|
Contents' List for 1998  Index for 1998
 Happy New Year! The Swanson household has had a merry Christmas indeed with Neela, a freshman at Berea College in Kentucky, home for the holidays. It's a good time to start up HeRD again.
Veteran HeRD recipients will have observed that HeRD in '97 continued to become more theoretical and less anecdotal, an evolution that it's been going on for some time now. Looking ahead, that trend will continue over the next few months. I'm pushing to finish a text on early church history in Thai church historical perspective, and so there'll continue to be a strong emphasis on the early church and its lessons for our situation in Thailand. If all goes according to plan, I'll be spending 5-6 weeks in March and April with the Karen churches of the Musikee District. Karen church history in Thailand, thus, will probably contribute a fair number of 1998 HeRDs. In June, I'll begin teaching a course on research methods to M.Div. students, this in preparation for their working on their "ministerial theses" for the McGilvary Faculty of Theology. We can expect that the research these students do for the course and for their theses will contribute a great deal to HeRD later this year and in early 1999. The topics they're considering are exciting and represent the frontiers of church-based research in Thailand. All in all, it should be a fun year. As always, your contributions and comments are a welcome, important part of HeRD.
Judaism occupied a unique and not entirely comfortable position among the religions and social communities of the Roman Empire. Wayne Meeks in his book, The Moral World of the First Christians , argues that it wasn't theological beliefs that distinguished the Jews from other communities. Others believed in a single God, and the Jews themselves generally believed in a whole range of divine higher powers below God, powers not unlike the gods of other peoples. Meeks writes, "What made Jewish monotheism unique--and difficult for other people in Roman pluralist society to understand--was the social embodiment of their belief. One God alone must be worshipped; the cults of all others must be shunned. The exclusivity of cult corresponds to the boundaries of the Jewish communities as resident aliens in the cities of the empire." (p. 92) Cultic practices, thus, rather than theological beliefs defined Jewish relationships with their neighbors.
Thai Protestantism stands in a similar relationship to its neighbors. Any serious study of classical Buddhism and classical Christianity will turn up numerous, profound parallels. Study of Thai culture-Buddhism and Thai culture-Christianity will yield its own crop of parallels. What distinguishes Thai Protestantism is its insistence on generally rigid boundaries in cultic practices. And just as in the case of Roman Empire Judaism, those exclusivistic boundaries define Protestant communities as "resident aliens" in the cities and villages of Thailand.
In HeRD #480, we summarized Edwin Zehner's article in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (September 1996) on "Thai Protestants and Local Supernaturalism." Zehner argues that Thai Protestantism's understanding of traditional animism has become dualistic. It brands animistic powers and beings as evil and opposed to God. If Zehner is correct, Thai Protestant dualism represents an important departure from Thai animism generally. In this light, the following comment about first century Jewish and Christian animism from Wayne Meeks' The Moral World of the First Christians is worth our notice. Meeks writes, "Jewish sources from Palestine in the Roman period picture this superhuman world in a rather more dualistic pattern than we find in the literary sources from pagan authors. That is, there was a fundamental moral division in the divine world, on the one side God and his angels, on the other, Satan or the devil and his angels, or 'demons.' The early Christians, insofar as our sources reveal, shared this dualistic vision." (pp. 100-101) Early Christians, that is, joined with Judaism in transforming the animistic world of the first century with their dualistic world view in a process that seems striking similar to the one described by Zehner.
It seems likely that there's a direct, if distant connection between ancient Jewish-Christian and latter day Thai Protestant dualistic animism. Western Christendom has been a "carrier" of ancient Persian-Jewish dualism to such an extent that the Western world view is centrally and essentially a dualistic one. Presbyterian and other Protestant missionaries introduced this dualistic heritage to their converts. Thai Protestantism embodies that dualism in, for example, the way in which it walls itself off from general Thai society. It, apparently and not surprisingly, has also introduced this dualism into its understanding of the spirit world, and it's done this in ways that parallels ancient Jewish thought. That too isn't surprising, since Thai Protestant dualism is the great, great grandchild of Jewish dualism, many times removed.
There was a heavy strain of asceticism in the earliest church, and the Gospel portraits of Jesus clearly reflect that asceticism. It was, however, an asceticism that didn't detach itself from the larger world. Wayne Meeks in The Moral World of the First Christians writes about the disciples whom Jesus sent out to preach his message (see Mark 6:6-11), "Notice that the radical separation of Jesus' messengers from the ordinary person's rootage in place, family, and livelihood requires for its fulfillment unqualified dependence on the charity of strangers. The 'asceticism' of the messengers is not the means of their salvation, so to speak, but the means for their mission." (p. 105)
Jewish restoration movements, such as the Jesus Movement (the earliest church) adopted one of two general strategies in their attempts to restore Israel to God's favor. Some withdrew to form puritan communities. Others, like the followers of Jesus, engaged the world through teaching and proselytization. Each strategy was risky. Withdrawal preserved purity at the risk of irrelevance and sterility. Engagement preserved relevance and vitality at the risk of impurity. Without trying to decide which approach is "better," it's worth noting that the earliest church decided to risk its integrity and identity for the sake of its mission. And in doing so, it claimed to be following the example and commands of the Master.
"It is not only our ignorance and distant angle of vision that make defining the [early] church problematical: the early Christians themselves had a great deal of trouble deciding just what their movement was out to become."
from Wayne Meeks, The Moral World of the First Christians , p. 120
Over the next several HeRDs, I'd like to "wrestle in public" over a central issue in the study of early church history, that is the "essential" nature of the church itself. This issue has, I think, important implications for the study of Thai Protestant history. It focuses on the very earliest years after Jesus. Was the earliest group of believers in Jesus the "church"? Traditional church historiography generally has held that the church began at Pentecost. More recent scholarship has discarded that notion in favor of a more complex model, the "Jesus Movement" model. The "church" began as a Jewish restoration movement, gradually separated from Judaism, and eventually became a distinct religious movement of its own. Over a much longer period of time, it then became a fully institutionalized religious organization. The history of the early church is the history of the institutionalization of the original Jesus Movement.
That framework makes early church history clear and shows a general direction. But, it doesn't feel "right" somehow. The distinction between movement and institution isn't that neat, not in actual practice. The very earliest Jesus believers formed groups, had distinct rituals, recognized certain leaders, and otherwise organized themselves as a separate social-religious entity within Judaism. They had organizational structures, however true it is that those structures were ill-defined and various. Much later, when the church was supposedly an organization rather than a movement, one still finds strong elements of the fluidity and enthusiasm of a movement present. The 2nd century ascetics in Syria, for example, functioned outside the structures of the churches and yet still had an important role in church life. Revivals of interest in the Holy Spirit (usually identified with the "movement era") appear over and over and over throughout church history. The early churches, it seems to me, combined various characteristics of movements and institutions in various ways. They could be more "rigid" or more "fluid" in structures, and they could shift back and forth from rigidity to fluidity (within limits) depending on many other factors.
We need to re-examine this movement-institution model, both in terms of the early church and the Thai church.
HeRD #496 questioned the "movement to institution" model of early church history. Emil Brunner in his book, The Misunderstanding of the Church (1960), is a particularly lucid advocate of that model. Brunner states, "...the ecclesia of the New Testament is a communion of persons and nothing else. It is the Body of Christ, but not an institution. Therefore it is not yet what it later became as the result of a slow, steady, hence unnoticed process of transformation: it is not yet a Church. The Church...is distinguished from the ecclesia above all in this--that it is no longer primarily a communion of persons, but rather an institution, and...understands itself as such." (p. 74, emphasis in original) Brunner doesn't use the term "movement," but it's clear that he has the concept in mind. He insists, thus, that the ecclesia is essentially different from the church. It has a purity and integrity in its communion or fellowship that the church as an institution doesn't have. Brunner's reconstruction of early church history is primarily a theological reconstruction and only secondarily a historiographical one. His understanding of the ecclesia is premised on its being the body of Christ, associated with Christ, composed of those who knew Christ personally and received his instruction directly. Brunner's task is to try to understand how the ecclesia became the institutional church, esp. how it became the highly structured, formal, ritualized, and rigidly institutionalized Roman Catholic Church.
When New Testament historians and scholars refer to the "Jesus Movement," they have something like Brunner's theologized description in mind, though few would accept the assertions of purity and integrity assigned to it by Brunner. But they would agree that there is something essentially different between the Jesus Movement and the later church. It was more expressive of Jesus' message and intentions than the later, institutionalized church. It was egalitarian and loving. It was thrilled by Christ and committed to him. It was Spirit-filled. It was a Movement! And, progressively, over the decades and centuries this essential nature of the Jesus Movement was lost as it became the church.
Two points of doubt: first, the church emerged as an separate religious organization because it intentionally started taking in large numbers of Gentiles. Once that happened it couldn't possibly have remained within Judaism. This has nothing to do with processes of institutionalization. Second, as mentioned in HeRD #496, the earliest church already had marks of an institution and, even two centuries later, it still showed elements of being a movement. There's no question it changed significantly over that time, it's just that I'm less and less convinced that the movement-institution dichotomy helps us understand that change.
HeRDs #496 and 497 raised doubts about the interpretation of the early church that sees it as a movement that developed into an institution. The concepts of "movement" and "institution" imply that clear distinctions exist between the two and that one can classify human social groups as one or the other. Thus, we have the academic convention of using the name, "Jesus Movement," to describe the followers of Jesus before the Christian church emerged as a separate entity. The term suggests that the Jesus Movement was only loosely organized at best and that it was a movement within Judaism. Only over a period of decades did the Jesus Movement slowly transform itself into the church. The movement-organization dichotomy also implies an inherent tension between the two.
