The Marginality of the
Cross
Is it possible
that the significance of the cross in the New Testament has been
overrated? Can it be that, at least in significant portions of the New
Testament, we have become used to reading familiar texts through the
even more familiar lens of Western atonement theologies? It is hard
sometimes to remember that doctrines have grown from the seeds of
individual verses and that, by themselves, those verses have a more
modest meaning. I grant that in most of the Pauline epistles and 1 Peter
we find a great, even a central, focus on the redemption wrought through
the crucifixion death of Jesus. But I wonder if another look at the
gospels will support a similar evaluation of the cruciality of the cross
there. I suspect not. It will be a question of what significance the
cross has, for the sheer amount of space all the gospels devote to the
Passion certainly means the event was important. But are the gospels
based on a Pauline-type (or later orthodox) belief in world atonement?
Not exactly. For my contention will be that the gospels place the
significance of the cross in theological contexts largely alien to
subsequent Christian theology.
Mark: “Rim Crater of Redemption”
Theodore J. Weeden, in one of those
truly ground-breaking books in New Testament scholarship, Mark:
Traditions in Conflict,1
sets forth the case that Mark has taken over a then-familiar pattern of
Jesus-faith that cast Jesus in the role of a divine man (theios aner),
an inspired superman or demigod.2
There are many such characters in the religious literature of the time,
including Empedocles, Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, even Moses as the
Hellenistic Jews Josephus and Philo of Alexandria depict him. Connected
to such a conception of Christ would have been a charismatic,
triumphalistic “enthusiasm” such as that discerned in first-century
Corinth
by Ernst Käsemann3
and others. For them the apocalyptic glory of the Kingdom of
God
was already present in the miraculous powers at work in Jesus and in
Christians as they practiced supernatural arts of healing and prophecy.
In the fashion of later messianic movements like that of Jacob Frank in
the seventeenth century,4
such Christians may have been libertines, regarding the prohibitions of
the Torah as obsolete in an age of perfection when nothing could any
longer count as sin. Martyrdom would take such Christians by surprise,
and Gnostic Christians considered themselves fully entitled to engage in
dissimulation (or as it is called today, “heavenly deception”)5
to avoid suffering to which they viewed themselves as superior and thus
exempt in Christ.6
Weeden acknowledged that Mark’s Jesus
is still a superman, walking on water, silencing demons, feeding the
multitudes with heavenly supplies. But Weeden sees Mark as periodically
trying to bring the hot air balloon of such hero-cult faith safely down
to earth or, to change the metaphor, to recall Icarus from his
high-flying proximity to the sun before it was too late. Weeden’s Mark
took seriously the martyrdom facing Christians and feared, like the
writer to the Hebrews, that the close approach of martyrdom would
shatter superficial faith, puncture the balloon. He fears for the
fair-weather believers he builds into the interpretation of the Parable
of the Sower (or, as some call it, of the Soils, Mark 4:16-17). And so
Weeden’s Mark pauses the gospel train to glory periodically to warn the
reader that the way of discipleship to Jesus is the way of suffering,
the way of the cross.
The most important such pressing of
the brakes occurs in the Caesarea Philippi scene of Peter’s confession
(Mark 8:27-38). No sooner does Peter confess his faith in Jesus as the
Christ than Jesus tells him the Son of Man must soon be martyred, though
he will also rise from the dead. There follows the summons to the crowd
(really, to Mark’s readers, since no one on the scene could have made
the connection)7
that if you are to follow Jesus, you must take up your own cross and
follow him to your own Golgotha.
The Markan apocalypse (chapter 13)
goes into some detail outlining the persecutions Christian readers may
expect if they are faithful (verses 9-13). The storm clouds have
gathered in Mark’s day, and he is trying to prepare immature Christians
for the storm, lest they become disillusioned by it, like a child who
repudiates faith in God when his prayers for a pony go unanswered.8
To borrow a term from Reinhold Niebuhr, Weeden’s Mark was trying to
sketch a Christology of “Christian Realism.” But it is important to note
that even on Weeden’s reading, the heightened import of the cross has
nothing really to do with soteriology. Rather, the cross is a model for
dedicated discipleship in a time of martyrdom.
In a sense, Weeden comes close to
positing not a mere change of emphasis in Mark’s retelling of the gospel
tale, but to making Mark the inventor of the Passion Narrative. This is
because he argues9
in great and, to me, convincing detail that, of the New Testament
evangelists, Mark and John evidence such striking parallels with
Josephus’ account of the arrest, interrogation, flogging, and eventual
death of the Jerusalem prophet Jesus ben-Ananias (Wars of the Jews
6.5.3) that they simply must have known the story and even borrowed it
for Jesus. Mark and John must have known of previous preaching of
“Christ crucified” (such as we read in the Pauline epistles, albeit--and
this is significant--with absolutely no narrative or socio-political
context). But when it came time to tell a story, Mark and John borrowed
one that lay ready to hand, that of “another Jesus” (2 Corinthians
11:4).
