Is There a Place for Historical Criticism?
Robert M. Price
Modern
historical criticism of the gospels and Christian origins began in the
seventeenth century largely as an attempt to debunk the Christian religion as a
pious fraud. The gospels were seen as bits of priestcraft
and humbug of a piece with the apocryphal Donation of Constantine. In the few
centuries since Reimarus and his critical kin, historical criticism has been
embraced and assimilated by many
Christian scholars who have seen in it the logical extension of the grammatico-istorical method of the Reformers. The new views
of New Testament exegesis and of early Christian history are important and well-known.
Many New Testament scholars would now hold with Schweitzer and Bultmann that
Jesus was a preacher of the imminent end of the world. He may have secretly
considered himself to be the Messiah, or he may have simply sought to pave the
way for another, the apocalyptic Son of Man. After his execution, his
disciples' experiences of his resurrection forced on them a conclusion already
implicit in his teachings and personal piety: that Jesus was indeed, or had
become, the Messiah, and was in fact God's Son. They expected he would soon return as the Son of Man he had
predicted.
Early Christianity was from its
inception a diverse phenomenon. There were significant differences over major
and minor issues, including Christology, soteriology, the significance and even
the reality of Jesus' death, the continuing role of the Torah, the work of the
Spirit, etc. The New Testament writers debate these issues among themselves
within the canon. The greatest division
was that between Jewish Christians who looked to Peter and James the
Just in the
Jerusalem Church for leadership, and
those Hellenistic Jewish and Gentile Christians whose major leader was
Paul.
The foregoing sketch contains many
points controversial even among critical scholars, but most of them are
commonplaces, building blocks of the critical approach to the historical foundations
of Christianity. Yet to a great many
traditional Christians this whole approach sounds strange, even un-Christian.
And such traditionalists can see no important difference between today's
biblical critics and yesterday's anti-Christian "free thinkers" and
"rationalists." They cannot see how anything but a desire to subvert
traditional faith could motivate such a reconstruction, since the critical
approach seems to them entirely
arbitrary and historically unsound. To defend the traditional understanding
of the life of Jesus and the foundation of the Church, traditionalists have set
forth an impressive array of apologetics arguments. These arguments shield
many conservatives from perceiving the
need, or even the possibility, of the historical-critical approach. I believe
these arguments are not very cogent and that the serious student of Christian origins needs
to penetrate this barrier if he or she
is ever to wrestle with the real issues in New Testament scholarship. I
will now attempt to facilitate the breakthrough.
Gospel Accuracy
In
recent years, Conservatives have published reams of apologetics material
defending the historical reliability of the gospels. Careful acquaintance with
these works reveals certain stock arguments. These include the importance of the short time span between Jesus and the
writing of the gospels and the centrality of eyewitnesses in the formation of
the gospel tradition. Such factors, it
is held, make it extremely unlikely if not impossible that the gospels contain
fabricated or legendary material. These arguments usually start from
generalized premises as to what is or is not probable in the development
of historical records. Such abstract
criteria are then applied to the gospel narratives in a blanket fashion. There
is a serious blind spot in this sort of approach. Almost completely deductive,
it pays insufficient attention either to specific data in the documents under consideration, or to outside documents
which might cast doubt on these criteria. Will the criteria work on other
materials analogous to the gospels? We begin with a representative statement by
Josh McDowell: “One of the major criticisms against the form critics' idea of
the oral tradition is that the period of oral tradition (as defined by the
critics) is not long enough to have allowed the alterations in the tradition
that the radical critics have alleged.”1 Similarly, John Warwick
Montgomery confidently asserts: "With the small time interval between Jesus' life and the Gospel
records, the Church did not create a 'Christ of faith'....”2 This "small time interval" would be
about thirty or forty years! Some conservatives protest that this is not really
a long period at all. McNeile and Williams in their
famous New Testament introduction state that "It is not unusual for men
even of slight intellectual ability to recall and relate clearly important
events occurring thirty-five years previously."3 But surely this is not
the real point. Form critics suggest not so much that eyewitnesses forgot the
details of what they saw. Their idea is that other people spun out legendary
material during the same period, or that as Strauss suggested, people who
witnessed only a little of Jesus' activity formed legendary
"remembrances" to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
In any case, if McDowell,
Montgomery, Buell and Hyder,
et al., are right, biographical records of similar religious figures written
within a comparable time span should also be free of legendary embellishment.
What do we find? Gershom Scholem's
study of the seventeenth-century messianic pretender Sabbatai
Sevi provides an instructive parallel here. Sevi was able to arouse apocalyptic fervor among Jews all
over the Mediterranean during the 1660s. The
movement suffered a serious setback when the messiah apostasized
to Islam! But still it did not die away. The history of Sabbatai
Sevi is more readily accessible to the modern
historian than are the gospel events. Sabbatai Sevi lived much closer to our own era and much documentary
evidence of various kinds survives him.
Here, too, according to the apologists, legends should have waited at least a
couple of generations till they reared their heads. But Gershom
Scholem speaks of "the sudden and almost
explosive surge of miracle stories" concerning Sabbatai
Sevi within weeks or even days of his public
appearances! Listen to his description: “The . . . realm of imaginative
legend... soon dominated the mental climate in Palestine [during Sevi's residence there]. The sway of imagination was
strongly in evidence in the letters sent to Egypt and elsewhere and which, by
the autumn of 1665 [the same year] had assumed the character of regular
messianic propaganda in which fiction far outweighed the facts: [e. g.] the
prophet was ‘encompassed with a Fiery Cloud’ and the voice of an angel was
heard from the cloud.”4
Letters from December of the same
year related that Sabbatai "commanded a Fire to
be made in a publick place, in the presence of many
beholders... and entered into the fire twice or thrice, without any hurt to his
garments or to a hair of his head." Other letters tell of his raising the
dead. He is said to have left his prison through locked and barred doors which
opened by themselves after his chains miraculously broke. He kills a group of
highwaymen merely with the word of his
mouth.5 Interestingly, the miracle stories often
conformed to the patterns of contemporary saints' legends.6 The spread of such
tales recalls the statements by the synoptic evangelists that many of their
miracle stories came from popular reportage (cf. Luke 1:65-66; 2:18, 38, 47;
4:14, 37; 5:15, 26; 6:17 18; 7:16, 22;
8:34 39, 47; 9:6 7, 9; 9:43; 12:1; 13:17; 18:43; 19:7, 37, 48).