Wayne Meeks, however, in The Moral World of the First Christians argues that the followers of Jesus from the very beginning placed a high value on unity. This emphasis on unity was highly unusual, if not unique, among the religions of the Roman Empire. Meeks argues, furthermore, that out of that drive for unity emerged the empire-wide structures of the Catholic Church. What this means is that the later organization of the institutionalized church was a flowering of its movement era. One of the Jesus Movement's most cherished values led naturally to its becoming an institution. Now, what does that mean? I'm still not sure I know, but if Meeks is correct the early history of the church is partly an unfolding of certain inherent tendencies rather than a process of slow ossification (death by organization rather than strangulation!). There isn't a tension between the characteristics of being a movement and of being an organization. The early churches, that is, weren't schizophrenic in their emergence as separate, increasingly structured religious bodies. The movement-organization paradigm, in sum, seems to be of limited value at best.
In all of these musing on the distinction between movement and institution, the point I want to make is this: there's no point at which the early church, suddenly or gradually, started being an institution. There is, likewise, no point at which it stopped being a movement. The movement-institution paradigm doesn't give us a correct view of the birth or historical development of the early church.
The "movement-organization" model for interpreting church life is extremely important to our interpretation of Thai church history. I'd like to deal with two points, one in this HeRD and one in the next. The assumption that these two categories are mutually exclusive has itself been a factor in Thai church history. Since the 1920s, the rationale for Thai Protestant revivalism has been that the churches are largely lifeless organizations, all rules and regulations and procedures and no Holy Spirit. Western Pentecostal missionaries, in particular, have until recently resisted church organizational structures as being deadening and dangerous. Organization kills the Spirit. In many quarters, I suspect, missionaries and church leaders would agree that Thai churches need to be less of an organization and more of a movement than they are today. The models of movement (positive, dynamic, Spirit-filled) and organization (negative, rigid, Spirit-denying) influence the way in which individuals, missions, and churches frame their work. Although not generally stated in so many words, the drive for renewing Thai churches and giving them a more movement-like character is a major theme in Thai Protestant history since at least the 1920s.
But, what if the model is a false one? What if these two "things" can't be distinguished from each other in any clear way in the real world? That would seem to call the whole rationale for the way a number of missions and churches work and think about their work into serious question. In order to exist at all, churches have to be both organized to one degree or another and have a sense of energy and liveliness ("Spirit" in theological parlance) to one degree or another as well. Some may be more organized and less energetic. Some may be more energetic and less organized. If Hope of Bangkok Church is any measure, others may be both more organized and more energetic. If any number of tiny congregations scattered across the country is any measure, other churches are both poorly organized and lacking in energy.
Using categories like "lively" or "energetic" instead of "movement" changes the whole way we talk about the nature of church life. A movement, by definition, can't be organized. Once it's organized, it's no longer a movement. But alive, energetic churches can be (and almost certainly will be) organized churches as well.
In HeRD #500 , we saw that the movement-organization model has been influential in the history of Thai Protestantism. It has also been influential, on me at least, in interpreting Thai church history. In my (draft) history of Protestant pastoral care in Thailand, I describe in some detail how the 19th-century Presbyterian missionaries in northern Thailand essentially defined "the church" as an "organization". To them, a church had to have a list of members, a set of officers, and a building. The implication in the book and in my classroom interaction with the students is clear. Their view was "bad". Embedded in this interpretation is the further assumption that the missionaries had a dead, static view of the church. That assumption, in turn, emerges from the hidden assumption that movements are good and organizations are bad and that the two categories are mutually exclusive. If, however, we were to go back to the records we'd find numerous indications that the 19th-century missionaries did not have an entirely static, organizational view of the church. They, for example, measured the strength of their churches by their rate of membership growth and by their enthusiasm for evangelism. They took pleasure in lively churches and worried when churches seemed to languish.
The concept of "movement" needs to be carefully thought out. In terms of early church history, I'm beginning to think there never was such a thing as the "Jesus Movement". There was a loosely structured grouping of people, what we might call a sect, who believed that Jesus was the Messiah and, for some at least, more than "just" the Messiah. Perhaps the best term is simply "followers of Jesus." The concept also needs to be thought out in terms of Thai church history. It probably should be discarded entirely.
Some will, I suppose, see all of this movement-institution "stuff" as a tempest in a tea pot. There are some important issues involved, however. If, as I suggested in HeRD #501, there never was a "Jesus Movement" then what were the earliest believers in Jesus? Were they already, in fact, "the church"? And if they were the church, that means that "the church" is not necessarily or essentially the distinct organizational body of a separate religion. It once existed, for example, within Judaism. If that's true, it would seem to me that such a thought could have important implications for evangelism in Thailand. Protestant missions are premised on the firm conviction, never questioned, that the church must be the Church --separate, distinct, apart, and on its own. But, if it didn't start out that way 2,000 years ago is it necessary to have it start out that way in Thailand? Is a church within the structures of the Three Gems of Buddhism possible?
Protestant missions, furthermore, is premised on the hidden assumption that salvation is to be found only in the separate and distinct church. But if the church was originally located within Judaism, what does that mean for our claims of an exclusive salvation apart from other religious traditions?
HeRD #502 raised the question, in light of the relationship of the earliest church to Judaism, whether its necessary for the church to exist as a separate organization in order to be the church. It made the point that the answer to this question is potentially important to how Christians might carry out evangelism in Thailand.
Eduard Schweizer's Church Order in the New Testament offers further insights into this question. Schweizer points out repeatedly that the earliest church never intended to divide from Judaism and never saw itself as anything but a part of Judaism. The church, he insists, "...continued in its Jewish national and religious associations." (p. 34) Indeed, it took Jerusalem, rather than Galilee, as its center to make the point that it was the true Israel. The temple and its rites belonged to it. He concludes, "The tradition shows nowhere any revolutionary attempt to build up a rival organization beside Israel; even the most radical group round Stephen contends only in support of the Old Testament, regarding the rejection of the temple as fidelity to the history, properly understood, of God's dealings with Israel--no deviation from the Old Testament is even suggested anywhere." (p. 46) There was, in other words, a great deal of convergence between the earliest church and Judaism. Schweizer, however, also points out that there was an important point of divergence. The earliest church could no longer give primary significance to the law, the temple, and the synagogue, however much it might honor them. Jesus was the point of divergence. Ultimate importance was given to him, rather than the law.
In Thailand, Protestantism has presented Christianity as a radical divergence from Buddhism-animism. It hasn't so much denied the existence of convergence, historically, as it has simply failed to see that there could be any convergence between Thai Christianity and Buddhism-animism. Any convergence that existed has been judged as dangerous. There is convergence, however, and probably far more than we realize. What would have happened (and could still happen) if that convergence were seen as a "natural" part of the emergence of faith in Jesus in a new cultural setting? For some decades there existed a Jesus-Judaism. Is a Jesus-Buddhism possible?
"If the life of Jesus does not, for me, put up any questions of the sort that the life of Napoleon, of J. F. Kennedy, of Gautama Buddha, of Hughie Long, put up, then I am a docetist. My Christ has not a real human. He is a theological construct. He never existed. If you have never seen Jesus, in your mind's eye, as faced with inescapable political social and personal integrity options, then you are a docetist. Your Christ never existed. He is a puppet in a theologians' puppet show."
from Sebastian Moore "The Search for the Beginning," in Christ: Faith and History (eds. Sykes & Clayton), p. 84.
"Trying to be as honest as I can, and invoking all that I know of human psychology, I am more and more deeply convinced that the birth of this faith is unaccountable for in ordinary psychological terms."
from Sebatian Moore "The Search for the Beginning," in Christ: Faith and History (eds. Sykes & Clayton), p. 88.
Cornelia Ann Kammerer's article on the Akha tribal Christians of northern Thailand in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (September 1996) compares and contrasts "traditionalist" Akha feelings about Akha culture to those of Akha Christian converts. She documents how the converts largely reject and ridicule not only Akha traditional religion but also traditional Akha culture more generally. The converts no longer find their identity in these things. At a number of points in the article, Kammerer betrays feelings of antipathy towards missionary Christianity and its consequences for the Akha people, traditionalists as well as converts.
This article suggests the need for a dialogue between anthropologists such as Kammerer and conservative Protestant missionaries. Commenting on how the missionaries project their own fear of heathenism onto their converts, she writes, "As an anthropologist, my opinion differs from that of these foreign missionaries. The Akha traditionalists with whom I did fieldwork do not fear their ancestors, who are the spirits to whom they make annual offerings at their household altars. Instead they see themselves as caring for these ancestors, who, in turn, care for them." (p. 331) Conservative missionaries should listen to Kammerer. Many Akha people are entirely at peace within their traditional structures of belief. Angry, judgmental assaults on those beliefs builds barriers that hardly reflect the Christian message of a loving, compassionate Saviour. By the same token, Kammerer, however, also needs to listen to the missionaries (or, better, the converts themselves). Not every Akha experiences traditional structures as benevolent. Some find them burdensome and worse than useless. Christianity, thus, is a viable religious alternative for contemporary Akhas.
Anthropologist and evangelical missionary, in sum, have something to teach each other. It's a dialogue not likely to happen, though. I doubt that either believes there's much they can learn from the other.
Albert Schweitzer in his seminal study, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1954), justified the role of historical study in the church by writing, "Historical truth not only creates difficulties for faith; it also enriches it, by compelling it to examine the importance of the work of the Spirit of Jesus for its growth and continuance. The Gospel cannot simply be taken over; it must be appropriated in his Spirit. What the Bible really offers us is his Spirit, as we find it in him, and in those who first came under its power. Every conviction of faith must be tested by him. Truth in the highest sense is that which is in the Spirit of Jesus." Schweitzer adds, "The faith of the Protestant Church is not in the Church, but in Christ. That lays upon it the necessity of being truthful in all things. If it gives up the fearless pursuit of truth, it becomes but a shadow of itself--useless to Christianity and to the world." (p. xvi).
