Review of Easter Enigma by John Wenham
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
I've been recently enjoying reading (partially re-reading) Easter Enigma by the late Anglican New Testament scholar John Wenham (1913-1996).
Easter Enigma is Wenham's conjectural harmonization of the four gospels' Easter accounts, taking each at face value and trying to make a plausible picture that fits them all together. In some cases Wenham even "handicaps" himself--for example, by treating the long ending of Mark as authentic and requiring his version to explain it.
I cannot recommend this slim book too highly. Readable and enjoyable but at the same time erudite, beautifully written, and most of all intensely sensible, Wenham's book is the antithesis of the majority of what passes for (even fairly "conservative") New Testament scholarship. If you are at all interested in the topics in question, get hold of this book and have a ball with it.
This is not to say that I agree with all of Wenham's conjectures. In particular, I think he is flat wrong to combine the three characters of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the sinful woman who anointed Jesus in Luke's gospel. In fact, I think these are three completely different women. Sometimes, too, his desire to make things vivid causes him to go farther than necessary--for example, in his conjecture that the family of John Mark (later the evangelist) owned the Garden of Gethsemane as well as the building with the upper room and were followers of Jesus during Jesus' earthly ministry. He also treats John Mark as the young man wrapped in the sheet in the garden, and of course he is not alone in this suggestion. It would have been interesting to discuss this conjecture with Wenham, for it is somewhat disconfirmed by Papias's account of Mark the evangelist, which states that Mark had never heard Jesus himself. One of Wenham's signature virtues as a scholar is the seriousness with which he takes the patristic evidence concerning gospel authorship.
I myself would probably keep the women together a bit more than Wenham does on Easter morning, separating Mary Magdalene from the others but not requiring (as Wenham does) the others to come back to Peter and John first to announce the empty tomb before some of them head off to find the other disciples, seeing Jesus on this second leg of their news-bearing journey. However, I should note that Wenham's way of harmonizing by splitting the women up into several groups does have the interesting result (which he doesn't mention) of explaining the absence in Luke of any appearances to women, especially given his conjecture that Joanna may have been Luke's source for the experiences of the women. If Joanna was not with the specific group that saw Jesus, and if Luke did not speak with Mary Magdalene, he may not have learned before writing his gospel of Jesus' appearances to women.
Any such disagreements or differences of preferred harmonization pale into insignificance compared with the beauty of Wenham's approach. It is truly a joy to read a scholar who is not messing about with skeptical (and silly) redactive and source critical theories and whose goal is to see if the accounts, taken as reliable and accurate individually, can be fitted together with a bit of intelligent imagination, just as reasonable people would do in secular matters. This is the kind of thing that we should be trying to do in dealing with sources that have shown themselves reliable in other respects and that present themselves as historically true (as the gospel authors do).
A great thing about reading Wenham is that one gets the feeling that he would have been fun to talk to, even about matters where one disagrees.
For example, I would like to know why he is so sure that the spices used in Jesus' burial were dry spices, given the eye-popping weight recorded. (Wenham translates it as something on the order of seventy pounds!) Given the light weight and consequent great volume of dry spices, it's hard to imagine that Nicodemus would have bought such a huge weight of dry spices to incorporate into the burial sheet(s). Some kind of denser ointment or oil seems indicated.
The book is full of little gems of information that I had not previously known. These are not perhaps properly characterized as undesigned coincidences but are nonetheless relevant to the realism and interlocking of the accounts. For example, Wenham notes that Luke says (23:49) that Jesus' "acquaintances and the women who accompanied him from Galilee" were at the crucifixion, and that the Greek for "acquaintances" is masculine. So we have both men and women at the cross. However, Wenham points out that Luke, who uses the word "disciples" in plenty of other places, does not do so here but rather uses a different word that could mean friends and/or relatives. This is consistent with the fact that of all Jesus' inner circle of disciples, the twelve, it appears that only John was actually at the cross. Presumably the "male acquaintances" group included Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, and perhaps (though no gospel says so) Clopas, who may well have been the husband of "the other Mary" mentioned in several of the gospels at the cross. This is plausibly the Cleopas who met Jesus later on the Emmaus road. (Wenham theorizes that Clopas may have been a relative of Jesus, though his overall argument does not depend on this theory.) By way of increasing the similarity of Wenham's Greek point to an undesigned coincidence, I note that Luke does not have the explicit statement "they all forsook him and fled" in the garden the night before (that is found in John), though the absence of most of the other disciples from the later scenes of the Passion is probably implied by Luke's mentioning only Peter as following to the house of the high priest.
(Wenham notes, "In mentioning male acquaintances Luke mitigates the otherwise unrelieved baseness of the men, as he does also by pointing out that Joseph was a good man, who had not consented to the decision of the Sanhedrin." p. 62)
Wenham has a charming discussion (p. 78) of ancient Greek narrations of time and the relative absence of the pluperfect in ancient Greek sources. That is, they had a pluperfect but, he says, often used the simple past instead. This fact is extremely important when it comes to document harmonization (of secular documents as well), and I note that drawing attention to this point could not be further from the statement one hears all too often that the ancients didn't care about time or would change the time at which something happened for some literary reason. Those theories actually depend on a truly anachronistic habit of taking order of relating events, even those all very close in time (e.g., the events of Easter morning) as strongly implying order of occurrence, which is often not the case, and then insisting that the author changed the order because, being one of those ancient folk, he didn't care about accuracy in chronology if he could teach a "higher truth" or make things more interesting by fictionalizing the chronology. It makes much more sense, both historically and in terms of theoretical simplicity, to take order of narration (again, especially of events that all occur at around the same time) to be at most a weak indication of the author's intended chronological order of occurrence, one that is easily defeasible by contrary evidence. Wenham uses this insight well when he suggests that Matthew's mention of the earthquake and the terror of the guards in Matthew 28:2-4 could well be conceived in the pluperfect and therefore as having occurred before the arrival of the women at the tomb: There had been a great earthquake. The angel had descended and rolled away the stone. The guards had become as dead men, etc.
I'll close this review with a lovely and valuable quotation about harmonization from one of Wenham's appendices:
Forced harmonizing is worthless. The tendency today, however, is the opposite--to force the New Testament writings into disharmony, in order to emphasize their individuality. The current analytical approach to the gospels often has the effect of making scholars more and more uncertain at more and more points, till eventually their view of Jesus and his teaching is lost in haze. The harmonistic approach, on the other hand, enables one to ponder long and conscientiously over every detail of the narrative and to see how one account illuminates and modifies another. Gradually (without fudging) people and events take shape and grow in solidity and the scenes come to life in one's mind. Such study is beautifully constructive and helps to vindicate the presuppositions on which it is based. It is sad and strange when immense learning leads to little knowledge of the person studied. One thing is certain: Jesus was a concrete, complex and fascinating figure of history, and any method of study which fails to reveal him as such is working on the wrong lines. (p. 128)
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
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