The pre-Markan version of Jesus as a
divine hero would have contained some form of a trial and martyrdom, and
the presence of such plot elements in no way infringes on the nature of
the narrative as that of a triumphant superman who cannot be kept down.
Indeed, the trial and execution of Jesus would make sense (I think most
sense) as the darkness before the dawn. Just as Apollonius easily
escapes the ire of Domitian (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of
Tyana 8.8), so does Jesus finally elude the grasp of Pontius Pilate.
Whether Jesus was originally shown surviving the cross, as several data
in the gospels imply (see my Deconstructing Jesus)10
or as rising from genuine death hardly matters. Even if truly dead, he
is dead for only a day and a half. The Passion Narrative then, does not
in itself imply a focus on the saving death of Jesus Christ. It is
rather that predictable portion of a heroic saga in which the initial
glory of the hero is set aside by a temporary reversal of fortune so
that his final victory does not seem to come too cheap and easily.
It seems to me that we are in the
presence of any sort of atonement talk only at the Last Supper, Mark
14:24, “This is my blood of the [new?] covenant, which is poured out for
many” and its twin text, Mark 10:45, “For the Son of Man also came not
to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
What we have here, as Loisy pointed out, is a piece of cult liturgy, not
historical memory.11
But what is the intended scope of this sacrifice? Without reviewing the
whole history of the tradition, it is sufficient here to note that the
language of “giving one’s life as a ransom for many” is martyrdom
language familiar from Hellenistic Judaism and expresses the hope that
the sufferings of the persecuted righteous may avail in the eyes of God
to expiate the sins of those unfaithful Jews whose laxity has caused God
to send the persecution (2 Maccabees 7:38, “Through me and my brothers,
may there be an end to the wrath of the Almighty that has justly fallen
on our whole nation.” Also 4 Maccabees 6:28-29, “Be merciful to your
people, and let our punishment suffice for them. Make my blood their
purification, and take my life in exchange for theirs.”). To find here a
statement that Jesus means to die for the human race as a whole, and in
future ages, is gratuitous. The scope of the language, which is all we
have to go on, is more restricted and modest.
“Blood of the covenant” represents a
midrashic attempt to understand the death of Jesus as a sacrifice
performed to seal or renew a covenant between God and the Jewish people,
as in Exodus 24:8. Such a theology is spelled out in great detail in the
Epistle to the Hebrews. Matthew uses similar language, derived from
Mark, and the whole structure of his gospel justifies it, as we will see
in the next section. But in Mark, it falls like a bolt from the blue. It
makes no more sense in the narrative context than does the fleeing away
naked of the young man in the Garden (Mark 14:51-52). The formula seems
to have been carried along by Mark since he found it present in the bit
of liturgy known to him from his congregation’s sacraments. But he does
not bother working it into the plot or even into the teaching of Jesus
as he presents it elsewhere.
Is the cross as a saving deed pivotal
for Mark? Even important? Perhaps not. At most, to borrow Albert
Schweitzer’s metaphor for the marginality of Justification by Faith in
Pauline theology,12
the cross in Mark is at best a “rim-crater” on the literary lunar
surface.
Matthew: Sanguinary Seal
Matthew’s gospel, a wide-ranging
expansion of Mark’s, provides a theological context, if only by
suggestion, in which Mark’s eucharistic utterance makes sense. His Jesus
elaborates: “This is my blood of the [new?] covenant, which is poured
out for many for forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). We should love to
know the precise significance of the added phrase “for forgiveness of
sins.” Does it imply something deeper, a la Paul and the Epistle to the
Hebrews, about the expunging of the moral failures and flaws of the
contrite heart, in contrast to the apparently purely ritual expiation of
ritual trespasses entailed in the Mosaic sacrifice system? If the
sacrifice of the blood of Jesus is taken to inaugurate a new
covenant, as in several manuscripts of both Matthew and Mark, would this
added moral and/or psychological dimension be the relevant novelty? It
might be that the purification of Gentile sinfulness (Galatians 2:15) is
in view here. As Sam K. Williams argued in Jesus’ Death as Saving
Event,13
the death of Jesus may first have taken on sacrificial coloring in the
minds of Hellenistic Jewish Christians as a means whereby God might make
the newly converted Gentiles (reeking of ham sandwiches and shrimp
cocktails) acceptable to himself, something Jewish believers did not
need, having already grown up in the covenant with its purifying taboos
and sacrifices. Such a question must have engaged Matthew’s attention,
given his own identity as a Hellenized (trilingual) Jew committed to the
niceties of Torah, probably resident in Antioch, the hub of the Gentile
Mission.