If Schweitzer is at all correct, it follows that the study of Thai church history itself becomes involved in the quest for the historical Jesus. It, in a sense, begins with Jesus and can't be understood apart from him. That isn't a faith statement. It's a statement of historical fact. However we might judge the church's faithfulness to Christ's original vision and teaching, the history of the church is a continuing commentary on its origins. Christians, including Thai Christians, have always taken Jesus very seriously, and those who study church history, including Thai church history, will also have to take him seriously. In a deeper sense, the churches today are themselves engaged in a dialogue with Jesus. That dialogue is central to their existence and integrity. It behooves them, then, care about the truth of Jesus and the truth of their own past and present, and the search for these truths is partly a historical search. Historical study is a useful tool in obtaining a measure of the truth necessary to the church's life and integrity.
The quest for the historical Jesus, in sum, is part and parcel of the quest for the historical Thai church. They aren't two unrelated fields of study. They are two sides of the same coin or two aspects of the same reality.
ONE . In a discussion on Adolph Hitler's personality and political program, Joachim Fest in Hitler (p. 532) observes, "History, Paul Valery once remarked, is the most dangerous product ever brewed by the chemistry of the human brain; it makes nations dream or suffer, impels them to become megalomaniacal, bitter, vain, insufferable. The hatreds and passions of the nations during the first half of this century have been stirred by false history far more than by all the racist ideologies or by envy or desire for expansion."
TWO . In an article on the problems related to research on global warming, William F. O'Keefe writes, "Every serious analyst knows that a problem poorly defined is a problem poorly solved. Or in the words of that great philosopher, Casey Stengel, 'If you don't know where you're going, you'll wind up someplace else.'" (in An Energy Program for the United States , National Textbook Company, 1997, p.53). [[Casey Stengel was a successful American baseball manager.]]
ONE means that a correct understanding of the past is an extremely important matter. It's a matter of life and death. TWO means that if we don't achieve that correct understanding, there's not much we can do to achieve viable solutions to the problems the past poses for the present.
HeRD #503, drawing on Eduard Schweizer's Church Order in the New Testament , argued that the very earliest church was Jewish in religion as well as ethnicity. It tended to converge with Judaism. Followers of Jesus attended the temple, kept the law, and otherwise behaved as any good Jew would. It also tended to diverge. Those very elements and precepts of Judaism that the Christians still observed had lost their centrality. Jesus had become central.
Schweizer follows his arguments about the church's convergence with and divergence from Judaism to a paradoxical end. It's the church's sense of openness that led it to not only continue within Judaism, but that also led it to accept uncircumcised Gentiles into its circle. To enlarge on Schweizer's point, the earliest Christians' concern for all of Israel, including Israel's most despised, impure marginals led the church, finally, to accept the great multitudes of despised and impure Gentiles. This acceptance, in turn, forced the church to withdraw from Judaism. If Schweizer is correct, it was the very Jewishness of the church, centered on the Jewish Good News about Jesus the Jew, that eventually led to the emergence of a distinct Christian religion. Being part of "another religion" wasn't a problem, difficulty, barrier, or obstacle to that emergence but integral to it. Christians owe a profound faith debt to Judaism.
Protestantism has entirely eschewed the possibility of a parallel process for Thailand. Without expecting that the Thai process could be more than vaguely similar to that of the church's emergence from Judaism, it would seem that the experience of the early church would have encouraged missionary Protestantism to take a less antagonistic stand towards Buddhism and animism. There is a great deal in Jesus, the Asian mystic and compassionate one, that makes sense within Thai religious traditions. Suppose Protestantism had allowed Thai piety its integrity and sought to work out who Jesus is from within that integrity. What might have happened?
A thesis for further reflection and debate: Only when the Thai followers of Jesus have come to see that they owe a "profound faith debt" to Buddhism will Jesus become Good News for more than a tiny minority of the Thai people.
It's impossible to write a history of the earliest church without coming to terms with the Resurrection. Christianity emerged because Jesus' followers believed he rose from the dead. Discovering what the Resurrection meant to first century Christians, however, is no simple matter. We tend to focus on the revivification of a corpse, but it's not at all clear that they did. Paul experienced the resurrected Jesus, but no revived body was involved. In I Cor. 15:35ff Paul describes his understanding of resurrection and states bluntly, "...what is made of flesh and blood cannot share in God's Kingdom, and what is mortal cannot posses immortality." (15:50 TEV) He talks about a "spiritual body". There is some evidence (inconclusive) that suggests that the church only came to insist on a physical bodily resurrection at a somewhat later date. Is it possible, then, to say that there was a Resurrection but no revivification? Would a first century world view have allowed for and accepted as true such an interpretation?
Something did happen. There was a well-documented Resurrection. The problem is in what we mean by Resurrection. It seems entirely possible that a few of Jesus' closest followers had intense mystical experiences that convinced them utterly that Jesus had Risen. As they shared their experience with others, a similar conviction arose among those others as well. Some Thai Christian converts have a deep conviction in the reality of a personal God based upon personal experiences, often prayers that were answered beyond all expectation. There's nothing "objective" or "empirical" involved in their witness to the reality of a personal God, but they most certainly can't be charged with lying or trying to deceive others when they assert the reality of the Christian God. In the first century world, where religious experiences were as real as stones and trees and where the divine interfaced with the mundane in numerous ways, is it not possible and even likely that there was a Resurrection without a revivification? Finally, we don't know because our sources don't tell us. It is worth noting, however, that none of those sources describe the revivification of Jesus' corpse. Historical data, that is, confirms the Resurrection and is completely silent concerning a revivification. The Resurrection is historical fact. The revivification of Jesus' corpse is not.
Over the last two years, I've given a fair amount of time to preparing a course on of early church history at the McGilvary Faculty of Theology. I took on this particular task for several reasons. First, early church history is important in and of itself. Every church historian should study it. Second, that history provides insights into the development of all church history. Understanding the beginnings of any history is vitally important to understanding the whole of that history, and the early church is church history's "Mother of All Beginnings". Third, the early church provides us with important comparative insights.
In the natural course of things, I've had to spend some time with the Gospels since they're key primary documents for the study of the early church. I've focused on the Gospel of Mark because most of the "experts" generally take it to be the earliest of the Gospels. Beginning this month, I'd like to share with you some of the things I've learned from studying Mark as a historical document. I confess that I'm undertaking these notes on Mark's Gospel with "fear & trembling.". The study of the life of Jesus and the disciples is in a great deal of ferment these days, and an amateur treads these grounds at his own risk. At the same time, there are a number of HeRD recipients who are far more qualified in New Testament studies than I ever hope to be. The opportunities for "going astray" are legion.
On the other hand, if we pursue the limited and focused task of "mining" Mark for information about the earliest beginnings of the church we can avoid at least a few of the pitfalls ahead of us. Many of the scholars tend to try to look behind the Gospels to find the "real Jesus". They seem to view the Gospels themselves as an obstacle to that quest. They obscure the data the scholars seek. Granted that, I think it's still useful to view the Gospels as significant secondary sources that provide us with their own insights into earliest church history. Those of us who aren't trained New Testament historians can still learn a few things from them for ourselves. So, let's just say that HeRD is taking a holiday in the Holy Land. It should be fun. We might learn something about our own historical situations as well. That's my hope.
Mark starts out according to the Today's English Version (TEV) by stating, "This is the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God." (1:1) This sentence plunges the historian into all sorts of problems, most of which revolve around the words "Good News." Mark isn't a history about Jesus Christ. We don't have any of the footnotes, bibliographies, or other scholarly conventions that go with history. At the same time, this isn't a primary document. It doesn't purport to be an eyewitness account of the events it records. Mark is the first-century equivalent of a published secondary source. The author is obviously writing about the past but not the way historians write about it. How, then, does this "good news" (gospel) treat the past? How did the author accumulate his material and how did he decide which parts of that material to include in the gospel? The author cared about the veracity of the story. So, how did he decide what was the truth about Jesus? What standards for the inclusion of material did he adhere to? How does a gospel approach to the past differ from the historian's? How do their understandings of the truth of the past differ? We're going to have to infer some of the answers to these questions, admitting from the beginning that final answers aren't possible.
There's more we'd like to know. We'd like to know just what primary sources the author did have available. Did these include eyewitness accounts? We can assume there were written documents and accounts (see Luke 1:1-2). Just what form did Mark's written sources take? How many sources were there? How many different traditions about Jesus did they represent? There's no way to answer these further questions, but as we go along we'll find that it's important to keep asking them. In any event, if we're to learn anything of historical value from Mark it's vitally important that we reach some conclusion, however tentative, about how the author conceived of the past and used oral and documentary sources to recreate it.
It's frequently very difficult to know where a historical event begins. For the author of Mark, the Jesus Story began with Old Testament prophecy. Jesus' story was thus rooted in the larger story of Israel and linked specifically to Israel's prophetic tradition. This is hardly a startling observation, but we should remember that the Christian church has historically ignored its Jewish roots and all but denied that its Lord and Saviour was a Jew. Mark doesn't ignore these facts. The Gospel opens, rather, with a vivid desert image involving Hebrew messengers, Hebrew paths in the wilderness, and Hebrew corvee laborers straightening those paths for the convenience and safety of their King.
What's the author's purpose in opening this way? The quotation, in part, reminds Mark's readers of Jesus' prophetic connections, and it also suggests that God's direction and purposes are involved. The author affirms that this is a divine event. Citing Isaiah's prophecy also associates Jesus with God in a special way. John is the messenger and the one shouting. He wasn't the one, however, who traveled on the straightened path. God, the divine King, was the one for whom all that work was done. But what about Jesus? Mark clearly implies that John was the messenger shouting orders to prepare Jesus' path. Doesn't that associate Jesus with God?
