as a divine passive (cf. Gnilka, Markus 1, 99). In contrast he cites Bornkamm, Jesus, 81 (Jesus doing something that is God’s prerogative); Harvey, Jesus, 171; Jeremias, Theology 1, 118 n. 1; Schweizer, Jesus, 14. See also Guelich, Mark, 87. Ernst, Markus, 88, rightly points out that in v. 5b Jesus does not question God‘s prerogative and argues that, if the incident actually occurred, this charge is a matter of a malicious accusation, a misunderstanding (unlikely), or, more plausibly, the projection back into Jesus’ lifetime of a later problem of the early church. 79 Henaut, Tradition, 39–40, holds the content of these verses to be ‘post-resurrectional’, but the argument that what is seen is ‘Jesus’ unique sonship’ is inaccurate: D^ could more naturally refer to Jesus’ deeds and words; the same is true of Luke 7.22b–23 par. Luz, Matthäus 2, 302, regards this logion as ‘probably an authentic word of Jesus’ (cf. also Becker, Jesus, 136; Gnilka, Jesus, 151).

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is this?’ It is, then, perhaps hardly surprising that it is so difficult to show with any certainty that Jesus ever claimed a recognized messianic title for himself. To do so might well invite misunderstanding and false expectations and yet, had he claimed any recognized title or role for himself, it is to be expected that his followers would afterwards have remembered that and would hardly have shown much reluctance to attribute the title or role to him. Unless, of course, they held the title or role to be fully inadequate to describe him. That may be true of the occasional references to Jesus’ role as that of a prophet, as when Jesus comments on his plan to go up to Jerusalem with the remark that it would be inappropriate for a prophet to die anywhere else (Luke 13.33). Here, as elsewhere, the presence of a reference that later Christians would regard as an understatement regarding Jesus’ status might be used as an argument that this formulation is an early one, indeed a pre-Easter one, were it not that many scholars are nonetheless disposed to regard such references to Jesus as a prophet as stemming from early Christian circles under the influence of Deuteronomic theology.80 It is, however, still true that one who had belonged to the circle of the Baptist and had then struck out on his own, with his own distinctive emphases, might well have been viewed as a prophetic figure.81 In that case Jesus’ followers would have retained and expounded something that belonged to his contemporaries’ perception of him and perhaps also to his own perception of his role. For it is unlikely that Jesus ignored or was unaware of these various titles and labels and their associated roles. It would be unrealistic to expect that, and it would be contradicted by those references to, and comparisons with, other figures of Israel’s past that we have just seen. It is, then, just as improbable that Jesus’ contemporaries, be they friends or foes, would have refrained from trying to fit him into the categories that lay to hand, categories that we may call ‘messianic’ in so far as the expected figures would play a role in the awaited denouement and the coming of the time of God’s salvation, whether or not they were actually described as God’s anointed or not. Furthermore, remembering Meier’s ‘criterion of rejection and execution’ mentioned in ch. 5 above, it is necessary to recall the persist hints in the accounts of Jesus’ last days that he was executed by the Romans because his accusers could credibly make him out to be a messianic pretender. Even if the inscription nailed 80 It might be thought that it is an argument for the authenticity of Luke 13.33 that Jesus’ followers in fact regarded him as more than a prophet, but Bovon, Lukas 2, 445, holds the style to be Lukan. It may be asked how relevant for a decision it is that v. 33b is historically false (Klein, Lukas, 491) – would Jesus or the evangelist be more likely to err in this respect? (Wolter, Lukas, 497, ascribes this generalization to the latter, seeing here a specifically Lukan emphasis; cf. also Niemand, Jesus, 156 n. 109.) But see also, e.g., Allison, Jesus, 66; Dunn, Jesus, 661–2; McKnight, Jesus, 132–7. 81 And for Jeremias, NT Theology, 78, this ‘was not a full description of the task for which [Jesus] had been sent …, but he included himself among the ranks of the prophets’.

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to his cross does not seem to have any exact parallel in what we know of Roman practice,82 it would at least point to the belief in early Christian circles that this charge of claiming to be ‘the king of the Jews’ was the reason why he was executed. That impression is confirmed by Luke’s formulation of the charges that the Jewish leaders brought against Jesus before Pilate, of leading the people astray, forbidding them to pay taxes to Caesar and claiming to be Christ, a king (Luke 23.2), as well as by the repeated accounts of the mocking of Jesus by Herod Antipas’s soldiers and above all by Pilate’s; in these accounts it is more or less clear that Jesus is treated derisively as a would-be king (cf. Matt 27.28–9//Mark 15.17–18//John 19.2–3; the same charge is presumably implied in Luke 23.11). Had Jesus’ ministry been utterly devoid of the least whiff of at least potential messiahship, it is harder to see how this charge could have been credibly levelled against him. At this point it may also be useful to refer to the distinction that Theissen and Merz employ, between an implicit, an ‘evoked’ and an explicit christology, even if this decision calls for greater precision.83 To start with the last: an explicit christology would be one in which Jesus says something like ‘I am the messiah’, as he does more or less in Mark 14.62.84 Yet such statements are more likely to reflect the theology of the evangelist in question or of the Christian community that preserved the tradition used. An implicit christology, on the other hand, refers to an inherent claim to be such a person who ushers in the coming of God’s salvation, and such a claim can legitimately be detected in some of Jesus’ words and deeds. The category of an ‘evoked’ christology presents more problems; Theissen and Merz explain it as referring to the fact that Jesus during his lifetime evoked christological expectations in others (454). Yet that is not quite clear; with the other two categories it is a matter of what Jesus said or did not say, whether deliberately or not, whereas this category is more a matter of others’ perceptions. Yet did Jesus want or expect them to perceive this? Presumably Theissen and Merz meant that, if they name this category between the other two. Having raised that question, though, one becomes more alert to ambiguities inherent in the other categories, especially the implicit christology. An implicit 82

Cf. Kuhn, ‘Kreuzesstrafe’, 733–6. However, Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 614, cite the case of Attalus in Eus., Hist. eccl. 5.1.44 who was led around the amphitheatre in Lyons in 177 C.E. with a placard carried before him on which was written ‘This is Attalus the Christian’. They add that the placard was then fastened to the cross, but in the case of Attalus this does not apply, for the Roman governor discovered that he was a Roman and first sent him back to prison, awaiting instructions from the emperor, but then ordered him back into the arena, there to be burnt to death (§ 52). 83 Theissen/Merz, Jesus, esp. 453–4. 84 Yet, as we have seen (ch. 7), this claim is weakened in the parallels in Matthew and Luke, a ‘minor agreement’ that is, if anything, intelligible on the supposition that these Gospels knew an earlier form of the Markan tradition, rather than our Mark; I find it far harder to explain such an agreement on the basis of a deutero-Mark.

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christology is defined as expressing Jesus’ exalted status without the use of a title. But did he do that deliberately, refraining from using a title, although he knew that some such title would be appropriate or because he feared that it would be misunderstood? Or is it the case that his exalted status and role simply became apparent, and his followers – up to the present day – have recognized that more clearly than Jesus himself did? This second possibility seems to be a live option, particularly if Jesus was more concerned with the task that God had, he felt, given him than with questions of his own status and the role that he personally was playing in God’s plan of salvation.85 That may be true, but it is worth bearing in mind a further consideration that Matthias Kreplin has suggested, namely that any claims to honour, power or rank would conflict with the paradigmatic role that Jesus saw himself as playing.86 After all, Jesus had insisted on the need to receive God’s kingdom like a child, on the need for service of others and to serve rather than rule, on the appropriateness of the tax-collector's approach to God in the example given in Luke 18.10–14, on the need to humble oneself. It would be in the future that one might expect to be rewarded, not in the present. ‘Whoever hopes for a heavenly treasure or eschatological reward, bases his or her life on that and does not seek for recognition, dignity or honour from human beings nor, either, an exalted position before God’ (299–300). Had Jesus revealed his understanding of himself as God’s eschatological representative and thus claimed an exalted position over against his fellow human beings, he would have distanced himself from them in a way diametrically opposed to his message. For he had proclaimed that only God is lord and that service was our only way of life, and to have exalted himself would have contradicted that. Instead he embodied that way of life that all men and women should follow, and that was only possible if he, as far as possible, avoided making his own person a theme of his message. At this point we must bear in mind one self-description that Jesus apparently used, a self-description that some regard as the only title that Jesus ever claimed for himself, namely ‘the son of man’;87 yet this self-description is a puzzling one 85 When Bultmann quotes Luke 12.8–9 and remarks that ‘Such a call to decision in the light of his person implies a christology’ (‘Significance’, 237) then this is certainly intelligible as a call that is issued in God’s name because it is perceived to be God’s will, and not because Jesus invested himself with any other role than that of God’s spokesman. Yet the prophets claimed as much for their message, but we would not speak of a ‘christology’ in their case. Nonetheless they felt themselves to be ‘anointed’ by God for their task, at least metaphorically. Perhaps in the case of Jesus we are reading back later convictions as to his more than prophetic status into the discussion of his claims for himself and to speak of a ‘christology’ at this stage is then somewhat anachronistic. 86 Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 285–302. ‘Paradigmatic’ because ‘at least when he called on people to follow him and to share his way of life he implicitly made himself a paradigm of those who live according to God’s will’ (258). 87 Some are understandably squeamish about this phrase, in that ‘man’ suggests maleness, whereas the Greek refers simply to a human being; ‘son’ is perhaps unavoidably male,

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with regard both to its origins and to its meaning and implications. It is true that it has been doubted by several scholars whether Jesus ever used the phrase at all, above all because this phrase never occurs in Jesus’ teaching in conjunction with the motif of God’s kingly rule; if Jesus indubitably spoke of that kingly rule, then, it is argued, talk of the ‘son of man’ cannot be integrated into Jesus’ message or find a place in it.88 Yet, as already indicated, that is hard to believe. How did it then come about that one ever got the impression that Jesus had spoken of the ‘son of man’? For this was no common messianic title in early Christianity and was in fact probably almost unintelligible to most its members, especially outside a Palestinian context. It can also be argued that this was a usage that was not current in contemporary Judaism either. The application of the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ would therefore suggest that there is a strong case in favour of the historical probability that Jesus had indeed spoken of the ‘son of man’. Moreover, it is striking how the phrase occurs almost entirely on the lips of Jesus; the only exception in the gospels is to be found in John 12.34 where Jesus’ Jewish audience take up his turn of phrase and ask who the ‘son of man’ is. Because they are echoing Jesus’ words this passage is no real exception to the rule that it is only Jesus who in the gospels uses the phrase. Outside the gospels Stephen is the sole exception (Acts 7.56). Equally striking are, however, those passages in the gospels that give the impression that the ‘son of man’ is someone other than Jesus himself. Particularly often quoted is Luke 12.8, ‘But I tell you, whoever acknowledges me before other people will also be acknowledged by the son of man before God’s angels’,89 but the same holds good of sayings like Luke 11.30 and 17.24, 26. It is hard to ascribe such sayings to the evangelists or the early Christian community, since for them there could be no one else but Jesus who would come in glory to judge the world; they would not, therefore, have wished to give the impression that the ‘son of man’ was someone else.90 That impression is sometimes avoided by substituting the first person singular for the reference to the ‘son of man’, as is the case in Matthew’s parallel to Luke 12.8 (10.32); at any rate it seems more plausible to arbut phrases like ‘son of humanity’ or ‘Son of the Human’ (so Meeks, Christ, 63) make the concrete DMQTUZYSRX too abstract. Diffidently I stick by the traditional phrase. 88 Cf. esp. Vielhauer, ‘Gottesreich’; also Conzelmann, Outline, 136–7; Fuller, Foundations, 124–5; Lindemann, ‘Herrschaft Gottes/Reich Gottes’, 205–6; Lohse, Grundriss, esp. 49; Perrin, Rediscovering, e.g. 198; Vögtle, ‘Logienquelle’. This is also a conclusion to which Burkett tends in the light of his survey of research even though he is uncertain about the origins of the title ‘son of man’ itself; ‘the likeliest solution is that the third-person speech [speaking of the ‘son of man’ as opposed to the use of the first person] represents the voice of the church rather than that of Jesus’ (Son of Man Debate, 123–4). 89 E.g. Bultmann, Erforschung, 35. 90 But cf. Vielhauer (‘Gottesreich’, 74–80; ‘Jesus’, 101–7), who argues that the saying reflects a post-Easter situation in which Jesus’ followers were required to make a statement about their allegiance to Jesus. But were decisions for or against Jesus not also necessary during his earthly life?

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gue that the tradition has developed in this direction, from ‘son of man’ to ‘I’, rather than the reverse, 91 although there are those who maintain that references to the ‘son of man’ have been inserted into sayings that were originally formulated in the first person singular. On balance, then, it is far more likely that Jesus in fact used the expression ‘son of man’, but how did he use it? The phrase occurs in various contexts, referring either to a coming ‘son of man’ or to one who must suffer and die and be raised from the dead or, lastly but least frequently, to one who is at present active on earth, but it is unlikely that all these sayings are authentic, and it may be asked whether the phrase was originally to be found in all these contexts. In particular those speaking of a ‘son of man’ who suffers, dies and is raised again arouse the suspicion that they are vaticinia ex eventu and all the more so the more detailed they are. At the most one might make out a case for the authenticity of the least detailed, such as Luke 9.44 parr., ‘For the son of man is going to be delivered into the hands of men’, where there is a possible word-play involving ‘son of man’ and ‘men’.92 At any rate, one has otherwise to explain why Luke would have chosen to abbreviate this passion prediction.93 With the cases of the future and present ‘son of man’ a decision is still more difficult, since at least some sayings in both categories seem to have a considerable claim to authenticity. Now we saw, in the case of some of the references to a future, coming ‘son of man’, that these had a high claim to authenticity, but that, at the same time, they raised the question to whom Jesus was then referring, if not to himself. In these cases, at least, ‘son of man’ and ‘I’ are not simply interchangeable. Yet are the phrases ever simply interchangeable? For, even when he is clearly seems to be referring to himself, Jesus never says ‘I am the son of man’ or ‘I, the son of man’, but refers consistently to the ‘son of man’ in the third person. Were the evange-

91

So, e.g., Marxsen, Beginnings, 46. Cf. Fitzmyer, Luke 1, 814; Wiefel, Lukas, 183. This is a case of a passage where Mark’s parallel seems subsequently to expand on the otherwise simpler form of Luke, who leaves out any reference to the son of man’s being killed and rising from the dead, but here Matthew joins Mark in adding more detail. Marshall, Luke, 394, argues for Luke’s independence of Mark at this point and sees here ‘a second tradition of the passion prediction which in all probability reflects the teaching of Jesus himself’. Luke and Matthew’s PHYOOHL may, however, be secondary. Cf. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 540–1, quoting J. Jeremias’ reconstruction of an Aramaic original of Mark 9.31 (cf. Jeremias, Theology, 281–2). The latter is, however, criticized by Casey, Solution, 209, who prefers to reconstruct an original Aramaic version of the first passion prediction in Mark 8.31: ‘A/the son of man is liable to suffer much and be rejected and die, and rise after three days’ (208). 93 It is hard to see why the shorter form provides a better foil for the disciples’ incomprehension (Bovon, Lukas 1, 519); it is true that if the prediction of the resurrection is removed then it is clear why Jesus soon cannot help them anymore (Wolter, Lukas, 360), but the same is not true of his being killed. 92

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lists and the Christian tradition before them then mistaken in believing that this ‘son of man‘ was Jesus and that in using this phrase he meant to refer to himself? Often it is simply assumed that one can speak of this phrase as a title, referring to the figure referred to in Dan 7.13, but the phrase used there is ‘one like a son of man’, i.e. a human figure as opposed to the beasts that have earlier appeared in Daniel’s vision.94 Yet it is clearer that a specific messianic figure is meant when Daniel’s vision is taken up and eleborated upon in two pseudepigraphal Jewish works, the Similitudes of Enoch and 4 Ezra.95 In these it is relatively clear that Dan 7.13 is interpreted as referring to the messiah. Yet, if Dunn were right in thinking that in both cases it was the situation following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. that provoked some to take up the prophecies of Daniel once more,96 then obviously one cannot use these texts as evidence for the situation and the expectations that were current in Jesus’ lifetime. And it is important to recognize that they represent a reinterpretation of Daniel rather than the original sense of that passage. For earlier the expected messiah had been a human, earthly figure, whereas Daniel’s figure is a heavenly one, an angel or the like, the heavenly representative of the people of Israel, and it was a considerable step to identify such a figure with the expected messiah and the expected messiah with such a figure. Moreover, it is clear that both 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra refer to this passage in Daniel and that their commentary is unintelligible unless this reference back to Daniel is presupposed. So 1 Enoch 46 takes up the vision of Daniel and the seer Enoch has to ask who that son of man was. Every reference to the figure in the following chapters, with or without a demonstrative pronoun, is referring back to the original vision, and one needs that original vision to understand the references to that figure.97 The clearer allusions to Daniel’s vision in the teachings of Jesus, such as the coming of this figure on the clouds, are at best allusive and, if Maurice Casey is right, secondary;98 are we to suppose that whenever Jesus referred to the ‘son of man’ he had first recalled the scene in Daniel 7 so that his hearers would know what he was talking about? And it also clear that one cannot speak of the phrase ‘son of man’ as a title in the case of 1 Enoch since, as Carsten Colpe has pointed out, three different Ethiopic phrases are used in this text, which in all probability go back to different Semitic origi-

94 Problematic is therefore Schröter’s description of the phrase ‘the son of man’ as ‘early Jewish’ (e.g. Jesus von Nazaret, 266) despite his emphasis on the difference between this phrase and that of Dan 7.13 and despite his denial that Jesus used it of all humanity (and in Ps 8.5 the phrase is anarthrous). 95 The dating of 1 Enoch 37–71 is uncertain, while 4 Ezra is probably to be assigned to the end of the first century C.E. 96 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 732. 97 Cf. Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 98–9. Rightly he contrasts this with the use with the simple definite article of references to the messianic figure of ‘the righteous one’, ‘the elect one’ or ‘the anointed one’. 98 Casey, Son of Man, esp. 213–19. But see below on Kazen’s more Danielic interpretation of Jesus’ use of ‘son of man’, even though he grants that Danielic imagery may in some cases have been introduced secondarily. On the other hand, following C. A. Evans, he argues for Danielic influence upon Jesus’ ‘kingdom ideology’ (‘Son of Man’ [2007], 91–2) and this makes a Danielic influence on Jesus’ use of ‘son of man’ all the more plausible; he rejects, however, an interpretation of this symbol as referring to an individual figure, treating it rather as collective.

