“A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume Two: Mentor, Message, and Miracles,” by John P. Meier (Doubleday/Anchor,
1,232 pp.; $40, hardcover); “Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom,” by Ben Witherington III (Fortress, 352 pp.; $35, hardcover); “The Gospel of Jesus: The Pastoral Relevance of the Synoptic Problem,” by William R. Farmer (Westminster/John Knox, 240 pp.; $19.99, paper). Reviewed by Robert W. Yarbrough, associate professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, Saint Louis, Missouri.
In a cover story on “The New, Unimproved Jesus” (CT, Sept. 13, 1993), New Testament scholar N. Thomas Wright surveyed the most influential recent attempts to reconstruct the “real” Jesus. While sharply critical of some of the arguments he assessed, Wright concluded by affirming the value of historical study of Jesus: “Let us not be on our guard against learning more about Jesus as he really was. In dismissing maverick writers and rejecting unsound scholarship, we should not miss out on the possibility of a new vision of the real Jesus that could revitalize the church and challenge the world of the twenty-first century.” Since Wright’s piece was published, the output of scholarship on the historical Jesus has continued at a prodigious rate. Here is an update from the field.
Remember that playground ditty sung out by children jumping rope? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief / Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief. Scholarly theories about the historical Jesus have by now multiplied to a tangled mass every bit as disparate as the characters in the jump-rope rhyme: Wandering preacher, zealot, activist, magician; / Cynic peasant, prophet, wisdom-logician. (The rhythm works out after about a dozen tries – honestly.)
In recent years, books have appeared presenting Jesus in all of these roles, and others besides. It is enough to make nonspecialists throw up their hands in dismay, or maybe brandish clenched fists. Martyrs once died for the sake of a faith staked (literally) on the authenticity of Jesus’ words, but today’s high-profile scholars, with their radically incompatible historical reconstructions, seem to agree only that Jesus never said or did most of what the Gospels report.
For some, it is tempting to give up hope that any new light – or, indeed, any light at all – could emerge from academic life-of-Jesus study. It is tempting to dismiss what biblical scholarship generates in its ongoing interaction with the wealth of ancient data that mediate knowledge of Jesus to us. Some have even asked, Why not ditch scholarly study of Scripture altogether?
This sentiment is not just the anti-intellectual impulse of a few on the Religious Right. Seminaries across the theological spectrum have reduced Bible and biblical language requirements in recent times. The reasons given publicly vary. One typically hears that practical skills, such as counseling and preaching, or contemporary topics in the areas of social science and critical theory, deserve more of the time traditionally devoted to technical biblical study. Few would question the value of practical and contemporary preparation. Yet the real reason for such curricular revamping cannot be separated from the apparently capricious nature and dubious results of much modern biblical scholarship. And if educational professionals are skeptical of the academic paper chase in biblical research, can the nonspecialist public be blamed for following suit?
Nevertheless, to be globally skeptical of academic Jesus-research would be a mistake. Just because some learned approaches to Jesus tend toward excess does not mean that all are useless. Reflection on three new books will indicate why.
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.
Second, we can be reminded of what one scholar long called “the peril of modernizing Jesus.” “Nothing ages faster than relevance,” Meier wisely notes. “The ‘cutting edge’ of scholarship at any given moment often turns out to be the sharp cliff of Gerasa, off of which academic lemmings keep hurling themselves.” Regarding the vexed question of Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom of God, Meier asserts that “the question must be resolved not by what strikes us moderns as a priori likely but by what Jesus himself said and did.” He concedes and laments that some of his fellow scholars seem to be “ruled more by the laws of Madison Avenue than by the laws of evidence.” It is salutary to be reminded of the danger of domesticating Jesus. This happens when our convictions blind us to what the New Testament texts are actually trying to convey. And it is not only scholars who are plagued by this tendency.
Third, Meier decisively lays to rest the tired claim that no intellectually responsible person can believe in miracles. Only 6 percent of Americans polled by Gallup disagree completely with the statement that “Even today, miracles are performed by the power of God.” In response to Bultmann’s well-known assertion that it is impossible to turn on a light switch “and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of … miracles,” Meier writes: “A more plausible conclusion is that only 6 percent of Americans share the mind-set of some German university professors.”
Meier also convincingly shows that Jesus was not a Cynic philosopher (Crossan), not a magician (Morton Smith), and not just a Jewish “holy man” (Vermes). Positively, sober research can justifiably conclude that Jesus was – at the historical minimum – an eschatological prophet and miracle worker who claimed to know “directly and intuitively what was God’s will for his people Israel in the last days.”
In this decade of a seemingly endless, sometimes crazy succession of reconstructed “historical” Jesuses, Meier’s monumental tome is a sheet anchor of stability against gales of arbitrary theory, undisciplined speculation, and unsound use of sources. But Meier is not the only scholar whose recent work illustrates the value of careful attention to the ancient sources that ground our knowledge of Jesus.
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