We're going to find that Mark isn't very clear about just who Jesus was. The author seems to be inviting his readers on a search for Jesus, and he himself presents a mixed picture. His answer is only a suggestive, tentative one. What we may have here is a broad hint that somehow Jesus was associated with God and walked on the path intended for God. In the author's interpretation, then, Jesus is no ordinary man. If I'm correct then the rest of the Gospel is but commentary on 1:2, telling the reader what the author knows about this man with divine associations who was sent by God and foretold by the prophets.
In Mark 1:2-3, the author of Mark put the Jesus Story on its largest stage, Israel and Israel's prophetic tradition. This next passage sets the more immediate stage, the prophetic ministry of John the Baptist. HeRD #434 dealt with John, and I'll only summarize its points here. Passages from the Gospels and Acts suggest that Jesus may have been connected to John before his baptism and may even have been a disciple of John's. Jesus held John in the highest respect and only began his public ministry after John was imprisoned. Jesus associated himself with John's message of repentance and forgiveness.
Jesus didn't come onto the Jewish stage out of nowhere. He was linked to a contemporary prophetic tradition. It's probable that John had a deep influence on Jesus. If Luke 1:36 is correct, Jesus and John were relatives. Jesus could well have had a long association with John, who was only a few months older. Something, in any event, happened between John and Jesus that brought Jesus to the Jordan River for baptism. I think that John had some kind of direct spiritual impact on Jesus. It may well have been formative. In HeRD #434, I wrote, "Perhaps it was John who first awakened Jesus' deep religious concerns and faith. Or, again, perhaps John first helped Jesus articulate such concerns, wherever they may have originated. This all isn't quite pure speculation, because all four of the Gospels and Acts point to a special relationship between Jesus and John. It does help us, furthermore, to appreciate more fully the human side of Jesus. He, like the rest of us, was influence by his culture, society, and particular individuals he knew." I'd only add here that Mark's attempts to put Jesus in his religious context increases the historical credibility of his gospel portrait of Jesus. If Mark had claimed that Jesus came out of the sky and was without human antecedents, his gospel would have been diminished in value for the historian. This way, we have a sense that there was an actual person who was born into a real world of complex historical associations. We know distressingly little about those associations, but Mark at least informs us that they existed and that they're associated with Israel's prophetic tradition and with John.
Mark 1:9 (TEV) says that Jesus went to the Jordan "not long" after John started baptizing. Mark 1:14 states that after John was imprisoned "Jesus went to Galilee and preached the Good News from God." Mark, we're going to find, has at best an obscure chronology. His sources, apparently, didn't tell the author much about Jesus' comings and goings. It could also be that he wasn't much interested in a precise chronology. But, Mark does imply that Jesus was with John for most of John's ministry, from close to the beginning until John was jailed. This is more circumstantial evidence suggesting a close relationship between Jesus and John, again leaving us with the possibility that Jesus was originally John's disciple.
Jesus' baptism was clearly a significant spiritual event for him. Mark states that Jesus had a profound experience with the Holy Spirit, one accompanied by visions. It seems, in fact, to be an entirely human pentecostal experience. If we set aside for a moment the later Christian belief in Jesus' full divinity, what we have is Jesus accepting John's call to confess his sins, repent of them, and be baptized. Jesus may have been in a state of some tension and agitation, for it's frequently in such a state that people have profound spiritual experiences. Note, also, that Jesus seems to have experienced God's forgiveness. What else could God's words, "I am pleased with you" mean in this context? Mark's Jesus was, thus, subordinate to God the Father and apparently felt himself in need of divine forgiveness.
We should also take note of Jesus' relationship to the Spirit. In 1:12 Mark states that the Spirit "made" Jesus go into the desert (TEV). Other translations (RSV, JB) use the word "drove" instead of "made". Language like this simply doesn't fit the later Christian dogma about Jesus being fully God-fully human and a co-equal Person of the Trinity. Jesus is clearly subordinate to the power of the Spirit.
History depends entirely on reliable information. The more the historian has the better her history will be. Does the same rule apply to gospel writers? More specifically, how did the author of Mark obtain the data reported in this passage? What source did he use to learn that Jesus saw a vision and heard a heavenly voice? How did he know that the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert or that Jesus was tempted there by Satan? Jesus could have been the only source for this information. Even so, we still don't know how the information reached the gospel writer. How was the data "massaged" in the process of transmission, if in fact it originated with Jesus? I think we can be confident that the author himself believed these events took place as he reports them, but we shouldn't suppose that means they were historical events in a modern sense. Indeed, the contents of visions and experiences with Satan aren't historical by definition. They aren't things that a historian can verify. The most the historian can say is that Person X believed she saw a vision and Person Y felt himself under attack by Satan. So, the question is whether or not Jesus believed he had a vision and was tempted by Satan. And how did Mark come to possess this information?
Mark isn't a fabrication. It isn't the product of an over-exercised religious imagination. Whatever it is, it isn't myth in any recognizable sense. The author firmly believed he was writing the truth about the past. It was, for him, an "empirical" past, though one determined by gospel rather than historiography. This means there was some connection with Jesus and the disciples as the ultimate source for much of what he wrote. If that's the case, then we're dealing here with a first century Jewish mystic who saw visions, wrestled with the devil, and believed that he had a special relationship with God--if we can trust Mark's sources. I think we can, at least at this point. It's highly likely that the early church thought Jesus saw dovish visions and the rest of it because Jesus shared this information with others and that information, in one form or another, reached the author of Mark.
As mentioned in HeRD #514, Jesus didn't begin his public ministry until John was imprisoned. And it's interesting to note that he wasn't even in Galilee when that event took place. He had to return there. Assuming this sequence of events is correct, we have no way of knowing Jesus' reasons for rejecting a Judean ministry or a desert ministry in favor of a Galilean town & country ministry. A number of things are possible. Jesus, being Galilean, may have felt more comfortable at home in his own setting. We can assume that Galileans had their own foods, their own speech-ways, and a host of other mores familiar to Jesus. He may, on the other hand, have wanted to dissociate his own style and message from that of John, which would have been harder to do if he'd stayed in Judea. Funding may have been an issue. Jesus may have had sources of financial support in Galilee that he didn't have in Judea. We'll see that Marks' Jesus tried to remain semi-covert in some ways, and that may have been easier to do in Galilee than in Judea. All of this is purely speculative, of course, and all that we know for sure is that, if Mark is correct, Jesus consciously decided to initiate his own ministry in Galilee. It's also interesting to note that there was an interval of some time between Jesus' baptism and his ministry. The text implies that he stayed on with John, which again reinforces our sense that Jesus was John's disciple.
Picture it. A bunch of Galilean fishermen are working at their trade. Jesus walks up, tells them to follow him, and off they go. This happens twice. The dialogue in Mark is bare bones and the description of details minimal at best. The passage seems to contain a paradigm for discipleship. Discipleship brings an end to daily, conventional life. It is a demanding call. Being a disciple takes priority over everything else. It changes one's relationship to society, including family. The emphasis is clearly on the immediate response of the four disciples. In 1:20 James and John literally "down tools" and walk off immediately and without further ado, leaving their father and all else. Why did the disciples leave immediately when Jesus came? And, why would a gospel writer tell the story in this way? There could be a number of reasons:
ONE, the author wanted to emphasize Jesus' supra-human powers and attraction. Jesus, thus, could walk up to complete strangers and compel their immediate discipleship. Or, TWO, these four men already knew Jesus and had indicated their willingness to be his disciples. Jesus was just picking them up. THREE, or, they had already heard Jesus preach and were receptive to him. Perhaps they'd even talked about joining up with him. Or, FOUR, there wasn't a real event like this. The story, rather, defines a model for discipleship for Mark's own time and readership. FIVE, this is a composite of the experience of the earliest church's sense of what it meant for the disciples and for they themselves to follow Jesus. It distills the larger experience of the earliest church. SIX, this is a political statement establishing the primacy of these four men among the leaders of the earliest church. SEVEN, this story affirms the central significance of membership in the Jesus Circle (and, by extension, the earliest church). Jewish society was a familial, patriarchal society, but here the first disciples reject family and father for joining with Jesus and his new community.
In the original draft of this HeRD, I opted for numbers Four and Five as being most likely. Now, well down the line, I'm not so sure. All seven options are speculative, and I have to admit that Two and Three are entirely possible choices. If I had to bet, I'd probably still go with number Five, but it's entirely possible that this is a composite picture based on actual events in the life of Jesus and his circle of disciples.
At this point we should give some attention to the way Mark handles chronology and transitions. In 1:14 Jesus returns to Galilee. Then, in 1:16 he's suddenly walking along the shore of Lake Galilee. How long afterwards? A day? a week? ten years later? There's absolutely no way of knowing. My sense is that the author either wasn't much interested in establishing a correct chronology and time frame or his sources didn't provide him sufficient information to do so. It's likely that both of these factors are at work. Strict chronology is essential to the historian and of little consequence to the gospel writer. These abrupt transitions, which abound in Mark, simply move the story along. We don't know the actual sequence of events that lay behind Mark's gospel. The author arranges them, as we'll see, thematically not chronologically. This means that we don't know, from Mark's gospel anyway, how long Jesus' ministry actually was. There is a general consensus among mainline New Testament scholars that it's not possible to reconstruct from the Gospels a chronology of events in Jesus' life between his baptism and his final journey to Jerusalem. This is a frustrating situation for the historian, one that closes some doors to the treatment of Jesus' life historically. Indeed, in the strictest sense, it seems that a biography of Jesus isn't possible. The best we can do is to dig out historical data, such as there is, without hope that a coherent biography of Jesus will result.
