The land of Israel is a small country. You can walk its length, north to south, in a few days, and from its central mountains you can see its lateral boundaries, the sea to the west and the river to the east. But it has had an importance out of all proportion to its size. Empires have fought over it. Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of it as the natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead.1 There are many places which, once beautiful, are now battered and mangled with the legacies of war. And yet it has remained a beautiful land, still producing grapes and figs, milk and honey.
The New Testament has not been around as long as the land of Israel, but in other ways there are remarkable parallels. It is a small book, smaller than anybody else’s holy book, small enough to be read through in a day or two. But it has had an importance belied by its slim appearance. It has again and again been a battleground for warring armies. Sometimes they have come to plunder its treasures for their own use, or to annex bits of its territory as part of a larger empire in need of a few extra strategic mountains, especially holy ones. Sometimes they have come to fight their private battles on neutral territory, finding in the debates about a book or a passage a convenient place to stage a war which is really between two worldviews or philosophies, themselves comparatively unrelated to the New Testament and its concerns. There are many places whose fragile beauty has been trampled by heavy-footed exegetes in search of a Greek root, a quick sermon, or a political slogan. And yet it has remained a powerful and evocative book, full of delicacy and majesty, tears and laughter.
What ought one to do with the New Testament? We may take it for granted that it will be no good trying to prevent its still being used as a battleground. No border fences would be strong enough to keep out the philosophers, the philologists, the politicians and the casual tourists; nor should we erect them if they were. There are many who have come to pilfer and have stayed to be pilgrims. To place all or part of this book within a sacred enclosure would be to invite a dominical rebuke: my house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations. Past attempts to keep it for one group only—the take-over bids by the scholars and the pietists, the fundamentalists and the armchair social workers—have ended with unseemly battles, the equivalent of the sad struggle for the control of Holy Places in the land of Israel. This book is a book of wisdom for all peoples, but we have made it a den of scholarship, or of a narrow, hard and exclusive piety.
There have been two groups, broadly, who have tried to inherit this territory for themselves, to make this book their own preserve. Like the two major claimants to the land of Israel in our own day, each contains some who are committed to the entire removal of the other from the land, though each also contains many who persist in searching for compromise solutions. We must understand something of both positions if we are to appreciate the overall task before us, let alone the smaller tasks (the study of Jesus, Paul and the gospels in particular) that fall within it.
There are those who, having seized power a century or two ago, and occupying many major fortresses (eminent chairs, well-known publishing houses, and so forth), insist that the New Testament be read in a thoroughgoing historical way, without inflicting on it the burden of being theologically normative. We must find out the original meanings of the texts, and set them out as carefully as we can, irrespective of the feelings of those who thought that a particular passage belonged to them and meant something different. There is sometimes an arrogance about this claim to power. Building on the apparent strength of history, and able to demonstrate the inadequacies of the simple way of life which preceded them, such scholars have set up concrete gun-stations where before there were vineyards, and they patrol the streets to harass those who insist on the old simplistic ways.
There are, on the other side, those who have shown just as much determination in resisting the advance of the new regime. Some still regard the New Testament as a sort of magic book, whose ‘meaning’ has little to do with what the first-century authors intended, and a lot to do with how some particular contemporary group has been accustomed to hear in it a call to a particular sort of spirituality or lifestyle. This phenomenon is seen most obviously within fundamentalism, but it is by no means confined to the groups (mostly in the Protestant traditions) for which that word is usually reserved. For some, the New Testament has become simply part of the liturgy, to be chanted, read in short detached snippets, used in public prayer, but not to be studied in and for itself, to be wrestled over in the hope of discovering something one did not already know. It exists, so it seems, to sustain the soul, not to stretch the mind. Such attitudes have responded to arrogance with arrogance, have tried to set up ‘no-go’ areas where the scholarly occupying forces cannot penetrate, have manned barricades with the stones of personal piety, and have bolstered morale with tales of scholarly atrocities.
As so often in the world of day-to-day politics, it is hard to feel that one side is totally right and the other totally wrong. The New Testament is undoubtedly a collection of books written at a particular time and by particular people, and if we were to treat it as though it fell from the sky in the King James Authorized Version, bound in black leather and ‘complete with maps’,2 we would be like those in present-day Israel who are content to know nothing about what happened before 1948. We would have forgotten that there was a Bible long before ‘our’ Bible, that St Paul spoke Greek, not seventeenth-century English. On the other hand, to imagine that the religious, theological, and spiritual aspects of the New Testament are all side-issues, and that because there is such a thing as fundamentalism we must avoid it by embracing some sort of reductionism, would be like ignoring the present problems and tensions in the land of Israel on the grounds that the only real issue is the meaning of the book of Joshua. On the one hand, then, we have a justifiable insistence on the importance of history as giving depth and extra dimensions to contemporary awareness; on the other, a justifiable insistence that historical description by itself is incomplete. Both sides, in fact, are arguably defending comparatively modern positions: post-Enlightenment rationalism on the one hand, anti-Enlightenment supernaturalism on the other. Both sides need to reckon with the fact that there might be other alternatives, that the either-or imposed in the eighteenth century might be false.