The echo we hear in Mark/Matthew of
the Mosaic saying, “Behold the blood of the covenant which Yahve has
made with you in accordance with all these commandments” (Exodus 24:8)
makes ample sense in Matthew because of the Matthean “new Moses” theme.
As is well known, Matthew likes to depict Jesus issuing revelation atop
a mountain, whence he delivers the Sermon on the Mount (Q apparently
gave no location, since Luke has a Sermon on the Plain) and issues the
Great Commission. He is transfigured like Moses on the mountain top, a
scene borrowed from Mark, but brought into closer conformity to its
Mosaic prototype by having Jesus’ face (not just his clothing) glow like
the sun (compare Mark 9:3; Matthew 17:2; Exodus 34:29). And if Moses was
the mediator of the original Pentateuch, Matthew deems it scarcely less
fitting for Jesus to be the messenger of a new one. This is why he
divides (somewhat arbitrarily) the teachings of Jesus into five great
sections: the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7), the Mission Charge
(10), the Parables (12), the Manual of Discipline (18-19), and the
Denunciation of the Pharisees/Olivet Discourse (23-25). Given its
inconsistently topical organization, we may feel there ought to have
been a Hexateuch, dividing the last section into two, but the fact that
Matthew joined the last two topics in such a forced manner only shows
how determined he was for the thing to come out to five. It is to these
five “books” of the teaching of Jesus that we must look for the content
intended in the Great Commission: “Make disciples of all nations,
teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you” (28:19-20).
Furthermore, the wording of the Commission at this point again recalls
that of Moses’ phrase “in accordance with all these commandments”
(Exodus 24:8).
In view of these Mosaic parallels,
especially to Exodus 24:8, surely we are to understand Jesus’
eucharistic saying in Matthew as a counterpart to the Exodus prototype,
“Behold the blood of the covenant.” The parallel may go even further as
we will shortly see, but for the present let us note that the general
trend of the parallel is to appropriate Jeremiah’s theme of the
post-Exilic New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34), whence also the addition
“for forgiveness of sins” also probably comes: “for I will forgive their
iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). Thus
it is a matter of indifference, at least in Matthew, whether the
original text had Jesus speak of the covenant or of the new
covenant. The point is the same.
A final Matthean parallel to the
scene of Exodus 24:8 must claim our attention. To what, precisely, was
Moses directing the attention of the Israelites on that fateful day when
he bade them “Behold the blood of the covenant”? Back up just a little,
if you please: “Then he took the book of the covenant and read it in the
hearing of the people, and they said, ‘All that Yahve has spoken we will
do, and we will be obedient.’ So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it
on the people, and said, ‘Behold the blood of the covenant, which Yahve
has made with you in accordance with all these commandments” (Exodus
24:7-8). These words seem to possess a familiar ring, and yet what a
surprise to realize where their counterparts occur! “Once Pilate
realized he was getting nowhere, only that a riot was brewing, he took
water and washed his hands in plain view, saying, ‘I am innocent of this
man’s blood! See to it yourselves!’ And all the people said, ‘His blood
be on us and all our children!’” (Matthew 27:24-25).
On any traditional reading, Matthew
is signing the death-warrant of future generations of “Christ-killing”
Jews. They have invited divine reprisal, albeit unwittingly, as if a
sincere but mistaken person should exclaim, “And may God strike me dead
if I’m wrong!” Persecutors of Jews in the name of Jesus Christ have too
often read these words and satisfied their consciences, saying, “Well,
they asked for it!” But is this Matthew’s intent?
Admittedly, Matthew regarded the fall
of Jerusalem as judgment for the generation that rejected Jesus’ call to
share the banqueting table of his Father. Matthew has interpolated such
an unmistakable lesson (Matthew 22:6-7) into the middle of the Great
Supper parable which he had from Q (Mathew 22:2-5,8-10; Luke 14:16-24).
If he means to have the Jewish mob before Pilate represent the people as
a whole, then the reference to “all our children” at least need denote
no more than the very next generation, an adjustment required to link
the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE with the death of Jesus a generation
before.
But one dares to wonder, in light of
the parallel to Exodus 24:7-8, whether what Matthew intends here is the
embrace by the Jewish people, perhaps despite themselves, of the
covenant sacrifice of Jesus, about to transpire. We would then have an
exact parallel to John 11:47-53, with its Balaam-like prophecy of the
saving death of Jesus: “‘it is expedient for you that one man die for
the people, and that the whole nation not perish.’ Now he did not say
this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he
prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the
nation only, but that he might gather together into one the children of
God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:50-52).