HeRD #518 point towards some of the problems Mark poses the historian. First and foremost among those problems is the question of sources. What sources did the author have and how reliable were they historically? There's no way of knowing for sure, but we can make some informed guesses about Mark's sources. They would have been of several kinds. First and most certain would be the church's oral traditions. Mark was only a generation or a little more from Jesus, which means that those oral traditions were still fresh and almost certainly still informed by the memories of older members who had first-hand, or near first-hand knowledge of the events of Jesus' life. Second, and almost as certain, were the written records already extant. Historians feel relatively sure that there were compilations of Jesus' teachings already in existence by the time Mark was written. It's likely he had access to some of them. Third, it may be that Mark actually interviewed original members of the Jesus Circle, though this is less certain. If Mark was written in Rome, as most scholars believe, there's no reason why some of them might not have moved to Rome. Or, perhaps, Mark was well-traveled enough to have met early disciples elsewhere. Four, besides these three more specific sources of information, the author's own personal Christian experience would have been an important source of what he (or she?) included in the gospel. Five, and by extension, the author's Christian community would have influenced the writing of the gospel through its shared general perceptions about Jesus. It would be incredibly helpful if we knew which of these sources the author actually had and in what combination.
From a historian's perspective, the issue of Mark's sources requires constant attention. It's a serious frustration to the historical study of Jesus that the Gospels' evidential base is so obscure. It seems possible to me, however, that Mark's author does give us a hint as to his sources. From the time Jesus called his first four disciples (Mark 1:14-20), the author constantly reminds his readers of the presence of the disciples. They were, as the author tells it, Jesus' constant companions. Is the author of Mark reminding his readers of his "ultimate" source? Can we assume that the author believed his sources were derived from the disciples? That's possible. It at least presents us with the possibility that this gospel rests on fairly solid evidential ground and included sources close to the actual events of Jesus' life and ministry. It's even possible that if a historian had had these same sources she could have written a credible biography of Jesus. That's pure speculation, but it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility either.
My own sense is that the author of Mark had good sources for his purposes, which was to tell the gospel truth about Jesus. We should constantly remind ourselves that gospel truth doesn't necessarily contradict historical truth. It just doesn't pay attention to historical issues. In other words, there lurks in the gospel truth about Jesus data for the historian, data obscured by gospel conventions and concerns but valid data none the less. That data, finally, comes from eye witnesses, though not directly or "purely" so.
This passage makes two declarations about Jesus, one human and one demonic. Jesus' human auditors were amazed by him. First because of the authoritative manner in which he taught. Second, because of his authority over evil spirits. The human view of Jesus contains no hint that Jesus was anything other than a highly unusual individual, a teacher and exorcist of notable authority. It's an evil spirit that recognizes in Jesus something greater. Most versions have the demon declaring that Jesus is the "Holy One of God," but the Today's English Version (TEV) translates the Greek as "God's holy messenger." The TEV makes explicit what's implied in the other translations, namely that Jesus is of God, but subordinate to God. Jesus is "set apart" (holy). Mark, again, associates Jesus with God but doesn't state he's divine. Jesus is under the power of God and, if the TEV is a proper translation of the Greek, a prophetic figure.
It seems significant that Mark puts the declaration of Jesus' "semi-divinity" or divine associations in the mouth of a non-temporal, spirit-world being. Things about Jesus were apparent to the spirit-world that weren't evident in the human world. (This seems even more clearly expressed in Mark 1:34). In a sense, Mark here acknowledges that the gospel Jesus isn't the same as the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus was a man of authority and skill. The gospel Jesus is a man and more than a man. The author of Mark may not have had the words and concepts to express that "more-ness", but already just a generation after Jesus he was groping towards an understanding of Jesus that would ultimately make of Jesus the Second Person of the Trinity. I'd emphasize, however, that the Gospel of Mark isn't Trinitarian. Jesus, here, is fully human. He isn't fully God. The fact that Mark seems to make a distinction between human and extra-human perceptions of Jesus is hopeful from a historian's point of view. It suggests that the author probably was at least somewhat sensitive to the distinction between theological and non-theological interpretations of Jesus. He might be less likely to mask the human Jesus with a divine overlay.
Peter's mother-in-law was ill with a fever. Jesus and the disciples visited her home. Jesus took her by the hand and she was healed. The image created by this episode is a striking one. It points to Jesus' power of healing. The story itself doesn't explicitly claim a miracle, and we could imagine a situation in which a person with the aches and pains of a low grade fever could have taken to bed and, then, found healing comfort and strength in Jesus' presence and felt better. We could also argue that Mark seems to constantly compress events into shorter-than-life time frames. Maybe Jesus actually took time to tend to her fever and in the process she got better. Beyond such speculations, the author's point seems obvious but also important. Jesus had a power for healing. His touch was healing. We glimpse here the profound impression Jesus made on those around him. We sense, as well, his compassion for others.
We should also remember the spiritual implications of his healing. Jewish ideology held that the ill were deservedly so. They'd done something to displease God. For Jesus to heal people then wasn't only a matter of bringing physical comfort to them, as important as that was. He was also reconciling God to people who believed they were living under divine judgment and punishment. In a world hardened to human suffering and divine wrath, Jesus of Nazareth must have been an incredible person, indeed.
Commentators note that Mark has a terse, sparse literary style. The author doesn't give us very much information in his stories. The story of the healing of Peter's mother-in-law is no exception. That's why it's fascinating that the author does give us some historical detail. This healing took place in Peter and Andrew's home, which suggests that the disciples didn't entirely "down tools" and leave everything behind. They, at least, still frequented their homes. Even more interesting is the fact that Jesus' healed Peter's mother-in-law. Nothing in the story requires that little detail, and Mark's healing episodes seldom contain such personal information. Now, if the author had either an oral tradition or an oral history source, this is about as much information as we could expect. Oral history interviews seldom illicit precise details, because people forget much of that "background stuff." They remember (and often disremember) a few salient points that stuck in their memory. This passage "feels" like that same type of thing. Because of the personal details of location and person healed, I'd almost bet this story came from one of the participants or someone who heard the story from a participant. It might be second hand, but I doubt if it would be any more distant from the event than that. It's entirely possible, then, that this event took place in the "real" world of the empirical past and that the author received his information many years later from an oral source close to the event.
This passage is incredible. It affords a glimpse of the empirical Jesus that two thousands years of Christian piety has increasingly obscured and even denied. One, Jesus had just spent, according to Mark, a long day intensely involved in peoples' sufferings. Jesus believed that he'd also confronted demonic powers. So, the next morning he went off to a lonely (TEV) or solitary (NIV) or deserted (NRSV) place. Mark doesn't say a word about fatigue, but the sense of it is there. Two, this human Jesus prays. It seems significant that Matthew doesn't report this incident at all and that in Luke (4:42-44) Jesus doesn't pray. A Jesus who prays contradicts the view of high christology, which may already been current in Luke's time. If Jesus was divine why would he pray to the divine? The way Mark's author treats Jesus, as we've noted before, places Jesus in a position clearly subordinate to God and emphasizes Jesus' human qualities. Three, another difference between Mark and Luke is that in Luke 4 the crowd pursues Jesus, but in Mark 1 it's Peter "and his companions" who go looking for him. This seems more plausible historically. They knew Jesus and probably guessed where he'd gone off to. It suggests that the disciples had a somewhat complex role, and that they sometimes acted not only as Jesus' representative to the people but also spokespersons for the people as well. They also appear somewhat insensitive to Jesus' personal spiritual needs. One has the feeling that they broke in on his prayers. There's even a bit of an accusatory tone here, as if Jesus shouldn't be wasting his time off by himself when there was so much need to be met. You can almost feel the pressure on Jesus, not only from the expectations of the populace but also from those of his friends.
Mark 1:21-38 is a chronological unit. It covers two days in Jesus' life. A Sabbath and the day after. In those two days, Jesus preached in the synagogue, healed a man there, healed Peter's mother-in-law, healed many others, and went off to a lonely place to pray. He stayed in Peter and Andrew's home. Now, if the author would only carry on with such careful chronicling of events, Mark would give us a good biography of Jesus. He doesn't. In 1:39 Jesus goes off to preach and do exorcisms all over rural Galilee. At some indeterminate point thereafter a man suffering a "dreaded skin disease" (1:40, TEV) comes to see him. We've totally lost the thread of any chronology. This is no minor matter for the biographer of Jesus. On the one hand, it is highly unusual to have so much information about one day in the life of someone who lived 2,000 years ago. On the other hand, there's no way to fit that day into a larger, credible sequence of events. And, we have the problem that the author puts things together sequentially by theme. There's no reason in the world why he might not have pasted these events together into one day. Mark provides important gospel data on Jesus. He doesn't have to stick to an empirical sequence of events to do so. We, therefore, can't be at all confident that these events actually happened on the same day.
This passage introduces us to a major puzzle (or headache, as the case may be) in Mark's Gospel. Why did Jesus tell the man he'd healed to keep quiet about the matter? This happens fairly frequently in Mark. Why? One can think up any number of reasons why Jesus might enjoin silence on those who proclaimed his name or praised him for his healing powers, but most of them don't make sense. For example, Jesus told people to keep quiet because he didn't want to get in trouble with the authorities. Trouble is, he kept doing highly provocative things in public venues where he knew his enemies were present. Why, then, would he bother to tell others to keep quiet? Or, again, maybe he thought the time wasn't "right" to be spreading word about himself. But, then, why did he start his ministry by proclaiming that the "right time" had come (Mark 1:15)? In this particular case, it's even more difficult to see why Jesus would tell the man to keep silent. Jesus must have cured skin diseases before this. He already had a reputation as a healer. So, why the silence? Some commentaries suggest that Jesus may have been wanting to avoid further crowds, but that seems so obviously futile that one wonders how a man as insightful as Jesus clearly was could have been so obtuse on this point. The commentators' proposed solution doesn't fit the gospel portrait.
