Matthew 5:30

Because it offended me,

I lopped off my right hand

and dropped it behind me

into the shadowy noplace

where the Adversary is said to lurk

It fell as a root

and burrowed thumb-first

into the blind field,

sprouting fine white tendrils

Its chill blossom, a crown of fingers,

wavers in my sleep,

the petals cold and blue

I pluck that bloom for candles,

lighting them with a knife

dipped in blood and water

The light they shed is a web of shadows,

on which that severed hand lurches,

a maimed spider,

dribbling behind it a thread of regret

Better to lose that crabbed part

than to find at the end

my whole body grown to a stalk of weed

to be plucked up and burnt,

a candle of desire burning itself to naught

EUGENE WARREN

In 1943 I produced a paper-back volume entitled Are the New Testament Documents Reliable?—my literary firstborn. From the fifth edition (1960) onward, its title was modified to The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?

When the first edition appeared, the teenage son of a friend of mine picked it up from his father’s table, thumbed through it, and remarked: “I suppose he takes 118 pages to say ‘Yes’!” He was right: the directors of the InterVarsity Press would not have encouraged me to write the little book if they had thought it at all possible that my answer might be “No”; and if, contrary to their expectation, “No” had been the answer, they would not have published it.

That edition was reviewed in the journal Theology by a theologian of my own age-group (now Professor of New Testament in the University of London). He commented on my remark that the professional theologian is apt to be more skeptical than the professional historian by saying that “this is presumably because the theologian is driven to a more exacting technique of criticism by the fact that the Gospels are not written purely as historical documents” and added: “In the question which the author supplies as his title there is another question latent, ‘Reliable as what?’ ”

This was a point worth making. What matters above all else is the reliability of the New Testament documents (and indeed of the scriptures as a whole) as a corpus of witness to the self-revelation of God in Christ. In my book I was concerned rather with their reliability as a record of historical fact. This is not irrelevant to their theological reliability: since the Christian revelation was given (as its earliest proponents claimed) in the course of human history, it is not unimportant to examine its foundation documents from the standpoint of historical criticism, which is what my little book undertook to do.

Archaeological research continues to provide pieces of evidence bearing on the New Testament record. The excavations at Caesarea, for example, begun in 1956 and continued in the following years, have provided the only extant inscriptional reference to Pontius Pilate and the earliest known Jewish mention of Nazareth. The reference to Pilate comes in an inscribed stone found during excavations in the Caesarean theatre in 1961: it records the erection of a Tiberieum, a building dedicated to the Emperor Tiberius, by Pontius Pilate, who is described as “prefect” (not “procurator”) of Judaea. The mention of Nazareth comes in a fragmentary Hebrew inscription found during excavations in 1962 in the northern part of the city. The inscription, on a marble tablet, listed the twenty-four priestly courses (cf. 1 Chron. 24:3–19), with a note of the places in Galilee where the members of each course lived after the destruction of the temple by the Romans and the erection of the pagan city of Aelia Capitolina on the site of Jerusalem. (The identity of the priestly courses was preserved for centuries after they had ceased to discharge their functions in the temple, against the day when they might be called upon to resume them.) The eighteenth course, Happizzez (1 Chron. 24:15), is assigned to Nazareth (nṣrt). While the place-name Nazareth occurs in Greek in the Gospels and subsequent Christian literature, this Caesarean inscription presents its earliest Hebrew occurrence: the next earliest is in a piyyuṭ or liturgical poem of the eleventh century A.D.

Many a topographical detail that comes to light from the world of the New Testament helps to place a New Testament reference in its proper setting and to fix it more securely in historical geography. This is so, for instance, with the port of Troas (more fully, Alexandria Troas) which is mentioned twice in the narrative of Acts and twice in Paul’s correspondence. Dr. C.J. Hemer has recently brought out the importance of this place as a focal point in communications under the Roman Empire: this goes far to explain Paul’s desire to preach the gospel there (2 Cor. 2:12) and the existence of a Christian community there a year or two later (Acts 20:6 ff.).

The texts from Qumran (popularly called the Dead Sea Scrolls), discovered in 1947 and the following years, constitute another form of archaeological evidence. The great majority of the texts thus far published belong to the last two centuries B.C., but they have provided welcome information about the religious background of the gospel story, against which the New Testament, and particularly those parts of it which have a Palestinian setting, can be read with fresh understanding.

When the Qumran scrolls were first discovered, it was thought that their main importance would lie in the light they threw on the history of the Old Testament text. But it was quickly realized that their relevance to the study of the New Testament was even greater than to the study of the Old, and it is New Testament students in particular who have paid closest attention to them.