If this should prove to be the real
intention of Matthew, the implications would be far-reaching indeed. But
for our purposes, the point is that the passage would complete the
parallel between Exodus 24:7-8 and various portions of Matthew, implying
strongly that the evangelist intended the death of Jesus as a saving
event in the particular sense that it inaugurated a new covenant of
faithful observance of the Torah and the commandments of Jesus, the new
Moses.
We are far here from any sort of
Paulinism, much less any traditional orthodox soteriology. One might
invoke the theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is usually
located in the Paulinist orbit: does it not similarly suppose that
Christ brought a new covenant, sealed in his blood? And is not the
result apparently the wholesale dispensing with the ritual regulations
of the Torah? Not at all. (Our task here is to expound the teaching of
the gospels, not the epistles; the relevant issue is whether Hebrews
casts any light on Matthew.) The sympathies of Hebrews would seem to lie
more in the direction of the Dead Sea Scrolls community, given (among
other things) the mention of repeated baptisms (Hebrews 10:22) and the
esoteric doctrine of Melchizedek (chapter 7). It is not evident that the
writer to the Hebrews envisioned believers as forsaking ritual
observance. All his talk about the superannuation and obsolescence of
the temple sacrifice system is better understood as a kind of theodicy
for the fall of the temple in 70 CE.14
The end of the sacrifices need not have entailed suspension of other
laws, as the Javneh deliberations of Rabbinic Judaism make perfectly
clear. But absolutely no doubt can remain about Matthew: he certainly
believed exhaustive legal observance was incumbent upon every disciple.
Matthew 5:17-19 even condemns Pauline Christians for so much as relaxing
commandments, and the least important ones at that. Remember, too, that
Matthew 23:23 congratulates the Pharisees for tithing garden herbs,
though he faults them for neglecting weightier issues (unlike the Q
original, preserved for us only in Marcion’s text, where Luke 11:42
lacks “without neglecting the others”).
Is the cross central to this plan of
salvation? Hardly. One senses that Matthew would have been quite
satisfied with a Jesus who died at a ripe old age, like his brother
Simon bar-Cleophas, like Johannon ben-Zakkai, and like Moses, at 120
years. Matthew can make a place for the cross, as inaugurating the New
Covenant, but this is just because he finds the fact of Jesus’ death
unavoidable. The Dead Sea Scrolls sect lived the life of the New
Covenant, too, but they did it without any doctrine of human sacrifice.
(Indeed, Robert Eisenman suggests15
that the Markan/Matthean “new covenant in my blood” is a pun on and
derivative from the Qumran term “new covenant of Damascus,” since the
Hebrew for “blood” is dam, while “cup” is chos. Paul and
others, initially part of the Dead Sea Scrolls community and partakers
of their communal “messianic” meals, Eisenman postulates, carried the
idea of the supper (and even the original Hebrew phraseology for it)
with them when they apostatized from the Torah-zealous movement and
preached a law-free gospel to Gentiles instead. The “Covenant of
Damascus” thus became the “covenant of the blood cup,” assimilating the
rite to the Mystery Cult sacraments with which the Gentile converts were
already familiar. Thus the connection with the death of a divine savior,
Jesus, would represent a secondary understanding of the ritual.
Luke: Mission and Omission
The Third Evangelist’s antipathy for
cross-based soteriology is well known, if not entirely understood. It is
not that he denies the reality of the crucifixion in the manner of
Christian docetists, Basilides, or the Koran (4:156-159). No, it is just
that, for Luke, the cross is important in a secondary sense. While not a
sufficient condition for salvation as it is for Paul, it is a necessary
condition. That is, while the cross is not the thing that saves
believers, it forms a necessary hurdle for him who would be Christ. This
is the thrust of the scripture survey the Unknown Christ imparts to his
Emmaus disciples on the road: “Was it not required of the Christ to
suffer these trials, and only then to enter into his splendor?” (Luke
24: 26). They had entertained the vain hope (as they came to view it)
that Jesus might be the one to “redeem” (i.e., to liberate) Israel. But,
they concluded, Jesus’ terrible fate disqualified him. Back to the
drawing board. Next time maybe Menachem the Zealot. But, no. Jesus tells
them they had it all wrong: the crucifixion was predicted. It was on the
true messiah’s agenda. Thus any candidate who shunned the cross could
never qualify! Thus the crucified Jesus deserves a second look.
It is a brilliant tour de force,
albeit a manifest case of transforming necessity into virtue. At any
rate, we are not surprised to read this much. What may surprise us is
the utter lack, here or anywhere else in Luke-Acts, of any mention of
the saving virtue of the cross. When Jesus teleports back to Jerusalem
(thoughtlessly leaving the Emmaus pair to hoof it under their own
steam), he reasons similarly with the eleven: “Scripture stipulates that
the Christ must needs suffer and, on the third day following, return
from the dead, and that [a message of] repentance and forgiveness should
be preached in [association with] his name to all nations, radiating
outward from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46-47). What is “missing” from this
scenario? Any link between the death of Jesus and the efficacy of
repentance for forgiveness. True, if Jesus had not died, repentance
would not be preached in his name. If Christ had not died, our faith
should be in vain. But there is not a word of his death enabling or
effecting our salvation.