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nals.99 Møgens Müller is right to observe that this terminology is here clearly non-titular.100 Again, in 4 Ezra the reference back to Daniel 7 is equally clear (13.7); the Danielic figure is in this passage also God’s son. Thus in both these later passages we can clearly recognize the influence and interpretation of Daniel 7 as well as the combination of Daniel’s ‘one like a son of man’ with other messianic ideas so that the one like a son of man becomes both a man and God’s son. In neither case is it appropriate to speak of ‘son of man’ as a title; that first becomes possible when the early Christian community claimed the phrase for Jesus and Jesus alone. The use of the phrase would only be intelligible if one could presuppose a knowledge of the scene in Daniel 7 so that the interpretative reference back to it, for instance with the aid of a demonstrative pronoun,101 would be apparent and, as we saw, it is doubtful whether that condition was fulfilled in Jesus’ teaching.102 On the other hand, it is surely difficult to explain such references to a future, eschatological figure with a role in the final judgement if they are not references to the Danielic figure. Yet it is remains doubtful whether they would be generally intelligible without further explanation. Such a further explanation would have been possible at least within the circle of Jesus’ disciples,103 but, if he used the phrase more generally, then it could hardly have been readily intelligible.

Yet, if the phrase was not previously a readily recognizable title referring to a specific figure,104 that raises the question what Jesus may have meant by it. In some sayings it is clear that it refers to an eschatological figure that would come in the future, but in others it seems to refer to the earthly, present experiences of Jesus. In some of these latter cases it could have a generic sense like that found in Ps 8.5 where ‘man’ or ‘son of man’ are synonymous parallels referring to all human beings. However the definite article is lacking there. And it is also doubtful whether a generic interpretation of the phrase would work even in the case of all references in the gospels to a present ‘son of man’. It could work in the case of a 99

Colpe, TDNT 8, 423–5. It is thus regrettably tendentious and misleading when E. Isaac translates all these phrases with a capitalized ‘Son of Man’ on the grounds that it ‘has become an accepted and standard expression among scholars for a long time’ (OTP 1, 34). At least M. Knibb includes a reference in 62.5 to ‘that Son of a Woman’ (Sparks, Apocryphal Old Testament, 244). 100 Müller, Ausdruck, 76; cf. Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 97–8. 101 Even the consistent use of the definite article in the phrase ‘the son of man’ is not enough here; it could have been generic originally, but of course, once the early Christians regarded the phrase as applying solely to Jesus, it was inevitable that the article was always used, since for them there was only one person whom they so designated, and thus the phrase came to function as a title, his title. 102 There are, of course, those who deny the force of this line of argument, but it is tantalizing when Collins, Cosmology 154, simply says ‘This argument is dubious’. That is not an argument, just a seemingly unfounded prejudice. Thus it may be granted that in texts like 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra there was reference to an individual figure, but it is oversimplifying things to assume that this figure was referred to as ‘the son of man’ (pace H. J. de Jonge, ‘View’, 32). 103 So Carsten Colpe points out that seven sayings about the coming son of man that ‘stand up to criticism’ are all addressed to the disciples and argues that this shows such references to be a mark of Jesus’ ‘esoteric speech’ (in TDNT 8, 440). 104 So, e.g., Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 527–8, 531.

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saying like Matt 12.32 par., ‘Whoever speaks against the son of man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the holy spirit will not be forgiven either in this age or in the coming one.’105 That could mean that speaking against one’s fellow human beings will be forgiven, but not speaking against God’s spirit. Mark 2.28 parr. (‘Thus the son of man is lord also over the sabbath’) could also be similarly understood, as a continuation of the thought of the previous verse, that the sabbath was made for humanity’s sake, not humanity for the sabbath.106 From that one could infer that humanity was lord over the sabbath that was created for its sake. Again, Mark 2.10 parr., ‘… so that you may know that the son of man has authority to forgive sins’, could mean that humanity had the right to forgive sins. But is it plausible that anything of that sort was in fact meant? There were people authorized to pronounce God’s forgiveness, it is true, but not everyone, but only particular people like the priests. Is it not, then, more likely that a particular person is meant? Nonethess, it is to be noted that, as Robert Funk points out,107 Matthew seems to understand what Jesus says in a collective sense, in that he adds the information that the bystanders glorified God for giving such authority to human beings (DMQTUZYSRL plural, not DMQTUZYSZ, Matt 9.8). And Casey sees this as yet another example of a ‘son of man’ saying that is, in its context, ‘primarily about Jesus’, but ‘also includes a restricted group of people who may also pronounce the forgiveness of sins’.108 This ‘restricted group of people’ is given more precision by Thomas Kazen, building upon the imagery of Daniel 7 and the earlier collective interpretation of the ‘son of man’ by T. W. Manson, C. F. D. Moule and L. Gaston:109 they are the representatives of the kingdom and the ‘son of man’ is a ‘role figure, which not only Jesus, but also his followers, identify themselves with’;110

105

Cf. Casey, Solution, 140–3. Cf., e.g., Casey, Solution, 121–5. Telling is Henderson’s point (‘Self-Consciousness’, 176) that ‘it is the disciples, not Jesus, whose actions have been called into question’. 107 Funk, Honest, 251. 108 Casey, Solution, 163. However, Luz insists that the plural is not a reference to Jesus as one member of the human race, but to the authority to forgive sins invested in the church (Matthäus 2, 38; cf. Davies/Allison, Matthew 2, 96; Gnilka, Matthäus 1, 327). Gundry, Matthew, 165, refers it to the disciples in the first instance, who are also designated as RL- D>QTUZSRL in 8.27. 109 Kazen, ‘Coming Son of Man’; ‘Son of Man’ (2007 – also mentioning C. H. Dodd; 2008). It is preferable to speak of ‘representatives’ of the kingdom rather than of the kingdom simpliciter, although Kazen sometimes does so. Cf. also Henderson, ‘Self-Consciousness’, 169: ‘the historical Jesus construed his messianic role primarily in dynamic relation to the faithful community that would manifest God’s rule’. Even closer to Kazen’s thesis is her statement that for Jesus ‘any interest in his own messiahship must have related organically both to the reign of God he heralded and to the messianic community he both ideally represented and sought to establish’ (178). 110 Kazen, ‘Coming Son of Man’, 166. 106

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Jesus himself was always part of the image, being included within it as the foremost representative of the coming kingdom, at least within the confines of his own movement. He was, in a way, never separated from the Son of Man.111

And the disciples’ authority to forgive sins, Kazen points out, is presupposed in Matt 18.15–18.112 But what of Matt 8.20 par. and 11.19 par.? The foxes have lairs and the birds in the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. The son of man came eating and drinking.

It is hard to regard these as statements about humankind in general, since there are plenty of people, although unfortunately far from all, who do have somewhere to lay their heads and there were plenty in Jesus’ time, too. And not all eat and drink as this son of man does, for the point of the saying is a contrast with another ‘son of man’, the ascetic John the Baptist.113 That would, however, be quite in keeping with Kazen’s interpretation relating the ‘son of man’ to the representatives of the kingdom, for the Baptist was surpassed by the least in the kingdom (Matt 11.11 par.). Was the expression then a common self-designation?114 The answer seems to be that it could be a self-designation, but hardly a common one, and that it would be easier to understand it in this way if it were prefixed by a demonstrative, ‘this son of man’. Even so it would be somewhat unusual, just as it would prompt puzzled questions if I were to refer to myself as ‘this miserable sinner’. The choice of such a form of self-designation would certainly raise questions about my selfperception that had led to a so unusual choice of phrase. If Jesus referred to himself as ‘the son of man’ and this, too, was something unusual, it invites the question what this usage reveals about his self-understanding. Or did he merely refer to himself as ‘a son of man’ and it is the Christian community that has read back the phrase with the definite article, referring to the future ‘son of man’, into the 111

Kazen, ‘Coming Son of Man’, 173. Kazen, ‘Son of Man’ (2007), 99. 113 But cf. Collins, Cosmology, 150–1. The parallel that she cites, in Plut., Tib. Gracchus 9.4–5 (cf. Bultmann, Geschichte, 102 n. 2), is certainly striking, but contrasted with the beasts there are not humanity in general but ‘those who fight and die for Italy’ and their dependants. It is thus at least in some cases true that, as Schröter, Jesus von Nazaret, 252–3, argues, Jesus used the expression in such a way as to emphasize particular, distinctive features of his life. But whether that is a good enough reason for speaking of ‘the son of man’ rather than ‘I’ is questionable. Casey solves this by arguing that the saying refers, not just to Jesus, but also to ‘the scribe and the disciples‘ (Solution, 177), that is, assuming that the scribe takes up the challenge. 114 Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, uses ‘self-designation’ and ‘name’ interchangeably, but there are ways of referring to oneself that are better not described as ‘names’ or at most as ‘nicknames’. 112

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usage of Jesus when referring to himself in his earthly existence? Theissen and Merz, at any rate, speak here of a ‘corrective function’ of the phrase: it was designed to correct any over-inflated expectations that others might have of him,115 and that would apply even more if he had only spoken of himself as ‘a son of man’, if that distinction can easily be made in Aramaic.116 (And if it could not, then it is the more readily intelligible that, with the translation of Jesus’ sayings into Greek, his followers allowed their convictions about the unique role of Jesus to lead them to use the definite article throughout, particularly when they simply identified him with the eschatological figure.) What he did, he did then, in his earthly life and work, as a human being, and the phrase stresses his humanity, his status as a human being. It is thus the opposite of a title of dignity, even if it was later to become one. At this point it was rather an expression of his lowly status and a rejection of any customary titles. That is, to my mind, a valuable proposal. That, at any rate, could explain the use of the phrase to refer to Jesus’ earthly activity, but what are we then to make of his references to a future ‘son of man’, particularly to one that seems to be distinct from himself? For, if there are sayings that have a good claim to authenticity and that refer both to the present ‘son of man’ and to a coming one, it would be a considerable advantage to find some way of holding the two together and showing a plausible relationship between them. Now the Similitudes of Enoch contains a passage that has considerably surprised and puzzled some of its interpreters, but one that may yield a clue to the solution of the comparable problem of the present ‘son of man’ and the coming one. For, in the majority of the Similitudes, the seer Enoch sees the figure of the son of man, depicted in terms strongly reminiscent of, and dependent upon, Daniel’s vision. Then suddenly, at the end of this section of 1 115

Theissen/Merz, Jesus, 479. Cf. Casey, ‘Problem’, 148; Son of Man, 228; Solution, 59–61 (cf. also 123): the emphatic state came to be used more often, and ‘in generic and some other uses, optional use of either state is found throughout the whole Aramaic corpus down to the time of Jesus, and in some later documents in Jewish Aramaic too’ (Solution, 59; cf. 45). The prevalence of the definite article (‘the son …’) he attributes to the strategy of the translator(s) in those instances where ‘son of man’ was regarded as referring to Jesus. (It sems a remarkable consequence of his argument that it seems to necessitate, if not one single translator, at least a small group of them working together: Solution, 265–6.) Yet this strategy may well have been reinforced by the association of the phrase with the figure of Dan 7.13, once it was interpreted as a messianic title applied solely to Jesus. On the other hand, if the translator or translators have obscured the general sense of the term by inserting the definite article before ‘son’, regarding the phrase as applicable to Jesus alone, it is more difficult to see why Casey repeatedly defends them against the charge of mistranslation; they may have ‘done as well as possible’ (e.g. Solution, 247), but they have nevertheless left us with a misleading translation, however hard it might have been to do better (the omission of the first definite article might have left unspoken their conviction that Jesus meant [only] himself, but from our point of view might seem preferable). To defend their practice on the grounds that it thus gave the early church a new christological title which was ‘just what the church needed’ (262) seems like a case of making the ends justify the means. 116

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Enoch, Enoch is snatched up into the heaven of heavens (71.5) and the ‘ancient one’ of Daniel 7 comes to him and tells him, ‘You are the son of man who is born to righteousness’ (71.14). So surprising is this statement that it has led to emendations or to suggestions that ch. 71 contains later additions.117 For how could that Enoch, who in the previous twenty-four chapters has been contemplating the ‘son of man’ in heaven as if he were someone else, other than himself, suddenly be identified with that figure?118 However, Maurice Casey finds a partial parallel in the older Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 85–90) in that Enoch there tells his son Methuselah of a dream in which he, in the midst of the events of the end-time, is ‘caught up’ and set down in the midst of the sheep that symbolize God’s people awaiting the judgement that would vindicate them (90.31). The later Similitudes would then have taken this a step further by making Enoch the one who would carry out the judgement. 119 Was it, then, that the ‘son of man’ that Enoch had previously seen, was in fact representative and symbolic of a role that he was destined eventually to fulfill? Would the phenomenon not then be somewhat similar to what we seem to find in the gospels? Jesus would then have spoken of a future, heavenly ‘son of man’ as if he were someone other than himself, yet a ‘son of man’ who was ultimately identical with himself.120 The only difference would be that the Enoch of the Similitudes nowhere speaks of himself as the ‘son of man’ while still on earth. Also comparable are other references in Jewish traditions to exceptional human beings who are closely linked to a heavenly figure, even if references to a ‘son of man’ are lacking. So Adela Yarbro Collins draws attention to the account by the tragedian Ezekiel in which Moses sees a man enthroned on Mount Sinai; he approaches and is given this figure’s crown and sceptre and is instructed to sit on his throne; thereafter the figure withdraws.121 And Marinus de Jonge draws attention to what may be another in117

Cf. Charles, Apocrypha, 2.237, who emends to ‘This is the Son of Man who is born unto righteousness’; for further discussion of the passage cf. Chester, Messiah, 64–6 and the literature cited there. 118 That is a problem that Delbert Burkett solves by separating ch. 71 from the earlier ones, claiming that it had a different origin (Son of Man Debate, 101). Yet, with the combination of ch. 71 with the rest of the Similitudes the impression of continuity is given; even if this part of 1 Enoch is too late to have influenced thought in Jesus’ time, it still suggests that such a combination could have been thought possible. 119 Casey, Solution, 111. 120 So Chester, Messiah, 65, regards the suggestion that ‘Enoch finally becomes one with his heavenly double’ as ‘at least worth considering’. That is all the more the case if this pattern is repeated elsewhere in early Jewish literature. Chester also draws attention to Enoch’s identification with the angel Metatron in the later 3 Enoch (4.2 – one could perhaps speak of a ‘transformation’ or ‘exaltation’ at the time of the Flood: 4.5; Charlesworth, OTP 1, 258), an identification that he considers comparable with that of Enoch in 1 Enoch 71, but he does not seem to note the potential parallels in Ezekiel the tragedian or the Testament of Moses. 121 Lines 68–76 (Charlesworth, OTP 2, 811–12; Collins, Cosmology, 155, also refers to Melchizedek in 11QMelchizedek (11Q13), although there is here no reference to a pre-

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stance of a similar phenomenon in the Testament or Assumption of Moses, ‘a writing commonly dated to the beginning of the first century C.E.’.122 There, in 10.2, a ‘messenger’ appears at the time of the eschatological manifestation of God’s kingly rule: Then will be filled the hands of the messenger, who is in the highest place appointed. Yea, he will at once avenge them of their enemies.123

The reference to the filling of the messenger’s hands leads de Jonge to see in him a priestly figure, and he is therefore the more inclined to support Johannes Tromp’s theory that the messenger is none other than the mysterious figure of Taxo, ‘a man from the tribe of Levi’ (9.1), who has just before proposed to his seven sons that they should fast for three days and then retire to a cave, to die there ‘rather than transgress the commandments of the Lord of Lords, the God of our fathers’ (9.6). If this is correct, de Jonge concludes, ‘there is an interesting analogy between Taxo and Jesus: both are completely obedient to God and exalted and vindicated by him; both are instrumental in bringing about the final manifestation of God’s sovereign rule on earth and, in fact, in his entire creation’ (52). Now some have argued that Jesus thought of ‘the son of man’ as someone other than himself,124 whereas others, while denying any simple identification, have seen a close enough relationship between Jesus’ view of his own role and that of the future son of man to offer a comparable analogy to the views of these early Jewish texts. So Helmut Merklein argues that the heavenly, future son of man is the ‘heavenly representative of eschatological salvation’, i.e. God’s kingly rule, or of ‘the eschatological elect people’.125 Thus Jesus, who already could claim to be the earthly representative of God’s kingly rule, would be a sort of earthly double of the heavenly son of man: Jesus’ task consists of proclaiming and setting in motion on earth that event that is already realized in heaven (162).

ceding earthly existence of this heavenly figure; instead one must turn for that to Genesis 14. 122 M. C. de Jonge, Envoy, 49. Puzzling, therefore, is Chester’s assertion (Messiah, 291) that the ‘one like a son of man’ in Daniel 7 is ‘understood as a heavenly individual … and not a collective symbol’ (his italics). In the case of Daniel 7 is he not both of these? 123 Tr. J. Priest in Charlesworth, OTP 1, 932. 124 Bultmann, Geschichte, e.g. 128, 163; Theology 1, 9, 29–30 (Ger. 9th ed. 8, 31–2), and more recently H. J. de Jonge, ‘View’, 32 (if Jesus spoke of ‘the son of man’ at all), and Niemand, Jesus, 89–90, who regards this eschatological person who is other than Jesus as the origin of post-Easter sayings about an earthly and a suffering ‘son of man’. 125 Merklein, Botschaft, 162–3 (the term he uses is ‘Erwählungskollektiv’).

