A Gateway to the Research of the Jesus Seminar
|
Mahlon H. Smith And he said:
I am a creature
of the twentieth century, who has had the good fortune of surviving,
with most of my marbles, into the next millennium. Who I am, and what I
think, have been shaped by myriads of persons and events I happened to
encounter during the more than 28,000 days of my existence to date.
Yet, not all have had an equal influence. Some—family, friends,
teachers, great books and current crises—have made a greater impact on
my mind and life than others, in forming and transforming how I view the
world and existence in general. In retrospect, however, I would have to
say that none has played a more persistent role in the evolution of my
life than a person from a culture and era far from my own: a first
century Galilean Jew, known to his contemporaries as Yeshu bar Yosef of
Nazareth (John 1:45) but more commonly referred to in my culture simply
as Jesus.
I have no memory
of my first encounter with this Jesus. As the son of a Methodist
preacher, I heard this name and was encouraged to probe the implications
of his purported words, deeds and fate for my life as far back as I can
recall. My father had a gift for making biblical stories relevant to
contemporary life – not just for me, but for thousands whose lives he
touched in a ministry that spanned forty some years. Thus, I could
never identify with reports of the experience of Christians who claimed
to have “found Jesus” or to have been “born again,” for Jesus has always
been a persistent presence in my world – at least, the world as I came
to imagine and experience it.
Presence, as I
understand it, is not necessarily visible. Even though the operations of
my brain and my other internal organs are not visible to me as I write
this, I am confident that they are present and functioning in the world
as I now experience it. Although I cannot see with a naked eye the
molecules and atoms that constitute me and the world around me, I am
sure that they are actually here. Without their presence I would not be
what I am.
Likewise,
persons other than myself can be present to me even when they are not
immediately perceptible to my physical senses. They are present insofar
as they still impact my memory and current patterns of thinking and
acting. As a child, I was never bothered by the fact that the presence
of the person named Jesus was not immediately visible to me. For even
though my own father was physically absent from my daily life during
many of my early years, while he was serving as a naval chaplain during
World War II, I was confident that he was alive and really with
me – in spirit, at least, if not in the flesh. His pictures on our
mantle and end tables kept his face fresh in the minds of our family;
and his periodic letters kept us in touch with what he was currently –
or at least recently – thinking and doing. By analogy, Jesus was and
is present to me insofar as his words and graphic stories about him
continue to shape my fundamental values and how I relate to the world.
In this sense, persons only cease to be present to us when they cease to
influence our daily lives or when we discover that the images and
echoes in our minds do not accurately represent them.
My concern for
an accurate image of Jesus and clear understanding of his words and
deeds antedates – by more than a decade – my formal introduction more
than half a
century ago to the modern scholarly “quest of the historical Jesus.” I
trace this concern to the weekly Sunday dinner table debates over the
morning sermon between my socially liberal, preacher father and his own
more conservative, pietistic sire. The fact that these intense
father-son debates involved rigorous questioning of the sources and
logic assumed by each party taught me that any person’s claims or
statements of fact need to be carefully subjected to close critical
cross-examination before they are accepted as true. The added fact that
my father and grandfather conducted their on-going debates with due
respect and clear affection for each other also taught me to respect
those whose views are at odds with mine and to avoid ad hominem
attacks in a mutual quest for truth.
It is such
experiences that have made some pragmatic sense for me out of Jesus’
paradoxical teaching to love one’s opponents (Matt 5:43 // Luke 6:27,
35). Without an opponent’s challenge I probably would not bother to
examine my current opinions and beliefs or bring them into closer
conformity with the actual evidence. It is in this sense of a
dialectical "opponent" – a dialogue partner, that is, who persistently
provokes me to reexamine my facile presuppositions – that Jesus has been
a presence throughout my life.
My lifelong
training in dialectics – the art and science of interaction between
those with conflicting perceptions and convictions – has convinced me
that absolute truth cannot be the property of any statement,
argument or text composed by a human mind. While any formulation using
a human language may seem true to the person who composed it and
those who accept it at face value, every such statement is in fact the
product of a particular mind or group of minds and, therefore,
inevitably only an expression of the author(s) personal view of reality
at a particular point in time. Moreover, since the experience of all
humans is limited by the conditions of their historical existence, any
assertion of truth by any human is never anything more than a
declaration of what that particular person believes to be true at
that particular moment. The adequacy of such affirmations of faith is
always open to question by any whose outlook and experience differ or
whenever new discoveries challenge the adequacy of the evidence
presupposed by those formulations.