The same tendency can be seen in the
apostolic speeches (all Luke’s work, if that even needs to be asserted
anymore). In Peter’s Pentecost sermon we learn of a startling reversal:
“this Jesus, delivered by the fixed plan and foreknowledge of God, you
crucified and killed by the hands of unwashed pagans. But God raised him
up” (Acts 2:23-24a). Whence salvation? That is another matter. It stems
from Jesus’ exaltation to heaven: “having received from the Father the
promise [of Joel] that he would dispense the Holy Spirit, he has poured
out [the signs] that you see and hear” (Acts 2:33a). “Repent and be
baptized, each one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the
forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy
Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Again, one looks in vain for any link between the
death of Jesus (itself no mistake, but a predestined milestone) and the
salvation of believers. We read only that Jesus is the name which makes
baptism effective and entitles one to the reception of the Spirit.
Peter proclaims both the death of
Jesus (with its dramatic reversal and foreordination, 3:13-15; 18-19)
and the salvation available through his name (Acts 3:16), but the one
remains unconnected with the other save as successive events in the same
story. The same situation obtains in Acts 5:30-31: Jews killed Jesus,
God raised him up, he gives repentance and forgiveness to Israel, no
connection. The import of Philip’s coaching of the Ethiopian eunuch had
naught to do with the salvation wrought by the old rugged cross; rather,
the point again is that the Christ had to suffer as (Deutero-)Isaiah had
laid down (Acts 8:34: “Sir, of whom does the prophet predicate these
things? Himself? Or someone else?”) To Cornelius Peter explains how God
reversed the seeming triumph of Jesus’ foes (Acts 10:39-40) and how
“every one who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his
name” (10:43), but he does not intimate that the death makes that
forgiveness possible. Acts 13:27-30 has Paul reiterate the secret plan
for Jesus’ death and the unwitting cooperation of Jesus’ enemies, an act
of murder that God reversed. And he goes on to say that (13:38-39)
forgiveness and freedom are to be had through him. Not through his
death, though.
The single possible exception to the
otherwise consistent trend is Acts 20:28, a reference to “the church of
God which he obtained with his own blood” or, as other manuscripts have
it, “the church of the Lord [or, “of the Lord and God”], which he
obtained with his own blood” (or, as others read, “with the blood of his
own [Son]).”16
Textual uncertainly of this kind often marks interpolation, even scribal
harmonization of different interpolations. It appears that someone has
sought to import into Luke’s text some of the “butcher shop religion”
(Harry Emerson Fosdick) that Luke sought so fastidiously to avoid.
Evangelistic tracts often diagram the
gospel, representing the sinner on one lip of a great chasm with heaven
on the far side and hell yawning in between. He is enabled to cross over
only when, in the next frame, the horizontal beam of Jesus’ cross forms
a bridge over the abyss. Such a diagram does not fit Luke’s
understanding of salvation, where the cross is not the bridge. A Lukan
tract would show a series of huge block letters spelling out the name
“Jesus” as a bridge across the ravine.
We saw that Matthew retained the two
scant Markan references to Jesus’ coming death as a ransom for many,
supplying a more elaborate theological context, that of the new covenant
and its sealing in sacrificial blood. Luke does just the opposite: he
cuts them both! Where Mark had Jesus say, “the Son of Man came not to be
served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (10:45),
Luke has, “which is the greater personage, the one who reclines at
table? Or the one who serves? Surely, it is the one who reclines, no?
And yet I conduct myself among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).
Conspicuously absent are both the Son of Man references (given the
context, a simple mark of self-abnegating humility anyway) and the
business about him dying, much less as a ransom.
Some suggest that Luke preferred a
parallel tradition (another version of the saying) to Mark’s, others
that Luke just rewrote Mark. The only difference between the two
opinions is that the former opens the possibility that Mark had added
either or both the ransom and the Son of Man phrases to a prior, simpler
tradition, represented by Luke, to which Luke had independent access.
Only it is hard to see why Mark would have changed it, since at least
the ransom notion is so comparatively unimportant for him, as we have
seen. In either case, Luke, who knew Mark, did not want to carry over
Mark’s reference to Jesus’ death as a ransom.
