Going Chreia-zy
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
I've written at length about the problems with "literary device" theories concerning the gospels, theories stating that the gospel authors had a broad license to alter and expand Jesus' words, change facts surrounding incidents, and even invent whole incidents and sayings.
I have not previously addressed one strand of this type of theory that uses the Greek term chreia, a term that simply refers to an anecdote about an important person, to justify such a broad license on the part of the evangelists.
One proponent of this use of the term chreia is Canadian New Testament scholar Craig A. Evans. On April 10, Dr. Evans and I had a debate/dialogue on the British Unbelievable radio show on the historical reliability of John's Gospel and its portrait of Jesus. This debate is set to air on May 19, and this post will contribute some background information. I will not here be citing anything specific that Dr. Evans said in our discussion on Unbelievable but only what he has already said elsewhere about the term chreia, which he was also discussing in our debate.
Evans uses his interpretation of the term chreia to push the idea of a license to invent in the gospels, though when he puts forward this theory he (rather frustratingly) does not give in the immediate context specific examples in the Gospels where he believes this was done, nor does he indicate what limits he would place on such a license. Here is a typical statement from Evans:
One of the first to comment on the Gospels was Papias of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Writing near the beginning of the second century, Papias says the author of the Gospel of Mark compiled chreiai (“useful, instructive anecdotes”) and wasn’t concerned with exact sequence and chronological order. The scholars and lecturers of this period of time instructed their pupils in the chreiai of the great thinkers, teaching them how to edit, contract, or expand the chreiai, and to give them new application, in order to make clear to new audiences the true meaning and significance of the wisdom of the great thinkers. Creative adaptation was expected. Remaining true to the original idea was essential.This is what the writers of the New Testament Gospels did. Indeed, this is how Jesus taught his disciples when he said, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matt. 13:52). That is, the disciples of Jesus are to pull out new lessons and applications, as well as the old, from the treasure of teaching Jesus has given them. Why should anyone be surprised that the disciples and the evangelists who followed them did what Jesus instructed them to do? Each evangelist presented the life and teaching of Jesus in his own fashion, using creative ways that made it understandable and relevant to different cultures and settings. The numerous differences and discrepancies we see in the Gospels are the result of the writers doing what Jesus taught — and in many ways reflect the standards of history writing current in late antiquity.
This broad statement has unfortunately been accepted uncritically by some evangelical Christians, who have immediately accepted Evans's false implication that anyone who is dubious about a broad license to invent, or about whether that is the source of alleged or apparent discrepancies in the Gospels, is a "fundamentalist" and must think that the Gospels contain only verbatim recordings of Jesus' words like those of a tape recorder.
Ironically, Evans in the short post in which that quotation appears is accusing Bart Ehrman of presenting a false dilemma to Christians, but Evans presents a false dilemma of his own: Either agree with him that the gospel authors had a broad license and even commission to put words in Jesus' mouth or, if disagreeing in any respect with that thesis "from the right," stand accused of "fundamentalism."
Before I move to some examples in which such a license is applied to the Gospels, I want to challenge at bottom the attempt to support such a claim by the use of the Greek word chreia.
Evans's use of Papias to support a literary license to invent in the gospels is quite incorrect--a severe overreading based upon taking a single word out of context.
Here is the relevant quotation from Papias. Evans, by the way, uses a somewhat non-standard translation according to which Mark is the one who wrote using chreiai, whereas the more common translation says that Peter gave his reminiscences in the form of chreiai. This is not the most important way in which Evans's interpretation is wrong, but it is one biasing factor in Evans's use of Papias, so here I give a translation that uses the more common assumption about who was using chreiai. This translation is given by Richard Bauckham:
The Elder used to say: Mark, in his capacity as Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory--though not in an ordered form--of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he [Mark] neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, [he heard and accompanied] Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of chreiai, but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia of the Lord. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he [Peter?] related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything. (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p. 203)
The idea that this passage, with its repeated emphasis upon accuracy and truthfulness, indicates that Papias, as one of those ancient folks, thought it perfectly fine for Mark (or Peter, for that matter) to put words into the mouth of Jesus or to alter fact is highly dubious on its face. To try to draw such a conclusion, in tension with the entire thrust of the passage, in light of the single word chreiai, is programmatic reading with a vengeance.