For me, these
insights not only confirm the wisdom of the American forefathers’
principle of religious tolerance, they also underlie my lifelong support
for ecumenical and interfaith dialogue. For one can only recognize the
limitations of one’s own current view of reality, when one takes
seriously the views of those whose experience makes them think
otherwise.
It is for these
reasons that, as far back as I can remember, I never considered the
Bible to be literally, simply “the Word of God.” Insofar as the
biblical books were demonstrably written long ago in archaic human
languages, by various authors who did not claim themselves
to be divine, for audiences that lived in historical circumstances quite
different from my own, I could never pretend that the text of the Bible
was the “Word of God” addressed personally to me. From my point of
view, anyone who makes such a claim is bound to confuse the different
voices and mindsets that actually formed the biblical texts and, thus,
to mistake what each passage in scripture was originally formulated to
say.
Whenever anyone
other than the audiences to whom the different authors of the various
biblical books first addressed their words reads a particular scriptural
text, s/he is, in effect, reading someone else’s mail. Failure to take
this into account has led to countless distortions and conflicts, holy
wars and holocausts, pogroms and crusades throughout Jewish and
Christian history, since those who view the Bible as the Word of God are
often prone to mistaking their own very human and selective reading of
the text for absolute truth.
But if the Bible
is recognized for what it really is – a collection of faith declarations
by humans who did not all
believe alike or exactly as I do – and is read with historical
perspective, it can be a salutary tool in promoting mutual understanding
and common cause between persons with quite diverse backgrounds and
individual agendas. Over the years I have found that there is greater
openness to honest dialog and exchange of insights across religious
divides between scholars who have been trained to study the Bible as a
historical artifact than even among confessional peers who take it upon
themselves to defend what they – individually or collectively – hold to
be the truth of “holy” scripture.
That said, I do
believe that passages from the text of any scripture – canonical or
otherwise – can have a formative or transformative influence on the
lives of persons who lived long after those who formulated those words
were dead and gone. Witness Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Martin
Luther or John Wesley. Whenever and wherever recorded human speech has
a seminal influence in shaping or altering any human life, then I am
prepared to grant that it has become the living “word of god”
(metaphorically speaking) for that particular person. It is only in
this sense that I would acknowledge words credited to Jesus – taken as a
foundational formula or pivotal principle in a particular person’s life
– have the power to become a creative “word of god.” Whether
that “god”– the driving force in such pivotal experiences – is, in fact,
the same that inspired the author of those words depends entirely on
whether the consequences remain consistent with the inherent logic of
the source.
This is equally
true of any passage, not just in the Christian church’s collection of
canonical texts, but in any scripture or great book that is held sacred
by any human anywhere, whether s/he would identify her (or his) social
formation as “Christian” or not. I come to this conclusion, not from
agnostic or secular presuppositions, but from a close reading of the
canonical biblical texts themselves. For the “God” depicted in both Old
and New Testaments is not limited to revelation through a particular
book or set of books canonized by any earthly authority.
On the contrary,
the Bible itself begins by portraying ha Adam – “the earthling”:
i.e., the human species per se, female as well as male – as in
essence a reflection of the primal Force that generated the stars
and the rest of the universe (Gen 1:27). The Hebrew prophets assumed
that this creative Power addressed its revelation to all nations; and
even that first-century Christianized Pharisee who identified himself
simply as Paul protested that the “power and nature” of this “God” was
evident for all humans to find, not through studying
sacred scripture, but through exploring the fabric of the cosmos itself
(Rom 1:19-20).
Thus, from the
perspective presupposed by the scriptural canon itself, any alleged
conflict between faith and reason, revelation and science, is a false
dichotomy. Instead, biblical texts regularly present rational arguments
to counter false beliefs and encourage clear-eyed study of the
real world to challenge superstitious traditions and hypocritical piety.
Therefore, I never thought that to take something “in faith” means to
swallow it without question. Rather, my Wesleyan heritage prepared me
to view the story of wrestling Jacob (Gen 32:22-32) as paradigmatic of
the human condition. One often has to grapple with the presence of the
Unknown to come to a clearer view of whom or what one encounters on
life’s journey. When such experiences involve ultimate questions of
existence, one’s prior convictions are not apt to emerge unscathed.
Rather, like Jacob, one may gain a more realistic image of oneself and
the forces one faces only by risking permanent dislocation of one’s
prior self-understanding.