When my book on the New Testament documents was first written, I was a university teacher of classics, academically interested in the New Testament as a body of Greek historical and religious literature. A new perspective has been dictated by my subsequent life and work in a theological faculty, thanks to which I am aware of aspects of the question which scarcely occurred to my mind thirty-five years ago. The book did indeed include a chapter on the Gospels, in which some attention was paid to source criticism and Aramaic origins; but important dimensions of gospel study were passed over without mention.

There was a time when Mark’s narrative was regarded as being for the most part a straightforward and unsophisticated record of fact, by contrast with the Fourth Gospel, which was taken to be essentially a theological treatise, presented in narrative style. No such contrast would be drawn today between Mark and John. Mark writes with a theological motive throughout—the proclamation of Jesus as Son of God. This title is given to him in the first sentence of Mark’s Gospel (according to the fuller text) and is still more emphatically bestowed upon him by the heavenly voice at his baptism: “Thou art my beloved Son” (Mark 1:11). It reappears at the end of the record when (of all people) the centurion who is in command at the crucifixion expresses the significance of the death of Jesus and incidentally divulges the messianic secret: “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39). Mark, that is to say, emphasizes Jesus’ divine sonship as clearly as John does. But this recognition of Mark’s theological motive does not at all impair the historical value of his narrative: why should it? The question of the historicity of the gospel record is largely independent of the literary criticism of the gospels or the theology of the evangelists.

Where gospel criticism is concerned, I devoted some pages of the aforementioned book to the older solution offered to the “Synoptic problem” in terms of literary sources. The main lines of literary source-criticism stand, but interest has shifted to pre-literary history of the gospel material, explored by means of tradition criticism and redaction criticism. Tradition is the handing down and dissemination of the gospel material in the believing community, more especially by word of mouth before written records began to be made; redaction is the treatment given by the individual evangelists to the material which they received by tradition.

Tradition criticism (of which form criticism is one aspect) has suffered in one influential school of thought by its association with a thorough-going skepticism about the historicity of the material which is theologically or philosophically motivated and has no essential connection with the critical method. This skepticism appears, for example, in the ruthless, and indeed arbitrary, application of “criteria of authenticity” such as would not be countenanced by historical critics working in other fields.

Most questionable of these criteria is the “criterion of dissimilarity,” according to which nothing in the tradition can be confidently acknowledged as a genuine saying or action of Jesus if it is paralleled in rabbinical records or in the life and thought of the early church. It is antecedently improbable that Jesus differed at every point from his Jewish contemporaries, or that men and women in the early church did not inherit his teaching and repeat it and adapt it to fresh situations. The picture emerging from an exclusive concentration on the unique features in Jesus’ practice and preaching could be a completely distorted one.

The criterion of dissimilarity, however, while inadmissible as an argument against the authenticity of material which does not conform with it, can be used with caution as an argument for the genuineness of material which does conform with it. For example, Jesus engaged in lively controversy with his contemporaries on the question of sabbath observance, which was not a major issue in the early church. Circumcision, on the other hand, was a major issue in the early church, but on this Jesus is not recorded as making any pronouncement at all. (His allusion to current practice in John 7:22 f. is not a pronouncement on circumcision.) We may conclude that both his engagement in the sabbath controversy and his nonengagement in the circumcision controversy are true to history.

Again, with the single and significant exception of Stephen, the early church does not appear to have taken over from Jesus the use of the designation “the Son of Man.” The criterion of dissimilarity might suggest that Jesus’ distinctive employment of this phrase is historically well grounded. Curiously, however, several scholars who most confidently invoke the criterion of dissimilarity are unwilling to give it due weight here: they think it unlikely that Jesus ever spoke of “the Son of Man” and certain that he never used the phrase to designate himself. On the other hand, the use of Abba in addressing God, which was taken over by the early church, is almost universally (and rightly) recognized as Jesus’ most characteristic locution. So even those who attach highest importance to the criterion of dissimilarity modify it when they consider that there is good reason for doing so.

The fact that Jesus is not recorded as making a pronouncement to which disputants on either side of the circumcision controversy could have appealed should warn us against accepting uncritically the argument that utterances, possibly made in his name by prophets in the church, were readily included in the tradition of his ministry. The same warning is provided by the care which Paul takes, in answering the Corinthians’ questions about marriage and divorce, to distinguish between what “not I, but the Lord” says and what “I say, not the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:10, 12): he does not invest his own judgment with the authority of the historical Jesus, whose ruling on this matter has been preserved independently in the gospel record (Mark 10:2–12).