The obvious answer to this puzzle is that this is a literary device. Mark's author progressively unveils a Jesus of power and authority, a man puzzling to others. His question is, "Who is this man?" Having Jesus enjoin silence at various points highlights the theme. The empirical Jesus didn't instruct people to be silent. The Marcan church, however, was going through its own process of discovering Jesus so that this literary device captures an important gospel truth. Jesus' identity wasn't obvious. It had to be discovered. The author's approach on this matter of silence, furthermore, would point to an important historical truth as well. The empirical Jesus was obviously a man, but there was also something about him that pointed beyond the human. The reader, if I'm correct, is then being invited on this gospel search for Jesus. This is all speculation, and certainly a case could be made that Jesus did enjoin silence on some people and spirits. The problem is that this forces his private words (to spirits and individuals) and his provocative public actions into contradiction with each other. Perhaps we have to conclude that we don't know if Jesus told people to keep quiet about him, but whether he did or not, it fits the author's purposes to have him do so and to emphasize the point.
This is another powerful image. A man with some kind of ugly, possibly leprous skin disease went to Jesus for healing. The man recognized Jesus' power to help him and asserted as much to Jesus. As Mark has it, Jesus felt pity (TEV, NRSV) or compassion (NIV) for the man, and said that he did want (very much, we feel from Mark's economical prose) to heal the man. And he did. Jesus then went an important step further, one that tells us about his socio-religious context and also shows how aware he was of it himself. Jesus instructed the man to go to the proper authorities and carry out the proper rituals so that he would be ritually purified as well as physically healed. Jesus, thus, didn't just cure the man, but he also liberated him from the oppressive social condition the physical deformity put him in. We need to constantly remember that illness wasn't a matter of being sick. The ill were ill because they'd displeased God. Their illness was, in a sense, karmic, and Jesus released them from that karma. Jesus, in sum, healed the man in three ways. Physically. Socially. Spiritually.
One way in which music historians describe the development of Western music is through its "texture". Western music before roughly 1000 CE was "monophonic". In monophonic music, "...the melody is heard without either a harmonic accompaniment or other vocal lines. Attention is focused on the single line." (Joseph Machlis, The Enjoyment of Music , p. 307). Between 1000 and 1600 Western music was largely "polyphonic" by which it combined two or more lines of melody. "Here the music derives its expressive power and its interest from the interplay of the several lines." (Machlis, p. 307). After 1600 Western music became increasingly "homophonic," the kind of music Western people are most used to today. There's one dominant melody, but there are also "blocks of harmony, the chords that support, color, and enhance the principal part." (Machlis, p. 308). On the piano, for example, the right hand plays the melody and the left hand plays the supporting chords.
Historical writing can be conceived in a similar way. Monophonic historiography is those monographs that focus entirely on a single subject and ignore the context of the story. Professional historians have little use, generally, for this type of history. Homophonic historiography follows that same single subject but surrounds it with a rich fabric of social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Monophonic history isolates the subject from these contexts while homophonic historical writing places them in it. Professional historians largely practice the homophonic variety. Polyphonic historiography is the field of comparative historiography. It looks at two (or more), usually related, histories to see how "listening" to each enriches our understanding of the other. This is how I see our tour of Mark. The gospel gives us a second melody that we play in counterpoint to the melodies of Thai church history.
One way to view the history of the earliest church is to see it, centrally, as a search for and a commentary on the person of Jesus. Mark makes this theme starkly evident. Jesus' humanity is in full display. His divinity is a matter of speculation. Discovering his true identity requires a search. As a consequence, early church historians can't avoid a keen interest in the history of theology in general and christology in particular.
Thai church history doesn't appear to be so centrally focused on the person of Jesus. In a strictly formal sense, furthermore, the Thai church has inherited its christology from the West. There isn't, in consequence, the sense of search and discovery that we find in Mark. Overtly, thus, the early church presents a striking contrast to the experience of the Thai churches in their various cultural settings. This overt contrast says a great deal about the nature of modern Protestant missions in Thailand. One, however, could argue that the ways in which the Protestant missionary movement and the Thai churches have viewed Jesus reveal a great deal about their approach to more mundane and supposedly secular subjects and activities. Protestant christology in Thailand, thus, would show important parallels to the way in which the church relates to society and to the forms of concrete activities it carries out. As we're working through Mark, it's important that we keep before us the question of how Mark's Jesus is similar to and different from the Thai church's Jesus--and how those similarities and differences help us understand the church here.
Historians have to make judgments about the past. One of the eternal headaches of the profession is assembling a meaningful and neutral set of standards that are widely acceptable and not prejudicial. It seems to me that church historians, when writing for Christian audiences, can find in the biblical portraits of Jesus just such a standard.
An example of how we might take Jesus as a standard for the study of Thai church history comes from the Jewish concept of "karma". In HeRD #528 we used that idea to describe the socio-religious understanding of illness in Jesus' time. If you were sick or poor or otherwise suffering it was because you had offended God. That's why the Pharisees and scribes appear to be so unfeeling in the Gospels. They believed that the ill deserved their illness. In Mark 1:40-45, after Jesus healed the man with a deforming skin condition he sent the man back to the priests to get the proper documentation that he was cleansed. He told the man, furthermore, to carry out the appropriate rituals to confirm that fact. Jesus didn't try to change the man's belief in karma or even tell him he shouldn't believe in the concept. Jesus liberated him from his own personal karma.
In Thai society, traditionally, people believed that similar conditions were a result of having lived a corrupted former life. Illness, poverty, and suffering were deserved. Belief in karma has been an important Thai belief, and it still has a strong, if less religious impact on peoples' thinking. Studying the differences in Jesus' understanding of karma and that of the Thai church would be an interesting and instructive research enterprise. It would help us gain new perspectives on issues of indigenization. And it would provide the Thai church with an opportunity to reflect theologically in a manner at once biblically and theologically relevant.
Studying Mark is a good experience for a historian whose own field of research is apparently far removed from the early church. On the one hand, there's the discovery of new themes in and perspectives on church history. We've looked at a number of these in HeRD. On the other hand, there's the major difficulties involved in obtaining even minimally reliable historical information on the life of Jesus and related events. Early church history is a much more difficult field than Thai church history. We have a vast evidential base, by comparison, and we don't have to be constantly questing after the reliability of the historical data it contains, at least not to the extent or depth of early church history. The fact that Mark is gospel rather than history makes using it for historical purposes a tricky, complex matter. It's hard to find solid ground. Thai ecclesiastical records contain their own pitfalls and tendencies to give misinformation but they are patently historical materials. They're the sort of thing historiography was invented to deal with. Mark, thus, reminds other historians of the importance of the critical historical method. Studying it sharpens their exercise of that method.
Early church history provides the rest of us with a warning as well. I will confess to you that I look somewhat askance at the way the Jesus scholars and other New Testament historians pile mountains of theory and interpretation on a tiny evidential base. They sometimes (frequently?) transform speculation into fact. On page 1 they state that "if this then it follows that..." and by page 10 the "if" has disappeared. "This" is established fact and "that" follows on for another 300 pages. The fact is that historians in other fields do the same thing, so that studying early church history provides a good reminder to the rest of us. Don't turn speculation into fact! All of this speculation has another side to it, however. New Testament church history is incredibly alive today. It's where the action is, a hotbed of ideas. Everything is up for grabs. Church historians generally, thus, would be wise to obtain some sense of what's going on in early church history. Wouldn't it be grand if so much talent and thought were poured into Thai church history!
Fundamentalist biblical literalism remains a potent force in the Thai church, as it does in the church throughout the world. Reading Mark for historical details, however, is a striking experience, one that demonstrates in a fresh way the power of Jesus' ministry. One doesn't need to believe in a literal, every-word-is-true Bible to experience that power. The Gospel of Mark is a fascinating document. It reflects a real life that was lived by an actual person. It makes a strong, historically plausible case that this Jesus had a profound ability to feel the pains of others and actually do something about their pain. Through the process of searching for the empirical Jesus embedded in the gospel portrait of him, we begin to understand why a whole new religion eventually sprang up from him. He was an incredible person.
Biblical literalism is a stumbling block to discovering the Jesus who lived and healed in Galilee. It denies the distinction between gospel and history. It prevents wrestling with the nature of Mark as gospel. It demands that one accept the literal truth of Mark's words rather than dig for oneself, as the author of Mark intended, into what sort of person Jesus must have been. That's dull. It doesn't stimulate one's mind or heart. It doesn't allow Mark to make his case for Jesus. It shuts us off from the earliest church's own struggle to understand this person. It's no wonder we don't have a clue as to who Jesus is within Thai society. The dominant trend is a biblical literalism that shades into bibliolatry. We're left with the early church's words but not its search, its struggle to comprehend, and its attempts to invent words and images and tell stories that illuminated the real things the actual Jesus did and said. Biblical literalism means: No questions allowed. No doubts entertained. Dead, binding words rather than an alive, liberating search. The term "biblical literalism," if Mark is any measure, is a misnomer. Literal it may be, but biblical it surely isn't.
The general image of Jesus is that he was a wandering, homeless itinerant who, unlike foxes and birds, had no place of his own to stay. Mark 2:1 appears to contradict that image, depending on which translation you read. Today's English Version (TEV) reads, "A few days later Jesus went back to Capernaum, and the news spread that he was at home." The New International Version's (NIV) translation agrees: "A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home." The New English Bible (NEB) and New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) also agree, but other translations are less clear. The Jerusalem Bible (JB) states, "When he returned to Capernaum some time later, word went around that he was back..." Still, apparently the majority of translators do agree that Jesus returned to his home in Capernaum after he'd been out teaching and healing for an indeterminate period of time. A second passing reference to Jesus' home in Mark seems to confirm this picture, although there the various translations are in less agreement. TEV still refers to Jesus' home, but the NIV says only that Jesus "entered a house." JB, interestingly enough, translates the Greek here as "home" and the American Standard Version (ASV) notes "home" as a variant reading for "house". Still, all of the major translations agree, either in 2:1 or 3:20, that Jesus had a home. Mark, furthermore, doesn't contain that famous statement by Jesus that foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest (Matthew 8:20, Luke 9:58).