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Marinus de Jonge himself, however, goes a step further, questioning ‘whether we are allowed to distinguish between the two representatives’, the earthly and the heavenly, although he grants that it is ‘unlikely’ that Jesus, ‘present as inaugurator of the kingdom of God, at the same time announced his coming as the Son of Man from heaven’.126 Yet is this further step justified, or are we reading too much too confidently into Jesus’ self-consciousness? (We have seen already the danger of arguments to the effect that ‘Jesus must have …’, which assume that we can readily identify with his thought processes and self-awareness, and de Jonge grants that Jesus has left us no saying on the subject.) It is true that ‘the son of man’, both as an earthly figure and as a heavenly, is a somewhat enigmatic designation, as we have seen: even as a designation of a heavenly figure, in its use of the definite article it goes beyond the Danielic allusion to ‘one like a son of man’, and in addition, but in keeping with the sequel in Dan 7, may represent or stand for a collective entity, the saved people of God, at least if Merklein is correct in his reading. As a designation of an earthly figure it is even more enigmatic, for, as we have seen, it is not the way in which an individual would usually refer to himself. Rightly, Hengel and Schwemer stress the way in which the use of this phrase serves to conceal Jesus’ identity.127 Nonetheless, we can ask whether Jesus must have identified the two enigmatic figures. That the heavenly one would in the future vindicate the work of the earthly one does not force us to identify the two, and indeed it is easier to speak thus if the two are in some measure distinguishable from one another. For is there not something odd about the idea of what would then in the last analysis be a self-vindication, however much both the earthly and the heavenly son of man might both act in God’s name? It is true that the future son of man sayings speak only of that son of man’s acknowledgement or denial of other people on the basis of their response to Jesus, rather than of the heavenly son of man’s attitude to Jesus, the earthly son of man. No saying, at any rate, survives that expressly says who will vindicate Jesus; it is merely assumed that he will be vindicated (e.g. in Mark 14.25, a verse that figures prominently in de Jonge’s account).128 And is it really to be expected that Jesus thought of himself as the future judge who would vindicate his earthly work, rather than God, his heavenly father. (And de Jonge elsewhere repeatedly stresses God’s vindication of Jesus.)129 Or is it that he would be vindicated by God, in order then to carry on the further work of judging humanity in God’s name? Or of bearing 126

M. C. de Jonge, Envoy, 91, 93. Hengel/Schwemer, Jesus, 344 (cf. also 530, appealing to the work of V. Hampel, 534, 536). Douglas Hare, too, concludes that Jesus’ use of the Aramaic phrase ‘communicates nothing to us about “Jesus’ own Christology”, except that he regarded modesty in speech as an appropriate form of behavior’. 128 Participation in the future kingdom implies vindication – cf. Gnilka, Markus 2, 246: this saying expresses Jesus’ hope for the future and his assurance of being resurrected. 129 E.g. in the summary in M. C. de Jonge, Envoy, 144. 127

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witness against those that have rejected him on earth, if his role is not that of ruler or judge, but that of a witness?130 It is true that Maurice Casey argues that in the Palestinian society of that time a judge might also act as a witness, acknowledging or denying one who stood before him, but at the same time he sees the ‘angels of God’ mentioned in Luke 12.8 as an indication that it is in fact God who does the judging in this case. 131 And, as Douglas Hare points out, the role of bearing witness at the final judgement is also ascribed to the ‘queen of the south’ and the Ninevites in Luke 11.31–2 par.; however, the way in which Jesus’ own relation to the outcome of that judgement is described discloses his ‘profound, yet modest, conviction concerning his central importance in God’s evolving eschatological drama’, yet involves ‘not so much loyalty to his person … as loyalty to his vision of God’s activity’.132 And yet, as we shall see, Jesus seems to to have held out to the Twelve the prospect of judging Israel (Matt 19.28 par.); would that mean that he saw his own role or that of the son of man as a different and less exalted one? These are possibities, but dare we assume that Jesus had worked this all out, when he seemingly remains so reticent about it?133

8.5. A Representative Figure? There is a further aspect of this usage which is important, and that is the collective dimension to the figure of the ‘son of man’ or the ‘one like a son of man’. That dimension is already indicated in the Book of Daniel: the ‘one like a son of man’, who may well originally have been an angelic figure, represents God’s holy ones. The kingdom that he receives is also the kingdom that they receive (Dan 7.18).134 This aspect of the Book of Daniel may explain a phenomenon to which 130

Cf. Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 163 (appealing to Leivestad, ‘Exit the Apocalyptic Son of Man’, NTS 18 [1972] 243–67), 172; cf. 267. Less convincing is his insistence (175–6) that sayings about the coming ‘son of man’ cannot have distinguished Jesus from the ‘son of man’, for the way in which Luke 12.8 is formulated certainly does not make their identity clear. Nor should it have according to Kreplin’s argument, for to make it clear would have glorified the earthly Jesus in anticipation of this eschatological role. 131 Casey, Solution, 184–6. He also finds a parallel in Wis 4.16; 5.1–16, in that the righteous will condemn the ungodly who once oppressed them; here he finds support for the view that this ‘son of man’ saying, too, ‘has a general level of meaning in addition to its reference to Jesus’. For those who acknowledged Jesus now would be acknowledged by ‘Jesus and other witnesses … at the final judgement’, which would be carried out by God (193). 132 Hare, Son of Man Tradition, 270–1. 133 At this point at least one of H. J. de Jonge’s arguments for his view (‘View’, 34–5), over against that of M. C. de Jonge, should be noted, for it is, I believe, also applicable to what I am arguing for here: in the light of Jesus’ concern for God’s imminent kingdom the identity of the ‘son of man’ would be irrelevant. 134 Cf., e.g., H. J. de Jonge, ‘View’, 31. Vermes, Faces, 33 n.2, 39, surmises that a collective interpretation is also assumed by 4Q246.2.4 (with the ‘son of God’ of 2.1 interpreted of the last of the wicked kings).

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Klaus Koch has drawn attention, namely that in a series of apocalypses one can discern a two-stage eschatology: first the messiah comes, and only then the time of salvation that is more than once coupled with the figure of the ‘one like a son of man’.135 Is it then only with this latter stage that the elect people of God is saved? And is the ‘one like a son of man’ associated with this stage because he represents in his person the elect people that is ultimately saved by God’s intervention? Would that, then, mean that, when Jesus speaks of the earthly ‘son of man’ and when a reference to Jesus himself seems most clearly to be intended, a representative aspect of his work is meant? Jesus then enters upon the way intended for the true, elect people of God, a way that also involved suffering before entering into God’s salvation. In that case the ‘son of man’, both on earth and in heaven, is inseparable from the destiny of those who are his, so that his destiny is theirs and vice versa. These considerations regarding the figure of the ‘son of man’ and Jesus’ statements about him are important for our understanding of his claims, inasmuch as they point to Jesus’ self-identification with his fellow human beings and his solidarity with them, his representative role with regard to them, and they express this dimension of his work and his message. And when Theissen and Merz speak of a ‘corrective function’ of the expression, then that implies that Jesus deliberately distanced himself from the attempts of his contemporaries to fit him into some already existing category amongst their expectations. For he matched up to none of them completely and some were quite inappropriate. Instead he seems to have preferred a way of referring to himself and commenting on his work that, on the one hand, preserved his particularity; that may be, despite all the other suggestions about it, the point of the consistent use of the definite article, were it to reflect an original feature of Jesus’ own usage, but it also seems to be required by the specificity of some of the sayings that prevents them being treated as referring to humanity in general. On the other hand, the very choice of this self-designation stresses Jesus’ oneness with his fellow human beings. He distances himself thereby from categories and designations that would set him apart from the rest of humanity and fit him into some special, pre-defined niche. The other side to the representative role that comes to expression in Jesus’ characteristic use of the phrase ‘son of man’ may be seen in another phenomenon to which Gerd Theissen has referred, and which he calls the idea of a ‘messianic collective’. Christopher Tuckett similarly refers to a ‘democratization’ of the apparently individual figure of the ‘servant’ of Isaiah 53 in Daniel 7, 1 Enoch and Wisdom 2–5, by which this figure becomes, or is the representative of, ‘a wider group of people suffering persecution’.136 With this ‘corporate’ interpre135 136

Koch, ‘Messias’, as the subtitle of the article indicates. Tuckett, ‘Son of Man’ (2001), 377–80 (cf. ‘Son of Man’ [2003] 176–9, 182), following

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tation of the traditions of Daniel 7, which he sees reflected in the ‘son of man’ sayings in ‘Q’, Tuckett seems to be referring to a similar phenomenon to Theissen’s ‘messianic collective’, although he refers here to a phrase used by Theissen in an earlier work, the ‘“structural homologue” which unites Jesus qua [son of man] with his followers in relation to their common experience of hostility and rejection’, except that in the phrase a ‘messianic collective’ Theissen refers more to Jesus’ uniting his followers with himself in his role as God’s elect one who is to be glorified. It would fit in with this that, if Kreplin is correct in seeing in Jesus’ way of addressing God as ‘abba’ ‘an otherwise seldom attested intimacy’, his opening up of this way of addressing God to his followers indicates that his intimacy is available to all that trust in the message of God’s rule that is near at hand.137 Not that Tuckett himself wishes to exclude that, for he himself goes on also to apply this ‘structural homologue’ quite explicitly to Jesus’ union with his disciples ‘in occupying a key role in the final judgment’. 138 By the phrase, ‘messianic collective’, at any rate, Theissen means that Jesus shared certain functions and roles with his disciples as a group, functions and roles that were usually associated with the figure of the messiah alone.139 Now he has ‘transferred messianic expectations normally associated with an individual figure to the social movement that he has set in motion’. Now God’s kingly rule is no longer exercised by an individual king but by a ‘messianic collective’. And the passages that reveal such a notion have a very good claim to historical authenticity because

G. W. E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection (at least pp. 76–7 would point in this direction). The subtitle of the 2003 version of this article highlights the ‘inclusive’ nature of the phrase ‘son of man’. 137 Cf. Kreplin, Selbstverständnis, 218, 221. Cf. Tuckett, ‘Son of Man’ (2003), 185. 138 Tuckett, ‘Son of Man’ (2001), 376 (cf. ‘Son of Man’ [2003], 176), referring to Theissen, Followers, 24–9 (cf. also Theissen, Jesusbewegung, 93–6). It is to be noted that Theissen also later speaks of a ‘democratization’ of the concept of the messiah (Jesusbewegung, 48). 139 Wright, too, comments on the phenomenon of texts that ‘might be thought to speak of a messiah’ being ‘referred to the whole community, a process which is already visible within the Hebrew Bible itself’ (New Testament, 319; Wright himself cites as an example the interpretation of Amos 9.11 in CD 7.16–17 and also compares Isa 55.3; Theissen draws attention to further examples: Hab 3.13 LXX; Pss 27.8; 83.10 LXX; Sib 5.68; 4Qflor/4Q174 1.14–19 (above all 1.18–19). See further below. In Wright’s later work (Jesus) this parallelism between the messiah and the group of the saved is augmented or even replaced (for this aspect of the messianic role seems to fade from sight) by a stress on Jesus’ messianic role as embodying the sufferings of sinful Israel or Jerusalem (e.g. ‘symbolically’ undergoing ‘the fate he had announced, in symbol and word, for Jerusalem as a whole’: Jesus, 594). He compares at this point the symbolism of Ezekiel’s action in Ezekiel 4 (although one could equally well cite the examples in later chapters such as ch. 5 or ch. 12), but this weakens the case for interpreting such actions as distinctively ‘messianic’ or ‘kingly’ – such an identification with a sinful people is very much the role of a prophet (cf. Isa 6.5). In other words, how far was Jesus’ ‘vocation’ here ‘messianic’ rather than ‘prophetic’?

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‘this concept runs counter to that concentration on the incomparable majesty of Jesus that arose as a result of the Easter-faith [of his followers]’. 140 And such a transferral and a collective way of thinking of this sort is not so unexpected if one is prepared to speak of Jesus conferring his authority on his disciples as, for instance, Ferdinand Hahn does.141 The more the mission of the Twelve or of the Seventy or Seventy-Two depicted in the Gospels (Mark 6.7–13; Luke 10.1–12) mirrors that of Jesus himself, the easier it becomes to discern his messianic role and function in their activity too. And here, too, it is appropriate to recall once more Richard Rohrbaugh’s analysis, for, if in fact Jesus’ ways of thinking were collective rather than individualistic, then one would expect him to think collectively here as well. Rohrbaugh is prepared to see some individualists amongst the urban elite of that time, but neither Jesus nor his disciples belonged to such circles. Rohrbaugh also allowed for the possibility of individualistic ways of thought among the marginalized, and Jesus and his disciples would in many respects have marginalized themselves by leaving their earlier life amidst the structured life of the society of the time and taking up an itinerant way of life. In that case, however, it is important to note that by this means a new ‘in-group’ had been called into existence by Jesus and this would have formed its own collective self-awareness. The phenomenon that Theissen calls a ‘messianic collective’ may help to undergird Rohrbaugh’s thesis: Jesus may have served as the initiator of, and model for, this new group-existence, but the identity of the group that thereby comes into being is a collective one. A messianic status and function belongs, then, to the group and not to Jesus as over against the group.142 The first example of this phenomenon that Theissen mentions is found in Matt 19.28 par., where Jesus speaks of the enthronement of the disciples and of their judging Israel. Here Theissen sees Jesus’ followers occupying a position of dignity comparable to that of the messiah in PsSol 17:

140

Theissen, ‘Gruppenmessianismus ’, 111–12. Hahn, Theologie, 1,85. Cf., too, Hengel and Schwemer’s talk of the Twelve as Jesus’ ‘Mitstreiter’ for God’s basileia (Jesus, 374); the very way in which he called them is an expression of messianic authority (365). 142 Cf. also Schüssler Fiorenza’s argument that, if EDVLOHLYD is translated in a spatial sense as ‘royal realm’ or in a collective sense as ‘kingdom’ (and that is certainly both legitimate and appropriate in some cases), then this ‘focuses on the people who constitute the basileia because according to ancestral tradition Israel was a covenant partner, a “kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:6; Isa. 61:6; etc.)’; this, she argues, involves ‘a radical egalitarian democratic polity’ (Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 113). 141

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He [the kingly messiah and son of David] will gather a holy people whom he will lead in righteousness; and he will judge the tribes of the people that have been made holy by the Lord their God.143

Theissen also comments how rare it is that God’s kingly rule is linked with that of an individual in Jewish literature; as exceptions he cites PsSol 17 and possibly also Daniel 7, if the ‘one like a son of man’ were to be treated as an individual figure, and also the writings of the Chronicler, where the Davidic dynasty is on a number of occasions linked to God’s kingly rule (1 Chron 17.14; 28.5; 2 Chron 9.8; 13.8).144 More frequently that kingly rule is assigned to Israel, as opposed to the other nations: Obadiah 21: Those who have been saved shall go up to Mount Zion to rule Mount Esau; and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.145 Dan 2.44: And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall this kingdom be left to another people. Test. Moses 10.1, 8: Then his [God’s] kingdom will appear throughout his whole creation … Then will you be happy, O Israel!146

Theissen finds in the Jesus traditions hints that God’s kingdom is ‘promised to small groups within Israel’ and the contrast with the other nations is missing. Thus a text like Luke 17.20–1 can be regarded as a collective messianic reformulation of current expectations: When [Jesus] was asked by the Pharisees when God’s kingly rule was coming, he answered them, saying: ‘God‘s kingly rule does not come in such a way that one can observe it[s coming], nor will they say “Look, here it is!” or “There!”, but God’s kingly rule is in your midst.’147

That the kingdom is in their midst means, Theissen thinks, that it is exercised and represented by those addressed, although that interpretation would be rather strange if applied to the Pharisees as in its present context in Luke; it would make more sense if the ‘you’ addressed were Jesus’ disciples. Rather easier to recognize is Jesus’ promise in Luke 12.32: ‘Fear not, little flock! For it is your Father’s will to give you the kingdom.’ This passage would be all the more 143

PsSol 17.26 (tr. R. B. Wright in OTP 2, 667). Cf. also Theissen, Jesusbewegung, 108– 9, 276. Hengel and Schwemer, Jesus, 367, speak of the Twelve’s participation in God’s role of judging. 144 Theissen, ‘Gruppenmessianismus’, 114. 145 NRSV. Cf. also Micah 4.6–8. 146 Tr. J. Priest in OTP 1, 931–2. 147 Theissen finds the obverse of such a promise in Test. Benj. 9.1: ‘you will be sexually promiscuous like the promiscuity of the Sodomites and will perish, with few exceptions. You shall resume your actions with loose women, and the kingdom of the Lord will not be among you, for he will take it away forthwith’ (tr. H. C. Kee in OTP 1, 827).