A similar phenomenon occurred with Jehudah the Hasid (died 1217). In his own lifetime, legends
made him a great purveyor of religious magic, though actually Jehudah
was a staunch opponent of thaumaturgy7 More
recently, African prophet and martyr Simon Kimbangu
became another "living legend" despite his own wishes. One group of
his followers, the "Ngunzists" spread his
fame as the "God of the blacks," or "Christ of the blacks,"
even while Kimbangu himself disavowed the role. Legends of Kimbangu's childhood, miracles and prophetic visions began
within his own generation.8 A final example is more recent still.
Researcher Ed Sanders encountered a number of legends about Charles Manson
during the writing of his book The Family.
On one particular bus trip in Death Valley, "several miracles
were alleged to have been performed by Charles Manson." One story relates
that "Charlie levitated the bus over a creek crag."9
So it seems that an interval of
thirty or forty years could indeed
accommodate the intrusion of legendary materials into the gospel
tradition. (Whether or not this actually
occurred is of course a different question.) But traditional apologists do not restrict their
arguments to matters of dating and time intervals. They also appeal to the role
of eyewitnesses in the gospel tradition. Montgomery, McDowell and some other
apologists employ what they call the "external evidence" test, in
dependence on military historian C. Sanders. Montgomery writes that "as to
the authors and primary historical value of the Gospel accounts, confirmation
comes from independent written sources.”10 He goes on to quote
Papias and Irenaeus to the effect that the gospels of Matthew and John were in fact written by the
disciples of those names, and that Mark
was written in direct dependence on the apostle Peter. It would
obviously be strategic for the apologetic task if these texts could be
established as the direct testimony of
eyewitnesses. This would be even better than being able to say, as F.F. Bruce
does, that the oral tradition underlying the gospels stems from eyewitnesses.
(We will consider Bruce's approach momentarily.) But this effort by Montgomery and company is dubious.
This is something of which we will see
several more examples: the adducing of something as unambiguous evidence that
is itself a matter of serious debate. For instance, Montgomery gives no hint of the
relevance of source criticism (of which he seems to be aware11) for this whole
question. By contrast, the fact that the first gospel makes use of the second
almost in its entirety makes F.F. Bruce restrict Matthean authorship to the Q
source of sayings, rather than extending it to the whole Greek gospel of
Matthew. Montgomery also ignores the
possibility of tendentiousness in ascription. In other words, Papias, Irenaeus
and others may have attributed the gospels to apostolic individuals for reasons
of theological pedigree. Evangelical New Testament scholar Ralph P. Martin
doubts for this reason that the gospel of Mark is dependent on Peter as Papias
claimed. But Montgomery's readers will suspect
nothing of all this.
Edwin M. Yamauchi assures his readers that
There is some dispute over the identity of the authors [of the gospels], but it is generally held that Matthew, a converted taxcollector, and John, a fisherman, were two of Jesus' apostles. Mark was an eyewitness as Jesus and the apostles met in his home, and later he learned more about Jesus from Peter, whom according to Irenaeus, he served as interpreter.12
Veteran apologist Wilbur Smith echoes this
opinion: "Most scholars believe that
the first Gospel, by Matthew, was written by a disciple of Jesus, who
was an eyewitness of what he wrote.”13 Is all this
"generally held" by "most scholars"? Hardly, yet if
Yamauchi's and Smith's readers are not familiar with the relevant literature,
they will not know any better.
Yamauchi comments on the fourth
gospel that "Although it has been customary to date John's Gospel
approximately A.D. 90, some scholars have recently favored a date in the 70s or
80s.”14 Yamauchi is referring to what John A.T. Robinson has called
"a new look on the fourth gospel." Thanks to the work of C. H. Dodd
(see his Historical Tradition in the
Fourth Gospel) and others, several
scholars have indeed rethought the dating of this gospel, or at least of the
traditions underlying it. Apologists rejoice in this. It seems to them to lend
support to their contention that this gospel was written by (or stems from) an
eyewitness, as the book itself claims (19:35; 21:24). Conservatives have
almost uniformly opposed the view held since D. F. Strauss, though anticipated as early as Clement of
Alexandria (cf. his remarks on the "spiritual gospel"), that John
represents the theological musings of a later theologian, put into the mouth of
Jesus. They reason that if the gospel actually stems from an eyewitness, then
the discourses recorded there must represent an accurate transcript of Jesus' words. I want to
suggest that this does not follow at all.
The assumption is challenged by the existence of Plato's later Socratic
dialogues. Plato was an "eyewitness disciple" of Socrates whom he
portrays in debate. Yet scholars agree that in the later dialogues, Plato
merely uses the figure of Socrates as a literary mouthpiece for his own ideas.
By analogy, even if the fourth gospel's claim to eyewitness authorship were
vindicated, the issue would not be
settled whether the Johannine discourses really represent Jesus or John.
Considerations such as the differences of theology and idiom between John and
the synoptics, the heavy stylization of the Johannine
discourses, etc., could not be swept under the rug by any confirmation of
eyewitness authorship. We would still have to ask whether and to what extent
the fourth gospel represents the meditations of the evangelist himself.