So what? It seems to me to be no small matter that Jesus, if the author of Mark is right, wasn't a homeless itinerant preacher. He worked out of a home base. He apparently owned, in fact, a home. In 3:21, Jesus' family heard what was going on in his home, where large crowds had gathered to be healed, and they "set out to take charge of him." Clearly, Jesus wasn't living with his family, and his home was his own. IF this was the case, then Jesus apparently practiced a form of semi-itinerant ministry based out of his own home. This is a form of ministry well known to Thailand and one widely practiced since missionary and Thai evangelists started doing rural evangelism. Itinerant evangelists, working from a home base, would go out for varying periods of time to evangelize rural areas. Not infrequently, they would also take simple medicines along with them. Among the missionaries, Daniel McGilvary in the North, was the premier model and practitioner of semi-itinerant evangelism. Although far well less known, the Rev. John A. Eakin, another Presbyterian, also conducted an extensive program of semi-itinerant evangelism during his years in Phet Buri in the 1920s and 1930s. More on this subject in the next HeRD.
The idea that Jesus may have owned a home (see HeRD #534) and used it as a base for conducting his ministry is striking. It gives us an entirely different model for living the Christian life from that of Luke and Matthew, where Jesus is a classic wandering itinerant teacher and healer. The Jesus of Mark is a model much more reasonable and obtainable for the overwhelming majority of Christians who lead lives according to the ways of their society. The idea that Jesus had a home could also put the manner in which his earliest disciples just walked off to follow him in perspective (Mark 1:14-20. See HeRDs #518 & 519). He called them to be his companions when he was on the road, not to leave their homes and families permanently.
New Testament historians point out that the early church included a class of wandering evangelists who dedicated their whole lives to their task. They were homeless. And their form of Christian ministry, as reflected in Matthew and Luke, became an important model for other Christians. There was, evidently, a certain amount of tension between the itinerants and the rest of the earlier church because the itinerants took themselves to be the "true followers' of Jesus. I'd like to offer you the possibility that the author of Mark stood outside the itinerant tradition and used sources that reflected something more closely akin to the actual way in which Jesus worked. This is speculation. Only two things commend it: first, Mark points to it. Second, it's the way evangelists in Thailand conducted themselves, in conditions in the 19th century not entirely unlike those in which Jesus lived.
A couple of further thoughts. If Jesus had a house, he had to have an income of some sort for upkeep. Undoubtedly it was a small house and probably didn't cost much to maintain. (Utilities were really, really cheap in 1st century Galilee). Still, Jesus had to be involved in the everyday economic and social life of a neighborhood and a community. So, where did his income come from? It's also worth reflecting that a home-owning Jesus was more fully incarnate in his world than the no hole, no nest, and no home Jesus. It's fun to play with the idea that Jesus the Christ, the Fully God Second Person of the Trinity, owned a home. Finally, Mark changes our view of what it means to live a Christ-like life. If Jesus was a home owner, we are more (not less) challenged to live the Christian life within the every day structures of society. And living such a life can be an ideal Christian life, such as it can never be if we accept the homeless Jesus as our ideal.
This passage contains the delightful story of the four friends who carried a paralytic to Jesus to be healed and had to break into the house through the roof. We should note here something modern day preachers never mention, namely that in Mark it was Jesus' own home they broke into. That puts an interesting twist on things. The story, more largely, highlights Jesus' deep compassion for human suffering. The commentaries point out that his compassion was focused primarily on spiritual rather than physical suffering, hence Jesus at first forgives the man's sins and only secondarily heals him physically.
One of the central themes of the Gospels concerning Jesus is the fact that he came into deep, eventually fatal tension with the over class. According to Mark, Jesus went out of his way to provoke that tension, as we can see in this story of Jesus' first confrontation with members of that class. In full view of these powerful individuals, Jesus makes statements that they couldn't possibly have judged other than blasphemous. Even so, they keep quiet, maybe because they were guests in Jesus' own home or maybe they feared speaking up in front of the crowd. So, Jesus doesn't leave well enough alone but brings the confrontation out into the open and criticizes the teachers of the Law in public and to their faces. Not only that, but he almost seems to heal the paralytic physically out of spite. It's as if he felt he had to do it or lose face. One could even accuse him of showing off.
Why would Jesus do this? Mark's Jesus is clearly a perceptive individual. He must have known the consequences of challenging the over class in this way. Was he betting he could ride this particular tiger? Did he think he had the crowd on his side and so could challenge power with impunity? That's hardly likely. Historians point out that there were plenty of messiahs running around in those years and that violent death was their common lot. Jesus was nobody's fool and only a fool would have thought he could get away with what Jesus was doing. Maybe Jesus was so overcome with compassion for the paralytic that he spoke without thinking. But, why would he then compound the mistake with an open critic of the teachers of the Law? On the face of it, Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and calculated that the possible advantages of challenging authority outweighed the risks involved.
There's no way of knowing if this event actually happened as Mark reports it. It's not likely, historically, that it did, not in just this way. Mark's account, on the other hand, feels very much like the real world that Jesus lived in. My own guess is that the passage is historical to the extent that Jesus did openly and intentionally challenge the over class. They did believe him to be blasphemous, but they didn't voice that opinion too loudly at first. And most certainly the point of tension came over Jesus' incredibly different manner of dealing with the poor and the sick. Modern-day Jesus scholars point out that in the context of first century Palestinian Judaism, Jesus' whole approach was a challenge to religiously-based political authority. The over class held its power, partly, on the premise that they were in God's favor. This, of course, is always the ideological position of those holding power. They deserve their power...because God loves them more...or because they're better at getting votes...or they led a better past life.
The four men cutting into Jesus' roof is a good story, and it may have its roots in a particular event. There's no way for a historian to know. But, I think we can reasonably accept as historically accurate the larger contents of the story. Frankly, this is another one of those points where the whole interplay of forces and personalities "feels" historical. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the whole thing happened something like Mark's account has it happening.
When Jesus heals the paralytic in Mark 2:1-12, he addresses the man as, "My Son" (TEV). If Jesus was only 30 or so, as Luke 3:23 claims, why would he have addressed this man as "son"? (The Jerusalem Bible translates this verse even more strikingly as "my child"). In a patriarchal society, this address puts the healed man in a relationship of being a generation younger than Jesus. Jesus was claiming to be old enough to be the man's father. Now, it's true that life spans were much shorter, something around 30 years, and it's barely possible that the paralytic was a very young man, a youth of 13-15. Jesus, being 30, could (barely) have been old enough to be his father. It's also possible that Jesus was older than 30. Crosson in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (pp. 21-23) points out that Jesus could have been born at any time during the reign of Herod (37-4 BCE) and died at any point while Pontius Pilate was Prefect of Judea (26-36 CE). The general opinion that Jesus was born close to 4 BCE, that is at the end of Herod's reign, is an educated guess. Now, if we speculate that Jesus was born about 10 BCE and that his ministry took place towards the end of Pilate's time, say around 35 CE, then Jesus was about 45 years old at the time of his ministry. Even if we accept the date of 30 CE for Jesus' death, the one most often given by scholars, Jesus would still have been about 40 at the time of his ministry. In this case, it makes much more sense for him to address the paralytic as "son". At 45 Jesus would have been nearly a grandfather figure anyway. All of this is sheer and pure speculation. Note, however, that it fits the general parameters of Crossan's "educated guess" just as well as a somewhat later birth and an earlier death does.
To those who would argue that we can't even know if Jesus said these words or this event happened, I would agree. But, the author of Mark saw no problem in having Jesus address the paralytic as "son," and he must have had some notion of Jesus' age. It's very unlikely that the author himself had any idea of how old the paralytic was, which means that he had Jesus calling a man of indeterminate age "son". The notion of a young Jesus calling another man of unknown age "son" in a patriarchal social context seems unpersuasive and questionable.
In this story, Jesus called Levi, the tax collector, to be a disciple. In the course of events, he sat down to a meal in Levi's home with a large gathering of socially objectionable people. (2:15) He did this in a public way and was seen by a group of Pharisees, who questioned his disciples about why Jesus ate "with such people" (2:16 TEV). For the second episode in a row (cf. 2:1-12), Jesus chose to confront representatives of the over class rather than ignore them. They didn't voice their criticisms directly to him, and he could have ignored them if he'd wanted to avoid a direct confrontation. Jesus chose to challenge them.
In HeRD #527, we raised the issue of Jesus' ordering demons and certain individuals to keep quiet about his identity. Jesus' actions in Mark 2 seem in clear contradiction to his words in Mark 1. In this chapter, Jesus is going out of his way to show his power and his attitudes towards the "sinners" and "saints" of his society. Jesus didn't enjoin silence to cover up his message or intentions. Is it possible, then, that when he ordered silence he was trying to deliberately point away from himself and towards his actions? Could he have been saying, "Don't focus on my person. Focus on my message, given in actions as well as words"? It's quite possible that this is exactly what Jesus (Mark's Jesus, at least) was doing. If he truly believed in the importance of humility, it's likely that Jesus practiced humility himself. If he believed his message was divinely inspired, furthermore, it's likely that he would have been concerned to have people focus on that message.
For 20 centuries Christian preachers have been castigating the tax collectors of Jesus' time as bad people--really, really bad people. Evidently, we've had good reason. Tax collectors were the oppressive agents of the over class. They made large, entirely legal profits by taking more from the people than they paid into the government's coffers. OK, they were "sinners," but they were wealthy oppressors, They did the over classes' dirty work for it and, in that sense, made the whole rotten, corrupt Roman system possible. They collected the money that paid the bills of oppression.