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significant in the light of Michael Wolter’s observation that ‘the expression EDVLOHLYDQGLGRYQDLWLQLY elsewhere describes a person’s being appointed to the position of a ruler’.148 Unfortunately the authenticity of this saying is uncertain, and the same is even more true of another saying contained in the material peculiar to Luke, 22.29, ‘And I confer a kingdom on you just as my Father has conferred a kingdom on me’.149 A reference to Jesus’ own kingdom would be likelier among his followers at a later stage.150 At any rate, it is to be noted that when a kingdom is given to someone that person exercises rule. That can be seen in Dan 7.27, ‘The kingdom and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them’ (NRSV). That is all the more significant because, even if the authenticity of texts like Luke 12.32 remain questionable, similar remarks are to be found in other sayings whose genuineness is less open to question. In the beatitude of Luke 6.20 the kingdom is promised to the poor, and, while we may more often think of this as allowing them to enter into God’s kingdom or to share in the good things that the kingdom brings,151 the doxology of the Lord’s Prayer that has later been added to it uses a similar phrase, ‘Thine is the kingdom’ (Matt 6.13 v.l.); that hardly refers to God’s entry into the kingdom or sharing in its good things, but rather to his kingly rule. What is then to prevent us interpreting the promise to the poor as also meaning that they will share in exercising God’s kingly rule, a reversal of their present position of weakness?152 Those to whom the kingdom belongs would then share in the exercise of rule and would not just have the status of subjects. That is the privilege of the poor, and of the disciples if Luke 12.32 is a reliable witness, and also, Theissen adds, of children according to Mark 10.14 parr.: ‘Allow the children to come to me and do not prevent them; for to such as these God’s kingdom belongs.’ And such a ruling in the eschatological kingdom of God is without doubt a function of the messiah. In the light of such passages Theissen concludes that

148

Wolter, Lukas, 457. The word EDVLOHLYD only occurs once; does that mean that one and the same kingdom is conferred? Bovon is of the opinion that it is less a matter of different entities than of different periods of time and, as he notes, that brings this text near to 1 Cor 15.23–8 (Lukas 4, 269). 150 Pace Marshall, Luke, 817. 151 The commentaries here mostly speak rather vaguely of the eschatological promise of the kingdom and do not elaborate on the relation of the poor to the kingdom. Moreover, is this promise ‘eschatological’ because it refers to the future or do the present tenses in both Matthew and Luke mean that they are already, paradoxically, participating in the kingdom? 152 Cf. Davies/Allison, Matthew 1, 445, comparing the reversal of rank also found in Matt 19.30 and 20.16. 149

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All in all there are more kingdom sayings in which God’s kingly rule is associated with a collective entity than sayings which depict an individual figure as its bearer and representative. On closer examination the latter do not tell against the possibility of a collective group of those who exercise this rule.153

Thus, when Jesus sees God’s finger at work in his driving out of demons (Luke 11.20 par.), that does not mean that that finger is not at work in the exorcisms practised by others, including Jesus’ disciples.154 For it was in the works performed by them that Jesus saw the downfall of Satan (Luke 10.18).155 (If in fact the context in which Luke places the saying is the original one; if in fact it was uttered by Jesus either with regard to some visionary experience of his own, e.g. at his baptism, or in connection with one of his own exorcisms, then this tells us nothing about his evaluation of the exorcisms performed by his followers. Nonetheless, it would then be striking that Luke has chosen to put it in this context.) In short, Theissen sees here good reason to believe that ‘Jesus shared his claim to authority with the circle of his disciples far more than one has hitherto supposed’.156 All this might seem to result in a dilution of Jesus’ authority and status , an authority and status that have traditionally been regarded as unique. Theissen, however, insists that one would be wrong to see in such a christology any diminution of Jesus’ position: what is here presupposed is greater than anything found in the messianic expectations current at the time, since Jesus is not only portrayed as Israel’s ruler but also as the one who appoints Israel’s future rulers, and that on the basis of people’s relationship to himself. Jesus’ role is not diminished. 157 On the contrary. For he who assigns messianic tasks to other people is more than a ‘messiah’. He who promises God’s kingly rule to disadvantaged groups amongst God’s people acts in a radically theocratic manner as God’s representative. He who promises others a royal status in God’s kingdom possesses an authority that surpasses that of a king, even if it goes beyond the categories that were then available as well as our ability to comprehend it.158 153

Theissen, ‘Gruppenmessianismus’, 116. Cf. Theissen, Jesusbewegung, 273–4. 155 And precisely in the fact that this defeat of Satan is attributed to the wonders worked by the disciples, not those worked by Jesus, lies one of the strongest arguments for the authenticity of this otherwise highly unusual saying. Hengel and Schwemer, too, see a messianic act in Jesus’s giving his disciples authority over unclean spirits; that goes beyond the competence of a mere prophet (Jesus, 466). 156 Theissen, ‘Gruppenmessianismus’, 118. And perhaps with more than them if Kreplin is right to insist that ‘Jesus at no point limited to his own activity the possibility of experiencing God’s rule at work in the present’; instead he speaks of manifestations of this rule at some remove from his person (Selbstverständnis, 230, quoting Goppelt, Theologie, 223); however, the evidence cited does not really bear this out – even if the HMJZY is a secondary addition to Luke 10.20, the verb HMNEDYOOZ is still in the first person singular). 157 Theissen, ‘Gruppenmessianismus’, 113. 158 Theissen, ‘Gruppenmessianismus’, 123. One could also compare Jüngel, Gott, 488: 154

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And one could add that, when he gives others the right to address ‘God’ as father as he himself addressed God, it is also significant that he passes on this right. Yet there is a further aspect of Jesus’ ministry that should perhaps be mentioned here, in addition to those to which Theissen appeals, an aspect to which Jürgen Roloff calls our attention, and that is the common fate and lot that Jesus shared with his disciples:159 they share his homelessness (Luke 9.58 par.) and his renunciation of life in his family, and must reckon with sharing his suffering by bearing their own cross (Luke 14.27 par.; cf. Mark 8.34 parr.).160 Jesus’ question to the two sons of Zebedee, after their mother had begged him to grant them a place on his left hand and on his right in his glory, points in the same direction: ‘Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am being baptized?’ (Mark 10.38 par.). And lastly there are Jesus’ actions during his last meal with his disciples, in his breaking and distributing bread and giving them the cup to drink; should one not understand them as, at the very least, actions that were meant to bind the disciples together with himself as he faced up to his imminent fate? This idea of a shared fate and destiny finds an echo in Paul’s self-consciousness, above all in his intensely personal reflections on his role as apostle in 2 Cor 4.7–6.1. For there he speaks of bearing about Jesus’ QHYNUZVL in his body and being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake so that Jesus’ life may also be revealed there. Death is at work in him (and other apostles?) but life in the Corinthian church (4.10–12).161 It is tempting then to go further and to trace a line of continuity to the work of the liberation theologian Ignacio Ellacuria who saw in the suffering people of El Salvador (and in the suffering and op-

‘Jesus is not only a member of the new community in fellowship with God, but the person who brings this community into being’ (cf. also 491). At this point Theissen seems to come near to the distinction proposed by John Cobb, ‘Christ’, 145, when the latter speaks of the early Christians experiencing themselves in a new way as God’s children and feeling this experience to be derivative from Jesus, while not regarding Jesus’ sonship as derivative in the same sense. However, Cobb does not wish to claim that Jesus taught anything like this. In other words, this may go back to Jesus’ followers’ later interpretation of the significance of his life for them rather than to anything felt or taught by Jesus. Theissen, however, identifies Jesus‘ own role in this appointing and this in turn would imply a consciousness of a difference between himself and others, however exalted the role might be to which he appointed them. Yet does not Mark 10.40 par. suggest that such a status was something that Jesus did not regard as being within his power to grant? 159 Roloff, Kirche, 40. 160 Rightly Gnilka remarks that this refers to bearing one‘s own cross, not that of Jesus; here he sees a sign that this saying stems from the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry and the bearing of one’s cross was understood as a metaphor covering ‘hostility, contempt, restrictions, sufferings’ (Jesus, 172). Tuckett, ‘Son of Man’ (2003), 181, also sees in Mark 8.33–4 the implication that the suffering of Jesus the ‘son of man’ is to be shared by his followers. 161 Also relevant is the puzzling reference of the author of Colossians writing in Paul’s name to the apostle’s ‘completing in [his] flesh what remains of Christ’s sufferings on behalf of his body, that is the church’ (Col 1.24); cf. Wedderburn, ‘Theology’, 38–9.

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pressed, a ‘crucified’ people, everywhere) the ‘continuation in history of the life and death of Jesus’ and indeed the ‘salvation and redemption for the whole world’.162

Nonetheless it does then become more difficult to speak of Jesus’ uniqueness, the more he shares his status with his disciples and offers to share with them his way and indeed calls upon them to do so. There remains ultimately the fact that it is he who shares and offers all this, who made it possible then and still makes it possible. What are we to make of all these phenomena? They seem to shed a different light on Jesus’ life than the post-Easter focus and concentration of the Christian community on the person of Jesus and on his otherness in comparison with the rest of humanity. In so doing they have a considerable claim to authenticity and at the same time present a formidable challenge to traditional christology, which has concentrated on the uniqueness of the God–man. On the other hand, they have points of contact with contemporary Judaism, again an important argument for authenticity. Theissen can point to the use of the phrase ‘the anointed one’ applying to the whole people of God or to a group within it.163 Yet the development of these points of contact is a striking and puzzling one. Historical research can attest the existence of these phenomena, but it is doubtful whether it can explain them. Nonetheless they are phenomena that seem to give us tantalizing glimpses into the way in which Jesus may have seen his work.164 At the same time they may also be an important clue to the way in which Paul’s Adamic christology could have developed later and may provide a significant link between this christology and the earthly Jesus’ claims for himself. Yet no more than a link, for the evidence that we have seen need mean no more than that Jesus saw himself as a sort of trail-blazer for a renewed people of God in the end-time, incorporating and realizing in his person all that the Jewish people should be. At this point it may be worth pondering whether this would also tie in with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concern to direct attention away from the unique 162 Ellacuria, ‘Volk’, 835–6, 849 (his basis for this lies primarily in the Old Testament in the figure of the suffering servant of deutero-Isaiah, and only secondarily in a New Testament text, Matt 25.31–46). In this respect Ellacuria takes a step beyond what Volker Küster sees as a common feature of liberation theologies, namely that Christ suffers with the suffering and is present in the Spirit in their suffering, an idea that leads to ‘a corporate theologia crucis’ (Faces, 182, his italics). But it is a step that can find some support in Paul’s view of his apostolic calling, and if the church is ‘apostolic’ then this redemptive role should surely belong to the people of God as well. 163 He refers to Hab 3.13 LXX, which speaks of ‘anointed ones’ in the plural and interprets this of the people, as well as to the Dead Sea Scrolls, where in 4QFlor/4Q174 1.19 the anointed one of Ps 2.1 is apparently identified with ‘the elect ones of Israel’; in CD 7.16–17 the king whose fallen Sukkat God will lift up (Amos 5.26) is the assembly. 164 On the other hand, I am doubtful about the logic of the argument that Jesus’ representative and collective role points to his ‘divinity’ (pace Moule, Origin, e.g. 53, 95; the latter reference overlooks the fact that Paul also views Adam as an ‘“inclusive” personality’, without in the least viewing him ‘as any theist conceives of God’).

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or exceptional figure of Jesus and to focus instead on the movement to which he belonged.165 It may be granted that this movement took its cue from Jesus or at least claimed to do so, but at the same time its earliest members would hardly have wanted to question Jesus’ uniqueness, increasingly convinced as they were that he enjoyed a relationship with his heavenly Father that was qualitatively different from their own. Were those convictions then at odds with those of Jesus himself? Or must we differentiate here, aware that the unfolding of a high christology was a process that took time and that it was a process whose progress was by no means uniform in all circles of the Jesus movement? Certainly differentiation is necessary with regard to other factors that Schüssler Fiorenza examines: different Christian circles varied, for instance, in the strength of their hostility to, and criticism of, Judaism and also in the role that they were prepared to grant to women.166 It would, then, be rash to suppose that it was any different with the formation of christology. Now for many the way in which Jesus himself saw his work is normative: we too, it is claimed, should view it in the same way. Yet that attitude is hard to justify. For one thing, the assumption that Jesus must have been right is hard to square with the likelihood that he, like probably every apocalyptically oriented prophet, believed in an imminent, dramatic change in world history.167 With the advantage of hindsight we can say that he was wrong. What basis have we then for the assumption that he got it right about his own role in a divine plan for the course of events whose unfolding he had thus incorrectly gauged? And another point is that what Jesus said about himself was in all probability later judged inadequate by his followers. The difference between his more modest, self-effacing claims for himself and above all for his work, on the one hand, and their more exalted claims for him alone and for his person is often one of the most reliable criteria for recognizing material that more probably goes back to him rather than having been produced by his later followers. The evidence mentioned in this chapter has, amongst other things, highlighted the unusualness of many of the claims implicit or explicit in the message of Jesus, and perhaps one might be tempted to follow Joachim Jeremias in saying that we are there ‘confronted by a unique claim to authority which breaks through the bounds of the Old Testament and Judaism’, although some might 165

See § 1.3 above. Even within the scope of the churches founded by, and stemming from, Paul the variations in the status and role accorded to women varies greatly. And alongside the later strand represented by the patriarchal Pastorals must be set the legendary traditions found in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, whether they are earlier or later than the Pastorals. 167 Despite the misgivings of many, I would still want to describe Jesus as ‘apocalyptically oriented’, even if he saw God’s kingly rule already being established and in this world rather than a different, still future one; one can still speak of Jesus as indebted to the ways and categories of apocalyptic thought (in all their variety) even if a major revision of those ways of thought and categories is discernible in his sayings. 166

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demur at the term ‘unique’. What is more serious, however, is Jeremias’ further claim that if, with the utmost zeal and conscientiousness, using the critical resources at our disposal, we occupy ourselves with the historical Jesus, the result is always the same, we find ourselves in the presence of God himself.168

If that were the result, then historical study would have proved too much, for it would have led us to a Jesus stripped of the ambiguity and ambivalence that quite clearly surrounded the Jesus of history if the varying reactions to him and his message and movement are anything to go by. It would strip his life of that element of the enigmatic that it possessed then and still possesses today. Against Jeremias’ confidence should be set Rudolf Bultmann’s sobering answer to H. P. Owen: What is there about the historical Jesus that lifts his incognito and allows him to be seen as the epiphany of the divine? Are there objective criteria for this? Such criteria could be exhibited only by objectivizing historical science. And is faith in Jesus Christ as historical event dependent upon historical science?169

That conclusion, however, poses in an acute form the question of the christological significance and usefulness of historical research into the life of Jesus. For if the result of that research is at best uncertain, a matter of the more or less probable, but perhaps even an impenetrable enigma, then what can Christian theology make of that uncertainty and that enigma? Wright, on the other hand, claims that his historical research leads him to conclusions that might perhaps at first sight seem just as far-reaching in their christological implications. However, whereas Jeremias spoke of what should be perceived and recognized by the historian today, Wright focuses on what could and should have been perceived by Jesus’ contemporaries as well as what had been Jesus’ own ‘mindset’ at the time. He points to various Old Testament texts that speak of God’s return to Jerusalem and argues, with reference to Jesus’ action in the temple and to his last meal with his disciples, that ‘we should see [Jesus’] final journey to Jerusalem … as the symbolic enacting of the great central kingdom-promise, that YHWH would at last return to Zion to judge and to save’.170 Jesus ‘saw his journey to Jerusalem as the symbol and embodiment of YHWH’s return to Zion’ (639, his italics). Wright also sees this expounded in the parable of the talents or pounds (Matt 25.14–30 par.) and other stories and sayings. Is Wright then claiming that Jesus meant more than a prophet did when claiming to act and speak in the name of God, as God’s representative? That 168 Jeremias, ‘Position’, 338. Roloff, ‘Suche’, 563, refers to a ‘historical positivism that would like to make an image of Jesus attained by academic means the norm for [Christian] proclamation’. 169 Bultmann, ‘Reply’, 262. 170 Wright, Jesus, 631.

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might well seem to be intended in Wright’s talking of Jesus’ coming to Jerusalem as ‘The Return of the King’.171 What Jesus was doing was not just referring to what would someday, perhaps even very soon, take place, but something that was already taking place in his actions; he ‘was hinting, for those with ears to hear, that as he was riding over the Mount of Olives, celebrating the coming kingdom, and warning Jerusalem that it would mean judgment for those who rejected him and his way of peace, so YHWH was returning to his people, his city and his Temple’.172 Yet to take the ‘embodiment’ of which Wright speaks as amounting to something like the claims of the Johannine Jesus or an equivalent to these would seem to be a step beyond what the historical evidence permits, and it is not clear that Wright intends to take this step. And, if Jesus staged a fulfilment of Zech 9.9, ‘Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey’ (NRSV), it is surely clear that this is the entry of some human agent and not God in person. Correspondingly, he is greeted with the acclamation ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’ (Mark 11.10 parr.); this is clearly God’s agent, not God in person. And furthermore, one must not lose sight of the texts that we have already considered, where Jesus seems to share his vocation with his closest disciples, and even promises them a role in judgement that would normally have been expected to be God’s prerogative (Matt 19.28 par. again). That suggests (a) that Jesus did not see himself as God’s sole or unique representative, and (b) that there would still be a future judgement lying beyond anything that he himself effected in his ministry. His actions in Jerusalem, like those of prophets before him, looked forward to a judgment still to be fulfilled, just as his saying about the destruction of the temple (Mark 13.2 parr.), whether uttered directly in connection with his action in the temple or not, would have entailed something greater than was ever realized by his action in the temple. With both Jeremias and Wright we see attempts to distinguish Jesus from other men and women, to make him claim more for himself than God’s prophets before him could claim, to make him greater than even the greatest of those prophets. And often those prophets had been lonely figures, lone voices speaking out for their God in a hostile world; and yet sometimes even they found that they were not so alone, as Elijah did when it was pointed out to him that seven thousand others remained true to their God and his (1 Kings 19.18). Indeed Jesus seems to claim that something greater than what had gone before was happening in his ministry but, as we saw, it was happening in his ministry, in what he believed God was doing in and through him, rather than in himself. And so far from setting himself apart from other men and women Jesus seems to have as171 The title of ch. 13 in Wright, Jesus, 612–53. (It may be asked what implications this would have for Jesus’ interpretation of any earlier visits to Jerusalem – if there had been any. This title at least seems to confer a particular importance on this last visit.) 172 Wright, Jesus, 639.