We now move on to a kind of appeal
to eyewitnesses that technically does not depend on the direct eyewitness authorship
of the gospels themselves. Here apologists are content to argue that the
gospels represent the end product of a process of oral tradition. Some, like
F.F. Bruce, actually seem to accept this idea; others, like Montgomery, seem only to be
accepting this premise for the sake of argument. But in either case the
objective is to show that the formation of any such oral or communal tradition
was firmly under the control of eyewitnesses all the way, and thus did not
admit of legendary embellishment. For example, F. F. Bruce writes:
... it can have been by no means so easy as some
writers seem to think to invent words and deeds of Jesus in those early years,
when so many of his disciples were about, who could remember what had and had
not happened. 15
The
idea, of course, is that the apostles and other eyewitnesses would have seen to
it that the rank-and-file believers did not let their fancy run wild in
creating stories about Jesus. It seems to me that this argument rests on a
rather anachronistic picture of the apostles' activity. To prevent the sort of
grassroots growth of legend envisioned by form-criticism, the apostles must
have been a squad of ethnographers, ranging over Palestine, sniffing out legends
and clamping the lid on any they discover. Again the story of Sabbatai Sevi offers an
illuminating parallel to the situation envisioned here. In this case we know
that the chief apostle of the movement,
Nathan of Gaza (a contemporary of Sevi), did
repeatedly warn the faithful that the messiah would have to merit their belief
without doing miracles.16 But, as we have seen,
miracle stories gushed forth without
abatement! So in a very analogous case, the efforts of the chief apostle
could do nothing to curb the legend-mongering enthusiasm of the faithful. I
have already mentioned the deification of Simon Kimbangu
in his own lifetime and despite his own wishes.
Bruce and Montgomery go on to add a
negative version of the eyewitness argument: what about non-Christian
eyewitnesses who could have called the Christians' bluff? "Had there been
any tendency to depart from the facts in any material respect, the possible
presence of hostile witnesses in the audience would have served as a further
corrective.”17 Would it? Bruce is not
reckoning with the contagious fervor of apocalyptic movements; one hears what
one wants to hear. In the case of Sabbatai Sevi, we know that "hostile witnesses" tried to
keep things under control but to no avail. The rabbis of Constantinople announced that during Sevi's stay there "... we have not beheld a single
miracle or sign... only the noise of rumors and testimonies at second hand.”18 No one seemed to
listen.
The eyewitness argument is dubious in yet
another respect. Evidence shows that
the proximity of eyewitnesses to the events does not even guarantee the factuality of their own enthusiastic
reports. Turning again to the Sabbatian movement, we
note Scholem's description:
The transition from history to legend took
place with extraordinary rapidity in what are practically eyewitness accounts.
Already the earliest documents confuse dates and chronologies, and abound in
legendary accounts of miracles.19 One may trace the
growth of the legends in some cases by comparing different versions of what is
known to be the same event.20
We also find eyewitness attestation
of numerous wonders in the battles of the Sudanese Mahdi
in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Here, we are told, fire
licked out from the wounds of enemy soldiers to finish them off. The corpses of the unbelievers miraculously
piled up into a huge mound within an hour of the battle, untouched by human
hands.21 Are
we to believe these stories on the strength of eyewitness testimony? Let us
turn now to the related question of the tradition of the sayings of Jesus.
Wouldn't special care have been taken to preserve Jesus' authentic sayings and to exclude secondary ones? Form
critics suggest that sayings were created by the early Christians by the
prophetic inspiration of the Spirit, and
then were ascribed to Jesus. The idea is that it mattered little to them
whether the saying came from the earthly or the exalted Lord. Conservatives
resist this suggestion strongly. F.F.
Bruce is typical here:
Indeed, the evidence is that the early
Christians were careful to distinguish between sayings of Jesus and their own
inferences or judgments. Paul, for example, when discussing the vexed questions
of marriage and divorce in I Corinthians vii, is careful to make this
distinction between his own advice on the subject and the Lord's decisive
ruling: "I, not the Lord," and again, "Not I, but the Lord.”22
But
surely one text (and the same one is invariably quoted when apologists argue
this point) is not enough to indicate what the general practice was. In fact
elsewhere Bruce himself recognizes the very ambiguity stressed by the form
critics. Citing I Thessalonians 4:14-18, Bruce says
"We cannot be sure whether Paul is quoting a verbum Christi which had come down to him in the tradition... or one
which was communicated by the risen Lord through a prophet.”23 Who knows if prophetic
sayings were in fact later credited to the earthly Jesus? If they were, we do
not need to deny the inspiration or reject the sayings. But my point here is that the evidence is not so clear as to
rule out this possibility.
In this connection we should mention
a related conservative argument. Montgomery, Charles Anderson, and I. Howard
Marshall have pointed with appreciation
to the work of Swedish New Testament scholars Riesenfeld
and Gerhardsson. Their hypothesis suggests that Jesus
and his disciples must have used the
strict methods of repetition and transmission used in rabbinic tradition. The
rabbis' teaching, as Marshall summarizes the
argument, was transmitted with great fidelity, each pupil learning accurately
by heart what he heard from his teacher, and then passing it on. There was, on
this view, little scope for the wild developments and addition to the tradition
which had been envisaged by some scholars [i. e.,
form critics]. Riesenfeld argued that if the
tradition was treated in this sacrosanct manner, the explanation must be that
it could be traced back to Jesus himself....24
Let us grant for the sake of
argument that Jesus and his circle of pupils did operate this way (though many
scholars doubt that these rabbinic practices can be traced with certainty back
to Jesus' day). At any rate, this argument
does not go as far as the apologists would have their readers believe.
The work of Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson
would effectively refute those theories which hold that community-tradition was so creative and
freewheeling that "the disciples must have been translated to heaven
immediately after the resurrection.”25 According to such
critical theories, the primary transmission of Jesus-material was a popular and
essentially creative one, fabricating countless new sayings and letting the
authentic teaching disappear. This extreme view is probably something of a
stereotype or even a caricature. But at any rate it is properly refuted by Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson. These
scholars establish that there was a careful, custodial transmission of Jesus-material
by people authorized to do this. The problem is that apologists think that
these men have in effect not only refuted, but also reversed the stereotype.
They assume that there was only such
custodial transmission, with no creative folk-tradition alongside it. But the
work of Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson
certainly does not allow us to assume this. Nor does it allow us to assume that
the gospels contain only the carefully preserved, authentic traditions stemming
from Jesus' circle of disciples and not also some of the other (creative
popular) tradition.
