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In this last post of our series on The Mirror or the Mask and compositional device views of the
Gospels I want to discuss the big picture about the big picture. Here’s what I
mean: Dr. Licona often mentions the big picture, the essence of the story or
being true to Jesus’ message. The idea is that it does not matter if the Gospel
authors felt free to alter things that do not change what the theorists think
of as the big picture or the essence of the story or of Jesus’ message.
Let’s talk about the big picture. What is the biggest “big
picture” event in the Gospels? Most of us as Christians, including those who
debate Christianity with skeptics, would say that it is the resurrection of
Jesus. Dr. Licona has done a great deal of work himself defending the
resurrection of Jesus, and that’s a good thing. The resurrection is a
centerpiece of his ministry. But it’s interesting to notice to what extent the
resurrection accounts in the Gospels are called into question by the alleged compositional
devices. In fact, in his 2010 book on the resurrection of Jesus he said this:
We have resisted the temptation to
employ sources of uncertain value as well as potential facts that would
certainly bolster the resurrection hypothesis (RH). In our assessment of the
relevant sources in terms of their ability to yield valuable data for our
investigation, we noted that the resurrection narratives in the canonical
Gospels may be useful. However, because
of unknowns, such as the amount of liberty the Evangelists may have taken in
their reports as well as the sharp disagreement among scholars pertaining
to their reliability, we have chosen to use them only when necessary and to
rely more heavily on earlier sources about which more is known and a greater
agreement exists within a heterogeneous majority of scholars. (The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 542,
emphasis added)
As we’ve seen, the allegations of compositional devices and
historical flexibility surrounding the resurrection accounts in his more
specific work on differences in the Gospels are consistent with this assessment
of the Gospel narratives. Repeatedly the analyses of differences emphasize this
claim--that we do not know the amount of liberty that the evangelists may have
taken, and that it is plausible that they may have taken quite a bit.
Some of the changes in question include...
--altering the time, place, and manner of Jesus’ first
appearance to a group of his disciples from Galilee to Jerusalem,
--altering the words of the angel at the tomb (in Luke) to
eliminate a reference to an appearance in Galilee and change that to a
different mention of Galilee,
--changing the entire circumstances of Jesus’ appearance to
Mary Magdalene.
Another alteration in the resurrection accounts that I have
not previously discussed: In Why Are
There Differences in the Gospels, Licona strongly implies that John
invented the action of Jesus in breathing on his disciples and saying, “Receive
the Holy Spirit” as an allusion to Pentecost.
With so many alleged changes in the resurrection accounts on
the table, we may fairly ask the literary device theorists some questions. Did
the original people who claimed to be witnesses to the resurrection even claim that Jesus ate fish with them? Did they claim to have met with him at
length and to have had lengthy conversations with him in groups? Did they claim
that they could touch him and that he invited them to do so? Did they claim to
have seen him over and over again, indoors and outdoors, in groups of different
sizes, over a period of weeks? Did they claim that the previously skeptical
Thomas saw him? Or is even the claim that they made those claims something that, given these theories, historians
cannot know?
My husband Tim and I wrote an article on the resurrection of
Jesus of Nazareth, published in 2009 in the Blackwell Companion to Natural
Theology. In that article we used as facts to be explained the disciples’ claims as represented by the accounts in the Gospels. We argued for the great
difficulty of explaining these detailed claims about their experiences, under
conditions of persecution, by any hypothesis other than the literal, physical
resurrection of Jesus. We emphasized then and have emphasized ever since that
the details of their claims are important to the strength of the case for the
resurrection.
This leads to a very serious issue, and a kind of paradox:
If we say that only “the big picture” is defensible, we may not even in the end
be able to make a strong case for “the big picture” itself. God, as the saying goes,
is in the details.
Here’s another point: Do we need more than the big picture
for our Christian life and teaching and for our churches? It’s obvious that we
do. How do these alleged compositional devices in the Gospels affect our
practical work and lives as Christians?
Suppose that you’re a pastor. When you get up on Sunday
morning to preach an expository sermon from the Gospels, do you confine
yourself only to the “essence of the story”? Of course not. Of course you also
preach on the narrative details and specifics of Jesus’ teaching. Notice here
that I’m not talking about grammatical minutiae based upon the unquestioned
assumption that we have verbatim records of Jesus’ teaching in that very
language. I’m talking, however, about specifics of the historical narrative and
specific, recognizable teachings of Jesus in real historical settings.You tell
your congregation that Jesus really said, “I thirst” and “It is finished” on
the cross, for example, and you draw out the implications of these sayings for
theology, for who Jesus was, for his sufferings, and for his victory over
death.
