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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781634311595 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pitchstone Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 255 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
APOPLECTIC PROPHET
THE SKY IS FALLING!
In his breakout book, Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, Bart Ehrman sets forth and defends an understanding of the historical Jesus first catapulted into prominence by Albert Schweitzer in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus. For Ehrman as for Schweitzer, Jesus must be acknowledged to have been a failed apocalyptic seer, whipping up excitement about the imminent end of the world and predicating upon that false prophecy his demand for repentance. Both Jesus scholars showed great courage in refusing to euphemize or sugarcoat the shocking truth. Both refused to cover up or to rationalize the gross embarrassment that, despite his reputation of infallible Godhood, Jesus was a colleague of Chicken Littles ancient and modern who electrified, then disappointed, their mesmerized followers and exposed them to a fusillade of scorn and jeers from their skeptical neighbors who had not been foolish enough to heed their dour warnings.
What? You mean Jesus Christ was a first-century Harold Camping? The ostensible Son of Jehovah was as much of a washout as Jehovah's Witnesses? 'Fraid so! The historical Jesus, an "apocalyptic prophet of a new millennium" that never materialized, was, Schweitzer says, seconded by Ehrman, "an offense to [modern] religion," whether of liberal or conservative stripe. Schweitzer was by no means the very first to draw such a picture of Jesus, as he himself readily acknowledged (just as Ehrman gives due credit to Schweitzer). One of Schweitzer's predecessors, the German Deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus, mercilessly drove home the fatal implications for Christian theology: of all the claims Jesus is said to have made about the unseen world of God, the only one empirically testable was the prediction that the Millennium would dawn in his own generation. And when it came to the test, the calendar rudely debunked it. And, well, if this one proved false, what conceivable reason remains for believing anything else Jesus said?
Obviously, Jesus is on record as saying many wise things and making many stirring appeals to one's conscience, and their validity in no way depends on his false belief that the world was soon to come to a crashing halt. But that is not the point. Christianity is much more than wisdom and morality. There is such a thing as Christianity at all because of the status of Jesus as a revealer of heavenly secrets, an oracle of divine truths unobtainable by mere human reason. And chief among these revelations was the way of salvation. On such a key issue, we cannot be satisfied with hypotheses and opinions. As fundamentalists like to say, Christianity offers good news, not good views. But Jesus turns out to have had nothing more than good views to offer, or rather, bad views, since his crucial tenet of belief was rudely debunked. "The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark 1:15). Yikes!
Despite Bart Ehrman's acknowledged debt to Albert Schweitzer's work, he is by no means merely recycling the earlier scholar. Schweitzer thought, for instance, that Jesus believed himself to be the destined Son of Man, or, more strictly speaking, that he should soon become the Son of Man via a supernatural (Enoch-style) transfiguration at the conclusion of the impending Tribulation. Until then, he refrained from publicly preaching his secret identity, hence his frequent third-person references to the Son of Man. (In the same way, and I don't think he got it from reading Schweitzer, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon was careful not to refer to himself as the Lord of the Second Advent, that is, until he judged that he had completed the necessary works to justify the title.) Schweitzer pictured Jesus as trying to prepare his disciples to hunker down and endure the coming Trial. One day he sent them out, two by two, to visit village after village, warning people to repent before it was too late and dodging expected persecutors as they went. Jesus thought they would not complete their mission before the Last Trumpet rang out. But here they came, no persecution to report, and Jesus still wearing solid flesh. Then he concluded that the End Times would zero in on him by himself. John had died in mundane, ignominious circumstances, and Jesus decided he, too, must suffer such a death, taking, Atlas-like, the burden of eschatological woe on his drooping shoulders, like a rough cross beam. The Tribulation should be his alone to undergo, suffering and dying in the place of his disciples. Only then should he be transfigured by a resurrection from the dead. None of this reappears in Ehrman's Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, though he does seem to like Schweitzer's theory that what Judas betrayed to the Sanhedrin was Jesus' hitherto-secret of his messiahship.
Any way you cut it, Schweitzer's schema is speculative, and not just in the sense that all attempts at historical reconstruction are. The very ingeniousness of Schweitzer's suggestions is a measure of their speculative character. Bart will not permit himself the degree of speculativeness upon which Schweitzer's view depends. Also, Albert Schweitzer allowed himself a larger database than Ehrman does; Schweitzer did not go in for theories of Synoptic interdependence. He simply decided that Matthew and Mark were substantially accurate sources, while Luke and John were inferior. He rejected the approach of William Wrede (The Messianic Secret) because he could not brook Wrede's skepticism. Wrede anticipated the method of redaction criticism and read Mark as far from an unvarnished report of Jesus. Instead, Wrede argued, Mark's gospel was already a pretty sophisticated narrative treatise in theology. This meant that the historical Jesus would be very difficult to detect behind the text. Schweitzer called Wrede's approach "thoroughgoing skepticism," necessitating dead-end agnosticism vis-à-vis Jesus. Wouldn't it be better all around to accept Schweitzer's alternative, "thoroughgoing eschatology," the result of his reading of Mark and Matthew as basically accurate? All right, you might not be able to stomach the knowledge of what Jesus was really all about, but at least you could know. I guess you could sum up the basic difference between Bart's approach and my own this way: he opts for "consistent eschatology" and I choose "consistent skepticism." As we continue, you'll see what I mean.