We have other statements by Papias himself that drive home further the distance between Papias and the use that Evans wants to make of him:
For unlike most people I did not enjoy those who have a great deal to say, but those who teach the truth. Nor did I enjoy those who recall someone else's commandments, but those who remember the commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the truth itself. And if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders should come my way, I inquired about the words of the elders-- [that is] what [according to the elders] Andrew or Peter said, or Philip or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord's disciples....For I did not think that information from books would provide me as much as information from a living and surviving voice.(emphasis added) Bauckham, pp. 15-16
Papias's emphasis upon Jesus' own commandments rather than someone else's interpretation of them is strong here, as is his emphasis upon information about Jesus obtained from "the living voice" rather than merely knowing some sort of growing church tradition or understanding of the meaning of what Jesus taught. (See also here the quotation from Julius Africanus with its emphasis upon literal truth.) Why would Papias have cared so much to get as close to testimony about what Jesus himself had said as possible if later interpretations of his statements, put into his mouth, were considered just as good?
And now to the term chreia itself. Though Evans will write and speak as though the word literally carries with it the idea of being permitted and encouraged to change history and to put words into the mouth of a master teacher, this is a large exaggeration of what the historical evidence actually shows. The word itself merely means an instructive, short anecdote or saying, attributed to an important person. That's it.
And that is even if one assumes that that term in Papias is to be transliterated and treated as a rhetorical term, rather than (as older scholars did) saying that Peter taught "according to needs"--that is, as the need arose for his teachings. The term chreiai can just mean "needs," or "uses," which adds another layer of uncertainty to the whole matter. It is true that it is far more widely accepted now to treat Papias as referring to chreiai or anecdotes rather than "needs," but the point of additional uncertainty deserves to be noted.
That Evans and others are over-reading the term chreia as used in the quotation from Papias is not merely my idea. Here is Richard Bauckham on the subject. Bauckham does translate the term as chreiai (meaning anecdotes) in the Papias quotation but does not believe that it has any major ramifications for being allowed or encouraged to engage in rhetorical exercises:
The English term "anecdote" seems the best equivalent, for an anecdote is also a brief story about a particular person, focusing on a particular action or saying or both....Greek education taught people how to use such anecdotes in argumentative rhetoric intended to persuade. Theon prescribed eight exercises for students to do with chreiai, including memorizing chreiai, grammatical exercises, commenting on, confirming and refuting, all with a view to the use of chreiai in speeches aimed at persuading people. In order to relate the deeds and sayings of Jesus in the form of short anecdotes Peter certainly did not need to have had such rhetorical training. We simply do not know how Peter would have used such anecdotes in his preaching, if Papias is correct in implying that he did. In spite of the assumption of the form critics that Gospel traditions functioned in a homiletic context in which their message was applied, Peter may in fact, for all we know, simply have rehearsed the traditions. Certainly, within the Gospel of Mark, the context of the traditions is a narrative, not a speech. The Gospel doubtless aims to persuade, but only in the way that a narrative can do, quite different from the way a speech can. In my view it is therefore a mistake to apply the exercises with chreiai prescribed by the grammarians to analysis of chreiai in the Gospels. There is no reason why Peter could not have given many of the chreiai in Mark their basic forms in his oral rehearsing of the words and deeds of Jesus. (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, pp. 216-217)
So Bauckham is rejecting the application of these pedagogical rhetorical methods to analyzing the gospels and is urging that the term chreia (plural chreiai) in Papias's quotation simply be understood as referring to short anecdotes, not as indicating rhetorical manipulation or expansion as dictated by exercise books.