To borrow a
metaphor from the mystics, my own night-long wrestling match with God –
more precisely, with the images of God in biblical texts – began with
passages presenting Jesus material. The fact that the New Testament
stressed Jesus’ crucifixion and death, convinced me that – whatever else
he was – he was fundamentally a mortal human, like me. I never doubted
my own inevitable mortality or naïvely thought death was divine
punishment for sin, since observation of the real world told me that all
species of living creatures were also mortal. For me, the eventual
death of any organism, myself or Jesus included, is nothing more than
evidence that no single creature or species can rival or avoid
the ultimate undying Power that generated and remains operative within
this ever-changing universe. If Jesus was really born and really died,
then he was a mortal human, like you and me, plain and simple.
The authors of
Jewish scripture were unanimous on one point: the Creator tolerates no
rivals. There is no place for a plurality of persons in Israel’s view of
the Godhead. Hebrew prophets, who presumed to speak for this God,
predicted and celebrated the demise of all earthly entities that dared
to claim or try to exercise totalitarian power, as dramatic evidence
that their God was in fact active and supreme. Therefore, if
Jesus and his first followers were in fact Jews, as New Testament
authors assert, neither he nor they would have claimed that he was God.
For, if they did, they would have been rightly regarded by Jewish
contemporaries as blasphemous pagans and their movement would have
effectively ended with Jesus’ death. Since the latter obviously did not
happen, I have long concluded that much in the development of gentile
Christian images of Jesus as a divine being has been misguided. Not
only could the historical Jesus not have uttered many of the
claims ascribed to him in the gospel of John, it is highly unlikely that
he would have approved of the general tendency of Christians to
elevate him personally to the status of sole mediator of divine
authority.
But my personal
struggle with the images of God that I inherited from orthodox Christian
tradition was far more existential than the intellectual challenge of
trying to reconcile the logical paradoxes of post-biblical Trinitarian
creeds with the claims of scripture. It was precisely because I
firmly believed those biblical voices that claimed that the Force that
ultimately directs human history supports social justice rather than
ritual worship that my faith was tested and shaken to the core.
The accounts of
Jesus’ crucifixion by other humans that I had heard since childhood
shaped my understanding of the unmerited fate of any martyr for a just
cause, such as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther
King. For study of history assured me that injustices can have
the paradoxical effect of galvanizing other advocates of the martyr’s
cause and attracting enough support to alter the eventual course of
history. I remain confident that even the horrific injustices in
Hitler’s Holocaust can have humane consequences, providing their
recollection leads enough people of all religious persuasions to
dedicate themselves to opposing any policy of genocide or ethnic
cleansing. But the paradigmatic power of such senseless events depends
entirely upon the ability of those who recall them to eliminate ethnic
prejudice from their own worldview.
While I had
little trouble reconciling the fact of human injustice towards fellow
humans with an understanding of a just God, my worldview was severely
challenged by events in my young adult years that were closer to home.
Since I, like my Pilgrim ancestors, truly believed in a divine
Providence that tends to support social underdogs and topple tyrants, I
was ill-prepared to come to terms with my own mother’s twenty-two year
painful deterioration into complete paralysis and eventual death due to
Parkinson’s disease. Here was a brilliant, articulate woman who had
devoted her whole life to helping others, who – through no fault of her
own – was slowly being reduced to total silent impotence. It was not
contemplating the inevitable death of a parent that troubled me, but
rather the helplessness I felt in having to watch her prolonged
suffering without being able to do anything to relieve it. While my
mother bore her deteriorating condition with grace and even
self-effacing humor, her family was crushed. Despite our deep-seated
faith in a just and loving God, there was no miraculous healing. Gospel
stories of Jesus’ cures became for me mocking myths. For in this case,
at least, the lack of positive results could not be blamed on either the
perversity of the patient or the weakness of her family’s faith in
Jesus’ vision of God.
The concrete
facts of this inescapable situation made post-modern analyses of the
absurdity of the human condition seem more realistic to me than any
optimistic scriptural promise of eternal life. For a time, the only
biblical texts that made any sense were the poetic core of Job and
Ecclesiastes. But neither gave much spiritual solace. Since no one in
our family could rightly be charged with hubris, we did not need such a
prolonged encounter with the existentially devastating effects of the
cosmic storm to teach us that the ways of the Almighty are often
inscrutable. While I could heartily second Qoheleth’s conclusion that
the unpredictable vicissitudes of life revealed human existence to be a
mere vapor in the cosmic Void, the realities of my mother’s condition
precluded me from heeding his advice to content myself with my work.