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cribed to others a role and a part in that work that God was doing through him, sharing with them his place in God’s work and in the coming of God’s kingly reign. In the sayings that seem to point to a collective messiahship and to a ‘democratization’ of messianic expectations we are confronted with texts that run contrary, not only to the tendencies inherent in the developing christology of the New Testament writings, culminating in that of the Fourth Gospel, but also to their successors in the form of the christologies of a later Christian orthodoxy.173 Historical research can, in this case at least, play a potentially thoroughly subversive role and invite us to view the central figure of the Christian faith and his claims with opened eyes. Put bluntly, this strand of Jesus’ teaching seems to suggest that Jesus himself might well have been horrified had he known what his followers would make of him and would have repudiated the very suggestion of talking of him as God incarnate, a unique being. Of course, it would nevertheless be possible to say that his followers were right in going beyond anything that Jesus claimed for himself or would have wanted to claim for himself, particularly if one regards it as possible for someone to be God’s messiah without knowing it or without knowing it fully; it might even be theoretically possible for someone even to surpass the human role of the messiah expected in the Judaism of the time and still to be unaware of it, but that is then to reject the understanding of Jesus’ self-awareness found in a high christology such as that of the Fourth Gospel. And it must be admitted that the higher one’s christology moves in this direction, the more difficult it becomes to contemplate so exalted a person having no insight into his exalted nature and status. Such an ignorance is, however, more easily comprehensible in a human agent of God who has eyes only for the task that God has set him to do, but such comprehensibility would then be gained at the risk of having to jettison a considerable dogmatic superstructure that later generations would then have erected upon very flimsy foundations. This superstructure could then only be sustained if sufficient reasons could be advanced in support of the thesis that later generations of Jesus’ followers had good cause to go further than Jesus himself in what they claimed for him. Occasionally scholars have referred to their christological enquiries as a ‘pilgrimage’, either a personal one or a collective one.174 Implied is presumably a 173 Should one, however, see in John 14.12 a Johannine continuation of this Synoptic strand of thought? 174 Perhaps best known is Norman Perrin’s Pilgrimage, but more recently a group of pilgrims have presented their report (Gaventa/Hays, Seeking). In the latter case the use of the analogy is justified (4–5) by the fact that the participants come from different locations and need varying equipment, yet ‘all hope to converge at a common destination’. That destination is, by implication, as yet unknown, although the editors speak of a ‘converging collective vision of the identity of Jesus, even though the precise articulation of that vision remains difficult’. They also assert that they have been ‘reliably guided by the reports of those who have preceded them on the journey’. But by all of them? For they had already dismissed with scorn the probings of the Jesus Seminar (2) and it is clear that this group of ‘confess-

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wandering, perhaps even an arduous wandering, but the metaphor also seems to suggest a goal that is known as well as a path that has been trodden by other pilgrims and is therefore likewise familiar. How far that is appropriate in this instance is a moot point. For the figure of Jesus seems as enigmatic to us as he was apparently to Albert Schweitzer or perhaps even more so,175 and the doctrinal formulations of later christologies threaten to confuse the issue yet further, as we have just seen, inasmuch as they seem to run counter to so much that our sources apparently tell us about Jesus. Rather than heading confidently towards some shrine along some path upon which countless feet have trod, we seem rather to be stumbling in the dark, guided (we hope) by occasional flashes of light that may (or may not) point us in the right direction, holding out to us tantalizing glimpses of what could conceivably lie before us. In matters of christology, too, we may at best be able to see ‘in a riddle’ (1 Cor 13.12).

ing Christians’ seeks ‘clarification’ of Jesus’ identity through the church’s canon and creed (only one?) and not apart from them. And yet, if ‘Jesus is a disturbing, destabilizing figure’ and we are therefore to be suspicious of any claim that he is ‘the guarantor of an established order’ (21), might this not also apply to aspects of the ecclesiastical order based on canon and creed? 175 Cf. Schweit zer, Geschichte, 516, 519, 620; Quest, 397.

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9. A Christological Epilogue At the close of the previous chapter it was indicated that some of the findings of historical research into the life and teaching of Jesus might be hard to reconcile with the claims made for him by later Christian theology. For traditionally the Jesus with whom historical research is concerned has been viewed as in some way God incarnate and thus in some measure set apart from the rest of humanity. But, to put it mildly, not all are agreed as to what that incarnation involves, and in view of the difficulties to which metaphysical speculations concerning the relation of the man Jesus to God have led, almost from the earliest years of the Christian church, such an indecision is readily intelligible.1 So Hick, drawing on the work of Sarah Coakley, lists a number of understandings of what ‘incarnation’ means, beginning with the less drastic and ending with the most farreaching:2 (1) God is involved in human life;3 (2) in Jesus’ life ‘God was involved in a particular and especially powerful and effective way’;4 (3) ‘incarnation’ involves Jesus’ pre-existence or (4) ‘a total interaction of the divine and the human in Christ’;5 further, (5) one can stipulate that only Jesus ‘has been and will be’ God’s incarnation in this sense,6 and lastly, (6) one can equate ‘incarnational christology with that of the Council of Chalcedon’.7

1

Cf., e.g., Hick, ‘Christology’, 17–18. Hick, Metaphor, 9–10 (his italics), referring to Coakley, Christ, 104–6. 3 Here Coakley cites those ‘left-wing Hegelians’ who accepted an ‘incarnational principle’ free from ‘Hegel’s own insistence on a perfect instantiation of the God/man unity in Christ’ (Christ, 104). Or, even more far-reaching, Cobb, ‘Christ’, 144: ‘in an important sense God is incarnate in all things.’ 4 Here in Coakley’s view are to be placed most of the contributors to Hick, The Myth of God Incarnate, except for Cupitt (Christ, 104–5 n. 4). Cf. also, e.g., Newman, Spirit Christology, 184: ‘The incarnation of God in Jesus is the model for God’s incarnation in all people.’ 5 Coakley, Christ, 105 nn. 5 and 6, sees (3) as the basic definition assumed by Dunn, Christology, and cites Brian Hebblethwaite and Michael Green as examples of (4). 6 Maurice Wiles gives this as a ‘stricter’ definition of ‘incarnation’ in Hick, Myth, 1 (the ‘looser’ one is the characterization of ‘Christianity as a religion in which man’s approach to God is through the physical world rather than by escape from it’). 7 Coakley, Christ, 106 n. 9, gives as examples Christopher Butler and John Macquarrie. 2

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Not that Jesus’ relationship to God is the only dimension of christological reflection. I am aware that Leander Keck, for instance, has asserted that Jesus’ relationship to the rest of humanity and to the world must be taken into account.8 Yet the dimension that concerns us here is his relationship to God or, more precisely, the relationship between our knowledge of Jesus and our knowledge of God.

In the earliest period, before the controversies arose within the Christian church that eventually led to the credal definitions accepted by the church’s councils from the fourth century onwards, it was involved in disputes with the Jewish community as well as its sympathizers within the Christian church itself over the compatibility of its claims for Jesus with the monotheistic tradition that it purportedly had inherited from Judaism and adopted as its own. Those controversies have left an at times particularly bitter and problematic residue in the Fourth Gospel, in its christology and in its frequent slighting references to ‘the Jews’.9 Nevertheless, there are still many who adhere to the idea of God being incarnate in the man Jesus, in more or less traditional terms, regardless of the logical and conceptual difficulties inherent in such a conception and the problems of applying it to the data of the gospels.10 Such problems as the limits on Jesus’ knowledge implied in a text like Mark 13.32 par. have traditionally been met by theories such as kenoticism, involving that divine self-emptying and self-limitation envisaged in Phil 2.7. Yet it is hard to deny that traditional views of the incarnation go far beyond anything that the depiction of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels would warrant. It is true that, just we saw earlier that one might, at least in theory, be God’s messiah without being aware of it, so too one might conceivably be God incarnate without knowing it, at least if one could assume a quite drastic form of kenotic theory. Such a step might at least appeal for support to the high christology of the Fourth Gospel, yet that work, unfortunately for such a theory, does not suggest so drastic a kenosis: the Jesus of that Gospel shows far too great an awareness of who he was (even before the creation of the world: John 17.5), who he is, and who he will be. It is regrettable that much that has been written on the subject of christology in recent years has sidestepped the whole question of the credibility or validity of traditional language of the incarnation. The discussion as to whether early Christian christology arose as a result of an ‘evolutionary’ or a ‘developmental’ process, for instance, centres on the question whether the high christology that eventually emerged was an unfolding of something already implicit from the start, in Jesus’ own claims for himself and his work, 8

Cf. Keck, ‘Renewal’. Confronted with the dismissal of Christian claims for Jesus on the part of ‘the Jews’, the author of the Fourth Gospel has, in my view, presented a christology that is one-sided in its exaltation of Jesus and has laid him open to the accusation of docetism levelled at him, above all by Ernst Käsemann, Jesu letzte Wille (cf. Rese, ‘Käsemanns Johannesdeutung’). 10 And there is the danger of applying it to the gospels, namely that ‘It is characteristic of incarnational theology to know what is necessary about Jesus before one studies him’ (Keck, Future, 210). 9

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or whether these beginnings ‘mutated’ into something that was essentially different.11 But the question how these high claims were arrived at leaves aside the question whether they are credible or appropriate. It is true that, if they are judged inappropriate, an awareness of the steps that led to that inappropriate conclusion may clarify where early Christian thinking may have gone astray, but will take us no further than that. Attention needs to be paid, not just to the route by which the doctrinal destination was reached, but also to the correctness of that destination. The words of caution uttered by Leander Keck are also a timely reminder here: ‘Arguments about the “divinity of Christ” appear as museum pieces because not enough is known about divinity for the predication of this to say anything about Jesus.’12

The precariousness of the results of historical research as well as the conceptual difficulties involved in theories of incarnation have, however, led many to seek other ways of speaking of the relation of Jesus to God, for instance as a parable of God, as a metaphor, or treating him as a symbol.13 Eugene Boring, indeed, dis11

See, e.g., the discussion in Chester, Messiah, 13–45, and the lit. cited there. Keck, Future, 210. 13 Cf. (on Jesus as parable) Jüngel, Gott, 394–5, 407, 487, 495; Keck, Future, 243–9; Pokorný, ‘Jesus’ (following a remark by Ernst Fuchs); Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 156–72, 626–74; Schweizer, Jesus Christ, 88–91, and Jesus, das Gleichnis Gottes; Wiles, ‘Myth’, 162; (on Jesus as metaphor) Hick, Metaphor (but cf. the critique of Dalferth, Der auferweckte Gekreuzigte, 19–22); (on Jesus as symbol) Arnal, Jesus (cf. also Tracy, Rage, 205, 218, 220–3). It is to be stressed that Arnal is not primarily advocating this as a christological hermeneutic (although at the close he does seem to endorse something of this sort for himself as well: ‘the Jesus who is important to our own day is not the Jesus of history, but the symbolic Jesus of contemporary discourse’ – 77), but is concerned to document the way that the figure of Jesus functions today for many: ‘[S]cholarship on the historical Jesus uses the figure of Jesus as a screen or symbol on which to project contemporary cultural debates, and to employ the inherent authority of this Jesus-figure to advance one or another particular stance on these debates’ (5; Bauckham, Jesus, 1 also refers to Jesus’ ‘supremely iconic significance in American culture’, in contrast to more secularized European societies). Yet Arnal nevertheless concludes that ‘the rarefied opinions of scholars … contribute almost nothing to the public conversation about the symbolic Jesus’ (7). That is hardly surprising if he is correct in supposing that ‘such ancient events [as the crucifixion of Jesus and what led up to it] in and of themselves, as history, are irrelevant to contemporary issues’ (51–2), although he does think that ‘history, or better, historiography, as discourse, does speak to the present’. But the events of the past need not speak in this way; ‘[t]he past does not speak at all; historians speak for it’ (83 n. 8, his italics). Yet ‘Jesus is so important that his historical reconstruction becomes unimportant, hopelessly overshadowed by its big brother, the Christ of faith’ (75, his italics). That still raises for me the question whether there are any controls on, or criteria for evaluating, what one asserts about this Christ or about ‘the symbolic Jesus of contemporary discourse’. John Cobb, too, seems to me to run into problems when he states that ‘Christ’ is for him ‘a living symbol, not a proper name or a common noun’ (‘Christ’, 141), even if it is ‘tied’ to Jesus ‘as he was remembered by believers’ as well as to ‘salvation as that is understood by Christians in different places and times’ and to God (142). S. T. Davis complains in his response that this 'principle or symbol' ‘seems so broad at times as virtually to amount to any thing salvific or even good in the world’ as is the expression ‘creative transformation’ (Encountering Jesus, 162). At the same time Davis should have paid more attention to the 12

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tinguishes sharply between the world of being relating to the Jesus of 30 CE and the world of language used to speak of him in later Christian tradition, and assigns christological affirmations, with all their paradoxicality, to the latter.14 That usage in itself suggests a far more indirect or mysterious relationship between Jesus and his God than that asserted by the traditional language of incarnation. Yet here one must also ask whether it is the man Jesus himself that fills this role or rather the stories about him or the ‘faith-image’ that his followers possessed or possess, an understanding that lies near at hand in that resistance to probing ‘behind’ the sources that we have noted earlier, and also whether assigning such a role to him is then purely a decision reached by his followers or is warranted by something in his nature or his life that especially fits him for such a role. For, between the stark alternatives of a christology based on a literal incarnation in the traditional sense and one focussing only on texts written by Jesus’ followers, there is also a whole spectrum of christological possibilities related to the historical person of Jesus that find in his earthly life ways in which the divine may be disclosed, in that the human figure of Jesus points beyond himself or is interpreted by others as so doing. And if indeed ‘the oldest attempt to express God’s presence in Jesus was characterized by the concept of the Spirit’,15 then it is hardly surprising that at this point various spirit-christologies may also come

fact that ‘Christ’ was not originally a personal name, but a title ascribing to a person a role in God’s plans, and that it was only secondarily that this became specially tied to one particular individual (one could compare the way in which 'Augustus’ came to function as a proper name). Pokorný, ‘Jesus’, in the end is content to speak of Jesus as the (not ‘a’) parable of God, but demurs at the talk of him as God’s metaphor, for metaphors, properly speaking, cannot enjoy the exclusive role that Jesus fulfils as God’s representative; this is a parable that transcends the category of ‘metaphor’ (408). His initial fear that treating Jesus as a parable might be docetic (402) is harder to understand; the language that Jesus uses in his parables is, at any rate, thoroughly human language, and talk of Jesus as a parable might also stress above all his humanity rather than calling it in question. Richard Bauckham, God, stresses the distinction between asking who God is and what God is, and it may be true that the former is the question that exercised Jesus and his Jewish predecessors and contemporaries, rather than the latter, but that surely cannot and should not prevent us from asking the latter question as well, even if the whole tradition of Christian mysticism should make us wary of any too great optimism about our ability to answer it. (In a world where belief in God or gods was general and which was more or less comfortable with anthropomorphic ways of talking of them the need to grapple with the problems of the nature of the divine was far less pressing than it is today.) Cf. also Chester, Messiah, 17–27, including his questioning of the appropriateness of the ‘neo-Barthian’ elements in Bauckham’s analysis. 14 Boring, Truly Human, esp. 91–113. Yet that leaves open the question of the appropriateness of the christological affirmations and how far they can legitimately claim, as they seem to do, to speak of the Jesus of 30 CE. 15 Pannenberg, Jesus, 116.

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into play, seeing the spirit of God at work in the man Jesus either in a unique way or at least to a greater degree than is usual.16 If, on the the other hand, it is purely a matter of the stories about Jesus or the ‘faith-image’ of him,17 then the question must be posed: which stories and which image? For here the multiplicity and variety of the stories about Jesus and of images of him becomes a major problem. Even if one limits oneself to the New Testament canon, the multiplicity of stories and of ways of looking at Jesus is still too great for comfort, particularly when one sets the lofty claims of Johannine christology over against the more modest depiction of Jesus in the Synoptics.18 The differences raise the question which image or picture of Jesus is valid or at least better than the others or whether this is purely a matter of subjective taste. On the one hand Ernst Käsemann was right to emphasize that the wish of the evangelists was a proper one when they turned to a depiction of the earthly Jesus 16 G. W. H. Lampe, God; Newman, Spirit Christology; Press, Jesus; cf. Hick, ‘Christology’, 20–1. Usually the Spirit plays a subordinate role in Christian thought, often neglected or handled almost as an after-thought or least defined in relation to the first two persons of the trinity. But what if God as Spirit is placed in the centre? (Can or should God be thought of otherwise as creator?) In that case the presence of that God who is spirit in the life and work of Jesus becomes central for any christology. Yet Press reminds us of the range of options open here: on the one hand, one can start with believers’ possession of the Spirit and see Jesus as a model of this possession different from others only in degree (here he mentions the works of Lampe, Newman and H. Berkhof; cf., e.g. Lampe, God, 142: Jesus‘ sonship as ‘a paradigm of all human response to the personal outreach of God’; Newman, Spirit Christology, 182: ‘Jesus is different from other human beings in degree rather than in kind’); on the other, one can, within a trinitarian framework, see Jesus’ possession of the Spirit as expressing his unique redemptive sonship (2). 17 Perrin, Rediscovering, 243, introduces the term, the ‘faith-image’ of Jesus, in the context of talking about ‘faith-knowledge’. An alternative is Theissen’s reference in his Argumente für einen kritischen Glauben to the ’christological poetry’ and symbolism generated by Jesus that at the same time goes beyond the historical Jesus (esp. 105–6). Yet Hamilton, Quest, 140, argues that this relative independence from any knowledge of the earthly Jesus was replaced a few years later in Theissen’s Biblical Faith (and later works) by ‘a more conventional post-Bultmannian optimism about what we can know about the Jesus of history’. In the earlier work Theissen was content to say that the decisive question was what resolution of the basic religious problem the New Testament’s images of Jesus offer us, although he adds that in all probability there was in general continuity between the image of Jesus passed down by his followers and the historical Jesus, at least until Christianity entered the ‘Hellenistic sphere’ (101–2). 18 And naturally, if one follows D. Brown, Tradition, in finding a place for continuing revelation in the Wirkungsgeschichte of the canonical texts, then the variety becomes even greater. (It is to be noted that Brown retains a belief in the incarnation as well, despite a considerable tension in that it is no longer clear why an incarnation was necessary if God had to communicate to later generations so many revisions and corrections of what had been revealed through Jesus, quite apart from revelations of the divine through other religious traditions. That question becomes all the more pressing the more Brown stresses the comparability of the development of tradition in religions that recognize no incarnation in the Christian sense [cf., e.g., 208].)