Here (beginning at minute 24:27) is Evans talking about his ideas of historical license as indicated by pedagogy:
We do have at hand a lot of important information about pedagogy...But more importantly listen up, about the way that a master teacher’s teaching was appropriated by his disciples....The teaching was memorized, but then it was understood and could be adapted and applied. It could be expanded, it could be contracted, the wording could be altered, it could be made to fit new circumstances. It could be linked in chains together and create a discourse. This was not just allowed, it was expected, that’s the way it was taught.
It is true that rhetoric books, such as the Progymnasmata of Theon mentioned by Evans, existed in which schoolboys were taught to make up rhetorical speeches based upon a short story or saying. But evidence is entirely lacking that such rhetorical exercises either constituted a license to invent or change facts in putatively historical works or that rhetorical expansions of fact are characteristic of the gospels.
Even Evans's attempt to connect rhetorical exercises (assuming that that is what he means here by "pedagogy") with the teachings that a disciple gained directly from his own master teacher is dubious, since the interesting or uplifting stories used by 1st-century Greek schoolboys for writing and rhetorical exercises would have been not about "master teachers" whom they heard and knew themselves but rather about people who lived long before.
Beyond this, there is a crucial distinction to be made between a student's showing that he understands his teacher's words by expanding upon them in his own words and applying them to new situations and a student's doing so by putting his own words into his teacher's mouth. Evans has not shown that the latter was encouraged in their disciples by Jesus or (for that matter) other Hellenistic or Jewish teachers of the time.
Indeed, there is plenty of reason to believe that the disciples and evangelists did not consider themselves licensed to do anything of the kind. Consider, for example, the various narrative asides in the gospels where an interpretation is given of what Jesus had said. Three of these in John occur at John 2:18-21 (where the narrator explains that Jesus was speaking of his body when he predicted that he would raise up the Temple after three days), 7:37-39 (where the narrator explains that when Jesus promised living water springing up from within those who came to him, he was referring to the Holy Spirit), and 13:10-11 (where the narrator explains that when Jesus said, "You are clean, but not all," he was referring to Judas Iscariot).
An example in Mark occurs, very interestingly, precisely when it comes to applying Jesus' words to a new situation (the question of kosher diet and Gentile Christians). In Mark 7:19, Jesus says that what comes out of man defiles him rather than what goes into him. The narrator pauses to add, "Thus he declared all foods clean." What the narrator does not do is to put the words, "Thus, all foods are clean" or something similar into the mouth of Jesus, as Evans's notion of "what they were encouraged to do" would lead us to expect.
D.A. Carson's words on John here are relevant to the gospels more generally:
More important, there is quite substantial evidence not only that Jesus spoke cryptically at times, and that his cryptic utterances were not properly understood until after his resurrection/exaltation and his sending of the Paraclete; but also that John faithfully preserved the distinction between what Jesus said that was not understood, and the understanding that finally came to the disciples much later (e.g. John 2:18-22; 7:37-39; 12:16; 16:12f., 25; 21:18- 23; compare Luke 24:6-8, 44-49). It is not at all obvious that John is confused on this matter. One might even argue plausibly that anyone who preserves this distinction so faithfully and explicitly is trying to gain credence for what he is saying; and if he errs in this matter it will be because of an unconscious slip, not by design. D.A. Carson Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (pp. 121-122)
To summarize, Evans's use of the concept and term chreiai is highly implausible because...
1) The term itself simply doesn't carry the weight he wishes to attribute to it. It is not a technical term that automatically means "a license to invent history and put words in the mouth of a teacher." It simply refers to a short anecdote.
2) The rhetorical exercises used in Hellenistic education need not have been recommendations for inventing fictional events or words in an otherwise apparently historical context.
3) Rhetorical exercises using stories of people living long ago are not the same thing as the application of the words of a teacher one has followed.
4) Applying and showing understanding of someone's teaching, and even engaging in one's own authoritative teaching as his follower, do not require putting words in that teacher's mouth.