Other oversimplifications crowd in at this point if we are not careful. Within the armies currently in the field, there are some who owe primary allegiance to older causes. The division between the academic and the popular has roots far deeper than eighteenth-century controversies between history and theology, roots which include, in their different ways, the Montanist, Franciscan, Lollard, Protestant and Quaker movements, and the reactions to them. The squabble between those who conceive of Christianity as basically a matter of outward and physical signs and those who conceive it to be a matter of an inner light is almost perennial; so is the deep mistrust that separates those who advocate simple piety from those who insist that faith must always be ‘seeking understanding’. Fighters from all these wars may well have joined up in the current battles, not necessarily wishing to support the present cause to the limit, but seeing it as the nearest equivalent to their own particular penchant. There are also the equivalents of United Nations observers, those who (in theory at least) come to the New Testament as ‘neutral’ outsiders: these are the literary theorists or the ancient historians, who from time to time survey the battleground and tell the warriors that they are all mistaken. Like their secular analogues, they may sometimes be right, but they may also sometimes get in the way.3
What then ought to be done with this strange and powerful little book? This whole present project is designed to offer a set of answers, which may well prove controversial. But something must be said at this stage in very general terms in the hope of establishing initial, even if superficial, agreement. It is, of course, open to anyone to do what he or she likes with this or any book. A volume of Shakespeare may be used to prop up a table leg, or it may be used as the basis for a philosophical theory. It is not difficult, though, to see that using it as the foundation for dramatic productions of the plays themselves carries more authenticity than either of these (though of course raising further questions about whether a ‘modern dress’ production is more or less appropriate than a ‘period’ one, and so forth). There is a general appropriateness about using Shakespeare as a basis for staging plays which justifies itself without much more argument.
What might the equivalent be for the New Testament?4 That is precisely our question. The New Testament, I suggest, must be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate contexts, within an acoustic which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that ‘we’—whichever group that might be—already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And, for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests. The present volumes are an attempt to articulate a reading which does justice to these demands.
(i) What to Do with the Wicked Tenants
What, then, is the nature of our task? It may help if we begin with another illustration, again concerning a squabble over territory:
A man planted a vineyard, put a fence round it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a tower. Then he let it out to tenant farmers, and went abroad. At the appropriate time he sent a servant to the tenants to that he might receive from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. They took him, beat him, and sent him away empty-handed. Again he sent another servant to them; this one they beat over the head and abused. He sent another, and they killed him; then, many others, some of whom they beat, and some of whom they killed. He still had one other, a beloved son; and he sent him last of all to them, saying ‘They will respect my son.’ But those tenants said to one another ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ So they seized him, and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard.
What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others. Have you not read this scripture:
‘The stone which the builders refused has become the cornerstone;
This was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous to our eyes’?5
What might we do with a text like this? In order even to see how we might address the question, we have to be aware of the pressures upon us from our surrounding cultural confusion. We live at a time of major changes and swings of mood within Western culture: from modernism to postmodernism; from Enlightenment dualisms to ‘New Age’ pantheisms; from existentialism to new forms of paganism. To make things more confusing, elements of all these and more layers still coexist side by side within the same city, the same family, and sometimes even the same mind and imagination. It is important to be aware that the sorts of questions one asks depend for their perceived force on all sorts of assumptions about the way the world is and the nature of the human task within it. Since there is no prospect of agreement on such questions, the only possibility is to proceed with caution, looking, at least to begin with, in as many directions as reasonably possible.
There are, perhaps, four types of reading that might be offered, which will illustrate four movements within the history of reading the New Testament at which we will presently look in more detail. The four ways (pre-critical, historical, theological and postmodern readings) correspond very broadly to three movements within the history of Western culture in the last few centuries. The first belongs to the period before the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century; the second, to the major emphasis of the Enlightenment, sometimes known as ‘modernism’ or ‘modernity’; the third, to a corrective on the second, still from within the Enlightenment worldview; and the fourth to the recent period, in which the Enlightenment worldview has begun to break up under questioning from many sides, and which has become known as ‘postmodern’.6
The first way of reading the parable is that of prayerful Christians who believe the Bible to be Holy Writ, ask few if any questions about what it meant in its historical context, and listen for the voice of God as they read the text. They might, perhaps, see themselves as tenants, needing to be rebuked for their own failure to recognize the Son of God; or, in a context of persecution, they might identify themselves and their church with the prophets who are rejected by the powerful de facto owners, but who will be vindicated at the last. This pre-critical approach aims to take the authoritative status of the text seriously, but would today be criticized on (at least) three grounds, corresponding to the other three ways of reading: it fails to take the text seriously historically, it fails to integrate it into the theology of the New Testament as a whole, and it is insufficiently critical of its own presuppositions and standpoint.
