Category: Theology & Faith

Continuing the series on Dale Allison’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (previous posts here and here).

Despite his defense of the general picture of Jesus offered in the gospels, Allison is not out just to comfort conservatives or other traditional believers. For starters, as we’ve seen, he’s dubious that we can determine with any real confidence that any particular saying or deed goes back to Jesus. Moreover, the historical Jesus revealed by the synoptics, while he has a high enough self-conception to make liberals nervous, can hardly be said to have a Nicene Christology.

During much of Christian history, theologians dedicated a fair amount of effort to explaining away passages in the gospels that seemed to make Jesus too human (e.g., passages about Jesus “advancing in wisdom,” not knowing certain things, saying things that seemed to imply that he was inferior to his Father). While Jesus may have regarded himself as a central figure in God’s plan for ushering in the new age, he almost certainly didn’t regard himself as the Second Person of the Trinity, the pre-existent Son of God.

Going hand-in-hand with this is the unsettling likelihood that Jesus was mistaken about how the end times would unfold. Jesus did not return to usher in the Last Judgment after his death, and many modern people–including many Christians–no longer buy into the mythological apocalyptic scenario which that would seem to entail.

Allison observes that the gospel of John, with its realized eschatology, already seems to be at work “spiritualizing” the apocalyptic elements so prevalent in the synoptic Jesus. But John is projecting this understanding back onto the historical Jesus, whereas we are forced to conclude, Allison thinks, that Jesus did not possess any such de-mythologizing hermeneutic:

[Jesus] envisaged, as did many of his time and place, the advent, after suffering and persecution, of a great judgment, and after that a supernatural utopia, the kingdom of God, inhabited by the dead come back to life to enjoy a world forever rid of evil and wholly ruled by God. Further, he thought that the night was far gone, the day at hand. (p. 95)

Whether or not we see this as mythic imagery containing valuable theological insight (much as the Genesis story contains insight about creation wrapped in mythic garb), Jesus probably didn’t. Coming to terms with that entails rejecting at least certain “high” Christologies.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Allison is right about this though, there have been efforts to articulate a Christology that doesn’t depend on denying or downplaying Jesus’s humanity. So-called kenotic Christology has maintained, for a century or more, that, in becoming incarnate in Jesus, God divested Godself–in some mysterious fashion–of the divine attributes. This would presumably include omniscience. And Jesus, being fully human, would have thought using the images, categories, and concepts supplied to him by his language, culture, and religious tradition. To think that Jesus could magically access supernatural knowledge about ultimate things and–moreover–express that knowledge in literal, non-mythological or non-metaphorical terms (whatever that might mean) is to fail to take his humanity seriously.

But these Christologies also maintain that God was really present in Jesus in a unique way. It’s possible to think that God’s love, grace, and saving will were enacted in a particular human life without supposing that the life so united to the divine will was anything but human. Allison is certainly correct, I think, that much traditional Christology has been functionally Docetic, but a Christology that takes proper account of Jesus’s humanity doesn’t, for that reason, have to deny his divinity.

As we saw in the last post, Allison thinks that the traditional method of sifting the NT materials to reveal pristine, authentic bits of knowledge about Jesus is doomed to failure. More promising, he argued, is discerning the general picture of Jesus, based on recurring themes.

For example, citing numerous passages in the synoptic gospels, such as Jesus’s prohibition of divorce, his command to love enemies, his admonition not to bury the dead, his enjoining of unlimited forgiveness, and others, Allison concludes that “Jesus made uncommonly difficult demands on at least some people” (p. 63). We can confidently believe this even if the individual units can’t be historically authenticated.

What matters is not whether we can establish the authenticity of any of the relevant traditions or what the criteria of authenticity may say about them, but rather the pattern that they, in concert, create” (p. 63).

We can make similar assertions regarding other recurring patterns: Jesus was an exorcist, he spoke of God as father, he taught in parables, he came into conflict with the existing religious authorities.

More controversially though, Allison thinks that we can be fairly certain that Jesus (1) was an apocalyptic prophet with a high sense of his own role in God’s eschatological drama and (2) was perceived and remembered as a worker of miracles. Both of these conclusions fly in the face, to some extent, of liberal opinion on the historical Jesus. Scholars such as Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan have downplayed Jesus’s apocalypticism and are uncomfortable with the notion that Jesus had an exalted view of himself. And much liberal theology is uneasy with the concept of miracles, period.