Let us take a look at another body
of evidence. Riesenfeld and Gerhardsson
applied rabbinic methods of tradition-transmission to the early Christian
situation. But this is not the only possible analogy in the history of middle-eastern
religion. Early Muslims were concerned to hand down the hadith, or oral traditions of the
Prophet Muhammad. How did they accomplish this? R. D. Smith has this to
say:
... regarding the character of the transmitters
of the traditions, especially during that vulnerable century when they were
transmitted only by word of mouth and memory, two ancient Moslem authorities
agree that "a holy man is nowhere more inclined to lie than in the matter
of traditions. " There are many venerated Moslems who actually are known
to have succumbed to this temptation, some of them explicitly admitting that
they did so. It is important to note, moreover, that in spite of the fact that
these men were known as forgers, they were nevertheless revered as holy men
because their lies were considered to be completely unobjectionable. It was a
quasi-universal conviction that it was licit in the interest of encouraging
virtue and submission to the law, to concoct and put into circulation sayings
of the Prophet.26
In other words, by ancient middle-eastern
standards, it is not at all clear that faithful "ministers of the
word" would never dare let a “phony" saying slip in. In fact this
might be the very thing they should do! It is only a modern Western distaste for this kind of thing that
makes George E. Ladd gratuitously assume that the Spirit's guidance would have
kept the gospel tradition "pure" of
new sayings. He arbitrarily dogmatizes that the Spirit could not inspire
the attribution of new sayings to Jesus.27 Please note that I am
not contending that ministers of the Jesus-tradition necessarily did follow the
same practices as the transmitters of hadith. I mean only this: the existence of such a precedent
in this milieu means that the creation of new sayings cannot be deemed a priori
contrary to a concern for "faithfulness" in transmission.
Well then, are the gospels in fact
filled with legends, completely fictitious? I have not once addressed this
question. I do believe that the major traditional apologetics for the
historicity of the gospels are in error at virtually every point. But this
conclusion in itself says nothing about gospel accuracy. Whether this or that
item in the gospels is authentic must be settled case by case, and on the basis of appropriate historiographical criteria. The quest for history in the
gospels has been going on now for generations in mainstream New Testament
scholarship. Such critical work has revealed, critics think, a hitherto
unsuspected theological richness in the gospels. We can not only begin to see
the dynamic message of Jesus of Nazareth freed from centuries of Churchly preconceptions; we can also begin to see and
appreciate the various and distinctive theologies of the early communities who
transmitted and reshaped the material, and of the four evangelists Mark,
Matthew, Luke, and John. We are swimming in new exegetical possibilities for
which we thank God and historical criticism.
The Resurrection Accounts
Let
us turn to a specific issue and show how historical criticism changes our
understanding of a crucial area of the gospels, the resurrection accounts. I
will continue in the approach used thus far, responding to traditional
Christian apologetics from the perspective of criticism. I do this both to show
what apologists fear from criticism and
to show how their defenses against it are not
cogent. Finally I will ask if there is really anything to be afraid of.
At the outset of his widely circulated booklet, The Evidence for the Resurrection, J.N.D. Anderson considers the
view that the resurrection narratives
are legends. Anderson decides that "this
is... impossible.... because the records were too early for legendary growth.”28 We have already seen
the fatal difficulties besetting such a claim. There is no point in repeating
it all here, except to remind ourselves that the time interval between Jesus
and the gospels is certainly sufficient to allow for the growth of legends.
What suggests to
many New Testament scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary
elements? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories
which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.
Perhaps the most detailed investigations of these are still to be found in
Reimarus' Fragments and Strauss' The Life of Jesus
Critically Examined. They include the well-known
discrepancies of which and how many women visited the tomb, and at what hour.
Was it Mary Magdalene alone, or was she with others? Did she/they see the
angel(s?) before or after she(they) called Peter and
the others? Where was Jesus buried, in a tomb that conveniently happened to be
nearby, or in Joseph's tomb? Did the risen Jesus tell his disciples to go to Galilee, or to stay in
Jerusalem? The most embarrassing
divergence between the narratives revolves around the spectacular scene in
Matthew. In this version, the women behold the sight of a brilliant angel
flying down, causing an earthquake, and heaving the stone away from the empty
tomb, and all this in full view of posted guards! The problem is that the other
evangelists somehow seem to have forgotten to mention the guards and the whole
sequence of events! Seemingly, if all this had really taken place, the women
could not help but have included it in every telling of their story, and no
gospel writer could have failed to use these "details" had he known
them. In a gospel which otherwise smacks of midrashic expansion (e.g., the
addition of Peter walking on the water, or the riding of two donkeys by Jesus),
it would not be surprising if we had an unhistorical addition here.
You have probably seen attempts to
harmonize some of the discrepancies between the gospel accounts. The precarious
and contrived nature of the result
should make anyone hesitant to base much on it. But let us suppose these texts
could all be harmonized. The value of the accounts as evidence for the resurrection would still be greatly
lessened. The very admission of the need
to harmonize is an admission that the burden of proof is on the
narratives, not on those who doubt them. What harmonizing shows is that despite
appearances, the texts still be true. This is a rather
different thing than saying that the texts as they stand probably are true, that the burden of proof is on the person who
would overturn this supposedly unambiguous evidence for the resurrection.
Traditional apologists often ignore all the discrepancies, or after they
have harmonized them, they continue to pretend
the texts constitute unambiguously positive evidence.
Surely the greatest difficulty with
the character of the gospel resurrection narratives must be that a much earlier
understanding of Jesus' resurrection differs sharply from them. This is 1
Corinthians chapter 15, where the resurrection of Jesus is used to refute
Corinthian errorists who denied the future resurrection of believers. Paul was
able to appeal to his preaching of Jesus' resurrection which his readers had
accepted years before. In fact the list
of appearances there can be pushed back with reasonable probability to within a
few years of the crucifixion. (Paul's material does not describe any
appearances, however, and this will be important to keep in mind.) Though
Paul's own writing does not go back so far, it is still several years earlier
than the gospels' resurrection narratives. Any divergences between the two sets
of material (i.e., between 1 Corinthians 15 and the gospels) may prove to be
significant.
