The very voice of a fictional Jesus
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
Blogger Steve Hays at Triablogue has posted and commented on some quotations from a 1999 paper and from a 2000 paper by usually-assumed-to-be conservative NT scholar Dan Wallace.
These are unpublished papers, but the contents of the 1999 paper came to light briefly in 2006 (I may post more later about the kerfuffle in 2006) and the contents of the 2000 paper came out to some degree in 2017, for those who actually read Mike Licona's Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? In that book, Licona takes from Wallace and adopts the view that Jesus did not say either, "I thirst" or "It is finished" from the cross but rather that these are "adaptations" by John of completely different sayings--respectively, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" and "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."
Wallace, who is thanked and cited frequently throughout Licona's 2017 book, apparently didn't mind this citation of his views from 2000, though he has not published either that paper or the 1999 paper.
In both of these papers, and in Licona's usage, the term used for such extreme fictionalization of Jesus' words is the highly misleading term "ipsissima vox." Used by a more conservative scholar, such a phrase ("the very voice") merely means moderate and normal paraphrase, as in the differences between the Father's words at Jesus' baptism--"This is my beloved son" in Matt. 3:17 vs. "You are my beloved son" in Mark 1:11. Used by Wallace and Licona, it means more or less anything, including changing "My God, why have you forsaken me?" to "I'm thirsty" and even inventing people bringing Jesus wine in response to his fictional, literal cry of thirst. To say that this is the "very voice" of Jesus is an joke. To call this sort of thing "paraphrase" (as has been done) is utterly misleading.
Hays quotes two other conjectures of so-called "ipsissima vox" from Wallace (2000): These are that Jesus' promise of many dwelling places and going to prepare a place in heaven for believers in John 14 may be John's "adaptation" of the apocalyptic predictions of death and destruction in the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24) and that Jesus' short comparison of himself to a vine and his disciples to branches (John 15:1-11) may be a "transformation" of the parable of the sower (Mark 4).
These pairs, of course, are nothing like each other. The notion that John would be giving the "very voice" of Jesus by transforming one into the other means that "ipsissima vox" means anything. If these "transformations" are "ipsissima vox," anything is. Jesus could be made to say, "I'll have the ham on rye" and, by this standard, that could be a "transformation" of some saying about the Father giving bread to his children or about how what goes into a man does not defile him. But it's just a paraphrase, right? It's the "very voice" of Jesus. What are you who object? Some kind of wooden literalist who thinks that the evangelists were writing down a verbatim tape recording of Jesus' words?
Hays makes the particularly good point concerning Jesus' words on the cross that, if we take the gospels to be reportage rather than heavily fictionalized works of art, Jesus himself may have not known just before the precise moment of his death and hence may well have said more than one thing (both "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit" and "It is finished") that might sound like "things intended to be his very last words." A dying man may say something and then add something else a moment later, and the mere fact that both sound vaguely "final" hardly means that the report of one is a fictional replacement for the other.
Back to the '99 paper, which I have cited elsewhere, including in the webinar "Six Bad Habits of New Testament Scholars." Since this paper concentrates on the synoptic gospels, with only occasional allusions to how John is probably doing much more alteration (which we then see in the 2000 paper), the examples are less radical. But as the title shows ("An Apologia for a Broad View of Ipsissima Vox"), Wallace viewed himself there as challenging his fellow evangelicals to lighten up. I have a copy of this paper and can confirm that he makes this explicit throughout.
His examples of a "broad use" are the usual grocery list of never allowing a variation to be just a variation. If Matthew left out Jesus' phrase "nor the Son" in Matthew 24:36 when saying that no man knows the day or the hour of his return (as textual scholarship seems to indicate), this must be because of Matthew's "high Christology." Jesus needed some help! "Facepalm, Jesus, why did you have to say that? People are gonna get confused about whether or not you're God! I'm not putting that into my version!" If Matthew 12:15 says of an incident, "He healed all" while Mark 3:10 says of the same incident, "He healed many," this can't be because the evangelists are telling the story in their own words. It must be because Matthew is concerned that people will think Jesus couldn't heal some of those who were brought to him.