Note that Allison doesn’t claim to be doing the scholarly spadework to demonstrate these claims, and he isn’t claiming these are incontestable findings. But he does pose a dilemma for those who would deny them:

If the primary sources produce false general impressions, such as that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet when he was not, or that Jesus was Israel’s redeemer when he had no such thought, then the truth of things is almost certainly beyond our reach. If the chief witnesses are too bad, if they contain only intermittently authentic items, we cannot lay them aside and tell a better story. Given how memory works, how could we ever feel at ease with a Jesus who is much different from the individual on the surface of our texts? Wrong in general, wrong in the particulars. In order for us to find Jesus, our sources must often remember at least the sorts of things he did and the source of things he said, including what he said about himself. If the repeating patterns do not catch Jesus, then how can he not forever escape us? (p. 66)

I have to say this is pretty convincing to my mind. It’s not too different from the conclusion Luke Timothy Johnson comes to in his book The Real Jesus. The gospels, Johnson argues, preserve the pattern of Jesus’s life, even if they don’t get all the historical details right.

Over the holiday I read Dale Allison Jr.’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus. Allison is a well-regarded historical Jesus scholar with a number of tomes to his name and a practicing Christian. This book is his attempt to come to terms with how his work as a historian affects his personal faith.

As part of this endeavor, Allison takes a critical look at the various “historical Jesuses” that have been paraded for our acceptance over the last several decades. These are usually reconstructions based, in part, on identifying the supposedly authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus, to the extent that they can be excavated from the overlay of ecclesiastical spin and theological reflection in the New Testament. Taken with various social-scientific theories and an improved knowledge of 1st-century Judaism, scholars have produced a diverse set of “Jesuses”: Jesus the Cynic peasant-philosopher, Jesus the egalitarian social critic, Jesus the mystic wonder-worker, Jesus the apocalyptic prophet, and so on.

Allison, however, is critical of the standard procedure for historical Jesus reconstruction. He argues that trying to isolate particular sayings and deeds as authentic rests on faulty assumptions about the way memory works. Empirical studies suggest that human memory is far better at grasping overall impressions or gestalts of events and much worse at accurately recalling specific details like, say, the precise words spoken by someone or the exact order of a series of events. This casts serious doubt, Allison contends, on the method of trying to identify the “authentic” sayings and deeds of Jesus. Furthermore, the traditional criteria used by scholars to determine the authentic material just aren’t strong enough to render a portrait of Jesus that can resist the theological agenda of the person doing the reconstructive work. It’s no surprise, Allison says, that, a century after years the liberal Protestant scholar Adolf Von Harnack, looking down the well of history, mistook his own liberal Protestant reflection for Jesus, the various historical Jesuses tend to reflect the theological and ideological positions of their proponents.

Moreover, he says, if the primary sources we have for Jesus’s life–the four gospels–are as unreliable in their understanding of who Jesus was as many of the historical Jesus scholars claim, then we are simply reduced to agnosticism. To try and reconstruct an entire personality apart from the impression that person made on other people completely misunderstands the nautre of personhood and memory. Instead, he says, we should focus on the whole rather than the parts: the general impression that Jesus made can be found in the gospels, even if we can’t say with certainty that any particular saying or deed goes back to him:

Given that we typically remember the outlines of an event or the general purport of a conversation rather than the particulars and that we extract patterns and meaning from our memories, it makes little sense to open the quest for Jesus by evaluating individual items with our criteria, in the hope that some bits preserve pristine memory. We should rather be looking for repeating patterns and contemplating the big picture. We should trust first, if we are to trust at all, what is most likely to be trustworthy. (p. 62)

And this implies that the canonical witnesses to Jesus, and the overall picture they paint, is the most reliable source we have. If we were to try and disregard their understanding of what Jesus was like in the attempt to base a reconstruction on some supposedly authentic bits and pieces, we could never produce a reliable picture:

Because the Synoptics [i.e., the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke] supply us with most of our first-century traditions, our reconstructed Jesus will inevitably be Synoptic-like, a sort of commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Nothing else, however, can carry conviction. If we insist instead on countering in significant ways the general impressions left by our early sources, the pictures we paint in their place will be like sidewalk drawings done in chalk: we may delight in making them, and others may enjoy looking at them, but they will not last very long. (p. 66)

In the following posts I’ll take a look at what kind of Jesus Allison thinks this leaves us with and what he thinks some of the implications are for theology and the life of faith.