The prophecy dilemma for literary device theorists
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
Recently Esteemed Husband and our friend Tom Gilson did a webinar for Apologetics Academy. I watched some of the livestream on Youtube. During such livestreams there is always some chat going on "on the side" in the comments, and this time a skeptic commentator was throwing in various questions, many of them irrelevant to what Tim and Tom were actually saying. One of his comments was something to this effect: Since the Gospel authors believed that Jesus fulfilled prophecy, wouldn't this have motivated them to invent things that never happened in order to be able to say that prophecy was fulfilled?
Since he is an outright skeptic, presumably he would have no qualms about saying that a Gospel author who did that was simply lying and was motivated by the desire to serve a religious cause by deceiving his audience. Still, one might ask him in that case why the evangelists believed in Jesus themselves, and in particular in his fulfillment of prophecy, if they knew that they had to invent things in order to "make" him fulfill prophecy. The skeptic would, one guesses, at that point have to fall back upon some generic statement to the effect that people, especially religious people, don't always think rationally about these things and may simultaneously believe in their religion and also believe that they are morally justified in lying to further it. Bart Ehrman has said this in so many words about early Christians. To my mind it is an unconvincing answer, particularly about the evangelists who were writing the very first memoirs of Jesus and claimed to have known him. At the founding of a religious movement, the distinction between "charlatan" and "sucker who listens to charlatan" is more stark and obvious, even to not-always-rational human beings. And if the evangelists were charlatans, their motivation is extremely difficult to figure out, given the initially low status and persecution of Christianity and the fact that they could have avoided much trouble for themselves had they not accepted and promoted Christianity.
But matters are difficult in a different way for the Christian literary device theorists whose work I am critiquing in my forthcoming books, The Mirror or the Mask and The Eye of the Beholder.
For the Christian scholar who holds that John or other evangelists sometimes tweak the facts or even invent things in order to make theological points emphatically does not want to say that the evangelists were deceivers. These scholars lean heavily on the word "genre" to help them to thread this needle. As Craig A. Evans says to Bart Ehrman, speaking of John's Gospel, "I object to saying it’s not historically accurate. Well, if something isn’t exactly historical, how is it not historically accurate? It’d be like saying, 'You mean the parable, the parable was a fiction Jesus told? It’s not historically accurate?'"
In other words, John's Gospel, like a parable, is not rightly judged by standards of historical accuracy at all. As Evans said later in response to a question from the audience, "And so the Johannine sayings, the distinctive ones, with a few exceptions, they’re the ones that look like, as I said earlier, a different genre altogether, something that only incidentally has historical material in it, but otherwise is a completely different type of literature..."
But the whole point of "another genre" is that the original audience itself is not led into thinking that these things really happened. Jesus' original audience didn't believe that the Prodigal Son was a real person, for example.
So if "genre" is to function in the way that the literary device theorists want it to function, the original audience is supposedly not misled by the ahistorical narrative, because they take the whole thing with enough grains of salt that they don't take all of the events to be historical, even when woven seamlessly into the rest of the document.
But consider the dilemma this creates concerning prophecy. I could choose here almost any prophecy that Jesus is said to fulfill, since the literary device theorists' method would mean that (as in a movie only "based on true events") we can put a question mark over almost anything in the narrative. The fact that the legs of the thieves were broken but that Jesus' legs were not, for example. Why should we take that to have really happened if John was wont to modify his narrative and add things for theological reasons? And the event is only singly attested. It is found only in John's Gospel.
Here are two things that actually are questioned by Christian, evangelical scholars: 1) That Jesus literally said, "I thirst" from the cross is questioned by Daniel B. Wallace and by Michael Licona. In his unpublished paper on the subject, Wallace expressly relates his questioning of the historicity of this event to the fulfillment of prophecy, though the exact connection in Wallace's mind is extremely obscure. It is apparently related to Wallace's strange idea that John would not want to record either Jesus making a literal expression of thirst (though it appears that John has done exactly that!) or his cry of, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" as in the Synoptics. So Wallace claims that, when John says that Jesus said, "I thirst" to fulfill Scripture, it is Psalm 22:1 that is fulfilled (where the Psalmist says, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"), but that John has made this fulfillment somewhat difficult to see by making up substitute words--namely, Jesus' expression of thirst. (Wallace, "Ipsissima Vox and the Seven Words from the Cross," unpublished, pp. 7-8. For some exact quotations, see here.) 2) Both Michael Licona and Craig Keener suggest that Jesus did not literally breathe out on his disciples and say, "Receive the Holy Spirit" as recorded in John 20:22. Keener is somewhat more ambivalent and unclear as to whether there might have been some real "encounter with the Spirit" that lies behind this passage, but he certainly calls its historicity into question. Yet at the same time, Keener insists that this breathing must, in John's Gospel, provide "fulfillment of [Jesus'] Paraclete promises" that Jesus has made earlier that he will send the Spirit. (Keener, commentary on John, p. 1200). In other words, maybe the event didn't happen at all, but John put it into his Gospel to fulfill Jesus' prophecies that he would send the Holy Spirit!
So this issue of prophetic fulfillment is not just something I am making up. It is a real and acute difficulty for literary device theorists.
Let's apply some analytical clarity to the matter. The evangelists narrate many supposed fulfillments of prophecy. For any given alleged fulfillment, there are the following possibilities:
The evangelist expected his readers to believe that the event happened.The evangelist did not expect his readers to believe that the event happened.