Again, we must remember that the pre-literary phase of the gospel tradition lasted not much more than one generation—two generations at the most, where the Johannine tradition is concerned. This means that eyewitnesses of the historical events were around, and their testimony, if necessary, would serve to check any gross distortion of the tradition. When Paul summarizes the kerygma which he had received and delivered in turn to others, he includes a reference to eyewitnesses. Among the resurrection appearances of Jesus he lists the occasion when he appeared to more than 500 people—“most of whom,” he adds, “are still alive, though some have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:6).

Paul wrote these words about twenty-five years after the event. Ten years later (more or less) Mark wrote his Gospel, probably in the first instance for the Christians of Rome who about that time were undergoing persecution under Nero. The gap of thirty-five years between the events recorded and Mark’s recording of them is not a seriously long one: it is comparable to the gap separating us today from the events of World War II. No one, writing an account today of those events, could hope to get away with it if he misrepresented them in terms which could be refuted by many people’s recollection of them; they would certainly say to him, “You are wasting your breath: I remember it as if it were yesterday!” Vincent Taylor had good reason to remark that if some proponents of form criticism were right, “the disciples must have been translated to heaven immediately after the Resurrection.” No matter how emphatically the dogma is repeated that the early Christians had no interest in the historical Jesus for his own sake, the dogma is a priori improbable, and there is no necessity for any one to accept it without proof.

The tradition was handed down along various lines and in a variety of centers. There was not the central control which one finds in the transmission of rabbinical tradition, imposing near-verbal identity on all its forms. Instead of such a central control, the early Christians had the presence of the living Spirit, not only keeping the ministry of Jesus fresh in their minds but interpreting it and applying it to their changing situations. But it remained essentially the same tradition as it was received by the various evangelists—not by the three Synoptists only but by all four.

When we come to consider the redactional activity of the evangelists, we must beware of a further fallacy—that which ignores the possibility that the evangelist was at all influenced in his personal reworking and presentation of the tradition by any factual information that he might have possessed outside the tradition. One recent writer on Matthew’s redactional activity, sharing the common recognition of his Gospel as a new and enlarged edition of Mark’s, goes almost to the extreme of denying that Matthew had any independent source for his non-Markan material: this material is all part of Matthew’s editorial work, so that the author of the Sermon on the Mount turns out to have been not Jesus, but Matthew. Such a conclusion is the reductio ad absurdum of the method.

When Mark himself received the tradition, some of it—pre-eminently the passion narrative—had already taken shape as a continuous record. Other elements may have come to him as isolated units, but Mark skillfully arranged them so as to weave them into a coherent pattern. Did Mark make up this skillful arrangement as he thought fit, or was he acquainted, over and above the traditional material, with an outline of the story which followed a generally chronological sequence and provided him with a thread, so to speak, on which to string the beads of tradition?

In 1932 C.H. Dodd argued that Mark did know such an outline, which could be traced not only in his Gospel but also in some of the speeches in Acts (especially Acts 10:36–43) and in certain passages in the New Testament epistles. His argument has been subjected to severe (but not fatal) criticism. Thirty years earlier, however, Allan Menzies anticipated later form critics by expressing the view that Mark was the first “to gather the narratives about Jesus together into a connected history,” but differed from them in concluding that to “find the cord on which all these pearls were to be placed” and to “fix their proper position on that cord” Mark “must have been guided by one who knew the life of Jesus not only as a set of isolated stories but as a connected whole inspired by a growing purpose.” My reading of Mark’s record persuades me that Menzies was right (and any one who pleases is at liberty to recall here the tradition of Papias that Mark set Peter’s reminiscences down in writing). The sequence of Mark’s story is too coherent to be accidental and too spontaneous to be contrived.

Luke, by his own account, derived the information in his twofold history from a variety of sources. Some of those which he used for his Gospel are revealed to us by comparative gospel study; Mark’s record was one of them. The establishment of the sources of Acts must be a more speculative exercise. Much more attention has been paid in recent years than formerly to Luke’s theological perspective. He is said to have replaced the original eschatological note of the Christian message by an emphasis on salvation history, in which (under the impact of the delay of the parousia) a third age of indefinite duration (the age of the church) was added to the age of Israel and the age of Christ: the age of Christ, instead of being the climax of all things, now became the mid-point of time. This account of the matter is at least an over-statement, but even if it were not, it is difficult to see how a change in theological perspective would adversely affect the historical trustworthiness of the narrative. (It might rather be argued that the historical events affected the theological perspective.)

The historical trustworthiness of Luke’s narrative is specially wide open to inspection in that he alone of the evangelists places the events he records in the context of contemporary world history. This becomes particularly relevant to our purpose when his narrative moves out of its Palestinian setting into the main centers of Graeco-Roman civilization, as it does from Acts 11:19 onwards.