The same tendency is at work in
Luke’s treatment of the Last Supper, where Luke has trimmed, really
truncated, Mark’s Words of Institution. Mark had, “And as they were
eating, he took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them,
saying, ‘Take it--this is my body.’ And he took a cup, and when he had
given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said
to them, ‘This is my blood of the [new?] covenant, which is poured out
for many. Amen: I tell you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the
vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God.’” (Mark
14:22-25). Luke’s version looks rather different: “‘I have earnestly
desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you I
will not eat it [again?] until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’
And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, ‘Take this, and
divide it among yourselves; for I tell you that henceforth I shall not
drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in
the kingdom of God.’ And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he
broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body’” (Luke
22:15-19a). This must be the original text, contra the efforts of
Joachim Jeremias
17
and others who prefer those manuscripts that continue thusly: “‘which is
given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And the same with the cup
after supper, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new
covenant in my blood’” (22:19b-20). The Lukan original is abrupt enough,
but the attempt to bring it closer to Mark, Matthew, and 1 Corinthians
11:24-26 is so clumsy that the interpolator does not even mind adding a
second eucharistic cup just to fit everything in!
We see, then, that Luke has taken the
knife to Mark’s text again, aiming to remove any impression that the
bread and wine have anything to do with a redemptive sacrifice.
John: Banner Held Aloft
On our topic, as with some others,
the Gospel of John seems conflicted, pointing in two directions. It
would be no surprise if the cause were simply the evangelist’s own lack
of closure, a failure to think systematically. But, given the patterns
that seem to form, it appears more likely to me that our present text of
John is the result of a late harmonization of the recensions cherished
and redacted by two competing Johannine factions: the Gnosticizing group
condemned in 1 and 2 John and the Catholicizing group who condemned them
as false offshoots. My guess is that each had its version of the gospel,
and that later scribes, perhaps oblivious of the obsolete debate,
decided to combine readings from both versions, thinking in that way not
to risk losing any of the precious text. It seems to me that the vast
majority of Johannine salvation texts understand Jesus as the Gnostic
Revealer come to earth to break the silence of eternity, which not even
the imposter Moses was able to penetrate (John 1:17; 10:8). He gives
authority to become God’s children only to those who believe in him and
his word. Without his light, one walks forever in darkness. Without his
water, one thirsts with the thirst of Tantalus. Without his
resurrection, one remains among the hordes of living dead.
On the other hand, there are a few
passages which seem to approximate something like Pauline soteriology,
though without spelling it out. Let us briefly survey them. First, John
the Baptist speaks with the voice of the evangelist when he calls Jesus
“the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). That
imagery, though succinct, certainly seems to posit Jesus dying as an
atoning sacrifice. Raymond E. Brown posited an earlier meaning of the
phrase, though, one which had no sacrificial slant. Brown thought the
evangelist might be employing a traditional saying of John the Baptist
which prophesied the advent of a warrior messiah along the lines of the
messianic Ram of 1 Enoch 90:38. For such a one to “take away the sins of
the world” need denote no more than his conquering the reign of sin by
vanquishing the wicked.18
Brown does not think that the evangelist had this in mind, but rather
that he was reinterpreting such a traditional Johannine oracle in the
framework of Christian soteriology. I think Brown’s guess is probably
correct; still, while we are reopening the question of precisely what
sort of soteriology John’s Gospel may feature, perhaps we ought to hold
open the possibility that John the evangelist intended the meaning Brown
ascribes only to John the Baptist. The well-known “realized eschatology”
of the Fourth Gospel need not militate against this possibility, since
the evangelist would simply be understood as applying one more
traditional messianic designation, albeit in a demythologized way.
And though the echo is fainter, we
catch a Pauline note in John 3:16, that “God… gave his only-begotten
Son” so we might “have eternal life.” And yet the Son is not said to be
“delivered up” or “handed over” to death. The Father’s gift of
the Son might simply refer to his sending him as a revelation.
Twice the Johannine Jesus speaks of
“being lifted up,” presumably on the cross. “As Moses lifted up the
serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that
whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). “‘I, when
I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ He said
this to specify the mode of his death” (John 12:32-33). Interestingly,
without the narrator’s comment, we might very well understand the
“lifting up from earth” to refer to the ascension (John 6:62; 20:17), as
in a larger sense it does seem to do, as if the cross is a stairway to
heaven, the means or the beginning of the ascension (John 17:1-5, where
the impending arrest is said to mark Jesus’ return to his Father’s side
in heavenly glory). In any case, this elevation of Jesus like Moses’
apotropaic caduceus in Numbers 21:9 serves to make Jesus visible,
figuratively, to the crowds who only need believe in him to be saved.
There is nothing here of a blood sacrifice.
Thrice Jesus speaks of laying down or
giving up his life or flesh for the sake of others. “The bread which I
shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” (John 6:51). This
verse occurs in the midst of a sacramental section added by the
Ecclesiastical (or Catholicizing) Redactor, as Loisy and Bultmann
clearly saw.