Allowing each of these objections its own day in court, this brings us to the historical approach. Associated primarily with the Enlightenment’s insistence on the importance of history, this approach will ask a range of questions. (1) Did Jesus actually tell the parable, and if so what did he mean by it? Were there other similar stories of owners and tenants in the Jewish background which help us to discover what nuances it might have carried for his hearers? (2) How did the early church use this parable in its preaching? Was it, perhaps, retold at a time when the church needed to explain why most of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries had rejected his message? What new impact might it have had in that newer context, and has it been adapted to meet different needs, for instance by the highlighting of Jesus’ divine sonship? Was it even, perhaps, created out of nothing to meet needs which remained unmet by actual sayings of Jesus? (3) How has the evangelist used the parable within his work? What new colour does it acquire from its placing at this point in the narrative, just when Jesus has performed a dramatic action in the Temple, and when the pace of the story is now quickening towards the crucifixion? Has the writer altered it and adapted it for these purposes? These three approaches correspond broadly to the questions asked by (1) so-called historical criticism of the gospels, (2) form- and source-criticism, and (3) redaction-criticism. I shall discuss them in more detail in Part IV below. Most scholars would agree that such questions are still indispensable for a serious reading of the text.
There are various further levels of historical enquiry which might also prove fruitful. If we met the parable unawares and out of context, we might treat it as a historical or quasi-historical account of a real, though somewhat improbable, incident. It would be of interest, perhaps, at the level of the social history of its period. But we would discover, by historical means, signs in the material itself that this story is not, as we say, to be ‘taken literally’. Its very improbability indicates that it is being used to say more than its surface meaning might suggest. When it is placed in the context of a narrative whose central character tells many such stories; when these stories are given a genre-name, ‘parable’; when we discover that the narrative stands in a tradition which already contains other similar stories (e.g. Isaiah 5:1–7); then we rightly conclude that it may best be read as a meta-story, not for its own surface meaning but for some other. All these discussions take place within the historical reading of the text, the attempt to ‘place’ it within its appropriate historical context.
Such a historical reading might be open to challenge on three grounds. First, it is not clear from all this how the text, thus read, can have any ‘authority’ for the church or world today, and it is simply the case that the great majority of people who have read the New Testament have come with some such expectation. Second, it would not at first sight raise questions about the theology of the documents; but it would now be generally agreed that such questions are both appropriate and necessary. Thirdly, it might be over-optimistic to think that we could get back to ‘what actually happened’, arriving finally at ‘objective’ historical truth. For all these reasons, historical criticism has broadened, over the last hundred years in particular, to include theological study of the texts.
The theological approach asks different, though overlapping, questions. What is the underlying theology of the parable? What christology is implied by the picture of the ‘Son’? Where does it belong within Mark’s (or Matthew’s or Luke’s, or the early church’s) total theological statement? These questions, growing out of the ‘New Testament Theology’ project as conceived by Rudolf Bultmann in the middle years of the present century, have been much in vogue recently. Although they can be answered in ways which include en route the questions both of authority and of history, they can also neatly avoid both, relativizing a potentially ‘normative’ statement or a potentially ‘historical’ one into ‘merely an aspect of Matthaean theology’. And it is not clear that this method, either, has taken seriously the charge of recent critics that it must attend more carefully to the processes involved in its own reading.