Source and Sorcery
Bart Ehrman returns to the question of our surviving sources of information about Jesus in his book Did Jesus Exist? where it assumes a different sort of importance. I will deal with that in a later chapter, but for the present, let's just discuss the number and value of the gospel sources, within and without the canon of scripture. The first is, collectively, the epistles of Paul. Here Bart and I find almost no common ground because he, with the huge majority of scholars, considers at least the "lucky seven" (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) to be authentically Pauline and thus earlier than the earliest gospel, while I think the whole lot of them are late-first, early-second-century patchworks of Paulinist (Marcionite and Gnostic) and Catholicizing fragments. Thus, in my eyes, the relation between the Pauline epistles and a historical Paul is exactly analogous to that obtaining between the gospels and a historical Jesus. The documents may be as much an obscuring barrier as a door of access. But this issue, too, is moot in the present connection, as Bart admits that the epistles tell us precious little about Jesus anyway. There is no citation of Jesus' sayings even on subjects germane to his arguments. If he knew the sayings, wouldn't they have pretty quickly settled the issues he was arguing? If we had nothing but the epistles we should never suspect that Jesus was supposed to be a teacher. Nor should we guess that Jesus was believed to have been a miracle-worker. It strikes me as a bit puzzling that Bart would not take these silences in a supposedly earlier source to undermine the credibility of such representations of Jesus in the gospels. The silences of the epistles speak eloquently, don't they? But Bart is quite willing to interrogate the miracle stories of the gospels once he gets to them, as we will see.
Dr. Ehrman briefly comments on an odd note in Galatians: "Paul tells us that Jesus was born of a woman (Gal. 4:4; this, of course, is not a particularly useful datum — one wonders what the alternative may have been!)" I think the alternative was the Marcionite belief that Jesus descended from heaven in the form of an adult, with a celestial body, a form of docetism (the notion that Jesus only appeared to be a flesh-and-blood human). I think that Galatians 4:4 is an interpolation to counteract the proto-Marcionite character of the epistle, on display in Galatians 3:19–20. Otherwise, why on earth would anybody assert that Jesus had a mother? It must have been up for dispute — as it was in the second century.
Bart accepts, as do I, the Two Document Hypothesis of Synoptic relations. To wit: Matthew and Luke overlap so much of Mark because they each incorporate most of Mark's gospel, already a widely known work. Each of these second-generation evangelists omitted some material from Mark (sometimes the same stuff) and edited much else. But Matthew and Luke also overlap one another where they did not derive material from Mark. The kind of editorial changes seen in their treatment reappear in the non-Markan material they share. This naturally implies the use of a second pre-Matthean, pre-Lukan source document. Scholars call it Q, for Quelle, German for "source." There are other theories, but since Bart and I are both Q partisans, there seems to be little point in going into these alternative theories here.
What about the material in Matthew and Luke that is unique to each? Many scholars theorize that this material represents two more Q-like sources, dubbed M and L. Others regard them as the contributions (creations) of Matthew and Luke. Each batch of material is characterized by certain themes, interests, and ethical-theological tendencies. M is more interested in Judaism and Torah-observance, Luke more occupied with the poor and apostolic authority. Each uses distinctive vocabulary. These facts would fit with either option: M and L as distinct source documents or as redactional layers. I incline toward the latter, though, because it looks to me as if the same interests, vocabulary, and ideas can be spotted in the redactional changes Matthew and Luke have made in the material they got from Mark and Q. Thus M and L belong to a younger gospel stratum, after Mark and Q, not contemporary with them. "M" simply is Matthew; "L" is identical with Luke.
This question will come up again in my discussion of Bart's book Did Jesus Exist? There he argues that one solid reason for thinking there was a historical Jesus is that, if there weren't, we wouldn't have such a multitude of pre-Synoptic source documents, i.e., Q, M, and L, bridging the gap between the written gospels and the oral traditions embodied in their sources. But these supposed sources seem to me to be purely hypothetical. They represent heuristic devices for interpreting the possible interrelationships between the actual source documents we do know we have: Mark, Matthew, and Luke. To treat Q, M, and L as independent early sources seems to me to place them in the wrong frame of discourse. It is to try to ground one hypothesis upon the shaky foundation of another (mere) hypothesis.