19
“I lay down my life for the sheep”
(John 10:15b). Here is a reference, reminiscent of both Calvinism and
Gnosticism, whereby Jesus’ saving death avails only for his predestined
elect, no one else, though the sentence may merely be telescoping
intention with result: Jesus dies to save, and those who heed him are
saved by that death.
“This is my commandment: that you
love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this,
that he should lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12-13). And
yet Paul could think of a greater: “Why, it is rare for one to die for a
righteous man, though it is conceivable that someone might. But God
shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died
for us” (Romans 5:7-8). That is not necessarily what the Johannine Jesus
is doing. His “friends” implies they are already identified as his in
some important manner, suggesting the Gnosticism which this gospel is
otherwise so frequently redolent.
We see, then, that the first passage,
part of a Catholicizing interpolation, may be discounted, and the second
and third seem to tend in a Gnostic direction in that the focus is on
the elect, who in a sense are already saved by nature. We may be seeing
the first steps from a Gnostic soteriology of receiving the word of the
extra-cosmic Revealer, toward a more Catholic notion of the sacrifice of
the Redeemer of the cosmos. Whether this transformation is occurring in
the mind of the evangelist or in the process of textual interpolation
and harmonization is impossible to say.
Conclusion
Why do we find merely the hints and
intimations of a doctrine of salvation by the crucifixion of Jesus in
the gospels? There is nothing in them like the exposition of Paul on the
subject. Granted, the very character of the gospels as narratives is
going to limit the amount of exposition on any topic, but there remains
much teaching in their pages, and that teaching bears little resemblance
to that of the Pauline epistles. But perhaps the question of genre does
hold the key. As Helmut Koester suggested some years ago,
20
the very nature of a hero biography or hagiography implies a certain
kind of faith among those by and for whom it is written. Among such
Christians there was a great interest in Jesus as a hero to admire and
to emulate. The gospels are largely aretalogies (though Mark, followed
by Matthew, Luke, and John, decided to combine that narrative form with
the teaching materials which, circulating at first by themselves in
non-narrative collections like Q and the Gospel of Thomas, presupposed a
more disembodied faith in a sage and his words, a “talking head”). In
the epistles, by contrast, the plot and action are replaced by the flow
and development of argument. Ideas and doctrines take the place of
characters and locales. And I suggest that the conception of Jesus’
death as a saving event fits more naturally into the epistles’ world of
ideas than into the gospels’ world of events. So the death of Jesus
winds up meaning something very different in the one genre than in the
other. Salvation by the cross seems to be central to the epistles, but
marginal in the gospels.
I do not mean to say that it only
seems, in reading the gospels, that there is a lighter emphasis
being placed upon the redemption of the cross, whereas in fact the
evangelists must also have believed in something like Pauline
soteriology. No, to the contrary, we have absolutely no right to assume
that all early Christians held unanimously to the same creed. That is
the fantasy of apologetical harmonists. We have no right to ascribe any
belief to the writer of a document that is not set forth in its pages.
Granted, one might yet believe something even if one had no occasion to
write it down, but in the case of “gospels,” accounts of the Good News
of Salvation, we must assume the writers were putting down in black and
white what they thought essential to that salvific message. So if a
gospel lacks one version of soteriology, we can rightly infer that its
author did not believe in it. If the historical fact was otherwise, we
have no way of knowing it. Certainly wishful thinking is no adequate
reason. No, I mean rather to say that various versions of Christian
soteriology evolved in the course of early Christian preaching,
exhorting, and evangelism, along the lines of different media, oral and
written. And we may discern how, during that propagation, genre
considerations led to very different theologies of salvation. A “Gospel
Christian” held a different sort of faith than an “Epistle Christian”
did. Not all whose faith was nourished by admonitory epistles
necessarily read much in the way of cross-soteriology (good luck finding
it in James, Jude, or the Thessalonians!).
Beyond the question of implicit genre
trajectories, we have to account for the fact that the developed gospels
we possess in the canon are by no means shy of Christological teaching,
implicit and explicit. So had their authors wished to propagate
something like Pauline soteriology, there was nothing stopping them. Why
didn’t they do it? All we can say (though it may be enough) is that the
evangelists’ rather different depictions of the death of Jesus and its
importance show no anxiety about departing from a Pauline norm, implying
that there was no such norm to reject or modify. Luke’s treatment seems
to be as close to this as we come, since admittedly it does seem to
avoid, and not merely to be innocent of, relevant Markan materials.