When the canons of historical criticism are applied to Acts, its trustworthiness remains unimpaired for all the emphasis laid on the author’s stylistic concern or theological perspective. We may be told that we should concentrate less on the details of the story of Paul’s voyage and shipwreck and more on the art with which the story is told, but the historian will continue to recognize this narrative as “one of the most instructive documents for the knowledge of ancient seamanship.” As for the broad outline of the book, it remains true, as was said by a Lord Chief Justice of England fifty years ago, “that the best short general picture of the Pax Romana and all that it meant—good roads and posting, good police, freedom from brigandage and piracy, freedom of movement, toleration and justice—is to be found in the experience, written in Greek, of a Jew who happened to be a Roman citizen—that is, in the Acts of the Apostles.”

The author of Acts writes with a purpose: in one way or another he is concerned to commend and defend the gospel and those who preach it. Yet for his work, as a modern English historian of imperial Rome puts it, “the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming.… Roman historians have long taken it for granted.”

We do not have the same kind of comparative material to control the record of Acts as the other Gospels supply for Luke’s “former treatise,” but we have comparative material of another kind in the earlier letters of Paul. The sequence of Paul’s apostolic career which can be established from his letters agrees closely with the sequence outlined in Acts (when regard is had to the gaps in both bodies of literature). Moreover, while in his letters Paul speaks in his own person whereas in Acts we see him from another man’s personal and theological point of view, it is nevertheless the same Paul who is presented to our view.

As for John’s record, self-evidently theological as it is from the prologue, with its affirmation of the incarnation of the Eternal Word, right on to Thomas’s confession of the risen Christ as “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28) and beyond that into the epilogue, the narrative form is not simply the literary framework in which the theology is presented. John presents his teaching in the form of a gospel because he is aware of the danger of dehistoricizing the Christian faith implicit in the docetic tendencies of the age in which he wrote. At a certain point in time, he maintains, the Eternal Word became flesh and appeared on earth as true man; at another point in time, several years later, the man in whom the Eternal Word had become incarnate died on a cross, and the reality of his death could be vouched for by a reliable eye-witness. Nevertheless, in these historical events truth of permanent and universal validity is embodied and made available to men and women for their acceptance.

C.H. Dodd, insisting that love is, “as a matter of fact, the only kind of union between persons of which we can have any possible experience,” goes on to point out that, according to John, this is the kind of union into which believers are brought with God.

“He makes use of the strongest expressions for union with God that contemporary religious language provided, in order to assure his readers that he does really mean what he says: that through faith in Christ we may enter into a personal community of life with the eternal God, which has the character of agapē, which is essentially supernatural and not of this world, and yet plants its feet firmly in this world, not only because real agapē cannot but express itself in practical conduct, but also because the crucial act of agapē was actually performed in history, on an April day about A.D. 30, at a supper-table in Jerusalem, in a garden across the Kidron valley, in the headquarters of Pontius Pilate, and on a Roman cross at Golgotha. So concrete, so actual is the nature of the divine agapē; yet none the less for that, by entering into the relation of agapē thus opened up for men, we may dwell in God and He in us” (The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, Cambridge University Press, 1953, p. 199).

The scholar who has just been quoted devoted much time and study to what he called “historical tradition in the Fourth Gospel.” His conclusions have tended to confirm the findings more tentatively published by a number of other scholars from 1938 onwards—that the Fourth Evangelist was not simply concerned to compose an imaginative reconstruction of the record found in the earlier Gospels, in which he could give free rein to his theological insights, but drew upon a trustworthy tradition, independent of Mark’s, which preserves topographical details of Jesus’ early ministry and aspects of his teaching which are not found in our other records. Yet this tradition agrees with the Markan outline not only in beginning with the preaching of John the Baptist (on which it gives welcome information not obtainable from the Synoptists) and in ending with the passion and resurrection narratives, but in placing the central crisis of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, immediately after the feeding of the multitude. This independent tradition was not only preserved in the memory of the last survivor of Jesus’ closest companions but was also probably kept alive and vigorous in the continuing life of at least one Christian community.

When critical trends of the present day are neither accepted uncritically nor repudiated without examination, but subjected to the same analytical scrutiny as they apply to the New Testament documents, they will be found to make their own contribution to validating the historicity of those records. And when criticism has done its perfect work, the last word remains with those who listen to the New Testament message in its entirety, bearing witness not only to events of the first century but to the abiding way of faith and life, and who recognize, because of its response in their own experience, that this message has “the ring of truth.”

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