Apologists usually focus on the list
of appearances quoted by Paul from tradition in verses 6-7. But it is important
not to stop there. They way he goes on to use this material in the rest of his
argument helps us reconstruct his understanding of the resurrection. In
describing the future resurrection of believers, Paul raises the question,
"How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" (verse 35). The answer is that it will be a "spiritual
body," not a natural or corruptible body such as we have in life (verse
44). Paul says he knows this because believers will recapitulate the
resurrection of Jesus himself (verses 48-49). He had a "spiritual
body" of the kind Paul describes. Though Paul is not so
presumptuous as to try and plumb this mystery completely, there is one thing he
can say in description of this "spiritual body"--it does not have
flesh: "I tell you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the
Kingdom of
God, nor does the
perishable inherit the imperishable" (verse 50). It follows that Jesus'
body was not flesh either. In fact, Paul can say that Jesus by his resurrection
"became a... spirit" (verse 45). We may have a similar idea expressed in I Peter 3:18, "In the body
he was put to death; in the spirit he was
raised to life." The conception in the gospels is exactly the
opposite. Whereas Paul had said that
the risen Jesus was "a spirit," not "flesh," Luke reports
Jesus saying, "It is I myself! Touch me and see! No spirit has flesh and
bones as you see that I have" (Luke 24:39). To underline the point even
more, the three evangelists who record appearances of Jesus describe the
tactile reality of his flesh, even of his wounds (Luke 24:39-40; Matthew 28:9;
John 20:27). They make Jesus "flesh," not a "spirit"!29
The implication should be evident,
as in fact it has been to several
generations of New Testament scholars. Serious doubt must be cast on
the historical reliability of these
narratives; they are not only chronologically later than the 1 Corinthians 15 tradition but they
seem to be based on a later and contradictory understanding of the
resurrection. If the gospel resurrection narratives turn out not to be factual
accounts based on eyewitness reporting, what is their origin? Apologists
suppose that the only alternative is
that they formed part of some kind of hoax as suggested long ago by the hostile skeptic Reimarus.
This is evident from statements like the following: “‘Legends’ put in
circulation and recorded by the original eyewitnesses are [tantamount to]
deliberate inventions” (Anderson).30
“...
what would have motivated the disciples, in the face of their overwhelming
discouragement, to create imaginary--yet closely detailed--resurrection
accounts such as [Luke 24:36-43]?” (Montgomery)31
There are two controlling yet unfounded
assumptions at work here. The first is that if the resurrection accounts are
not factual reports, then this must mean the resurrection itself never
happened. The second is that if these accounts are not factual reports, they
still were written by the immediate disciples of Jesus, and therefore must be lies. The
apologists are only able to make these
assumptions on the basis of their mistaken conclusion that the gospels
are too early to admit of the intrusion of popular legends. Therefore they must
realize that popular legends would not involve anyone in a charge of
intentional fraud. Yet if the unbeliever can be induced to see the alternatives
as "history or hoax," the apologist's task is easier. It is a little
difficult for any intelligent person to imagine that Christianity is based on a
huge fraud.
Let us look at some data which make
it not unreasonable to see the
resurrection narratives as legends. Charles Talbert, in a recent volume What is a Gospel?, has demonstrated that in Jesus' era philosophers, kings, and
other benefactors were often glorified in terms of ancient legend. Heroes of
antiquity such as Romulus and Hercules were
rewarded for their labors by "apotheosis"--i.e., they were taken up
into heaven and divinized. Their ascent into heaven was supposedly seen by
gaping eyewitnesses (as in the case of Romulus) or was at least
evidenced by the absence of any bodily remains from the site where they were
last seen. The hero might even reappear to his mourning friends to encourage or
direct them. Not only were such legends
circulating about mythical figures of the past, but the same stories would be
applied in popular imagination to more recent or contemporary figures such as
Apollonius of Tyana, the Emperor Augustus, and the prophet Peregrinus. In fact,
so many contemporary figures were divinized that the whole practice came to be
satirized, e. g., in Seneca's The Pumpkinification of Claudius. Thus Michael Green is
simply mistaken when he reassures his readers that "nobody had ever
attributed divinity and a virgin birth, resurrection and ascension to a
historical person whom lots of people knew.”32 The application of this
kind of glorification legend to Jesus (as to other historical figures like
Augustus and Apollonius) is, please note, to be distinguished from the older,
untenable, theory that Jesus' resurrection was derived from vegetation cults
centering around mythical dying-and-rising deities like Adonis, Sandan, or Attis.
In the light of these tendencies it
is not difficult to understand the gospels' resurrection narratives as based on
legends that had grown up to glorify Jesus. To recognize the possibility of
this, one need not assume that there was no resurrection. Indeed it was
precisely because of experiences of some kind (such as those intriguingly
listed but not described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15) that anyone cared to
glorify Jesus. But the growth of legends describing appearances of Jesus in physical terms would
help explain the development between Paul's "spiritual body" version
of the resurrection and the physicalized conception
in the gospels. It should be obvious that such historical data go a long way
toward stultifying apologetical standbys like the old
"empty tomb argument." One hardly need exercise himself over whether
"either the Jewish or Roman authorities or Joseph of Arimathea removed the
body,"33 (Anderson) if the whole
story may be understood as an apotheosis legend.34 The research done by Talbert and others makes
the set of alternatives proposed by the
apologists ("hoax or history") a false one. It is considerations like
this which make works like Anderson's The Evidence for the Resurrection hopelessly out of date. In this
book, and a large number of others like it, the apologists manage to effect a
resurrection of their own--they bring back the Deists and Protestant Rationalists
of the eighteenth century as their opponents in debate. The apologists assume
that their opponents, the imagined advocates of the "wrong tomb" and
"swoon" theories, etc., agree that the gospel resurrection accounts
are substantially accurate even down to the details. Otherwise, for instance, Edwin
Yamauchi could hardly dismiss the possibility that grave-robbers removed Jesus'
body, merely by an appeal to the Johannine notation that Jesus' shroud was left
behind. 35 Yamauchi assumes that his opponents will accept the Johannine
narrative at face value as he himself does. Unfortunately, such easy targets
have long since vanished. Rationalists and deists like Paulus
and Venturini used to argue this way since, oddly,
they held to the near-inerrancy of the texts' reportage of events, yet claimed
that apparent miracles were to be explained naturalistically! That
Anderson has such people in mind
is obvious from a quote like this: "The only rationalistic interpretations
of any merit admit the sincerity of the records, but try to explain them
without recourse to the miraculous.”36 New Testament
scholarship has long since left both Anderson and Venturini
behind, since it has shown at least that the facticity
of the resurrection narratives cannot be simply taken for granted. Granted they
are not lies, they may yet be legendary.