The fourth and final approach is that of the recent so-called postmodern literary critics. Rejecting pre-critical piety on the one hand, and the historicizing approach of the Enlightenment on the other, such criticism insists on examining the process of reading in itself. What are we doing when we are reading this text? What do I bring to the text by way of presupposition, and in what way am I changed through reading it? Though the answer to this question might depend in part on whether I think Jesus actually told the parable, that historical question would only be ancillary to the real one, which concerns me and my reading. If such questioning gains its apparent strength from the difficulty that the other projects have in proving their case, that victory is won at the cost of the natural objections: I may end up discovering what is happening to me, but I thought I was going to find out about God, or Jesus, or the early Christians. Am I simply to give up those possibilities? Can such a reading coexist with authority, history or theology? Perhaps because of these problems, postmodern literary theory has not yet made many inroads into mainline biblical scholarship, but there is every reason to suppose that it will shortly do so.7
The problems that arise when these different approaches are juxtaposed are often focused on to one particular point, namely, the tension between a reading that seeks to be in some sense normatively Christian and that which seeks to be faithful to history. The modern (as opposed to the postmodern) reader has been under two conflicting pressures. There is, first, the Enlightenment’s insistence that all dogma be tested at the bar of history. Thus H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768), who was one of the Enlightenment’s chief representatives in New Testament studies, believed that Jesus was an ordinary Jewish revolutionary, and that this fact disproved orthodox Christianity. There is, second, the Christian insistence that, so to speak, Pontius Pilate belongs in the Creed; that the events which are central to Christian belief and life are not reducible to terms of non-spatio-temporal reality, but have to do with events that occurred within the real world. The rootedness of Christianity in history is not negotiable; one cannot escape from the Enlightenment’s critique by saying that history cannot question faith. (At least, attempts to do so, from early Gnosticism to the recent theologian Paul Tillich, have been widely regarded as avoiding rather than addressing the problem.)
Part of the difficulty has been, I think, that the heirs of the Enlightenment have been too shrill in their denunciation of traditional Christianity, and that Christianity has often been too unshakeably arrogant in resisting new questions, let alone new answers, in its stubborn defence of … what? Christians have often imagined that they were defending Christianity when resisting the Enlightenment’s attacks; but it is equally plausible to suggest that what would-be orthodox Christianity was defending was often the pre-Enlightenment worldview, which was itself no more specifically ‘Christian’ than any other. Who are the real tenants in the New Testament vineyard? And in what does their responsibility consist? And who has the right to be seen as the band of prophetic figures, coming to rescue the vineyard from the ravages of the usurpers?
Here is the paradox that lies at the heart of this whole project. Although the Enlightenment began as, among other things, a critique of orthodox Christianity, it can function, and in many ways has functioned, as a means of recalling Christianity to genuine history, to its necessary roots. Much Christianity is afraid of history, frightened that if we really find out what happened in the first century our faith will collapse. But without historical enquiry there is no check on Christianity’s propensity to remake Jesus, never mind the Christian god, in its own image. Equally, much Christianity is afraid of scholarly learning, and in so far as the Enlightenment programme was an intellectual venture, Christianity has responded with the simplicities of faith. But, granted that learning without love is sterile and dry, enthusiasm without learning can easily become blind arrogance. Again, much Christianity has been afraid of reducing a supernatural faith to rationalist categories. But the sharp distinction between the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘rational’ is itself a product of Enlightenment thinking, and to emphasize the ‘supernatural’ at the expense of the ‘rational’ or ‘natural’ is itself to capitulate to the Enlightenment worldview at a deeper level than if we were merely to endorse, rather than marginalize, a post-Enlightenment rationalist programme.
It is, therefore, impossible for Christianity to ignore or relativize the ‘modernist’ challenge of the eighteenth and subsequent centuries. This does not mean, of course, that we must simply endorse the Enlightenment critique; merely that its questions must remain on the table. And, as I shall argue later, the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment itself, while placing very necessary restraints on Enlightenment ambitions, does not (as some would like to think) invalidate the ‘modern’ project lock, stock and barrel. While the dispute between the tenants continues, it would be a bold person who presumed to speak for the Owner.
All this may sound very negative. Reading the New Testament seriously, at the present moment in Western culture, sounds so problematic that some may feel like giving it up. The vineyard is overcrowded and apparently unfruitful. But this response, too, would be inappropriate. Whatever one’s viewpoint, this text matters. If the Christian claims for the New Testament are anywhere near the truth, we cannot see it as a safe garden into which Christians can retreat from their contemporary world. It must function as part of the challenge and address of the creator god to the contemporary world. If, however, the Christian claims about the New Testament are false, then (as critics since the eighteenth century have been saying) the sooner its deficiencies are pointed out, the better. Whether, therefore, one has a Christian or non-Christian point of view, a thorough examination of this text is a necessary responsibility.
Underneath all these puzzles, I suggest that there are two questions in particular from which we cannot escape. They are: (1) How did Christianity begin, and why did it take the shape that it did? and (2) What does Christianity believe, and does it make sense? Hence the overall title of this project: Christian Origins and the Question of God. Both these questions, obviously, take up the question of the New Testament within them. It is part of the first question that we ask why the early Christians wrote what they did. It is part of the second that we explore the dynamic relationship between what the New Testament says and what Christians believe—and the further question, of whether those beliefs are coherent.