The only
immediate benefit that I found in such a situation was that it motivated
me to devour the works of a wider range of philosophers and theologians
than I might have otherwise. It was only after my mother died, when
almost a thousand people attended the service of thanksgiving that she
had requested instead of a funeral, that I began to put this experience
into a more positive perspective. For most – including many who had
known my mother only as an invalid – made a point of telling us that the
way in which she faced her condition had helped them deal with troubles
of their own.
While benign
consequences of human suffering and tragedy are never assured, I have
come to think that Paul’s eudemonistic pronouncement that “all
things work together for good” (Rom 8:28) is not so much of an
exaggeration after all. So long as one sees that forces inherent
in the on-going evolution of this ever-changing cosmos really tend to
generate and support the development and triumph of life – if not the
life of the individual creature, at least the lives of others – there is
no situation or experience that can ultimately destroy faith or hope. As
an intellectual historian who has spent more than half a century tracking
trajectories in the development of Christian theology, I have found that
the most persistent pious distortion of biblical texts can be traced to
a widespread gnostic mindset that views “the world and the flesh” per
se as the handiwork of “the devil” instead of the field for the
cultivation of a triumphant faith. I myself could have easily succumbed
to such a view that this world is inherently evil – or at least
absurd – if historical circumstances had not kept me grappling with the
logic inherent in the words of Jesus.
Close reading
can convince any unbiased reader that sayings ascribed to Jesus in the
gospels cannot be taken as verbatim utterances of this Galilean.
The wide range of divergent wordings of the same saying in different
gospels makes it clear that at best these are translated paraphrases of
something that the author recalled that Jesus allegedly said. The
historical question of whether such recollection was accurate cannot be
easily answered by either a leap of faith in the basic honesty and
reliability of the gospel writers or a blanket skepticism that a
priori proclaims all elements of their narrative portraits figments
of their vivid individual or collective imaginations. While either
thesis remains theoretically possible in the abstract, the accuracy of
such conclusions depends entirely on whether it is supported by the
details of the texts themselves.
Creations de
novo are extremely rare – rarer, in fact, than any creationist would
care to admit. Since most things in this cosmos are the product of the
impact of one thing upon another, the probable source of anything can be
accurately identified only by careful analysis of trace elements in its
composition. Thus, it is important to sift and compare the actual data,
before accepting or rejecting the accuracy of anyone’s ascription
of the logic of any statement to Jesus.
The gospels
themselves authorize and encourage the task of distinguishing the voice
and worldview of Jesus from those of others. While the story of Jesus’
transfiguration (Mark 9:2-8//Matt 17:1-8) may owe more to the mythic
imagination of some early Christian than to recollection of any
particular historical event, it clearly illustrates the tendency of
Jesus’ would-be disciples to confuse his voice with those of others whom
they regarded as agents and revealers of God. Though the synoptics’
portrayal of Jesus’ disciples as persistently misunderstanding his
message may be an exaggerated caricature, almost forty years of teaching
have convinced me that most students are more apt to misinterpret
their teachers than not. Selective hearing and misinterpretation are
the rule rather than the exception, particularly in oral communication.
We all tend to hear what we are prepared to hear; and when we listen to
someone else we are naturally prone to be more concerned with
reconciling what we thought we heard with our own a priori
worldview than with trying to understand the presuppositions of the
speaker. Thus, the voice at the end of the transfiguration account that
urges disciples and readers alike to listen to the voice of Jesus
alone justifies a historical hermeneutic that distinguishes the
logic of Jesus from that of other voices in either the Jewish or
Christian traditions.
Despite recent
scholarly attempts to discredit this criterion of double dissimilarity,
distinguishing the characteristics of one phenomenon from those of
another remains the fundamental human tool for developing an
accurate detailed understanding of anything in this universe. It is
only by focusing on the differences in the characteristics of
elements, or persons or things that we can tell one from another.
Concentrating on such differences is a necessary prerequisite to
separate the wheat from the chaff or finding a needle in a haystack.
Thus, if one is concerned to develop an accurate description and
understanding of Jesus as a historical individual, one must
concentrate on elements in the gospel record whose inherent logic is
distinct from and in tension with that of other voices in the biblical
tradition.
There is neither
time nor space here for me to lay out a complete inventory of items in
the gospel accounts that I think, after critical examination, can be
reasonably accepted as accurate representations of the Jesus’ thinking.
Sayings that I am convinced reliably reflect things that he actually
said are the subject of following essays in this collection. Nor is this the proper occasion to attempt a detailed portrait of Jesus
himself by drawing lines between these dots. Provisional sketches
of the historical Jesus are the focus of other essays that follow. I conclude,
rather, by summarizing some of the traits that I find in Jesus’ sayings
that have left a lasting impression on my understanding of my own
existence.