We should certainly not tell pastors that they shouldn’t
care. A good shepherd pastor preaching on the Gospels wants to feed his
congregation on the facts. Did the disciples squabble about who would be the
greatest in the kingdom on the night in which Jesus was betrayed? Might you
preach on that squabble and on the fact that it took place that night? Sure,
you might very well do that. Dr. Licona says in his book that it looks
plausible that Luke moved that squabble and Jesus’ rebuke from a different time
and located it in the Last Supper context.
When you are comforting the bereaved, do you quote to them,
“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believes in me though he were
dead, yet shall he live”? Of course. But according to Dr. Craig Evans, these “I
am” sayings with predicates are highly questionable as an historical matter.
This would cast significant doubt on whether Jesus actually said that.
When you are doing marital counseling, do you assume that
Jesus historically said, as in Matthew, that divorce is not allowed “except for
fornication”? According to evangelical New Testament scholars Robert Stein and
Daniel Wallace, Matthew added that exception clause. Jesus didn’t historically
utter it. That could well make a significant difference to pastoral practice.
When we meditate on the Gospels in our personal devotion, we
often use precisely the sorts of teachings that, according to the literary
devices views, might be changed or added as elaboration.
Like Dr. Licona, who mentions some reader e-mail in his
conclusion video, I receive unsolicited e-mail from people who have been helped
by my work. One of them, Charles Drennon of Memphis, gave me permission to
share some recent correspondence I had with him. He said that he was
specifically helped by The Mirror or the Mask because of its defense of the
robust historicity of Jesus’ teachings. As an example of the importance of
these in his own spiritual life, he said,
When I was in 6th grade, in Bible
class, our teacher mentioned the unpardonable sin. I became terrified. “Had I committed
it? Could I commit it?” etc. The thought of the unforgivable sin haunted me for
a long time. I'm not sure where I would be without the soul-comforting,
anxiety-abolishing words of Jesus:
John 6:44, “No man can come to me,
except the Father which hath sent me draw him…” John 6:37, “…him that
cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”
I’m sure all of us can recall similarly specific aspects
of the Gospels that have been crucial to our own spiritual lives. But if we
think that it’s quite plausible that the evangelists invented such specifics,
we would have to be honest and question whether these are historical.
It’s good to remember: The essence of Jesus’ message is made
up, built up, from the specifics. It doesn’t exist as some separate, abstract
thing. We know Jesus’ humanity in many ways other than his human cry of thirst
on the cross, and that is true. But all of them are specifics--for example, his
weeping at the grave of Lazarus, also reported in John. His manifestation of
his suffering humanity is known in part by his crying out, “I thirst,” just
as his glorification and accomplishment are known in part by, “It is
finished.”
As I have mentioned before, the details of the
Gospels are relevant to the defense of the faith. As my husband and I over the
years have defended the robust historical reliability of the Gospels we have
found numerous small details of the Gospels confirmed. I couldn’t possibly
list them all. These include, among many others:
The grass was literally green at the feeding of the five
thousand.
Jesus asked Philip specifically where they could buy bread.
The Temple building had been begun 46 years before Jesus
cleansed the Temple as told in John.
John the Baptist actually called himself the voice of one
crying in the wilderness and actually heard the voice from heaven at Jesus’
baptism.
Archelaus, whom Joseph was afraid to settle under when he
returned from Egypt with the baby Jesus, really had manifested his crazy side
just about that time.
The name “Simon” was such a common name in the time of the
Gospels that it required a second designation with it to make it clear which
“Simon” was in view.
And many, many more. These present a big picture of
evangelists who were not fabricating details and for whom something more than
just “the big picture” or “the essence of the story” was important.
It would be entirely fair to ask scholars who have endorsed
this approach whether they propose to offer help to pastors, other ministers,
and Christian laymen in order to teach them to base their preaching, devotional
life, and counseling only upon the “big picture” aspects of the Gospels’
content that are really well-authenticated rather than upon the whole welter of
mere details that these methods cast into doubt. Tom Gilson, editor of The
Stream and a mutual friend of Dr. Licona’s and mine, has publicly asked exactly
this question--How are these scholars going to help pastors to know when they
are preaching on aspects of the Gospels that are genuinely historical? Thus
far, no such help has been forthcoming. From my perspective, this is a good
thing. For it gives the church an opportunity to pause and reckon with the true
scope of the shift that is being proposed and to investigate carefully whether
it is actually justified.