Thus, the Pharisees' question in Mark 2: 16 is a fair one. Jesus, the exorcist and wisdom teacher, was supposed to be on the side of the people. So, what was he doing making up to the likes of tax collectors? To do so was unpatriotic. It also made him ritually unclean. Now, why would a supposedly pious man do such a thing? They must have suspected that Jesus was finding a way to fund his operation and pay the expenses on his home. His approach and bad attitudes weren't going to get him any funds from the pious wealthy. The poor didn't have much, if any, money. That left the dirty tax collectors as a viable source of funding.
Assuming that Jesus' motivation wasn't pecuniary, as hardly seems likely given the kind of man he was, then we're thrown back on Mark's explanation. Jesus trafficked with these sinners out of a sense of compassion for them. This, in spite of the fact that they were the minions of the over class. Jesus' compassion for the tax collectors provides, possibly, an explanation as to why Jesus openly challenged the pious over class. He did it to try to communicate the gospel to them as well. He apparently thought that he could do that only through daring acts of public compassion and by challenging the Pharisees and others to learn new ways of thinking.
There are three stories included in this long passage, and they all follow on one connected theme. Jesus, through his actions, was defining the rules of behavior for his disciples in distinction from the social and religious norms of their society. It's important to note that the disciples are a constant presence of some importance in each story. In 2:16 the Pharisees ask them why Jesus ate with sinners. In 2:18ff their own behavior (failure to fast) is subject to question, and again in 2:23ff the behavior of the disciples (picking wheat on the Sabbath) is criticized. What we have here, in a sense, is a charter for the very earliest church. The Jesus Circle, according to Mark, maintained close social contact with social marginals and even includes them in its numbers. It defies conventional expectations concerning pious behavior (2:18-22). And, it doesn't assign ultimate significance to keeping the Jewish Law (2:23-28). The author makes no attempt to link these events chronologically. They are, rather, linked by the common theme mentioned above.
It's not clear at all that any of these events actually happened as such. They represent, I think, remembered values, sayings, and stories about the sorts of things Jesus did. Most of the details in the stories are generic rather than specific, excepting the name of Levi, the tax collector, and the fact that Jesus ate in his house (2:14-15). My own feeling is that in these verses we're located as much or more in the author's own time than in Jesus' time. He's defining, if I'm correct, the nature of Christian community for the church itself. He's describing and defining the church's identity, both to explain why the church is different from other religious entities and how church members should behave. Mark 2:21-22 (new patches and new wine) highlight the theme that the life of the new community is different from the social and religious norms of society. The church contains new wine (Jesus? the Holy Spirit?) and it requires a new wineskin. What we have here, in sum, is quite possibly a second generation Christian saying, " This is who we are. This is how we became who we are."
I'm fairly sure that this passage never happened as Mark described it. First, the author gives no specific time frame and offers no specific details, such as would lead us to feel there was an actual event involved. Second, why were Pharisees out walking in wheat fields with Jesus and his disciples on the Sabbath? Seems unlikely. Third, the whole scene must have taken place close to where Jesus and the disciples were lodging. Sabbath travel laws were strict, but the Pharisees didn't criticize the disciples for traveling on the Sabbath. But, if they were close to home and it being the Sabbath, would they have been likely to eat the wheat? Why didn't they just return their lodgings and eat there? What they did couldn't have been done casually, in spite of Mark making it seem that way. They transgressed the Sabbath Laws in a serious manner. The author may have made the story up entirely as the context for Jesus' teaching about keeping the Sabbath, specifically the statements in verses 27-28. Or, he may have pieced the story together from scattered fragments of his sources' memories and writings. Fourth, the whole sequence of events in 2:13-28 is artificial. Mark doesn't disguise that fact in any way. He's clearly presenting a line of argumentation. The story fits too neatly to be taken as an actual event.
Now, of course, one can invent a logical set of reasons why this story could have happened as Mark tells it. But those reasons have to be fairly complicated and aren't the sort of thing likely to have survived a generation of failing memory to reach Mark's time. What I'm saying is that there are none of those little details that have given other Marcan stories a sense of specificity and probability.
Note: I haven since come across information that, in fact, Jesus himself rejected the idea that picking grain on the Sabbath was a violation of it. The matter, evidently, was in dispute in his time, and he took a less strict view. Thus, an actual historical dispute is reflected here, and it's quite possible that the disciples actually did pick and eat the grain quite casually, knowing Jesus approved.
Mark isn't just telling a story. He's presenting gospel data and lines of argument. In HeRD #541, I argued that most of Mark 2 contains a definition and description of the nature of Christian community. At the same time, Mark is also pointing to a progression in the tension between Jesus and the over class. That theme runs through this chapter. In 2:7, the Pharisees are critical of Jesus' forgiving a man's sins, but they don't actually voice their thoughts. Jesus read their minds, as it were. In 2:16 the Pharisees voice their criticisms of Jesus' eating with sinners, but not directly to him. They go to his disciples. Finally, in Mark 2:24, the Pharisees voice their criticisms of the disciples picking wheat on the Sabbath directly to Jesus. On one level, the whole sequence seems entirely artificial in its construction. It's much too neat for the real world. At another level, however, I suspect that Mark is pointing to something that did happen. The more the over class came to know about Jesus the more openly critical they became of him. I can just hear some informant telling the author of Mark, "At first, you know, the Pharisees didn't say much. They mostly just listened. But we knew they weren't happy about things. And Jesus kept egging them on, kept criticizing them to their faces. And he encouraged us to do things that only made matters more tense. After awhile they started to question us and question Jesus more and more openly. Things soon got really bad." This is completely speculative, but if the author did use oral sources and was told things like this, then we can see him crafting his raw data into gospel data, a set of stories that capture several intertwining themes and carry the gospel story forward with dramatic effect. In any event, there's no good reason why the author's gospel description doesn't contain strong hints as to historical realities.
Let's jump ahead a long ways, to Mark 10, and look at how one of the "name" Jesus Scholars treats Mark. In his book, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (pp. 63-64), John Dominic Crossan devotes a couple of paragraphs to Jesus' blessing of the little children. His approach offers an interesting contrast to what we've been doing in HeRD.
First, Crossan divides these verses into the words of the historical Jesus and the words of the "historical Mark." According to Crossan, the actual words of the empirical Jesus were, simply, "Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it." (Mark 10:15 NRSV) The rest of the text was written by Mark. It's what Crossan calls the "framing situation". He points out that the words "touch," "took in his arms," blessed," and "laid hands on" are "...official bodily actions of a father designating a newly born infant for life rather than death, for accepting it into his family rather than casting it out with the garbage." He then states that the "Marcan church" "must have been" debating, like Jesus against the disciples, whether it should adopt abandoned infants.
Crossan's treatment of Mark 10:13-16 is very much in the tradition of the Jesus scholars. They hold that the Gospels contain only a smattering of Jesus' actual words. These words are embedded in a dominating overlay that mixes mythological and literary themes. Each Gospel, then, is a mythic-literary response to Jesus, one based primarily on the experience of the authors' own churches. We have to work very carefully and very hard, almost like an archeologist, to discover anything about the empirical Jesus. The Jesus scholars have, to date, focused largely on rediscovering Jesus' actual words and not given much attention to his actions. I'd like to share with you some critical comments on Crossan for our next HeRD.
In HeRD #544, I summarized briefly John Dominic Crossan's treatment of this passage in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (pp. 63-64). It's a good example of the approach of the so-called Jesus Scholars, who are trying to reconstruct the empirical Jesus through historical methods. There are a number of things here that leave me feeling uneasy about that approach. It's disconcerting, for example, how easily Crossan seems to divorce Jesus' words from events. Crossan assumes, apparently, that Jesus' words, although not remembered exactly, would have more likely survived than his actions because Jesus lived in an oral culture. He also seems to assume that the author of Mark would have worked only with "oral traditions" or written texts, documents that mostly preserved Jesus' teachings. The Jesus scholars, furthermore, think that the mythic component of ancient Greek and Roman thinking also had an impact on the Gospels.
Admitting that Crossan has some points (and that he's the expert!), we could still take a different perspective on things. First , the author of Mark doesn't seem to be consciously writing myth. Luke and Matthew's Christmas stories, yes, OK, they contain mythic elements. But Mark seems bent on exposing the human Jesus. Let's give the ancients some credit for brains. They knew when they were augmenting events with mythic themes. As far as I can see, the author of Mark eschews such themes and isn't interested in turning Jesus into a deity. Second , Mark wrote only 30 years or so after Jesus. That's just a generation away, and there were still people living who knew Jesus personally. Others had died only recently, having left their memories with friends and relatives as they told and re-told their experiences with Jesus. From an oral history perspective, Jesus was still very much within living memory. It's as if Jesus had died in about 1968, which in terms of oral history is no big deal at all. I've interviewed people with memories that go back to before 1910. A person who is 60 will have adult memories going back to the mid-1950s and childhood memories back to before 1945. It's even possible that the author of Mark was himself a witness to some of the events he reports. The empirical Jesus wasn't nearly so distant a figure from Mark as the Jesus scholars seem to think. There's no way of knowing whether Mark consciously did oral history interviews, but in any event there was a lot of oral data available to him informally. Given his perspective on Jesus, it's hard to believe he didn't make use of that data. Third , people remember events more clearly than they do words. This is just as true for an oral culture as it is for a literate one. It's true that there were Jewish scribal oral traditions that preserved the teachings of important rabbis. There were probably some such scribal memories of Jesus' words. But there's no reason to throw out the existence of informal "people's-traditions" that more likely preserved memories of Jesus actions than his words.
Mark,
|
