2 of 3

MARGINAL JEW THE CENTER OF FOCUS

John P. Meier, a Catholic priest and professor of New Testament at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., has just issued the second volume of his projected trilogy, "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus." Meier's work bears the imprint of the prestigious "Anchor Bible Reference Library," edited by David Noel Freedman. The introductory first volume (1991), by now extensively reviewed in various magazines and journals, whetted appetites for this sequel. If volume one was substantial, volume two is epic in scope. Readers with the time and patience to digest it will be gratified for several reasons.

A major contribution is the sheer breadth and depth of coverage that Meier manages. Today's "information explosion" poses a problem for students of Scripture that is no less daunting than in technological areas more commonly associated with the term. Some of Meier's chapters (chap. 21, for example, "Jesus' Healings," and chap. 23, "The So-Called Nature Miracles") devote more words to scholarly bibliography and interchange than to direct treatment of the chapter's topic. Happily, this technical discussion is relegated to the endnotes; the general reader can skip the fine print, while readers wishing to follow out this or that point more fully will be grateful for Meier's comprehensive scholarship.

But why should anyone care about all the technical scholarly discussion in the first place? One recently published book on evangelical apologetics implies that the two best responses to biblical criticism are (1) skepticism and (2) a sense of humor. While both responses have their place, what is missing here is the recognition that before skeptical assessment and guffaws there needs to be humble understanding. And it is just such understanding that Meier helps the reader attain.

In particular, Meier underscores that scholars laboring to reconstruct the historical Jesus are observing certain "rules of the game." Here is the basic game plan: "The data and inferences drawn from the data must be equally open to and testable by all observers" - Christians, Jews, and agnostics alike. Obviously, the historical Jesus that emerges from such investigation will be at best a pale facsimile of the personal Savior who stands at the heart of historic Christian confession and piety. But as long as we do not expect the scholar's "game" to do for us what it never said it would - uphold and exalt the resurrected Jesus Christ of biblical, personal faith - there is no need to cavil at the results. We can take them with the grain of salt they deserve and learn from them what we can.

So what can we learn from Meier along these lines? Quite a bit, it turns out. First, we can be apprised of the Achilles' heels of various other scholars whose theories Meier debunks. Rudolf Bultmann, Geza Vermes, Helmut Koester, John Dominic Crossan, Hendrikus Boers - these and several others receive a fair thrashing when Meier finds their views far-fetched. Evangelical scholars such as Howard Marshall, Robert Gundry, Harold W. Hoehner, Edwin M. Yamauchi, and John R. McRay take their lumps, too (for the most part unjustly, I think). We may agree or disagree with Meier's criticisms, but in either case, our own thinking is sharpened by so well-informed a source.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14