The two main questions which we have posed break down into more detailed ones. To begin with, there are questions to be raised about the literary study of these texts. What is to count as an appropriate reading of them? How might we tell? Looking at the methods of reading the New Testament that have become institutionalized and even sacralized over the years in the public and private devotion of the church, we are bound to ask whether such readings do justice to the texts: whether, for instance, a book like the Gospel according to Mark is well served by being read a dozen or so verses at a time, taken out of context. We are looking for an appropriate reading, and there is at present no agreement as to what might count. We shall continue this quest in chapter 3.
Looking next at the historical set of questions, we find the issues focused on Jesus, Paul and the gospels. (a) Who was Jesus, and was he in any sense responsible for the beginning of ‘Christianity’? What were his aims, what did he hope to achieve, why did he die, and why did (what we now call) the church come into being? (b) Was Paul the real founder of ‘Christianity’, the corrupter of the original message, or was he the true interpreter of Jesus? What was the structure and content of the belief-system that motivated him to undertake such extraordinary labour? (c) Why are the gospels what they are? Where do they stand in relation to Jesus and Paul? And, in answering these three sets of questions, can we relate them to each other? Can we draw the lines of early Christian thought so that they pass in some way or other through all of them, and if so how? These are the questions—to say nothing of other important and interesting ones, such as the origin and theology of the Letter to the Hebrews, or of major non-canonical works such as the Didache or the Gospel of Thomas—which, I suggest, must be looked at. They are open to any historian, of whatever ideological or cultural background, who wishes to understand and do justice to the first century and the extraordinary phenomenon which confronts us there, namely, the rise of a new and exceedingly powerful movement which some called a religion, some a sect, and its own adherents ‘the way’.
From one point of view, it is an accident that we happen to need to study the New Testament in depth in order to answer historical questions about early Christianity. It might in principle have been the case that we had excellent alternative records which would have enabled us to provide a thorough and adequate set of historical answers with only occasional recourse to the books written by Christians themselves. Some, of course, might want to object to this suggestion, and to insist that the events could only be understood through the eyes of faith, so that nothing short of the New Testament would do—and perhaps that Providence has ordered the obliteration of almost all other evidence in order to make the point clear. I think this smacks of cooking the evidence in advance, but such a retort could only properly be made when the bulk of the work is done. But whatever option we take here, this second set of questions remains firmly within what is normally thought of as ‘history’. We shall look at the methodological issues raised by all this in chapter 4.
But there is a third set of questions that must also be addressed in various ways throughout this work. What is Christian theology? In what way ought it to be the same today as it was in the beginning? Is such continuity even thinkable, let alone possible? What counts as normative Christianity? How do we know? Is there a worldview available to modern human beings which makes sense of the world as we know it and which stands in appropriate and recognizable continuity with the worldview of the early Christians? Should we even be looking for an authoritative statement of what the true faith and life might be, and if so where might we find it? How might it be reproduced in the modern church and world? And, underneath all such questions: what should we mean by the word ‘god’, or ‘God’?
Some people (self-styled historians, mostly) will protest that one should never muddle up this set of questions with the historical set.8 Some theologians have taken this warning seriously and have written about Christian theology with little attention to the historical question of Christian beginnings.9 It is, nevertheless, a matter of fact that most people who have tried to write about Christian theology have felt it appropriate to devote some space to the historical questions,10 and that the vast majority of people who have read the New Testament seriously from a historical point of view, and who have written about it thus, have in some way or other intended to address the theological questions as well, albeit of course reaching a wide range of answers.11 Naturally, the questions have often been confused with one another, and have interacted upon one another in ways which have produced distortion. Usually this has taken place to the detriment of history, as various theological or practical agendas have been projected back anachronistically into the first century.12 But these risks, happily, have not prevented other people from struggling to find out whether there is an appropriate way of integrating the literature, the history and the theology—the questions, that is, of early Christian literature, of Christian origins and of the Christian god—and, if so, what that way might be.13
Without some such attempt at integration, the danger is always present that history and theology will fall apart. There are still plenty of people who insist that the only proper task for the New Testament scholar is ‘neutral’ historical description.14 ‘History’ is regarded as the public task, out in the open. Anyone can engage in it, and indeed anyone might wish to, since, as Räisänen argues, early Christianity was part of a vital period in world history, and to understand it might well contribute to greater mutual understanding within our own worldwide community. Theology, meanwhile, is often seen as a private Christian game, played on a safe pitch away from serious opposition. Many Christians have in fact encouraged this conception of the task and have acted accordingly. Many will only regard historical study as ‘legitimate’ if its contemporary relevance is immediately obvious and accessible (‘but what does that mean for us today?’, said in the tone of voice which implies that failure to give a quick and easy answer will indicate that a mistake has been made somewhere).15
This potential mutual hostility between ‘history’ and ‘theology’ has resulted in the well-known split in New Testament studies, whereby the subject is divided into ‘Introduction’, conceived as a ‘purely historical’ task, and ‘Theology’, conceived less historically and more synthetically. This split is now enshrined in the rubrics of many a university syllabus, and (an even more Law-of-the-Medes-and-Persians area) in the classification systems of many a library. But this great divide, however much it is encouraged by some on either side, is neither necessary nor automatic, and is in fact highly misleading. On the one hand, studying the theology of the New Testament depends on some belief, however vague, that certain things that happened in the first century are in some sense normative or authoritative for subsequent Christianity. On the other hand, studying the history of early Christianity is impossible without a clear grasp of early Christian beliefs. It is notoriously difficult to go beyond these two vague statements. This, however, does not detract from, but rather emphasizes, the fact that theology, even specifically Christian theology, cannot exist in a vacuum, or in a sealed world away from public scrutiny and question. Integration, though difficult, remains an appropriate task.