Whether or not Mark intended such texts as Luke bypasses to be hints of
a cross-soteriology we cannot say, but Luke apparently took them as such
and rejected them. Even here what we are seeing is a period of
Christianity in theological flux. The Pauline option, which seems to
undergird eventual Western Catholic soteriology, is but one voice in the
early Christian canon, and it had its work cut out for it shouldering
aside Gnostic, theios aner, nomistic covenant sealing, and other
understandings of the cross. Once we know this, our own theologies, even
if we fancy ourselves still to be Biblicists in some manner, must
partake of the same freedom of interpretation. Theological
experimentation on the cross has never really ceased, as witness the
theories of Francis Turretin, Hosea Ballou, Karl Barth, Donald M.
Baillie, Charles Fillmore, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And there is
no reason that they should.
1. Theodore J. Weeden, Mark:
Traditions in Conflict (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), Chapter
II, “The Christological Conflict,” pp. 52-69.
2. Gail Anne Paterson, “The Divine
Man in Hellenistic Popular Religion.” A Ph.D. dissertation for Drew
University, 1983. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1996. Clyde Weber
Votaw, The Gospels and Contemporary Biographies in the Greco-Roman
World. Facet Books Biblical Series 27 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1970). Charles H. Talbert, What Is a Gospel? The Genre of the
Canonical Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).
3. Ernst Käsemann, New Testament
Questions of Today. Trans. W.J. Montague (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1979), Chapter V, “On the Subject of Primitive Christian
Apocalyptic,” section 2, pp. 124-127ff.
4. Gershom G. Scholem, Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism (NY: Schocken Books, 1973), Eighth
Lecture: “Sabbatianism and Mystical Heresy,” pp. 287-324. Scholem,
The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality
(NY: Schocken Books, 1971). Lecture Four: “Redemption Through Sin.”
Trans. Hillel Halkin. Pp. 78-141. Arthur Mandel, The Militant
Messiah, or The Flight from the Ghetto: The Story of Jacob Frank and the
Frankist Movement (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,1979).
5. Frederick Sontag, Sun Myung
Moon and the Unification Church (NY: Abingdon Press, 1977), pp.
184-187.
6. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic
Gospels (NY: Random House, 1979), Chapter IV, “The Passion of Christ
and Persecution of Christians,” pp. 70-101. Sami Nasib Makarem explains
the same practice of holy dissimulation among the Druze sect in The
Druze Faith (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1974), pp. 100-101.
7. Robert M. Fowler, Let the
Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), pp. 76-77.
8. Gordon W. Allport, The
Individual and his Religion (NY: Macmillan, 1950, 1974): “The child
who finds his personal advantage not immediately and satisfactorily
served by his prayers may discard his conceptions and terminate once and
for all his religious quest. Sometimes the issue comes to a head only
later in life, in conjunction with acute personal need. ‘Prayer does not
stop bullets,’ was the refrain of many [WW2] veterans; ‘they perforate
both devout and infidel.’ … A faith centered in self-advantage is bound
to break up” (p. 120).
9. Theodore J. Weeden, “Two Jesuses,”
a paper delivered to the Jesus Seminar of the Westar Institute, Fall,
2003.
10. Robert M. Price,
Deconstructing Jesus (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), pp.
221-224.
11. Alfred Loisy, The Birth of the
Christian Religion. Trans. L.P. Jacks (London: George Allen & Unwin
LTD, 1948), p.249.
12. Albert Schweitzer, The
Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Trans. William Montgomery (NY:
Seabury Press, 1968), p. 225. Montgomery renders the phrase “subsidiary
crater,” which loses Schweitzer’s typically striking visual imagery.
13. Sam K. Williams, Jesus’ Death
as Saving Event: The Background and Origin of a Concept. Harvard
Dissertations in Religion 2 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975).
14. John C. O’Neill, The Theology
of Acts in its Historical Setting (London: SPCK, 1961), pp. 83-93.
15. Robert Eisenman, “Qumran’s ‘New
Covenant in the Land of Damascus’ and the New Testament’s ‘Cup of the
New Covenant in (His) Blood’” Journal of Higher Criticism 10/1
(Spring 2003), pp. 121-136.
16. Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox
Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological
Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (NY: Oxford
University Press, 1993), pp. 87-88. Ehrman holds for “the church of God
which he obtained with the blood of his own [Son],” but I think the
original was simply, “the church of God.”
17. Joachim Jeremias, The
Eucharistic Words of Jesus. Trans. Arnold Ehrhardt (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1955), pp. 87-106.
18. Loisy, Birth of the Christian
Religion, p. 243. Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A
Commentary. Trans. G.W. Beasley-Murray, R.W.N. Hoare, and J.K.
Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), p. 219.
19. Raymond E. Brown, “John the
Baptist in the Gospel of John,” in Brown, New Testament Essays
(Garden City: Doubleday Image, 1968), pp. 179-181.
20. Helmut Koester, “GNOMAI DIAPHOROI:
The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early
Christianity,” in James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories
through Early Christianity ({Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971),
pp. 151-153.
By Robert M.
Price
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