Related articles and links |  1 of 5

JESUS THE WISDOM OF GOD

The late French film director Jean Renoir summarized his artistic creed as follows: "Man is a creature of habit. The artist's task is to break with habits." But are all habits bad? When the artist's critique of conventional practice becomes gratuitous, we call it iconoclasm.

Iconoclasm exists in biblical research, too. In "Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom," Ben Witherington III lodges a protest against it. He notes the guild's "ever present urge to say something new without reflecting on whether it is true." He has new insights to offer himself - but wishes to ground them securely in something more substantial than the present cultural mood.

Witherington's book joins Meier's as testimony to the value of rigorous academic biblical study. Arguing from a quite different set of data than Meier does, Witherington refutes recent claims by Crossan, F. G. Downing, and Burton Mack that Jesus closely resembled a Cynic philosopher. Yet, as the title of his book suggests, Witherington is not averse to the idea that Jesus should be seen, in the end, as a sage. A major purpose of his book is "to show that one crucial dimension, perhaps the most comprehensive dimension of Jesus' teaching, is the Wisdom dimension." Accordingly, "the best overall categorization of the man is that he was a sage."

Some of the strengths of Meier's study are present in Witherington's, too. There is breadth and depth of coverage of an important topic, for example, as well as helpful sifting of overly imaginative reconstructions of the gospel data. Witherington provides useful reflection on language theory and (following E. D. Hirsch) mounts a cautious defense of the validity of objective standards of interpretation: " 'Blessed are the peacemakers' cannot be construed to mean 'Blessed are the warmongers.' " He offers reasonable strictures regarding today's popular literary-critical emphases in gospel studies: "Literary criticism that seeks to short circuit historical inquiry will in the end not do justice to either the text being studied or the one who originally wrote it."

Witherington makes his case by sweeping across the whole biblical canon to show the nature and place of wisdom literature in both Old and New Testament thought. Nor does he neglect the crucial intertestamental period. He particularizes his study when he reaches the New Testament era to show how the so-called Christological hymns (Phil. 2:6-11, Col. 1:15-20, 1 Tim. 3:16) and related passages are solidly moored in wisdom reflection.

Herein lies the major contribution that Witherington makes. Much modern study of Jesus is rigorously, and to a point, justifiably, synchronic in nature. That is, the gospel texts are investigated against the backdrop of literary evidences thought to originate in the same era as the Gospels. Examples would include Josephus, rabbinic literature, and the Dead Sea scrolls.

Witherington, however, calls for diachronic sensitivity as well. While a synchronic view stresses literature contemporaneous with the canonical Gospels, a diachronic view looks back through history at thought modes - such as the biblical wisdom tradition - that meander down the centuries, finally bubbling up in various pools of New Testament thinking. Witherington thinks this has happened as Old Testament works such as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, preserved in Judaism and appropriated by intertestamental sources such as the Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira, affected the outlooks of virtually all the New Testament writers. To describe the process succinctly: Jesus, part of a Jewish community steered by wisdom traditions, interpreted himself in an unprecedented way as the personification of biblical wisdom. Then "the early church took this seed, planted it and raised a vast harvest of Wisdom Christologies. … "

next page... |  1 of 5

December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14