While history and theology work at their stormy relationship, there is always a danger, particularly in postmodernism, that literary study will get on by itself, without impinging on, or being affected by, either of the others. The more we move towards a climate in which ‘my reading of the text’ is what matters, the less pressure there will be either to anchor the text in its own historical context or to integrate a wider ‘message’ of the text with other messages, producing an overall theological statement or synthesis. This again, as I shall argue later, represents an unnecessary step, though preventing it being taken is not always easy.
The present work, then, is an attempt to integrate three tasks often thought to be disparate. There will be times when we shall lean more heavily on questions of one sort rather than another. In a sense, the study of Jesus is first and foremost a matter of history, needing careful ancillary use of literary study of the texts and theological study of implications. I shall describe Jesus from the point of view of historical events which precipitated a theological and literary revolution. In a sense, the study of Paul is a matter of theology, needing careful ancillary historical and literary work. I shall discuss Paul from the point of view of a revolutionary theology which precipitated a historical achievement. In a sense, studying the gospels in their own right is first and foremost a literary task, but it cannot be done without careful attention to the historical and theological setting, context and implications. I shall analyse the gospels from the point of view of a literary achievement which embodied a revolutionary worldview (or several revolutionary worldviews?). And, as I shall argue in Part II of the book, none of these kinds of study can be done with a detached, positivistic ‘objectivity’. All involve, as all knowledge involves, the knower or researcher, the student or reader. Unless we are clear about this from the start we shall be labouring under an over-simplistic conception. Things might look pleasantly straightforward to begin with, but trouble would be stored up for later on.
If we are to take this programme further forward, we must now look briefly at what has been done in the three areas under consideration, and offer some comments on each. I take them here in the order in which they have emerged as forces to be reckoned with in New Testament studies during the last century.
(iii) The History of Early Christianity
For the last two hundred years and more, scholars have busied themselves with the search for what may be called early Christian history. What was the early church really like? What were its main movements? How did it change, within a hundred years, from being a small Jewish sect to a large and loosely knit multi-cultural group stretching across the Roman empire?16 We shall look at this whole area in Part IV of the present volume, and there is no need to anticipate that survey here. As we have already seen, this historical study must include what may be called early Christian theology; that is, a historical description of the worldviews and belief-systems of professing Christians between, say, 30 and 130 AD.17 If this is what we want, the New Testament is obviously the main place to go, even if only for want of anything else. But a lot of reading between the lines will be needed, since the writers of the New Testament were not for the most part trying to give their readers this sort of information, and indeed were sometimes combating certain types of early Christian belief-systems. Reconstructing the theology of early Christianity will include the reconstruction of the theologies of those whose own writings (if such there were) have not been preserved. Fair enough: that sort of between-the-lines reconstruction is what historians often have to do. In principle it may be possible. Certainly a great deal of energy has been expended on it in recent decades.18
The great advantage of this task is that it can be seen quite clearly as a public operation. It is open to all and sundry; its methods are those of any historian reconstructing any society and its belief-systems. In addition, there is a great opportunity for this task in contemporary scholarship. New tools and texts have opened up worlds of thought and life of which our predecessors a century ago were ignorant. Studying the history of the early church, including the history of its beliefs, is possible, fascinating, and potentially fruitful.
At the same time, there are several difficulties that this task will encounter. To begin with, it shares the general difficulty of all ancient history: there is not enough material to make a thorough job. We cannot attain to as full a description of early Christian religion, and hence theology, as we would like. The documentation, not having been designed to give us this information, is inadequate. As a result there is always the danger of a vicious circle: part of the aim of historical study of early Christianity is to arrive at a vantage point from which we could survey the whole landscape, including the New Testament; but most of the material for this task is contained within the New Testament itself.