5) The Gospels show in multiple places a careful distinction between what Jesus actually said and what his disciples understood later.
6) Papias, who is being cited to the contrary, emphasizes accuracy and seems to have been concerned with what Jesus himself said directly, not treating others' teachings as equally authoritative. Therefore he would probably have taken a dim view of a gospel author's pretending that Jesus said what was really someone else's elaboration or application of his teaching.
I should address Evans's extremely strange use of Matthew 13:52.
And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
Evans presents this verse with an air of definiteness, as though it simply amounts to an instruction on Jesus' part to his disciples to elaborate creatively upon his teaching and present it as if he said those elaborations in the first place. But this is an exercise in eisegesis.
The verse itself is fairly cryptic. Jesus simply does not say exactly what he means by old things and new things. It comes immediately after (vs. 51) he asks his disciples if they have understood his parables, so presumably it has something to do with his teaching. Any interpretation of such a brief, cryptic saying should be held lightly, and using it to support a license to put words in Jesus' mouth is irresponsible exegesis.
What might the "new things" in the verse mean? Well, for one thing, it might refer to passing on those new teachings of Jesus himself, as historically taught, that were not previously contained or fully understood in Jewish doctrine. Jesus came to reveal the Father, to give new teaching, and to inaugurate a new covenant. Such doctrines as his atoning death and his desire for all men to be saved could certainly constitute "things new." Jesus often emphasized that individuals could have a personal relationship with God the Father, which was not previously well understood. Moreover, if Jesus had in mind the disciples' own further understandings of his teaching, there would (once again) be no endorsement here of their attributing those expansions and interpretations to Jesus' own lips. Nor do we have reason to think that they did so. Indeed, the whole point of apostolic authority was that the apostles were licensed teachers, commissioned by Jesus, in their own right, not that they were supposed to engage in a charade of pretending that Jesus personally said something that was really their own gloss or application to new circumstances.
Finally, I want to give some examples of what is apparently meant by "creative adaptation," "new application," and the like, while remaining "true to the original idea."
Craig Evans himself rarely gives specific examples in the immediate context of his teachings about so-called chreiai. He prefers in those contexts to speak in generalities and to imply that anyone who disagrees with him is an uninformed or rigid fundamentalist.
But here is one application from him that might well be an instance of what he has in mind. Video here.
On a historical level let us suppose we could go back into time with a camera team and audio and video record the historical Jesus and we followed him about throughout his ministry. I would be very surprised if we caught him uttering, “I am this” and “I am that” and one of these big long speeches that we find in John. Okay, so I’m just taking a different tack, but I’m saying the same thing I said before. This aspect of the Gospel of John I would not put in the category of historical. It’s a genre question.The real question then would be, do these from a theological point of view reflect an accurate theological understanding of Jesus’s person, his accomplishment, what he’s achieved, what he brings to his believers. Is he the light of the world? Is he, y’know, the way, the truth, the life? Is he the bread of life? See? And that’s what Christians can affirm. [snip] So you could say, theologically, these affirmations of who Jesus is in fact do derive from Jesus. Not because he walked around and said them. But because of what he did, what he said, what he did, and because of his resurrection. And so this community that comes together in the aftermath of Easter says, “You know what? This Jesus who said these various things, whose teaching we cling to and interpret and present and adapt and so on, he is for us the way, the truth, the life, the true vine. He is the bread of life,” and so on. And so that gets presented in a very creative, dramatic, and metaphorical way, in what we now call the Gospel of John.
Here Evans is expressly denying that the historical Jesus said, recognizably, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" and other sayings that are usually called "'I am' with predicate" sayings. He says that these "derive from Jesus" but not because he said them! Rather, they present an accurate theological picture of who Jesus was. In fact, however, they were the theological creation of the Christian community.
