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To a greater degree than Meier, perhaps, Witherington makes a constructive proposal in the midst of the current Jesus debates. (In fairness to Meier, we should note that the third volume of his trilogy might prove to be more constructive, less rigidly analytical, than the first two.) Witherington forges plausible suggestions regarding the possible origins of the New Testament's "high" Christology. His theory is that the very earliest "Jesus tradition, if not Jesus himself, drew on the riches found specifically in the wisdom of Ben Sira," which, in turn (like most New Testament writers), drew on the Old Testament. Unlike many of his academic peers, Witherington thinks such Christology could have "originated very early and on Palestinian soil." This is significant, since the earlier that "high" Christology is placed on a time-line of early church expansion, the more justified it is to trace this Christology to Jesus and his earliest followers rather than to later, and possibly fanciful, religious speculation generations after Jesus' death. On Witherington's time-line, Jesus' divinity is upheld in Palestinian Jewish Christianity no later than "within the first twenty years after Jesus' death."

So much for the stereotype that scholarly reconstructions of New Testament evidence for Jesus must run counter to traditional Christian belief. Yet someone skeptical of current Jesus research might be leery of the whole enterprise for a different reason. Are not both Meier and Witherington working within the confines of a critical consensus based on Markan priority and a hypothetical Q document? In this view, virtually unheard of until the nineteenth century but now the dominant scholarly paradigm, Mark was the earliest gospel written. The composers of Matthew and Luke then made use of Mark as the basis of their own gospels. They also used a second (hypothetical) document or collection of sayings, dubbed Q (for the German word Quelle, meaning "source"). As scholars reconstruct it, Q contains no passion narrative and no resurrection. In the end, are not all the experts who accept these theories really birds of a feather, showing differences of degree but not of kind in how they handle the New Testament?

A third recent example of Jesus research challenges - no, explodes - that stereotype, too.

THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL

Why was a whole nation glued to the TV during the Gulf War and again following the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the sentencing of the police who beat Rodney King? Reasons are numerous and varied, but one thing is certain: many were lured by the terrible fascination of open, gloves-off conflict.

Intense conflict, even of a clean-hitting and constructive kind, is precisely what nonspecialists find lacking in current debates about Jesus. These debates seem, in the end, literally just academic. Scholars rise, scholars fall, books come, books go, but the basic vocabulary and methods and authorities (Q, form criticism, historical Jesus, redactor, Markan tradition, L, M, Schmidt, Dibelius, Bultmann, etc.) remain unchanged. In fact, for all the insights they offer, neither Meier nor Witherington does anything to question this basic paradigm. They rather both affirm it.

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December 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 14