The result of this, in turn, is the possibility of endless and fruitless speculation. Extraordinary hypotheses can grow up in the night like Jonah’s gourd, but no hot wind comes the next day to cause them to wither. They survive, giving shelter to various contemporary views of Christianity that do not, perhaps, deserve them. There is the ‘big bang’ theory of Christian origins, according to which true, pure and unadulterated Christianity appeared briefly at the beginning, and has been cooling down and getting itself muddled up ever since. There is the ‘steady development’ hypothesis, according to which theological and practical ideas and agendas develop in straight lines, without twists, turns or second thoughts. There is the old Tübingen hypothesis, according to which Christianity developed in two parallel and distinct ways, divided by racial background, and then came together in the second generation into the catholic church. There is a good deal to be said against each of these theories, but they continue to wield influence at a subliminal level.
A further problem with one regular conception of the task is its positivistic self-description. I shall argue in chapter 4 that all history involves selection, arrangement and so on, and that the idea of a ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ history is a figment of post-Enlightenment imagination. If we must make any distinction here, it is better to think of ‘public’ and ‘private’ tasks, rather than ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Yet the positivist element still remains, advocating a value-free and dogma-free historiography as though such a thing were really attainable.19 This approach is, in a measure, self-refuting: Räisänen’s own account of the history of the discipline is itself a good example of selection and arrangement on the basis of prior conceptions.
Granted that some sort of historical knowledge is possible, that we resist a slide into subjectivism as firmly as we resist arrogant objectivism, we must ask: of what use is this task? It is all very well to say, as some will, that history is undertaken for its own sake, to find out simply what happened. But the fact remains that all writers on the New Testament and early Christianity known to me, without exception, have come with their own ideas about the importance of the events concerned, and have not remained content with bare description. The story that is told about this bit of the past is universally perceived as having relevance for the present. So far, so good; but how is the history of early Christianity to be ‘relevant’ for the present day? At this point there is no agreement, but rather a muddle.
First, many writers of this and some other centuries have seen the religious experience of the early Christians (sometimes including their ‘theology’) as the normative element within Christianity. This has the apparent advantage that it enables one to conduct the ‘scientific’, supposedly ‘objective’, study of early Christian religion and theology, with the knowledge that when one has found them one is in touch with the real model of what Christianity is supposed to be like. One might then, it would be hoped, reactivate this model by preaching and prayer.20 This achieves some integration with the agenda of Wrede and Räisänen, in that it appeals to a history which is in principle observable by all. It also fits conveniently with the programme of the so-called ‘biblical theology’ movement of the post-war period, which rejected the idea that the Bible was itself ‘revelation’ and opted instead for the idea that God reveals himself in mighty acts within history, to which the observers, specifically in this case the early Christians, bear witness, enshrining that witness in their writings.21 On this showing, the New Testament, read historically, is ‘authoritative’ because it is the set of documents closest to the facts. It is therefore ‘authoritative’ in the same sense that Suetonius is the best ‘authority’ for the life of Domitian. This example, however, shows just how slippery the word ‘authority’ actually is. Suetonius is no more reliable than a tabloid newspaper. Mere proximity to the event is not enough.
Second, if early Christianity is to function in any way as a norm, the process will clearly involve selection—not simply the selection involved in any historical account of anything, but the selection of types of early Christianity according to a pre-arranged evaluative scheme. This will inevitably involve omissions. There are more types of early Christianity than can easily be grouped together and given authoritative status. And at this point—since on the model being used the canon is of no significance—one is forced to import other criteria from outside, which will enable us to distinguish the ‘right’ sort of early religious experience from the ‘wrong’ sort. Either one must elevate the earliest period on the grounds of its being primitive and therefore purer;22 or one will take a particular type of religion, described according to either its cultural provenance (Jewish or Greek) or its conformity to a theological norm (Pauline Christianity, for instance).23 And this again seems highly problematic: where did these criteria come from? They do not seem to have come from the Bible or tradition. They can only have come from the interpreter’s view of what mainstream, or ‘authentic’, early Christianity was really like. But in that case the would-be ‘objective’ study of early Christianity has been abandoned. What is being attempted instead is a far more generalized Christian theology (with a starting-point as yet undisclosed), or at least some sub-branch of New Testament theology.24