I believe that a brief note is in order here on
the question of verisimilitude. Montgomery, Stott, Lewis, and others point to
the "vivid detail" in the narratives as proof of eyewitness
authorship. A favorite text adduced in this regard is John 20:3-8, "[an]
eyewitness account in a vivid, yet restrained, passage [which] … records the
visit of Peter and John to the tomb."37 (Anderson) "The account [John]
gives of this incident... bears unmistakable marks of first-hand
experience.”38 (Stott) I invite the
reader to open his New Testament to this text and compare it to a passage from Chariton's Chaireas and Kallirroe, a fiction novel written
probably in the first century B.C. It concerns a girl, mistakenly entombed
alive, who has been removed by grave robbers.
Chaireas was guarding and toward
dawn he approached the tomb.... When he came close, however, he found the
stones moved away and the entrance open. He looked in and was shocked, seized
by a great perplexity at what had happened. Rumor made an immediate report to
the Syracusans about the miracle. All then ran to the
tomb; no one dared to enter until Hermocrates ordered
it. One was sent in and he reported everything accurately. It seemed incredible--the
dead girl was not there.... [When Chaireas] searched
the tomb he was able to find nothing. Many came in after him, disbelieving.
Amazement seized everyone, and some said as they stood there: "The shroud
has been stripped off, this is the work of grave robbers; but where is the
body?"39
Of
course I am not suggesting that John or the other evangelists used this novel
as a source. I mean only to show that vivid descriptions of empty tombs and
abandoned grave clothes prove nothing about "eyewitness authorship"
since we find them also in an admitted work of fiction.
There is another whole group of arguments once
the question of whether the resurrection appearances might have been
hallucinations. One point here demands our attention. Clark H. Pinnock says, “It is striking that all of the factors
favorable to the hallucination hypothesis are absent from the New Testament.
The resurrection caught everyone off guard. The disciples were surprised and
disbelieving for joy (Mark 16:8; Matthew 28:17; Luke 24:36-43; John 20:19).
They needed convincing themselves. Jesus did not come into an atmosphere of
wishful thinking.” 40 Or to put it slightly
differently, C. S. Lewis maintains that: “... any theory of hallucinations
breaks down on the fact (and if it is invention it is the oddest invention that
ever entered the mind of man) that on three separate occasions this
hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Luke xxiv. 13-31; John
xx. 15, xxi. 4).”41 Pinnock
and Lewis mean to say that while hallucinatory visions are supposed to occur
only to those primed for them by sentimental or enthusiastic longing,
the disciples are pictured as being so disillusioned as to be skeptical that it
was really the risen Christ they were seeing! If the resurrection appearances
were really the result of wishful thinking, how could the disciples have been
doubtful, as the narratives depict?
Once again, these arguments are considerably
weakened by their assumption that the resurrection accounts must be
historically accurate. What if these narratives are legends? In
this case the picture changes considerably. I propose that in the
context of religious legend, the reported skepticism of the disciples is
"the oddest invention that ever entered the mind of man" (Lewis). In
fact such an "invention" would not be odd in the least. We find
several other examples of it in miracle stories glorifying Asklepios,
Apollonius of Tyana, and Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, that I believe no one would deny are legendary. In all
these stories, the skepticism of the characters functions as a literary device
to magnify the miracle worked by the hero. He was able to "pull it off"
despite the doubts of everyone! By his
mighty works the hero (Asklepios, Apollonius, or Hanina ben Dosa)
silences the skeptics.42 If
the gospels' resurrection accounts are legendary in character then "the
disbelief of the disciples" would be a perfectly natural element in the
story. Their disbelief functions to highlight the glory of the resurrection,
since it is able to overcome their skepticism. If much
critical gospel scholarship is anywhere near the mark, it becomes clear that
there was a significant evolution of, or at least diversity in, the
resurrection idea within the New Testament. Was Jesus "spirit, not
flesh," or "flesh, not spirit"? Was he slain in body and raised
in spirit, or raised in a spiritual body, or raised in a body of flesh, nail scars
and all? Or was he "exalted" or "raised"
to heaven directly from the grave, so that ascension and resurrection are one?
What all New Testament traditions agree on,
however, is that the crucified Jesus was exalted to heavenly lordship, and
"raised" at least in this strategic and fundamental sense. The
various secondary differences may be seen as different ways of picturing or
articulating this good news. And notice that the speculations and hypotheses of
New Testament critics merely concern the sifting and analysis of these ways of
presenting the resurrection message. And I am convinced that the central
affirmation can quite easily bear the scrutiny of its manifold expressions.
Here I am reminded of C. S. Lewis' wise thoughts on the various theories of the
atonement: “The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put
us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this
are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it
works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.”43 I believe this all
applies equally to the New Testament message of the resurrection--the various
expressions of the central fact are not the important thing.