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as a control over the manifold portrayals of the Christian message,19 but on the other hand the variety in their depictions means that the issue of the criteria for assessing the faithfulness and the legitimacy of their depictions must be raised. Is it enough simply to say ‘vive la différence!’ or should one not be able to discriminate between the various portrayals?20 Inevitably, the results of historical research into the life of Jesus will impinge in varying degrees and in differing ways on these various christological conceptions. At the one extreme, if it is the Jesus of the gospel stories who is christologically significant (or indeed the Christ of early Christian proclamation), and one is only interested in, and starts from, the portrayal of Jesus there, then it will matter relatively little what lies behind the stories and the picture of Jesus that the evangelists paint and how far their portrayal distorts or does justice to the historical reality of Jesus’ life.21 The main problem may then lie rather in the differences between these portrayals, e.g. between the sublimely sovereign Jesus of 19 Käsemann, ‘Blind Alleys’, 50 (Ger. 55); cf. also Perrin, Rediscovering, 233, 244, who stresses the particular need for sifting out true versions of the Christian message from false today. Schillebeeckx, too, faced with a plurality of ‘Jesus-images’, argues that Jesus ‘becomes indispensable only if and when the really crucial point of our human existence and its proper destiny are actually defined by the historical phenomenon of the real Jesus of Nazareth, and our own projections of truly human being are corrected by that; within that context there is legitimate room for the play of our human projections – always under the corrective and directive criterion of what and who Jesus actually was, in history’ (Jesus, 65). 20 Faced with the variety of church orders reflected in the New Testament and the way in which different ecclesiastical traditions found now this, now that congenial, J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit, 359–60, is content to say that, of the four models that he has found in the New Testament, it is the Pauline one that he finds ‘most attractive’. It is true that, when he comes to the variety manifested in New Testament christologies, Dunn instead finds there ‘a common kerygma’, a ‘core kerygma’, with three components, the proclamation of the risen and exalted Jesus, the call for faith and the promise held out to faith (Unity, 30), unified by ‘the unity between the exalted Christ and Jesus of Nazareth’ (203, his italics); apart from the mention of the person of Jesus these components would probably hold good of the structure of any religious proclamation. But unless one knows more about Jesus of Nazareth this does not greatly help us to say more about the exalted Christ or the character of either of them. 21 At this point Patrick R. Keifert’s concluding comments (‘Paradigms’, esp. 204) on a series of contributions on Christology and Exegesis should be noted, in that he assigns the various approaches to a spectrum embracing a historical and a linguistic paradigm: the former includes those concentrating on ‘historical events and context’ as well as those concerned more with the author and the author’s intentions, the latter is subdivided into those investigating the dialogue between the text and the ‘contemporary audience’ (i.e. today rather than contemporary with the text) and those interested in the text in itself. This spectrum corresponds to a further range of options with the conviction that the text is completely transparent at one extreme and completely opaque at the other. His own preference for the linguistic paradigm is based on the assumption of ‘the need for the linguistic turn characteristic of most contemporary philosophy’ (212). Yet in practice these categories seem at times rather difficult to apply to the various contributions (cf. Jewett’s assessment in Christology, 11).

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the Fourth Gospel and the more credibly human and ambivalent Jesus of the Synoptics. Or, if one has a predilection for the apocryphal Jesus traditions then there is also the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas with his suspiciously gnostic tinge. Once, however, one assigns more importance to the historical reality of Jesus’ life, even if certainty about its course and its shape may be almost unattainable, apart from a few aspects that may be deemed to be beyond all reasonable doubt, then historical research and its results matter more, and have far more direct implications for christology and the shape of Christian faith in Jesus. And the more direct the implications and the greater the significance for christology, we have seen, the greater the danger that christological interests and concerns will bias and skew the research and its findings. If, then, one believes that there is a historical reality behind the texts and early Christian traditions and that this historical reality is of relevance for, perhaps even determinative of, the shape of Christian faith today, the constraints of historical research must seem both frustrating and potentially threatening. They can be frustrating once we grasp that this research’s findings can never be more than probable and provisional, reconstructions of what happened in the past evaluated according to criteria of coherence and doing justice to the evidence, the traces of the past that we possess today, yet we should resist the temptation to take some short cut in the hope of reaching the desired state of assured knowledge by some other route. The threat posed by such research and by the questions that it has left open or unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) may similarly provoke a desire to resort to a short cut, but again the longing for some safe haven would then provoke us, whether we realize it fully or not, into taking a course that drastically alters the basis upon which Christian faith has traditionally been built, a christocentric basis where the figure and the earthly reality of Jesus of Nazareth forms the centre around which Christian faith is oriented.

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Bibliography of Works Cited For the most part only works actually referred to in the text and notes of the above study are cited. Not included separately are a number of dictionary articles to which reference is also made.

1. Primary sources The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (ed. R. H. Charles; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913) The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (ed. J. K. Elliott; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) The Apocryphal Old Testament (ed. H. F. D. Sparks; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) The Apostolic Fathers (tr. B. D. Ehrman; LCL 24–25; Cambridge MA/London: Harvard University Press, 2003) – Papiasfragmente; Hirt des Hermas (ed. U. H. J. Körtner, M. Leutzsch; Schriften des Urchristentums 3; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998) Augustine, Confessions (tr. W. Watts [1631]; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1912) Cicero, De oratore (tr. E. W. Sutton, H. Rackham; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1942) – Commentary on Cicero, De oratore, by A. D. Leeman, H. Pinkster, H. L. W. Nelson (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981–96) Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum (ed. T. Mommsen et al.; Berlin: Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften/Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1863–) The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition (ed. F. G. Martínez, E. J. C. Tigchelaar; Leiden, etc.: Brill, 1997, 1998) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, The Critical Essays (tr. S. Usher; LCL; London: Heinemann/ Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1974) Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia ecclesiastica (tr. K. Lake, J. E. L. Oulton, H. J. Lawlor; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1926, 1932) Fragmente apokryph gewordener Evangelien in griechischer und lateinischer Sprache (ed. D. Lührmann, E. Schlarb; MTS 59; Marburg: Elwert, 2000) Herodotus, Historiae (ed. C. Hude; SCBO; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908, 3rd ed. 1927) Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (tr. H. G. Evelyn-White; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1914, 1936) Josephus, Opera (tr. H. St. J. Thackeray, R. Marcus et al.; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1926–65) – Life of Josephus (tr./comm. by S. Mason; Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2001, 2003)

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Livy, Ab urbe condita (ed. R. S. Conway et al.; SCBO; Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 1914–65) Lucian of Samosata (tr. A. M. Harmon, K. Kilburn, M. D. MacLeod; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1913–67) The Mishnah: A New Translation (tr./ed. J. Neusner; New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1988) The Nag Hammadi Library in English (ed. J. M. Robinson; Leiden, etc.: Brill, 1977, 3rd ed. 1988) Neutestamentliche Apokryphen in deutscher Übersetzung (ed. W. Schneemelcher; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 6th/5th ed. 1989–90) Novum Testamentum Graece (ed. E. and E. Nestle, B. and K. Aland et al.; Stuttgart, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 27th ed. 1993) The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (ed. J. H. Charlesworth; London: DLT, 1983, 1985) Pausanias, Description of Greece (tr. W. H. S. Jones et al.; LCL; London: Heinemann/ Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–35) Pliny, Epistulae (ed. R. A. B. Mynors; SCBO; Oxford: Clarendon, 1963) Plutarch, The Parallel Lives (tr. B. Perrin; LCL; Cambridge MA: Harvard University/London: Heinemann, 1914–26) Polybius, The Histories (tr. W. R. Paton; LCL; Cambridge MA: Harvard University/London: Heinemann, 1922–7) Quintilian, Institutio oratoria (tr. H. E. Butler; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1921) Septuaginta (ed. A. Rahlfs ; Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 7th ed. 1962) Suetonius, De vita Caesarum, De viris illustribus (tr. J. C. Rolfe; LCL; London: Heinemann/Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1913–14, 2nd ed. 1951) Tacitus, Annales (ed. C. D. Fisher; SCBO; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906) Talmud, Babylonian (tr. L. Goldschmidt; Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1929–36; 2nd ed. 1964–67) – ed./tr. I. Epstein (London: The Soncino Press, 1935–52; also in part online at http:// www.come-and-hear.com/talmud/)

2. Reference Works Aland, K. (ed.), Synopsis quattuor evangeliorum (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 3rd ed. 1964) BDAG=A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (ed. F. W. Danker; Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed. 2000) BDR= Blass, F., Debrunner, A., Rehkopf, F., Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Griechisch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 15th ed. 1979) DNP=Der Neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1996–2003) EWNT=Exegetisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Stuttgart, etc.: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1978–80, 2nd ed. 1992) Hatch, E., Redpath, H. A., A Concordance to the Septuagint and the Other Greek Versions of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897, repr. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987) Huck, A. (ed), Synopse der drei ersten Evangelien mit Beigabe der johanneischen Parallelstellen (13th ed. rev. H. Greeven; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981) KlP=Der Kleine Pauly: Lexikon der Antike (München: Druckenmüller, 1975/München: dtv, 1979)

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Moulton, J. H. with W. F. Howard, N. Turner, A Grammar of New Testament Greek (4 vols; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1908–76) Neirynck, F. (ed.), The Minor Agreements in a Horizontal-Line Synopsis (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Auxilia 15; Leuven: University/Peeters, 1991) – Q-Synopsis: The Double Tradition Passages in Greek (Studiorum Novi Testamenti Auxilia 13; Leuven: University/Peeters, 1988, 2nd ed. 1995) OCD=The Oxford Classical Dictionary (ed. S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth; Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 3rd ed. 1996) Robinson, J. M., Hoffmann, P., Kloppenborg, J. S. (ed.), The Critical Edition of Q (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress/Leuven: Peeters, 2000) RGG4=Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Handwörterbuch für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 4th ed. 1998–2005) TDNT=Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (ed. G. Kittel, G. Friedrich; Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1964–76; ET of Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1933–79)

3. Other works Abelove, H. et al. (ed.), Visions of History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976) Aichele, G. et al., The Postmodern Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) Alexander, L. C. A., ‘The Living Voice: Scepticism towards the Written Word in Early Christian and in Graeco–Roman Texts’, in The Bible in Three Dimensions (ed. D. J. A. Clines et al.; JSOTSup 87; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990) 221–47 Alexander, P. S., ‘Orality in Pharisaic–Rabbinic Judaism at the Turn of the Eras’, in Wansbrough, Jesus, 159–84 Allison, D. C., Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998) – ‘The Secularizing of the Historical Jesus’, PRS 27 (2000) 135–51 – ‘The Historians’ Jesus and the Church’, in Gaventa/Hays, Seeking the Identity of Jesus, 79–95 Andersen, Ø., ‘Oral Tradition’, in Wansbrough, Jesus, 9–58 Ankersmit, F. R., ‘Historiography and Postmodernism’, in Fay et al., History, 175–92 (repr. from History and Theory 28 [1989] 137–53=Ankersmit, History, 162–81=Jenkins, Reader, 277–97) – ‘Reply to Professor Zagorin’, History and Theory 29 (1990) 275–96 – History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press, 1994) – Historical Representation (Cultural Memory in the Present; Stanford: University Press, 2001) Appleby, J., Hunt, L., Jacob, M., Telling the Truth about History (New York/London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1994) Arnal, W., The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity (London/Oakville CT: Equinox, 2005) Assmann, J., Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: Beck, 1992, 5th ed. 2005) Aune, D. E., ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Oral Tradition in the Hellenistic World’, in Wansbrough, Jesus, 59–106

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365

Index of Primary Sources 1. Old Testament Genesis 14

306

Exodus 19.6

311

Deuteronomy 16.3, 12 1 Kings 19.18

204

218

1 Chronicles 17.14; 28.5

312

2 Chronicles 9.8; 13.8

312

Isaiah 6.5 40.2 53

310 266 311

Ezekiel 4–5; 12

310

Daniel 2.44 7 7.13 7.18 7.27

312 300–2, 306–7, 309–10, 312 300, 304 308 313

Amos 5.26 9.11

316 310

Obadiah 21

312

Micah 4.6–8

312

Habakkuk 3.13

310, 316

Zechariah 2.11; 4.9 9.9

290 319

319

2 Kings 4.42–4

Psalms 2.1 8.5 22 27.8; 83.10

55.3 56.7 61.6

316 300–1 253 310

310 264 309

366

Index of Primary Sources

2. Other Jewish Sources 1 Enoch 37–71 62.5 71; 85–90

300 301 305

3 Enoch 4.2, 5

305

Ezekiel the tragedian 68–76 305 4 Ezra 13.7

301

Josephus Antiquitates Judaicae 18.63–4 215 18.93–4 173

Moses, Testament of 9.1 306 10.1 312 10.2 306 10.8 312 Psalms of Solomon 17.26 311–12 Qumran CD 7.16–17 4Q22 4Q174 1.14–19 4Q174 1.19 4Q246 2.1, 4 11Q13

310, 316 240 310 316 308 305

Sedrach, Apocalypse of 2.2 290

Bellum Judaicum 2.197, 200 43 2.263 173

Sibylline Oracles 5.68 310

Contra Apionem 1.49–50 232 1.55 210

Talmud, Babylonian Gittin 60b; Temurah 14b 226

Vita 110 361

43 232

Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs Benjamin 9.1 312

Mishnah Aboth 1

197

Berakoth 5.5

289

Wisdom of Solomon 2–5 309 4.16; 5.1–16 308

3. New Testament Matthew 3.7–10 3.7–12 3.12 4.21–2 5.9 5.11

237 260 237, 263 262 288 152

5.13 5.19 5.20 5.25–6 5.38–48 5.39–42 6.7–15

236 222 176 236 16 236 155, 236

367

Index of Primary Sources

6.13 6.19–21 6.24–33 6.25–33 7.1–5 7.7–11 7.13–14, 24–7; 8.5–13 8.12 8.19–22 8.19–23 8.20 8.21–2 8.27 9.2 9.8 9.27 9.36 9.37–8 10.5–6 10.6 10.13 10.30–1 10.32 10.32–3 10.34 10.34–8 10.40 11.2–11 11.9–11 11.11 11.16–19 11.19 11.21–7 12.11 12.11–12 12.13 12.27–32 12.32 12.39–45 13.24–43 13.33 13.36–43 15.21–8 15.24, 28 16.18 18.15–18 18.17

313 236 237 239 237 237, 239 236 46 237 239 302 292 302 262 302 266 265 237, 239 158 289 288 239 298 266 288 236 289 237 290 303 237 302 237 241 265 268 237 302 237 265 237 265 236 289 219, 227 303 227

18.19, 21–2 19.28 19.30 20.1–16 20.16 20.22 20.30 21.33–43 (44) 21.35, 38 21.43 21.44 21.45; 22.1 22.1–14 22.36 23.37–9, 45–51 25.14–30 25.31–46 26.29 26.39, 64 26.68 27.28–9 28.17 28.19

236 308, 311, 319 313 229 313 288 266 150 268 150 237 15 151, 236 269 237 318 316 269 267 269 296 72 158

Mark 1.1–2 1.2–8 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10, 12 1.14–15 1.20 1.22 1.24 1.27 1.29 1.31 1.33 1.40 1.41 1.44 2.1 2.1–3.6 2.4 2.5–7 2.7 2.10

264 260 264 263, 270 264 267 264 262 281 287 281, 286 264 262 264 269 265 268, 294 264 147 262 294 286 302

368 2.13, 15–16 2.17 2.21 2.22 2.23 2.23–8 2.25, 27 2.28 3.4, 5 3.6 3.9 3.16–18 3.17 3.22 4.7–8, 10 4.11 4.15, 26–9 4.31–2 4.35–41 4.38 4.39 5.1–43 5.7 5.25–34 5.27–9; 6.7 6.7–13 6.11 6.13 6.14 6.31 6.32–44 6.34 6.39–40 7.15 7.24–30 7.28 8.12 8.15 8.27–9 8.29 8.29–33 8.31 8.32 8.33–4 8.35 8.38 9.3 9.4

Index of Primary Sources

264 288–9 262 268 262, 268 36, 292 265 302 265 175, 264 264 268 264 262, 281 265 262 265 270 236 265 264 262 287 279 268 311 268 262 268 264 262 266 268 174 289 269 265, 268 264 287 270, 282 170 268, 299 265 315 265, 268 266, 268 264 268

9.5 9.10 9.14–27 9.14–29 9.19 9.25–9 9.31 9.33–7 9.37 10.14 10.21 10.24 10.30, 32 10.34 10.38 10.40 10.43–4 10.46 10.46–52 10.51 11.10 11.15–17 11.16 11.17 11.28 12.1–12 12.13 12.14 12.19, 21 12.28 12.28–34 12.31, 35 12.37 12.41–4 13 13.2 13.3 13.19 13.32 14.5 14.10 14.22–5 14.25 14.35–6 14.47 14.51–2, 54 14.62 14.65

269 266 236 262 236, 268 262 299 236 236, 289 313 265 266 264 268 288, 315 315 36 266 209 269 266, 319 31 264 266 286 290 175 266 264 264, 269 262 264 265 236 163 319 264 268 324 264 268–9 236 307 267 268 264 267, 287, 296 269