And so forth.
This is what is wrong with NT scholarship, and as a set-up for the still wilder conjectures in the 2000 paper, it is entirely inadequate.
Hays comments:
Somebody might object that I'm quoting and commenting on unpublished presentations. However, the Christian faith is not supposed to operate like a secret society, where there's one message for the rank-and-file, and a different message for favored initiates. Christianity is a public religion. It's the same message for everyone, believers and unbelievers alike. There is no disciplina arcana. Christianity isn't supposed to have a dichotomy between what is said from the pulpit, for popular consumption, and what the preacher really believes–which he only shares with fellow elites.
Indeed, a split between what the preacher or scholar says where the public can hear him and what he says to groups of his fellow scholars is a recipe for theological and interpretive disaster.
I've noticed another trend, which is to publish things in books but hope that no one notices them with a critical eye. This is a variant of the "We can say it but you can't" trope that one sees in politics as well. If Scholar X publishes a book saying that John made something up out of whole cloth, that's legitimate. If a critic notes that Scholar X has said this and makes the point more widely known, with a criticism of the point, then that is an illegitimate attack.
I suspect that that is what is going on with the theories about the words from the cross that Dr. Licona publicized from his friend Dr. Wallace. Since Licona was agreeing with the theories and burying them in a book that some people might never read, his citing them from Wallace's unpublished paper was no problem. For a critic to emphasize that these theories came from an unpublished paper by Wallace and to make a point of this fact, much less making known other far-fetched theories from the same paper while disagreeing with them, may well (I predict) be treated by a double standard.
Needless to say, there is not the slightest evidence that John invented "I thirst" as a replacement for "My God, why have you forsaken me?" I have treated this point elsewhere. This is what I call an utterly unforced error. Indeed, terrible thirst was a common effect of crucifixion. Remember the facts on the ground? Jesus was being crucified?
And so on for the rest. There is no more reason to think that Jesus' promise to go to prepare a place for his followers is a fiction inspired by the Olivet Discourse than to pick any saying by Jesus at random in any of the Gospels and postulate that it is a fiction. The content of the passages is completely different. Since John's historicity is well-established in other ways, there is every reason to believe that Jesus did say that he was going to prepare many dwelling-places for believers. His words (as in the case of the synoptics) may have been moderately different than those recorded. He may have been speaking Aramaic which John translated into John's own distinctive Greek. On the other hand, both John and Jesus may have spoken a similar Greek-as-a-second-language, with Aramaic as their first language, so by no means is it clear that John's portrayal of Jesus' linguistic tendencies is radically different from the way that Jesus really spoke while the words of Jesus in, say, Luke are closer to his ipsissima verba.
In any event, these conjectures by Wallace are just more of the unevidential treatment of John as prima facie ahistorical--a kind of disease of New Testament scholarship. If it is a little surprising to find it in Dan Wallace, I'm afraid I must sadly advise readers to get used to such surprises. The notion of fictionalizing Gospel authors is far more entrenched among "conservatives" than you probably thought a year ago. That is certainly the case for me.
I note here as well that a pattern is emerging in which a scholar will have relatively conservative views about purely textual scholarship and will defend the textual integrity of the manuscript evidence for the New Testament but will actually have fairly liberal views on the interpretation of Scripture and the degree of fakery that the authors engaged in. If the scholar then also, say, debates Bart Ehrman on textual criticism, he gets a name as fidei defensor (defender of the faith), and laymen naturally assume that they can trust him on matters of the New Testament. The ambiguity of a question in common parlance like, "Is the New Testament text reliable?" as between its being reliably preserved from the original version and its being a reliable record of what happened also contributes to this problem of reputation. Increasingly laymen need to be more careful about making such assumptions about scholars, especially when they move from a specialty (as in Wallace's case) in lower criticism (purely textual scholarship) to wide-ranging conjectures in higher criticism (redactive conjectures and the like).
Now is the time when the laymen must, indeed, be wise as serpents, for unfortunately the immune system of the evangelical church is at a low level. Protecting scholars from any possible criticism or backlash from those who disagree with their views is now a higher priority than protecting the church itself from false teaching.
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