It is this realization that explains
a state of affairs that is usually puzzling to conservatives--how can
"liberal" critics profess faith in the resurrection, yet sit so loose
as to the factual accuracy of the gospel accounts? To conservatives, such
criticism carries the foul odor of debunking. But this is surely not the intent
of liberal critics. Why is it perceived as such? One suspects the presence of an insecure faith: some apologists almost
give the impression that they themselves would not accept the resurrection
faith if they could not prove it to them selves. Many conservatives regard the
resurrection as the "clincher"; why believe in Christianity if you
can't prove that Jesus rose from the dead? But this is surely not Paul's conception
in 1 Corinthians 15. He says not that if we cannot prove that Christ rose, our
faith is in vain, but that if he did not rise we are in trouble. There is quite
a big difference between the two! How did Paul expect believers to achieve
certainty about the resurrection? Did he rely on arguments involving "the
evidence for the resurrection"? Would he not rather have considered such
argumentation reliance on "wise and persuasive words" instead of the
"demonstration of the Spirit's power"? Wouldn't a faith established
on such apologetical arguments "rest on man's
wisdom" instead of "on God's power"? (1 Corinthians 2:4-5). And
such a faith will naturally find threatening, even destructive, the critical
sifting of the resurrection traditions. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that
this instinctive retreat to conservatism is a cloak for a "faith"
that will not believe unless it can see the nail holes and put its hand in his
side. Seen from this perspective, a new critical openness on the part of conservative
Christians might result not only in greater scholarly honesty, but in a more
courageous faith as well. What a surprise if New Testament criticism were to
bring the challenge of faith rather than the challenge of doubt!
l. Josh McDowell, More Evidence That Demands a Verdict ([n. p.] Campus Crusade for
Christ International, 1975), p. 205.
2.
John Warwick Montgomery, History & Christianity (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter Varsity
Press, 1974), p. 37.
3.
A. H. McNeile and C. S. C. Williams, An Introduction to the Study of the New
Testament (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 54.
4. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1973), pp. 252, 265.
5.
Ibid., pp. 390, 535, 375.
6.
Ibid., p. 605. 7.
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New
York: Schocken Books, 1973), pp. 82, 99.
8.
Vittorio Lanternari, The Religions of the Oppressed, A Study of
Modern Messianic Cults (New York: The New American Library, 1965), pp. 25-26ff;
see also G. C. Oosthuizen, Post-Christianity in Africa (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1968), p. 40; see also Marie-Louise Martin, Kimbangu, An African Prophet and his Church
(Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976), p. 40.
9.
Ed Sanders, The Family (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p.
133.
10.
Montgomery, History & Christianity,
p. 32.
11.
Ibid., p. 37.
12.
Edwin M. Yamauchi, Jesus, Zoroaster,
Socrates, Buddha, Muhammed (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1974), p. 9.
13.
Wilbur Smith, Have You Considered Him?
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1972), p. 6.
14.
Yamauchi, Jesus, Zoroaster, Socrates,
Buddha, Muhammed, p. 10.
15.
F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents:
Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1972), p. 45.
16.
Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah, p.
252. By invoking this parallel, have I just negated my own argument above, that
the apostles would never have tried to curb the spread of miracle-tales? I don't
think so, because the apologists envision the apostles of Jesus safeguarding a
sort of canonical list of true miracle stories, and fending off any
"counterfeits" as if they had foreseen precisely the situation of the
modern apologists and were trying to make things easier for them. What Nathan
of Gaza did is quite parallel in effect but hardly in intent to the
hypothetical efforts of the apostles. What he was doing was to explain why
there were no miracles. Similarly, the Koran contains several rationalizations
by Muhammad as to why, though a genuine prophet, he did no miracles. So if we
were to grant that Jesus' apostles might have made similar disclaimers about
miracles attributed to Jesus, it would be even more embarrassing for the
apologists, since such efforts, we have just seen, are made when no miracles
have been performed. My principle point was merely that such efforts at denial,
in a known case, proved to be unsuccessful.
17.
Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are
They Reliable?,
p. 46.
18.
Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah, p.
612.
19.
Ibid., p. 215.
20.
Ibid., p.411.
21.
Haim Shaked, The Life of the Sudanese Mahdi
(New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1978), pp. 60-61.
22.
Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are
They Reliable?,
p. 46.
23.
F.F. Bruce, Paul and Jesus (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1974), p. 70.
24.
I. Howard Marshall, I Believe
in the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing
Company, 1977), p. 195; see also John Warwick Montgomery, History & Christianity, pp. 37-38.
25.
Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition
(London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 41.
26.
Robert D. Smith, Comparative Miracles
(St. Louis, Missouri: B. Herder Book Company, 1965), pp. 131-132.
27.
George Eldon Ladd, The New Testament and Criticism (Grand
Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1978), pp. 153, 163.
28.
J. N. D. Anderson, The Evidence for the Resurrection (Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1974), p. 9.
29.
I am quite aware of the harmonization offered here. As a matter of fact this
harmonization is taken so much for granted that conservatives do not realize
that it is a harmonization. It so controls their reading of the texts that they
never seem even to see the problem. Not noticing the "spirit" vs.
"flesh" problem, they just assume that the "spiritual body"
in 1 Corinthians 15 refers to Jesus' "ability to walk through walls"
and his inability to be recognized at first glance as allegedly reported in the
gospels. However, I am afraid this harmonization rests on too superficial a
reading of the gospel accounts. The sudden appearances and disappearances of
the risen Jesus have little necessarily to do with any changed quality of his
body. Rather, what seems to be in view is spatial teleportation. The same thing
happens elsewhere in Hellenistic religious biography, such as in Philostratus' Life of
Apollonius of Tyana, where the philosopher Apollonius suddenly vanishes
from the courtroom of the Emperor Domitian only to reappear elsewhere among his
friends. His companions are startled, but Apollonius laughingly reassures them
that despite his mode of travel, he is a flesh and blood mortal like themselves. In fact Luke himself, who makes the most of
Jesus' teleportation, gives another example of it in Acts. There Philip (who
certainly has no risen "spiritual body") is supernaturally caught up
after he baptizes the Ethiopian, reappearing near Azotus
(8:39-40).