Since Evans here denies the historicity of Jesus' saying, "I am the bread of life," this calls into question an entire discourse of Jesus (perhaps the only thing that could really be called an "I am discourse") in John 6. If Jesus never claimed that he was the bread of life at all, it is difficult to see how he could have based a relatively lengthy teaching on this statement. Moreover, in the passage, the crowds are offended by this teaching of Jesus. Was that circumstance also invented as part of a chreia elaboration? And if so, what was it an elaboration of? Merely a feeling that Jesus is "to us" the bread of life, that a relationship with him is important? What was the historical teaching on which this large extrapolation was based?
This, then, is a fairly radical application of the idea that the Gospel authors were supposed to remain in some sense true to Jesus' original "meaning" while being encouraged to be "creative." And it is Evans's own statement.
Michael Licona has discussed (attributing it to "many scholars") the idea that Jesus never historically, recognizably said, "I and the Father are one" or "Before Abraham was, I am" but that these are more explicit spellings-out, on the part of John, of Jesus' relatively more implicit historical claims to deity as indicated in the Gospel of Mark. See here and see video here. In his recent debate with Bart Ehrman, Licona goes so far as to say that such invention on the part of John, if it occurred, "came to the same thing" as what is found in Mark. This despite the fact that, as Licona must realize, it would have involved the invention of whole sayings and scenes. He has even attempted to call such invention "paraphrase," though that is a completely incorrect use of the term "paraphrase." Once again, with the emphasis upon the claim that such wholesale (and important) inventions "come to the same thing" or are merely making explicit what is implicit elsewhere, this seems like an attempted application of the idea Evans expresses (which Evans connects with the term chreia) of elaboration while remaining, perhaps only in some rather vague sense, true to the original meaning or idea of the teacher.
Obviously, if this is what is in view, it is rather an important matter, and it behooves us not simply to accept statements such as Evans's generalities without asking what they amount to.
Even shorter inventions, allegedly drawing out the meaning of what Jesus was saying, are important and deserve scrutiny rather than uncritical acceptance. In a 2002 dissertation available here, Greg Alan Camp suggests, expressly using the concept of chreia, that Jesus' quotation of Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice" in Matthew 9:12 was a fictional elaboration on Matthew's part (p. 155, see esp. note 47).
There is nothing about this quotation by Jesus that contradicts anything in any other Gospel. It makes sense in the context, where Jesus is chiding those who are giving him a hard time about eating with sinners. It's just that it appears in Matthew and not in the other Gospels. Campbell's is a typical redaction-critical move, beginning with the assumption that what is unique to a particular Gospel is in all probability a fictional elaboration. The use of the term chreia merely adds an air of false rigor to this gratuitous fictionalization theory.
Nor would it be necessary to hold that Luke quoted Jesus' words absolutely verbatim merely to assert that Jesus did, in fact, quote (in some words or other, but recognizably) Hosea 6:6 and apply it in this context.
A couple of fictionalizations that would seem to fall quite squarely into Evans's categories are suggested in connection with Jesus' teaching on divorce. NT scholar Robert Stein argues that Jesus never literally said "except for fornication" in Matthew 5:32 but rather made, historically, what would sound like a prohibition on all divorce if the saying occurred without the exception. On Stein's theory, Matthew divined that Jesus really was speaking with deliberate exaggeration and inserted the exception clause into Jesus' words to explain his true meaning:
If we assume that the “exception clause” is a Matthean comment, of what value is this? The value lies in the fact that it reveals how Matthew understood Jesus’ teaching on divorce, i.e., that it was an example of overstatement for effect....Matthew provides with an implication and submeaning of the statement, which he believed Jesus would accept and which is equally authoritative. (Robert Stein, The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction, p. 153, as quoted in “An Apologia for a Broad Use of Ipsissima Vox” by Dan B. Wallace)
But it is by no means obvious that such an interpretation by Matthew would have the same degree of authority as Jesus' own actual statement. I would guess that a great many people in all denominations who have agonized over Jesus' teachings on divorce and what, precisely, this exception clause amounts to, would have taken a different approach (in one direction or other) if they believed that it did not reflect Jesus' own words but rather Matthew's interpretation thereof. Perhaps we would have concluded that there are no exceptions under which divorce is permitted at all, for example. And the Catholic Church would have relied upon this clause at least with (probably) a different emphasis for defending the concept of annulment if they had believed that it did not originate with Jesus. At a minimum, Christians quite rightly want to know which it is, and we should not allow ourselves to be told by modern scholars who wish to impose their own redactive-critical assumptions on the text that the desire to distinguish Jesus' own words from his disciples' glosses is merely a modern hang-up of ours. This is an instance where either what Wallace calls "a broad use of ipsissima vox" or what Evans would call a creative chreia alteration, while allegedly remaining true to original meaning, can have very real practical consequences.