369

Index of Primary Sources

14.72 15 15.1, 7–8, 15 15.17–18 15.21–2, 24–5 15.34 15.39 15.41–2 15.44–6 16.1, 3–4 16.5 16.6 16.8

268 253 264 296 264 171 262 264 262 264 269 264, 269 249, 269, 271

Luke 1.1 1.1–4 2.19, 51 3.16–17 4.13 4.18 5.10–11 5.17–26 5.18–19 6.1–5 6.10 6.20 6.20–3 6.22 6.27–35 6.27–36 6.27–42 6.36–45 6.41–9 6.46–9 7.22–3 8 8.22–5, 40–56 9.44 9.57–60 (61–2) 9.58 10–13 10.1–12 10.2–11 10.7–8 10.16 10.18, 20 10.23–4

258 15 230 263 238 44 262 260 262 260 268 313 239, 242 152 239 16 292 239 242 239 294 265 260 299 239 315 242–3 311 239 292 239, 289 314 239, 294

10.25 10.30–5 10.30–7 11.1–4 11.2–4, 9–13 11.20 11.30 11.31–2 11.33–52 12.2–9 12.8 12.8–9 12.11–12, 22–31 12.32 12.33–4 12.49–50 12.49–17.6 12.51 12.51–3, 54–6 13 13.18–21, 24 13.29–30 13.33 14.12–15 14.13 14.15–24 14.21 14.26 14.26–7 14.27 14.34–5 15.3–7 15.11–32; 16.1–7 16.1–13 16.19–26 17.4 17.20–1 17.24, 26 17.33 18.9–14 18.10–14 18.35 22.18 22.19 22.29 22.62 22.64 22.67

269 145 152 155 239 44, 209, 314 298 291, 308 238 239 298, 308 266, 297 239 312–13 239 288–9 238 288–9 239 265 239 45–6 295 16 150 150, 245 287 292 239 315 239 245 145 160 145 239 312 298 239 229 145, 297 266 269 203 313 268 269 267

370

Index of Primary Sources

23.2, 11 24.16

296 72

John 1.1–18, 35–9 2.19–20 2.22 4.46–54 6.31–51 7.27 7.37–9 12.14–16 12.34 13.23 14.12 15.20; 16.4 17.5 19.2–3 20.9 20.14–15 20.14–17 21 21.4 21.24

210 191 208 236 43 101 208 191, 208 298 210 320 191 324 296 208 72 200 210 72 210

Acts 1.5 1.6 2 2.3 7.36–44 7.56 11.28; 12.23

264 287 107 264 43 170. 296 68

Romans 1.3–4 1.17 8.9 15.19

1 Corinthians 2.16 3.13–15 5.7 7.10 7.10–16 7.40 10.1–13 11.23 11.23–6 11.24–5 12.9–10, 28–9 13.12 15.3 15.23–8

157, 168 263 43 157 158 157 43 228 236 203 228 321 228 313

2 Corinthians 3 4.7–6.1 12.12

107 315 228

Galatians 2.1–14 2.11–14 3.5

136 221, 229, 293 228

Philippians 1.19 2.7

157 324

Colossians 1.24

315

2 Thessalonians 1.8 263 227 229 157 228

Hebrews 3.17; 11.29

43

Jude 5

43

371

Index of Primary Sources

4. Other Early Christian Literature Augustine Confessions 1.7; 11.18

138

Eusebius Historia ecclesiastica 3.39 5.1.44 5.20.5–7 9.9.4–8

65 71 77b 82 97–8 114

290 149 145 168 145 168

230 296 232 193

Jerome Lives of Illustrious Men 18 230

Gospel of Thomas 10 42, 47a, 58

288 145

Secret Gospel of Mark fol. 2r, 3–4 262

5. Other Graeco-Roman Literature and Sources Cicero De oratore 2.9.36

189

Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum 13.1668 109 Dionysius of Halicarnassus De compositione verborum (LCL) 2.224–5 261 Herodotus 1 prooemion

20, 222

Hesiod Theogony 53–62, 77 189 Livy Praefatio 10

61

Lucian Quomodo historia conscribenda sit 47 231 Pausanias 1.4.4

193

Pliny Epistles 7.21.7; 8.21.2

255

Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus 9.4–5

303

Polybius 1.35.9 12.4c.4–5 12.27.6

61 231 6

Quintilian 1 prooemium 25 8.6.19

vii 100

Suetonius Domitian 23.1

97

Tacitus Annales 11.24 15.44

109 215

Thucydides 1.22.4

61

372

373

Index of Authors (Secondary Literature)

Abelove, H. 138 Aichele, G. 128 Aland, K. 266 Albrecht, M. 123 Alexander, L. C. A. 230 Alexander, P. S. 292 Allison, D. C. 50, 93–4, 169, 265, 269, 289, 295, 302, 313 Andersen, Ø. 231 Ankersmit, F. R. 17, 19, 40, 69–70, 72–3, 100, 104, 106, 112, 122–3, 128–9, 135, 138–9 Appleby, J. 24, 40, 44, 53, 67 Arnal, W. 58, 90, 161, 166, 173, 325 Assmann, J. 30, 153–4, 189, 198, 202 Aune, D. E. 233, 245 Baberowski, J. 17, 29, 40, 67, 137, 192, 194, 199 Backhaus, K. 14–15, 21, 26, 28, 37–8, 100, 103, 109, 126, 141, 179, 191–2, 218 Bailey, K. E. 196–7, 228, 234–6, 244 Bar-Ilan, M. 225 Barbour, I. G. 38 Barbour, R.S. 166–7 Barnett, P. W. 2, 43, 61, 153, 175, 292 Barr, J. 36, 108, 110–11, 118, 123–4 Barthes, R. 15, 24, 103 Bartsch, H.-W. 81 Bassler, M. 116 Bauckham, R. 2, 75, 147, 151, 157, 161, 191–2, 195–6, 200–1, 203, 206–12, 227–8, 230–3, 235, 237, 266, 325–6 Baum, A. D. 191, 239, 247, 256–8 Becker, C. 24 Becker, J. 154–5, 161, 165, 169–70, 175, 179, 288, 290, 294

Belli, R. F. 206 Bergemann, T. 237, 241–2 Berger, K. 161, 292–3 Bergjan, S.-P. 26, 39 Bernejo Rubio, F. 57, 60, 64, 81, 93 Best, S. 33, 40, 73, 113, 118, 120–1, 123 Betz, H. D. 291–2 Bevir, M. 134, 181 Biehl, P. 124–5 Bird, M. F. 195 Blank, R. 196 Bloch, M. vii, 23, 73, 123, 132, 137, 272–3 Bogatyrev, P. G. 158 Boman, T. 196 Borg, M. J. 61, 145, 292–3 Boring, M. E. 158, 228, 249, 261, 325–6 Bornkamm, G. 1, 91, 262, 294 Botha, P. J. J. 196, 252–3, 255 Bovon, F. 231, 245, 260, 262, 265–6, 268, 288–9, 295, 299, 313 Braaten, C. E. 73–4 Brandon, S. G. F. 220 Braun, W. 23, 58, 90, 112, 192, 197 Brewer, W. F. 202, 206–7 Breytenbach, C. 94, 175–6 Briesen, D. 122 Broadbent, R. 110, 141 Broer, I. 250 Brown, D. 5, 105, 120, 123, 136, 140, 177, 327 Brown, R. E. 268–9 Buller, A. 23, 129, 136–7, 140, 198 Bultmann, R. 21, 28, 45, 49, 52, 67–8, 72, 78, 81–7, 89–93, 96, 125, 147–8, 152, 164, 167, 170–1, 204, 234–5, 249, 262–4, 266, 270, 275–7, 288–91, 298, 303, 306, 318

374

Index of Authors

Bunzl, M. 68, 124 Burckhardt, J. 72–3 Burke, P. 44, 190, 222 Burkett, D. 250, 263, 267, 270, 298, 305 Burnett, F. W. 113 Burns, R. 29, 134 Burrow, J. 61, 63, 74, 132 Byrskog, S. 5, 98, 127, 158, 190–1, 195–6, 201, 216, 232–3, 235, 260 Cancik, H. 4 Caputo, J. D. 29, 45, 133 Carlyle, T. 63, 76 Carr, D. 51–2 Carr, E. H. 4, 24, 38–9, 57, 63, 67, 73, 104, 137, 141, 277 Carroll, N. 102, 135 Casey, E. S. 194, 202 Casey, P. M. 227, 239, 244–5, 299–300, 302–5, 308 Catchpole, D. 211 Champlin, E. 97 Charles, R. H. 305 Charlesworth, J. H. 166, 277, 279–80 Chartier, R. 103–4, 106 Chester, A. 280–1, 284, 287, 305–6, 325–6 Chilton, B. 50, 220, 292 Clark, E. A. 38, 101, 112, 123, 135–6, 139–40 Claussen, C. 28, 95, 192 Clayton, P. 119 Coakley, S. 66, 73, 77, 141, 323 Cobb, J. B. 315, 323, 325 Collingwood, R. G. 37, 41, 67–9, 72–5, 78, 106–7, 125, 133, 180, 277–8 Collins, A. Y. 262–3, 301, 303, 305 Colpe, C. 300–1 Conrad, C. 19, 40, 111, 123 Conzelmann, H. 91, 165, 282, 290, 298 Cook, A. S. 100, 102 Coser, L. A. 192, 198, 202 Crossan, J. D. 2, 14, 20, 41, 44, 49–50, 70, 81, 90, 115, 137, 145, 148, 168–9, 173–4, 191, 193, 206, 213–14, 229, 290 Crossley, J. G. 63 Cullmann, O. 78

Dahl, N. A. 58, 142, 162, 170–2, 190, 231 Dalfert, I. U. 325 Danto, A. C. 18, 72, 78, 124, 138, 141, 276 Daston, L. 19 Davies, M. 232–4, 271 Davies, O. 118 Davies, W. D. 265, 269, 289, 302, 313 Davis, S. T. 325 De Certeau, M. 4, 105, 112, 137, 139 DeConick, A. D. 207, 248 De Jonge, H. J. 286, 301, 306, 308 De Jonge, M. C. 166, 280, 286, 305–8 Denaux, A. 241–2 Denton, D. L. 1-2, 7–8, 49–52, 55, 104–5, 137–8, 148, 173, 177–8, 280 Derrenbacker, R. A. 225, 238, 243, 246 Derrida, J. 15, 29, 45 Dewey, J. 149, 231, 248, 251–4, 256 Dibelius, M. 6, 147–8, 152, 243, 266 Dodge, B. 127, 133, 213 Domanska, E. 38 Donahue, J. R. 17, 40, 257 Downing, F. G. 166, 250–1, 270 Draper, J. A. 150–1, 158, 225, 244–5, 248, 253 Dray, W. H. 106 Droysen, J. G. 1, 5, 14, 17–18, 20, 24, 29, 39, 57, 66, 72, 75, 104–6, 129, 138–40, 154, 191 Duling, D. C. 199 Dunn, J. D. G. vi, 2, 7–8, 13, 16, 37–49, 54–6, 58, 63, 66, 71, 89, 91, 94–5, 98, 136, 151, 153–7, 159, 165–6, 168, 190–3, 195–9, 201, 206, 217–18, 220–1, 229, 231, 234–41, 245, 247, 254–6, 258, 273, 275, 285, 295, 300, 323, 328 Du Toit, D. S. 21, 179 Eagleton, T. 44, 71, 118, 120 Eck, W. 96 Edelbüttel, F. 26 Ehrman, B. 17, 259 Elam, Y. 198–9 Ellacuria, I. 315–16 Elliott, J. K. 130, 288 Elton, G. R. 2, 5, 19, 40, 42, 71, 130, 137, 141–2 Ennulat, A. 259–60, 263, 265–6

Index of Authors

375

Ernst, J. 288, 294 Evans, C. A. 134, 157–8, 171, 300 Evans, R. J. 5, 25, 33, 39–40, 64, 66–7, 102–3, 105, 112, 114, 119, 123, 128, 137, 140, 142, 174

Greenblatt, S. 110, 117 Greeven, H. 266 Gross, D. 183 Guelich, R. A. 256, 263, 288, 294 Gundry, R. H. 302

Farmer, W. R. 175, 180, 198, 279 Fay, B. 136 Fish, S. 20, 123 Fitzmyer, J. 263–4, 299 Flaig, E. 26, 108, 111, 132–3 Fleddermann, H. T. 263 Fluck, W. 117 Foley, J. M. 248 Foster, H. 118 Fox-Genovese, E. 4, 18 Fredriksen, P. 172–3 Frey, J. 94 Fried, J. 133, 158, 192, 195, 198, 208, 212–15, 234 Fried, U. 108 Frye, N. 101–2 Fuchs, A. 249, 263 Fuller, R. H. 290, 298 Funk, R. W. 33, 152, 176–7, 192, 206, 234, 290, 302

Habermas, J. 118, 123 Habermas, R. 102 Häfner, G. 14–15, 21, 26, 28, 37–8, 100, 103, 109, 126, 141, 179, 191–2, 218 Hahn, F. 231, 285, 311 Halbwachs, M. 192, 197–9, 202, 204–5 Hamilton, W. 26, 327 Hampson, D. 35 Handler, R. 204 Hare, D. R. A. 307–8 Harlan, D. 119 Harrington, D. J. 257 Harris, W. V. 225 Harth, D. 27 Harvey, A. E. 159, 294 Harvey, V. A. 66–7, 71–2, 81–3, 86–90, 123–4, 276 Hawkins, J. C. 240 Hays, R. B. 320 Heidegger, M. 4–5, 124–5, 138 Henaut, B. W. 225–6, 254–5, 265, 294 Henderson, S. W. 302 Hengel, M. 1, 61, 126, 157–9, 167, 171, 175, 191, 196, 209–10, 229, 243, 249–50, 254, 258, 268–9, 271, 281, 284, 287, 291–3, 296, 299, 301, 307, 311–12, 314 Henige, D. 232 Hens-Piazza, G. 23, 110–12, 114, 116 Herzog, W. 49, 58–9, 92, 94, 145 Hexter, J. H. 133 Hezser, C. 225, 256 Hick, J. 179, 323, 325, 327 Himmelfarb, G. 3, 115–16, 131, 181 Hirsch, E. D. 46, 57 Hobsbawm, E. 38, 106, 142 Hodgson, P. C. 118 Hoffmann, P. 260, 263 Holmberg, B. 40–1, 49, 193 Holmén, T. 69, 164, 167, 172, 174 Hölscher, L. 25, 28, 69–70 Horbury, W. 281

Gadamer, H.-G. 5, 18, 29, 49, 140, 156, 235, 275 Gaddis, J. L. 22–3, 69, 103, 122, 129, 277 Gaventa, B. 320 Gedi, N. 198–9 Geertz, C. 23–4, 115 Georgi, D. 58, 62, 66, 86, 111, 114 Gerhardsson, B. 95, 153–4, 157, 191, 227, 235 Gnilka, J. 149, 159, 161, 167, 171, 263, 268, 285, 290, 294, 302, 307, 315 Goertz, H.-J. 6–7, 20, 28–9 Gooch, G. P. 63 Goodacre, M. 152 Goodman, M. 96 Goppelt, L. 227, 314 Graf, R. 122, 132, 134 Graham, S. L. 110, 114, 117 Grappe, C. 293 Grässer, E. 58, 60–3 Green, A. 198–9

376

Index of Authors

Horsley, R. A. 14, 147, 150–1, 158, 166, 173, 225, 244–5, 248, 253, 291 Huck, A. 266 Hultgren, S. 146–7, 237, 239, 242 Hunsinger, G. 118 Hunt, L. 24, 40, 44, 53, 67 Iggers, G. G. 15, 19, 24, 29, 38, 63–4, 67, 73, 77, 102, 106, 108, 112, 118–19, 126 Irwin-Zarecka, I. 113, 183, 192, 199–200, 219 Isaac, E. 301 Jacob, M. 24, 40, 44, 53, 67 Jacobs, A. 136 Jacobson, R. 158 Jaffee, M. S. 225–6, 259 James, W. 207 Jameson, F. 120 Jauss, H. R. 24 Jenkins, K. 53, 133–4 Jensen, M. H. 43 Jeremias, J. 160, 162, 165, 167–8, 294–5, 299, 317–19 Jewett, R. 328 Johnson, L. T. 61, 148, 194 Jordan, S. 5 Jüngel, E. 314–15, 325 Kaes, A. 110–12, 115, 125 Kähler, M. 47, 60, 73–4, 148, 276 Käsemann, E. 1, 36, 91–2, 142, 160, 165, 169, 171, 174, 184–7, 221, 291–2, 324, 327–8 Kazen, T. 293, 300, 302–3 Keck, L. E. 43, 58, 64, 87, 95, 142, 154, 165, 173, 261, 284, 324–5 Keifert, P. R. 328 Kelber, W. H. 30, 151, 153–5, 158, 189, 192, 196, 205, 225, 234, 237–8, 248, 251–3, 256 Kellner, D. 33, 40, 73, 113, 118, 120–1, 123 Kellner, H. 19, 100 Kessel, M. 19, 40, 111, 123 Kirk, A. 154, 191, 197–8, 204–5, 238, 240–1, 246–7, 253, 259 Klein, H. 249–50, 295