Bart joins most scholars in accepting the verdict of David Friedrich Strauss and Albert Schweitzer that the Gospel of John is an almost purely literary work. It may be free creation, or it may have been a thorough rewrite of the Synoptics (sometimes critiquing them). For our purposes it doesn't really matter which theory is correct. Either way, it is exceedingly dubious to appeal to John for historical information about Jesus, as Bart sometimes does.
Of the once-popular Gospel of Peter, Bart has this to say.
An author living perhaps at the beginning of the second century did what others had done before him and yet others would do afterward, collecting the stories he had heard, or possibly read, and creating out of them a narrative of the words, deeds, and experiences of Jesus. The result is that this Gospel may provide some independent verification of some of the accounts found in our earlier Christian sources, the New Testament Gospels.
To me, the Gospel of Peter reads like a stringing together of bits and pieces from the four canonical gospels embellished with apocryphal, legendary elements like the friendship between Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate, the heightened anti-Semitism, and the spectacular depiction of the resurrection. But John Dominic Crossan shows to my satisfaction that there is more to it. He makes an intricate but powerful case that Peter and the canonical evangelists made use of a "Cross Gospel," a bare-bones crucifixion account consisting largely of Old Testament "testimonia," commonly used proof-texts supposedly predicting the sufferings of Jesus. "Peter," Crossan argues, fleshed out this skeleton with passages from the canonical gospels, and, later still, other scribes added apocryphal embellishment. If Crossan is correct, the only pre-gospel source underlying the Gospel of Peter is this Cross Gospel, which looks to be a collection of the Old Testament building blocks that were rewritten as gospel episodes, i.e., not historical information about Jesus.
Bart regards the Gospel of Thomas as independent of the canonical gospels. The numerous parallels to them he chalks up to independent oral tradition, a view many scholars share: "if Thomas did use the Synoptics, we would be hard-pressed to explain why he left out most of their sayings of Jesus, many of them relevant to his agenda." But I think differently. There's no way to know for certain, but I get the impression that whoever compiled Thomas wrote down what he remembered of Jesus-sayings he had heard read in church. No written copy of the gospels was available to him, so he had to rely on his imprecise recollections (as we still do today in informal conversation). In Thomas the sayings found in the gospels had returned to the oral-traditional stream. In any case, the possible independence of Thomas seems too debatable for us to rely upon that gospel as an additional source of information for the historical Jesus.
Criteria and the Christ
Where on earth did the sayings and stories in the gospels come from? And how does their possible/probable origin bear on their historical accuracy/authenticity? Bart Ehrman thinks that the gospels grew from eyewitness testimony, but that this doesn't mean that witness is accurate, since it must have been distorted along the line through oral transmission.
I suppose everyone would agree that the Gospels of the New Testament in some way or another go back to the reports of eyewitnesses. [...] For many people, who possibly haven't thought much about it, such a claim — that a story is based on an eyewitness account — provides a kind of guarantee of its accuracy. A moment's reflection, though, shows that nothing could be farther from the truth [ ... because] even stories based on eyewitness accounts are not necessarily reliable, and the same is true a hundredfold for accounts that — even if ultimately stemming from reports of eyewitnesses — have been in oral circulation after the fact.
It is striking that Bart invokes the theory of eyewitness testimony, not to defend gospel accuracy as Christian apologists like to do, but instead to argue the very opposite! "Eyewitness testimony? Uh-oh!" This is because he envisions what the process must have been like, given a realistic picture of early Christianity's spread. Apologists insist that the transmission of Jesus material must have been carefully supervised by eyewitness apostles, preventing and censoring the slightest instances of careless or inventive Christian embellishment, distortion, or (God forbid!) fabrication. By contrast, Bart begins with realistic conditions "on the ground."
The new converts tell the stories; and since the faith necessarily grows exponentially, most of the people telling the stories were not eyewitnesses and indeed had never laid eyes on an eyewitness or even on anyone else who had. These stories were then circulated year after year after year, primarily among people who had no independent knowledge of what really occurred. It takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories.
It is quite revealing that one evangelical New Testament scholar genuinely friendly to mainstream biblical criticism, George Eldon Ladd, admitted that the historical skepticism of form critics like Bultmann was perfectly justified except for God's supervision of the Jesus material's transmission. In other words, it would have taken a miracle for the sayings and stories not to become distorted and embellished during their pre-literary stage! This is of course one more case of the discredited "God of the gaps" gimmick, invoking the supernatural to get your theory out of a tight spot.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bart Ehrman Interpreted"
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Copyright © 2018 Robert M. Price.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Hopefully Not Misquoting Bart 9
1 Apoplectic Prophet 15
2 Agnostic Apologist 65
3 When I Get That Feeling I Want Textual Healing 141
4 Blessed Are the Cheese Makers 167
5 No Talk of God Then, We Galled You a Man 205
6 The Way, the Truth, and the Lie 233
About the Author 255