Dan Wallace himself further suggests that when, in Mark 10:12, Jesus makes explicit reference to (and condemns) a woman's divorcing her husband and remarrying, this is not a saying of the historical Jesus but rather a gloss added by Mark to apply Jesus' teachings in a Gentile context. ("A Broad Use of Ipsissima Vox," pp. 11-12) While Wallace himself does not use the term chreia in this context, it fits quite well within Evans's idea that the disciples were encouraged to apply Jesus' words to new situations and that this is what gives rise to variations in the reports of Jesus' own words in the Gospels.
Ironically, Wallace's argument here appears historically uninformed. For he argues that "it is difficult to claim that" the comment on a woman's divorcing her husband "belongs to Jesus' original utterance" on the grounds that "Jesus was speaking to Jewish men, and is addressing in this clause not ethical precept but cultural realities..." and that the right of a woman to divorce her husband was not recognized by Jewish law.
But a famous case in which a woman did go against Jewish law and divorce her husband would have been in the forefront of the minds of both Jesus and his audience. Herodias had divorced her husband in order to marry Herod Antipas, a situation that gave rise to the execution of John the Baptist, as told in Mark's own Gospel, chapter 6. Josephus, writing on this very event, says:
But Herodias, their sister, was married to Herod [Philip], the son of Herod the Great; who was born of Mariamne, the daughter of Simon the High Priest; who had a daughter Salome. After whose birth Herodias took upon her to confound the laws of our country, and divorced her self from her husband, while he was alive, and was married to Herod [Antipas], her husband’s brother by the father’s side. He was tetrarch of Galilee.
This is, in fact, an external confirmation of the historical "situatedness" of the Gospel of Mark. Wallace abandons the epistemic value of that external confirmation by jumping to the conclusion that it was a fictional addition, by Mark, to Jesus' words in order to apply those words to a Gentile audience. Of course, if Mark wished to do so he could have inserted a narrative aside, as in the passage already described concerning Jesus' words and whether all food is "clean."
And, once again, Jesus' wording when saying that a woman would also be committing adultery if she divorced her husband and remarried could have been somewhat different from that given in Mark, without Mark's having invented that bit of his teaching on the issue.
These are only a few examples of what it can mean to claim that the authors of the Gospels had a license to put words into Jesus' mouth or even were enjoined to do so by Jesus himself.
We should not uncritically accept such claims merely because they are uttered by scholars, not even when the scholars make use of a Greek word and imply that they have specialized, technical knowledge. Further investigation often shows how flimsy the underlying argument actually is. Nor is it a matter of being a "fundamentalist" to hold that whole sayings, much less discourses, were not placed into the mouth of Jesus by his disciples or by the Gospel authors.
I suggest that we evangelicals have previously been far too hasty in such matters. Eager to find an intellectually defensible via media between what one might view as rigid fundamentalism and the extreme skepticism of Bart Ehrman, and charmed by the idea of accusing Ehrman himself of having a "fundamentalist" understanding of the Bible, one may leap to accept unsupported generalizations like those uttered by Evans, without asking more about either their meaning or their basis.
I suggest that the matters involved are important enough that a different approach is called for.
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