As for Jesus' ability to go unrecognized,
Luke attributes this not to any quality of the risen Jesus, but to an
interference with the faculties of the witnesses. Luke 24:16 says, "They
were kept from recognizing him," in practically the same terms as Luke
uses elsewhere, in one of the passion predictions: "It was hidden from
them, so that they did not grasp it" (9:45). Traditionalists who
use this argument are probably subconsciously influenced most by the spurious
passage Mark 16:12: "Afterward Jesus appeared in a different form to two
of them while they were walking in the country." Even if this text were
originally part of Mark, the context indicates that for some reason Jesus'
appearance on this one occasion was different from that of the other
resurrection encounters where he was recognizable.
30.
Anderson, Evidence for the Resurrection, p. 9.
31.
John Warwick Montgomery, Where is History Going? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1972), p. 82.
32.
Michael Green (ed.), The Truth of God Incarnate (Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), p. 36.
33.
Anderson, Evidence for the Resurrection, p. 11.
34.
The inability of anyone to find a single one of his bones had convinced his
companions that Hercules had indeed been taken to
Mt. Olympus. Men assumed that Aristeaus had gone into heaven because he was no more to be
seen. Aeneas was known to have joined the gods when after a battle his body was
nowhere to be found. Romulus ascended from another
battlefield as evidenced by the fact that no one could find so much as a
fragment of his body or his clothes. One might include here the Old Testament
stories of Enoch and Elijah (both of whom were the objects of considerable
speculation in Jesus' milieu). Both were taken up to be with God, the result of
which was that no trace of either could be found. (Genesis 5:24; 2 Kings 2:16-18;
cf. Deuteronomy 34:5-6)
In more recent (i.
e., non-mythical) times, the philosopher Empedocles disappeared after an
evening meal with his friends and could not be found, and together with a voice
from heaven, this proved he must have ascended. Another philosopher, Apollonius
of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus, was said by later legend to have heeded the
summons of heavenly voices to "go upwards from earth"; his friends
searched the temple from which he had disappeared but could find no remains. Is
it surprising that Christians would eventually circulate a story wherein
mourning friends came to Jesus' tomb only to find no trace of his body and to
be told by an angel that he had been "raised"? Stories of the
physical reappearance of Jesus to comfort or command his followers would also
fit into this pattern. Ovid records this appearance of Romulus, after he had ascended
from the battlefield.
Proculus Julius was coming from
the Alba
Longa; the moon was shining,
he was not using a torch. Suddenly the hedges on the left shook and moved. He
shrank back and his hair stood on end. Beautiful and more than human and
clothed in a sacred robe, Romulus was seen, standing in
the middle of the road. He said, "Stop the (Romans) from their mourning;
do not let them violate my divinity with their tears; order the pious crowd to
bring incense and worship the new [god] Quirinius .... He gave the order and he
vanished into the upper world from before Julius' eyes. (David L. Dungan and David R. Cartlidge, Sourcebook of Texts for the Comparative
Study of the Gospels [Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1974), p. 155.
In another text strikingly reminiscent of the
gospel accounts, Philostratus tells the story of a
doubting pupil of the departed Apollonius of Tyana:
This young boy would never agree to the
immortality of the soul, "I, my friends, am completing the tenth month of
praying to Apollonius to reveal to me the nature of the soul. But he is completely dead so as never to respond to my begging, nor
will I believe he is not dead. " Such were the
things he said then, but on the fifth day after that they were busy with these
things and he suddenly fell into a deep sleep right where he had been talking
.... he, as if insane, suddenly leaped to his feet ...
and cried out, "I believe you ! " When those present asked him what
was wrong, he said "Do you not see Apollonius the sage, how he stands here
among us, listening to the argument and singing wonderful verses concerning the
soul? . . . he came to discuss with me alone
concerning the things which I would not believe." (Dungan and Cartlidge, Sourcebook of Texts, pp. 295-296.)
35.
Edwin M. Yamauchi, "Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History?" Christianity Today, March
31, 1974,
p. 16.
36.
Anderson, Evidence for the Resurrection, p. 10.
37.
Ibid., p. 19.
38.
John R. W. Stott, Basic Christianity
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1978), p. 52.
39.
Dungan and Cartlidge, Sourcebook of Texts, p. 157.
40.
Clark H. Pinnock, Set
Forth Your Case (Chicago: Moody Press, 1973), p. 97.
41.
C.S. Lewis, Miracles (New York:
Macmillan, 1974), p. 153.
42.
At the ancient healing shrine of Epidauros, there
survive numerous testimonial inscriptions, left there for advertisement
purposes. One tells of a man whose fingers were crippled. He came to the
healing temple, but "he disbelieved in the healings and he sneered at the
inscriptions. " Yet in his mercy, the healing god
Asklepios restored his hand, despite the man's
unbelief. Similarly, the one-eyed Ambrosia of Athens came to the shrine with
doubts in her mind: "as she walked around the temple of healings, she
mocked some things as incredible and impossible, that the lame and blind could
be healed at only seeing a dream." Yet Asklepios
takes pity and heals her anyway. Another suppliant who actually has an empty
eye-socket goes to the shrine for help. This time it is the bystanders who mock--surely
this is too great a task even for Asklepios.
Nonetheless the man is given a completely new eye! In Philostratus'
Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the hero
pinpoints the cause of a plague in Ephesus as a demon. We are told
that Apollonius points out an old blind beggar and directs the crowd to stone
him to death! Understandably, the crowd is skeptical! But Apollonius knows
best. He prevails, and the old man is revealed as a "devil in
disguise"; beneath the heap of stones is found no human corpse, but rather
that of a huge dog ! Another example occurs in a
legend about rabbi Hanina ben
Dosa, who lived in the first century A. D. Some
friends are on their way to his house to ask him to pray for the recovery of a
sick boy. But as they arrive, the rabbi meets them with the announcement that
the fever has left the boy! They are surprised and a bit skeptical, since they
haven't even made their request! They retort, "What? Are you a
prophet?" But Hanina is right--it turns out that
the fever left the boy "in that moment." (Dungan and Cartlidge, Sourcebook of Texts, pp. 51-52, 278-279,
61.)
43.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New
York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 57.===============
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