At this point I fully expect some pedantic readers to point out that maybe the author thought some of his readers might be confused but most would not, to point out that "readers" and "audience" are not monolithic terms, and so forth. But unless we have some concept or other of what the majority of the original audience would have understood, what a typical member would have understood, and what the author expected them to understand, then we cannot talk about genre at all. In other words, such generalizations are needed for everyone in the discussion, and indeed literary device theorists desperately need such generalizations, for they are the ones telling us all that "the original audience" wouldn't have minded such-and-such, or would have expected these sorts of changes, and so forth. So take it that when I ask what the author thought his audience would believe, I am using some such category as "the majority of his audience," "the audience for which he desired to write," "the typical members of his audience." This would be similar to what we would mean if we talked about a movie "based on true events." We would point out that people who go to such movies, steeped in our own culture, are "supposed to" understand that some things have been factually changed, even if they don't know what those things are. While there might be some outliers, such as children or people who have never stopped to consider what a "movie version" really is, there is supposed to be a general consensus in the audience, on which the movie-makers can rely, that the movie is not entirely factual.
Now let us further suppose, to set up the dilemma, that the evangelist himself did not believe that the event happened. Suppose, for example, that John did not really think that Jesus literally stood on earth before his disciples, breathed out, and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit."
Then, not believing it himself, he either did or did not expect his readers, seeing that he narrated it, to believe it.
Suppose that he did expect them to believe that it happened. In that case, John is a deceiver. He wants his readers to think that Jesus did something at that time that in fact he himself believes that Jesus did not do. According to Keener, the idea is supposed to be to narrate the fulfillment of Jesus' promises about the Holy Spirit. (This, by the way, is a highly implausible theory, since Jesus' promises about the Holy Spirit in John make it clear that he himself will not be physically present when he sends the Holy Spirit. So in terms of the theology taught in John's Gospel itself, this would not even appear to be a fulfillment. But set that aside for now.) If John wanted his audience to believe that this happened and that the promises were fulfilled in this way, then he is knowingly misleading them, and the literary device theorist who accepts this option can no longer express outrage when we say that, on his theory, the evangelists were liars. One wonders in that case why we should think of a deliberately lying Gospel as divinely inspired at all.
On the other hand, suppose that John, believing that the event didn't happen, did not expect his readers to believe it either. In that case, what's the point? In that case, nobody in the situation thinks that there was a real-life action of Jesus that looked like this that fulfilled the prophecy in question. Is the function of the narrative then supposed to be like that of some known-to-be-apocryphal story? Does it just cause us to reflect on how great it is that the Holy Spirit exists?
And why, we might ask, should we then independently believe that we ourselves are empowered by the Spirit? If the narrative in John is just a bit of pious fiction and would have been accepted as such (or at least suspected to be such) by its original audience, what then is our evidence for our own empowerment by the Spirit? After all, Jesus' own words, especially in John, are often called into question by the same scholars. Did Jesus ever clearly promise to send the Holy Spirit at all?
Or take another prophecy--the one about Jesus' bones not being broken. As already noted, if John tended to add things to his narrative for theological reasons, and if he modified his crucifixion narrative in particular (per Wallace) by adding words that Jesus never said, and if John's "genre" is such that we should not assume that the events it appears to narrate in all sobriety really occurred, how confident should we be that the thieves' legs were broken but that Jesus' legs were not?
Then, once again: If John believed that these parts of the narrative did not occur, did he expect his readers and hearers to believe that they did? If so, then he is a deceiver. If not, and if he was right, then for all his readers could tell those parts of the narrative do not really fulfill any prophecy. Prophecy is fulfilled only if an event really happens that fulfills prophecy. No event in history, no fulfillment. If neither John nor his readers believed that there was a real fulfillment as described in the narrative (the thieves' legs were broken, but Jesus' legs were not), then the narrative does not show that Jesus fulfilled prophecy.
But the apostles were constantly preaching that Jesus fulfilled prophecy. Jesus' fulfillment of prophecy was very important to their message to their fellow Jews. And there is every reason to take the evangelists (some of whom almost certainly were apostles themselves) to be at one with the apostles in their attitude on this matter. Real prophetic fulfillment was central to the founding of Christianity as it originated in Judaism. Why would we think that John and his original audience would think that there was any point whatsoever in the narration of a pseudo-fulfillment grounded in made-up facts?
This argument, of course, is the same argument that I have made in other posts under the heading "Fake Points Don't Make Points." Here I am putting it into the form of a dilemma in order to encourage us to think clearly about the issues involved.
As Julius Africanus (Christian historian, circa A.D. 160-240) said about the alleged attempt to use fake points for religious purposes in Jesus' genealogies,
Nor shall an assertion of this kind prevail in the Church of Christ against the exact truth, so as that a lie should be contrived for the praise and glory of Christ. For who does not know that most holy word of the apostle also, who, when he was preaching and proclaiming the resurrection of our Saviour, and confidently affirming the truth, said with great fear, If any say that Christ is not risen, and we assert and have believed this, and both hope for and preach that very thing, we are false witnesses of God, in alleging that He raised up Christ, whom He raised not up? And if he who glorifies God the Father is thus afraid lest he should seem a false witness in narrating a marvellous fact, how should not he be justly afraid, who tries to establish the truth by a false statement, preparing an untrue opinion? For if the generations are different, and trace down no genuine seed to Joseph, and if all has been stated only with the view of establishing the position of Him who was to be born—to confirm the truth, namely, that He who was to be would be king and priest, there being at the same time no proof given, but the dignity of the words being brought down to a feeble hymn,—it is evident that no praise accrues to God from that, since it is a falsehood, but rather judgment returns on him who asserts it, because he vaunts an unreality as though it were reality.
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