I have argued carefully and systematically that it is not. But
I don’t ask you just to take my word for that. And I don’t ask you to reject
the literary device views because of theological presuppositions but on the
basis of evidence.
A principle that Dr. Licona often articulates is this: We
need to make our view of Scripture conform to what we find in Scripture rather
than making Scripture conform to our preconceived ideas. Who could disagree
with that? But we need to realize that that has absolutely no force to tell us what we actually find Scripture to be. It doesn’t tell us whether the
reportage model or the literary device model is true. What if we find that the
Gospels look like reliable reportage? Then we want to make our ideas conform to
that! It doesn’t even tell us who is more likely to force Scripture to
conform to his preconceived ideas. I would say that the literary device scholar
is at least as likely to do so as someone who takes a more conservative view.
So as far as it goes, that principle is unhelpful to the argument, and if we’re
not careful, we could get the impression, just hearing such a solemn
declaration, that the literary device theorists are humble and objective, accepting
Scripture as it is, while those who reject these theories must be the ones
putting Scripture into a box of their own making. That is by no means the case.
From unjustified, highly specific judgements about the
Gospels’ literary genre to the radical misunderstandings of Greek exercise
books, from wooden readings of passages in Plutarch to at least equally
misguided refusals to combine passages in the Gospels, the arguments of the
compositional device theorists fail at every point along the line.
Throughout all of the arguments, the Gospels come shining
through with the luster of real history upon them in incident after incident.
We’ve heard a lot in Dr. Licona’s recent series about “the
majority of scholars.” I would contest some of those generalizations about what
“the majority of scholars” think, especially when it’s supposedly “the majority
of evangelical scholars.” And I would say that even when we are talking about
living scholars. But another point: When we’re talking about the majority of
scholars, we too often forget what G. K. Chesterton called the democracy of the
dead. We shouldn’t assume that just because some scholars happen to be alive at
the same time that we are, they are the ones who are right.
If I were to choose a fantasy baseball team of defenders of
the faith, living and dead, one person I would want on my team would be J. B.
Lightfoot, the Bishop of Durham in the late 19th century. I would without
hesitation put Lightfoot up against a
whole flock of modern biblical scholars, put together. Here is what Lightfoot
said about the Gospel of John,
The Fourth Gospel...is replete with
historical and geographical details; it is interpenetrated with the Judaic
spirit of the times; its delineations of character are remarkably subtle; it is
perfectly natural in the progress of the events; the allusions to incidents or
localities or modes of thought are introduced in an artless and unconscious
way, being closely interwoven with the texture of the narrative; while
throughout, the author has exercised a silence and a self-restraint about his
assumed personality which is without parallel in ancient forgeries... (J. B.
Lightfoot)
Yet John’s Gospel is the one that comes in for some of the
most intense doubt, based on the claim that he is somehow even less historical than Matthew, Mark, and Luke, though they also made historical changes.
Here we should also consider the words of the late Johannine
scholar Leon Morris, who just died in 2006. Concerning John’s Gospel, he
writes:
It seems to me that John is a
greater figure than has been reckoned with. He is so supremely master of the
situation and the tradition that he is able to bring out his essential point
without distorting the facts. Many recent critics have found it impossible to
believe this. They have reasoned that he must have been ready to distort facts,
for his concern was with the interpretation of the facts, not with historical
accuracy. This a priori approach
should be firmly rejected. John tells us that he is bearing witness and his
testimony should be taken with the utmost seriousness. (Leon Morris)
I could do no better than to conclude with these remarks
from Morris on the subject of history, Christianity, and the Gospels:
This is of the essence of the
matter as the New Testament writers understood the faith. It was a bold, and
for most of the ancient world a novel doctrine that God had willed to reveal
Himself in history. In fact so bold a conception is this that sometimes men
still shrink from its implications. It is difficult to resist the conclusion
that some scholars have feared to trust God to history. The world of history is
such an uncertain world...It is safer to rescue God from the whole world of
history....
However,
God has...preferred to reveal Himself in the historical, and it is there that
we must find Him. (Leon Morris)
Thanks for reading these posts. I urge you to think carefully about these issues.
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