First, and most important, Jesus illustrated the realm and activity of
God by focusing his hearers’ attention on the behavior of
phenomena that they themselves could observe in the physical world
around them rather than by reporting his own personal mystical visions
of another-worldly paradise. Moreover, in comparing God’s rule to the
natural behavior of leaven (Matt 13:33//Luke 13:21f) or mustard seed
(Mark 4:30f//Matt 13:31f//Luke 13:18f),1 Jesus not only called his
hearers’ attention to phenomena that they might otherwise overlook or
disparage as unworthy of theological insight, he pointed them to an
understanding of the organic, evolving character of divine activity
within the universe. This convinces me that, were he a child of our
current era, Jesus would side with natural scientists rather than
biblical literalists or apocalypticists.
Second, Jesus’
parables and aphorisms challenged conventional family, social, and
economic values. This is not something that makes me comfortable, so I
can hardly be accused of reinventing Jesus in my own image. As an
obedient son who feels fortunate in having been blessed with
understanding and supportive parents, I am constitutionally inclined to
empathize more with the dutiful older son in the parable of the prodigal
than with the spendthrift who wasted his inheritance in excess and
debauchery.2 As a father who feels proud of his children, I find Jesus’
sayings involving parent-child relations deeply disturbing.3 And as a
child of the Great Depression, whose family often had to struggle to
survive from one day to the next, I never saw any sense in “selling all”
and depending on God to provide me with my daily bread.4 While I have
long viewed such sayings as rhetorical exaggerations, I have never been
able to dismiss them as fictions invented by either Jesus’ Jewish
followers or gentile evangelists. To me they remain dramatic warnings
against endorsing the agendas of nominally Christian champions of the
so-called moral majority or traditional family values.
Finally, genuine Jesus tradition proves that he did not think of himself
as better than other people.5 On the contrary, he identified himself
with those with least influence and power.6 He fraternized with and
defended those whom law-abiding religious contemporaries criticized and
avoided.7 Instead of posing as sole “son of God,” he encouraged others to
see themselves as offspring of the Creator and Sustainer of the
universe, who could dare to appeal to their cosmic parent directly
rather than through himself or any other religious mediator.8 And he
warned them not to imitate those who flaunted their righteousness or
authority.9
Such
observations make much in Christian religious tradition problematic for
me. If Jesus was a child of our own era, I am sure that he would be a
secular social gadfly rather than the founder of any religion. While I
firmly believe that, in the balance, the historical triumph of
Christianity over the religious alternatives in ancient cultures has
been for the good, in the process Christian triumphalism has too often
deafened self-proclaimed Christians to the voice of Jesus himself.
Given the
evidence, Jesus will always be a disturbing presence in history.
Everyone is going to have to decide for her- or himself whether to
listen closely to the logic inherent in things he most probably said or
to give the promptings of other voices priority in shaping one’s values
and views of the real world. While others are free to come to other
conclusions, I for one have found that Jesus’ view of God as the often
paradoxical Parent of all humans who helps even the lowest life-forms
flourish by providing the basic conditions for life – food, sun and rain
– for all without regard for their moral merit (Matt 5:45) is a far more
realistic understanding of the transcendent Force that actually propels
this universe than the image of God as an other-worldly Judge who rewards
the righteous and punishes the wicked. Jesus’ view of the irony of this
God who sometimes motivates even those whom we perceive as enemies –
like the Samaritan in the parable (Luke 10:30-37) -- to do good while
those who are concerned for religious purity pass by on the other side
is, in my eyes, a far more accurate paradigm for human history than that
of preachers who promise paradise for the faithful and consign all
sinners to hell. Learning to distinguish the logic of Jesus from that of
conventional voices in scripture has clarified my vision of God.
1. See my
Synoptic Gospels
Primer for detailed analysis of the various versions of these
parables and surrounding passages.
2. See
"Israel's Prodigal Son:
Reflections on Reimaging Jesus" for analysis of this parable & its
historical significance.
3. E.g., Matt
10:34-38//Luke 12:51-53, 14:26.
4. Mark 10:21//Matt
19:21//Luke 18:22.
5. Matt
11:7-11//Luke 7:24-28.
6. Mark 9:33-37//Matt
18:1-5//Luke 9:46-48.
7. Matt
11:16-19//Luke 7:31-35; Mark 2:13-17//Luke 5:27-32//Matt 9:9-13. Copyright © 2017-2023 by Mahlon H. Smith |
Website designed by
Mahlon H. Smith
|