Kloppenborg, J. S. 152, 237–41, 245–6, 260 Knibb, M. 301 Koch, K. 309 Kocka, J. 74, 105, 277 Köpf, U. 57, 272 Koester, H. 115, 149, 234, 253, 262, 265–6, 270 Körtner, U. H. J. 6, 23, 25, 117, 131 Koselleck, R. 7, 15, 23, 123, 139, 199 Kreplin, M. 91, 287, 292, 297, 300–1, 303, 308, 310, 314 Kristeva, J. 116 Krötke, W. 27 Kuhn, H.-W. 229, 296 Kümmel, W. G. 57, 83, 146–7, 155, 161, 174–5, 231, 290 Küster, V. 316 LaCapra, D. 137–8 Lampe, G. W. H. 327 Lampe, P. 26, 28, 71 Landmesser, C. 26 Lapide, P. E. 70 Lategan, B. C. 18, 97 Laufen, R. 264, 270 Lausberg, H. 100 Le Donne, A. 44, 215, 223 Leivestad, R. 308 Lentricchia, F. 112 Liechty, D. 118 Lindemann, A. 83, 250, 282, 298 Linnekin, J. 204 Loftus, E. F. 206 Lohse, E. 291, 298 Lonergan, B. J. F. 4, 7–8, 11, 40, 71, 124, 138, 277 Lord, A. B. 163, 196, 226, 231, 243, 254, 257, 261 Lorenz, C. 19, 24, 26, 69, 100, 106, 114, 121–2 Lührmann, D. 271 Luz, U. 238, 244, 262, 265, 268–9, 288, 289–91, 294, 302 Lyotard, J.-F. 40, 121, 128, 132 McCanles, M. 110 McCullagh, C. B. 103, 134

Index of Authors

MacIntyre, A. 4 Mack, B. L. 204, 225, 229 McKnight, E. V. 17, 120 McKnight, S. 2, 4, 7, 53–5, 177, 289, 295 MacMillan, M. 142, 193, 212 Macquarrie, J. 3, 68, 83 Maitland, F. W. 143 Mandelbaum, M. 65, 78, 102, 105, 129, 134 Marcus, J. 267 Marguerat, D. 17, 57, 162, 171, 174 Marsh, C. 110–12, 114–15, 117 Marshall, I. H. 265, 291, 299, 313 Marwick, A. 4–5, 21, 26, 105, 124, 137, 198 Marxsen, W. 276, 299 Maser, C. 95 Mason, S. 126 Mattila, S. L. 109, 225, 240 Meeks, W. A. 23, 58, 64, 89, 92, 112, 172–3, 275, 285, 298 Meier, J. P. 2–3, 14, 93, 159, 171–4, 217, 292–3, 295 Mendels, D. 192–3, 195, 197, 220 Merkel, H. 271 Merklein, H. 306–7 Merz, A. 82, 164, 170, 176–7, 280, 282, 286–7, 290, 293, 296, 304, 309 Metzger, B. M. 203 Meyer, B. F. 2, 7–8, 13, 20, 40–1, 45–6, 49, 59, 67, 71, 92, 128, 130, 149, 151, 154, 157, 167, 177–8, 180, 244, 277, 279–80, 284 Meyer, M. 270 Millar, F. 173 Miller, R. J. 165–6, 194 Millard, A. R. 227 Mink, L. O. 26, 37 Misztal, B. A. 183–4, 189, 194, 198–200, 202–3, 219 Moltmann, J. 57, 63, 91–2, 131, 133 Montrose, L. A. 111, 113, 116–17, 277 Moore, S. D. 110, 114, 117 Morgenthaler, R. 237, 241–3, 247 Moule, C. F. D. 302, 316 Moulton, J. H. 291 Mournet, T. C. 154, 197, 225–6, 237, 240

377

Moxnes, H. 14, 40, 44, 81, 93, 122, 173 Moxter, M. 106 Muhlack, U. 14, 23, 105 Müller, M. 301 Munslow, A. 23, 37, 41, 104, 181 Mussner, F. 282, 288–9, 291 Namier, L. 276 Neirynck, F. 239, 249, 260–1, 268, 270 Neumann, K. 28, 40, 57, 73, 113, 123, 128, 276 Newman, P. W. 323, 327 Nickelsburg, G. W. E. 310 Niebuhr, R. R. 72 Niemand, C. 159, 295, 306 Norman, A. P. 4, 103, 129 Novick, P. 4, 124 Oakeshott, M. 3, 181 Oeming, M. 112 Oexle, O. G. 24, 67, 100–1, 104 Ogden, S. M. 82–3, 86–90, 276 Ong, W. J. 105, 158, 234, 245, 252 Ostmeyer, K.-H. 43 Ott, H. 83–4 Pannenberg, W. 326 Parker, D. C. 259, 270 Patterson, S. J. 154, 210–11, 266 Pelling, C. B. R. 23, 250 Penner, T. 75, 126 Perrin, N. 39, 82, 86, 155–7, 159–60, 162–8, 173–4, 277, 298, 320, 327–8 Pesch, R. 266, 288 Pokorný, P. 325–6 Polkow, D. 170–1 Porter, S. E. 93, 162, 169, 171 Poster, M. 24, 29, 71, 104, 110, 112, 119, 132, 140 Powell, M. A. 171, 174 Press, M. 327 Räisänen, H. 75 Ranke, L. von 40, 62, 66, 123 Reicke, B. 201, 258, 262 Reimarus, H. S. vi, 58, 60, 164, 279 Renan, E. 59–60, 62 Rese, M. 324

378

Index of Authors

Riches, J. 94, 165, 170–1, 279 Ricoeur, P. 4–5, 9, 16–17, 23, 25, 41, 62, 64–5, 68–9, 72, 74–5, 101–5, 112, 127, 137–9, 161, 182, 189, 192–4, 202, 208, 252, 278 Riesenfeld, H. 153–4 Riesner, R. 2, 153–4, 157, 161, 177, 180, 196, 227, 266, 290–2 Rivkin, E. 70 Robbins, V. K. 203, 253 Roberts; C. H. 227 Robinson, J. A. 208 Robinson, J. M. 1, 81–3, 85, 87–9, 93, 150, 260, 288 Rohrbaugh, R. 283, 311 Rollmann, H. 282 Roloff, J. 58, 315, 318 Rorty, R. 124 Ross, D. 40 Rubin, D. C. 194, 204 Ruether, R. R. 34 Rüsen, J. 5, 15, 18, 20–1, 25, 29, 37, 62, 67–9, 71–4, 86, 103–5, 107, 120, 131, 133, 138, 142, 180–1, 276 Sand, A. 244 Sanders, E. P. 14, 40, 93–4, 114, 134, 162, 169, 174, 196, 232–4, 249, 263–4, 266, 271, 292, 294 Sartre, P. 194 Scheliha, A. von 94 Schenk, W. 266–7, 270 Schillebeeckx, E. 171, 178, 325, 328 Schlosser, J. 165, 179 Schmeller, T. 158 Schmidt, K. L. 146–7, 149 Schmithals, W. 227–8, 230, 249–50, 289 Schnelle, U. 6, 16, 21, 23, 106, 108, 243, 249, 259 Schöttler, P. 109, 119 Schröter, J. 2, 6–7, 13–32, 43, 48, 50, 55, 57–8, 61–2, 66, 95, 99, 106–7, 114, 126, 190–2, 206, 208–9, 227–30, 246, 260, 300, 303 Schudson, M. 204 Schulz, S. 263, 289 Schüling, J. 270 Schürmann, H. 81, 92

Schüssler Fiorenza, E. 2, 7, 27, 32–7, 56, 66, 73, 108, 111, 176, 291, 311, 316–17 Schwartz, B. 169, 204–5 Schweitzer, A. 13, 57–66, 77, 85, 139, 146, 282, 321 Schweizer, E. 263, 294, 325 Schwemer, A. M. 1, 61, 126, 158–9, 167, 171, 175, 191, 196, 209–10, 229, 243, 249, 254, 281, 284, 287, 291–3, 296, 299, 301, 307, 311–12, 314 Scott, B. B. 254 Segal, A. F. 293 Sellin, G. 251 Shils, E. 5, 232 Shiner, W. T. 254–6 Shoemaker, S. 194, 202 Small, J. P. vii, 207, 225, 255, 261 Soards, M. L. 269 Spiegel, G. M. 25, 119, 132 Spiegelmann, A. 103 Stell, S. L. 75 Stemberger, G. 226, 256 Stern, F. 1, 62–3, 76, 122, 143, 276 Strauss, D. F. vi, 57–8, 61, 67, 146, 227 Strecker, C. 23–5, 117, 255, 276 Strecker, G. 150, 230, 256, 291–2 Streeter, B. H. 241, 245, 267 Struever, N. S. 130 Stuhlmacher, P. 74, 161, 280 Tanner, J. 190 Taylor, V. 238, 267 Telford, W. R. 271 Tesnière, L. 9 Thatcher, T. 154, 191, 198, 205 Theissen, G. 18, 43, 82, 97, 158, 164, 170, 176–7, 280, 282, 286–7, 290, 293, 296, 304, 309–16, 327 Thiselton, A. C. 83–4, 120 Thomas, B. 110–11, 123 Thomas, R. 196, 231, 252–3 Thompson, E. P. 138 Thompson, P. 198 Timpe, D. 61 Tracy, D. 17, 71, 120, 325 Trocmé, E. 169–70 Troeltsch, E. 66–79, 83, 107, 180

Index of Authors

Tuckett, C. M. 243, 247, 249, 259, 263, 268, 309–10 Turner. D. 118 Tyrrell, G. 60 Vander Stichele, C. 75 Vanhoozer, K. J. 40, 118 Vansina, J. 158, 195, 231–2, 237, 247 Veeser, H. A. 32, 111, 115–18, 123 Vermes, G. 48, 90, 291, 308 Vielhauer, P. 298 Vögtle, A. 179, 298 Vouga, F. 209 Walde, C. 189 Walker, W. O. 162, 166, 169, 179 Walter, N. 227, 264 Warnock, M. 194, 202, 219 Watson, F. v–vi, 7, 18, 27, 35–6, 64, 118, 143 Weaver, W. P. 93 Wedderburn, A. J. M. 15, 32, 34, 41, 46, 71–2, 107, 134, 136, 158–9, 166, 173, 222–3, 315 Weder, H. 160, 290 Weeden, T. J. 235–6 Welsch, W. 119–21, 123, 128, 132 Wernle, P. 60 Wheeldon, M. J. 61, 126

379

White, H. 15–16, 19, 24, 27, 38, 51, 62, 67, 74, 99–106, 111–12, 117, 119–20, 130, 132, 135, 138, 181 Wiefel, W. 237, 299 Wiles, M. 323, 325 Williams, B. 39, 71, 101, 130, 277 Wilson, N. J. 4, 110, 137, 189 Winsch, P. 181 Winter, D. 164, 176–7 Winterling, A. 96 Wischmeyer, O. 4, 170 Witschel, C. 97 Wolter, M. 295, 313 Woodward, C. V. 122 Woodward, E. L. 1 Wrede, W. 90, 142, 282 Wright, N. T. 1–2, 4, 7–13, 40–44, 51, 54–5, 89–90, 94, 145, 151, 171, 173, 178, 196–7, 211, 233–4, 276, 279–80, 291–2, 310, 318–19 Young, N. J. 78, 81, 84, 276 Zager, W. 179, 282 Zagorin, P. 67, 120, 132 Zahl, P. F. M. 91 Zangenberg, J. 43 Zimmermann, R. 23, 37, 106

380

381

Index of Subjects Acts, Book of 6, 57, 107, 126, 236 Acts of Paul and Thecla 317 Acts of Pilate 215 Analogy 66, 71–4, 87 Aramaisms 162–3 ‘Authorial intention’ 10, 17

– historical 8, 38–9 Dead Sea Scrolls 99, 166, 240 ‘Dialogue’ (hermeneutical) 83, 136–40 Didache 240 Diodorus Siculus 240 Doctrina apostolorum 240 Domitian 96–7

Caligula 43, 96 Cause(s), causation, historical 67–70 Christology 275–329 – ‘spirit-christology’ 326–7 Cicero 226 Claudius 109 1 Clement 191 Coherence, principle of 36, 173–82 – coherence and correspondence 181–2 Construction and reconstruction 20–30, 81, 110, 128, 204 Context(s) 51 Correlation 66–70 Criteria (for the authenticity of Jesus traditions) 161–82 – ‘criterion of coherence’ (see also Coherence, principle of) 162, 167–8, 175 – ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ 162, 164–7, 174, 178 – ‘criterion of embarrassment’ 171 – ‘criterion of multiple attestation’ 162, 168–71 – ‘criterion of plausibility’ 176–8 – ‘criterion of rejection and execution’ 172, 295 ‘Critical realism’ 7-8, 11, 13, 40 Criticism, historical 66, 74–6 – and faith 75

Herder, J. G. 227, 234, 251 Herod Antipas 172 Herodotus 222 Historical method (see also Forensic analogies to historiography) 11–13, 31–2 ‘History’, ‘historiography’ 3–5, 7, 69–70, 93–143, 189–90 – forensic analogies 21–3, 26, 129, 135 Hume, D. 72

‘Data’ – and ‘facts’ 37–9, 50

Incarnation 323–4, 326–7 ‘Intentional fallacy’ 45

Eusebius 193, 197 Existentialist historiography 21, 92 Eyewitness(es) 196–7, 206–15, 233, 235 Ezekiel the tragedian 305 4 Ezra 300–1 Feminist writings 34 Fiction 23–5, 126, 135 Form criticism 227, 234 Galen 230 Genesis Apocryphon 240 ‘Geschichte’, ‘Historie’ 4–7, 84–5 ‘Grand narrative(s)’, ‘master narratives’, ‘metanarrative(s)’ 13, 33, 39–45, 54, 81, 121 Gunkel, H. 235

382

Index of Subjects

James (brother of Jesus) 158, 217, 221, 228–9 James, Letter of 222, 229 Jerusalem church 196, 221, 228 Jesus – action in the temple 12, 31, 134 – aims, intentions of 275–321 – and forgiveness of sins 293–4 – and Judaism 165–7, 173–4, 177–80 – and purity, holiness 292–3 – and rabbis, Pharisees 292–3 – authority of 284, 292–3, 317 – ‘faith-image’ of 327–8 – miraculous acts 278–9, 285 Jesus Seminar 33, 58, 61, 89–90, 145, 176, 214, 290, 320 Jesus traditions 109, 145–87, 201, 213, 215, 223, 226, 228–31, 247, 271–2, 278 Johannine writings 220 John 47, 191–3, 208–12, 227, 320, 324, 329 1–3 John 229 John the Baptist 34, 44, 47, 91, 171–2, 210, 263, 279–80, 290, 292, 295, 303 Jonah 218, 291 Josephus 126, 210–11, 215, 240, 250 Justin 191 Kenosis 324 ‘Linguistic turn’ 14–15, 33, 45, 118–19, 124, 132, 135–6 Lord’s Prayer 156, 245, 247 Lord’s Supper 203, 235, 245, 315 Luke 220, 258, 260–71 Luke–Acts 191 Mark 147, 228–9, 231, 249–73, 282, 287 – Deutero-Mark 249–50, 253, 260–3, 267–8, 296 – Secret Gospel of Mark 130 – Urmarkus, Proto-Mark, Grundschrift 227, 249–50, 260–1, 267–70 Mary 230 Matthew 158, 164, 167, 227, 238, 246, 249, 260–71, 302 ‘Meaning’ of events 13, 133

Memory, remembering 20, 30, 155, 189–223 – and identity 219–23 – individual and collective 195–205 Messiah 280–1, 284–5, 287, 294–5, 300–1, 309–14, 320, 324 ‘Metanarrative(s)’, see ‘Grand narrative(s)’ Mimesis 129 ‘Minor agreements’ 249–50, 253, 256–60, 263, 267–70, 296 Narration, narrative 4, 20–1, 23, 30–1, 51–2, 106–7 Nero 97 ‘New historicism’, ‘new historicist’ 23, 32, 110–16, 118, 123, 140 Orality, oral tradition 155, 163, 225–73 – and ‘autopsy’ 232–3 – and ‘oral history’ 232–3 Palestine in the time of Jesus 43, 173, 272 Papias 201, 230, 232, 272 Past, ‘traces’ of 135, 137–9, 181–2 Pastoral Epistles 220, 317 Paul 157, 166, 190, 220–2, 227–9, 234, 280, 316–17 – conversion of 200–1, 236 ‘Performance’ of tradition 151–2, 156, 243–4 Peter 206, 221, 229, 283 1 Peter 229 2 Peter 191 Plutarch 250 Polycarp 191 ‘Postmodern(ism)’ 14, 16, 19, 24–5, 33, 40, 54–6, 94, 110–43, 183 Prophecy, early Christian 156–7, 159 Pseudo-Philo 240 ‘Q’ 150–2, 169, 193, 226, 228, 237–49, 255, 259–61, 263, 266–7, 270–1, 288–9 ‘Quests’ for the ‘historical Jesus’ 1, 59 – ‘new quest’ 1, 81–93 – original or ‘old quest’ 1, 57–81, 86, 179 – ‘third quest’ 1, 93–9, 145, 174

Index of Subjects

Qumran Community Rule 240 Reformation 184 Re(-)presentation 129, 135, 138 Resurrection (of Jesus) 71–2, 222–3 Rhetoric 126–7, 130, 233–4, 240 Romans 229 ‘Salvation history’ 42 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 58–9, 72, 275 Schools 155 Seneca 230 Sermon on the Mount, on the Plain 146–7, 242, 291 Seventy (-Two) 311 Similitudes of Enoch 300–1, 304–5, 309 ‘Son of man’ 159, 163, 282, 287, 297–310 ‘Story’ 9, 21 Suetonius 109, 180

383

Synoptic Gospels 157, 192, 208, 236, 250, 256–8, 266, 288, 324, 329 Tacitus 180 Taylor, V. 238 ‘Teacher of righteousness’ 286 Texts – autonomy of 45–6 – and reality 18 Thomas, Gospel of 149–50, 329 Thucydides 195, 212 ‘Tropes’ 100, 112 Truth (of historical account) 54, 134–5, 174 Twelve 159, 308, 311 Weisse, C. H. 59, 227 Wirkungsgeschichte 46, 98, 327 World-view 9–10, 13 Yohanan, R. 226