This problem is equally evident in the work of Räisänen, who, advocating ‘objective’ study of the history of early Christian belief, argues that it would be good to apply the results of New Testament study to the world, and not just to the church. This accords with the presuppositions of first-century Jews and Christians, as he correctly notes (although, interestingly, he cannot explain this phenomenon historically or theologically).25 But this raises two difficulties. Why should anyone outside the Jewish or Christian traditions find any relevance in the retelling of a chapter in the history of those traditions? At most it would be an example of either human folly and credulity or human courage and perseverance—or, perhaps, a mixture of both. And that would hardly merit the attention that scholars, Räisänen included, still lavish on the material. In addition, Räisänen’s claim to read the New Testament and find there material with which he can address modern issues leaves him with the problem of selection: where is his evaluative scheme coming from, to enable him to sort out the wheat from the chaff and use the former to address contemporary questions? The main message that seems to emerge from his treatment is that the early divisions between Judaism and Christianity are so muddled and confused that we would do a lot better to rethink the whole question from scratch. Similar generalized messages emerge from other recent historians who try to move from a descriptive to a normative statement.26 An alternative method is to suggest, by historical reconstruction of Jesus and his first followers, that later Christianity has been wrong to accord them the status it has.27
Finally, what does this scheme do with Jesus? It is residually odd to subsume Jesus under ‘early Christian experience’, or theology, or religion, as though Jesus were simply the first early Christian, whose ‘experience’ of his god might be deemed the most normative.28 From one perspective, as we shall see, it is of course vital to describe Jesus with as much historical accuracy as possible. But it would be quite a radical innovation to claim straightforwardly that Jesus’ experience of his god ought to be that of subsequent Christians. There are, no doubt, parallels and analogies (the ‘Abba’ prayer, for example), and there certainly is a strand of imitatio Christi in the New Testament. But there is also normally thought to be a uniqueness about Jesus which would make it strange to hold up his experience, or his beliefs, as the normative part of early Christianity, to be copied as closely as possible by subsequent Christian generations.
For all these reasons, it seems to me clear that the simple historical description of early Christianity and its theology cannot by itself be a complete enterprise. It remains, of course, one vital part of the task. We shall see later on that, without it, the attempt to mount a successful reading of the New Testament, let alone a Christian theology, is doomed to failure. It purports to have a simple and clear-headed agenda. But the clarity is superficial, and is purchased at the cost of major difficulties elsewhere. At the theoretical level, it tends towards either positivism or idealism, or an uncomfortable alliance of the two. At the practical level, it is bogged down by two things: the apparent arbitrariness, or at least the question-begging nature, of the choice of supposedly normative samples, and the difficulties of abstracting from a first-century context, complete with all its cultural trappings, a picture of this supposedly normative Christianity that would be both adequate for the task and sufficiently transportable to be applied in other cultures and times.29 The historical project, if it is to be successful even in its own terms, must broaden its horizons.
The second model we must explore is that of New Testament theology proper. This phrase has come to designate, more or less, the attempt to read the New Testament from a historical point of view, and, either simultaneously or subsequently, to draw its major theological emphases together into a coherent statement which can then address subsequent generations, our own included.30
About both aspects of this two-sided term, ‘New Testament theology’, there are certain preliminary things that need to be said.31 The first half (the description of the theology of the New Testament) forms, of course, a subset of the category we have just been examining: New Testament theology is one part of the theology of early Christianity, and the latter is one part of the total history of early Christianity. These things should not be confused, as they sometimes are. In addition, there can be no guarantee in advance, unless we adopt an unthinking a priori, that the theologies of the different writers will be the same, and indeed a good deal of recent writing has been devoted to demonstrating that they are not. A certain amount of precision is therefore called for in the use of the phrase.
The second half (addressing the modern world on this basis) is more complex, bringing us of course into the sphere commonly, though misleadingly, called ‘hermeneutics’.32 We need to look first at the roots of the question. Why should people think that studying the New Testament would allow a fresh word from their god to be heard?
This belief grows out of the ineradicable Christian conviction, held from very early times, that being Christian means, among other things, living, believing and behaving in some sort of continuity, in principle demonstrable, with the New Testament (and hence with the Old Testament too, though that has always raised further difficulties which need not be addressed here). This belief gained additional momentum as a result of the Protestant Reformation, when the principle of sola scriptura was articulated, placing the Bible (and, de facto at least, the New Testament in particular) in the position of supreme authority. Reading the New Testament, it has always been felt within Protestantism, is where the Christian begins, and in doing so he or she is equipped, challenged, reinforced, given a basis for belief and life.
The particular emphasis which eventually gave rise to the present meaning of the phrase ‘New Testament theology’ was the Protestant insistence on the literal or historical sense of scripture as the arbiter of the meaning of the text and hence the vehicle of its authority. This principle, originally articulated as a way of keeping allegorical fancy at bay, left residual problems within the churches of the Reformation as they struggled with what the literal sense might be and how it might function as authoritative. These problems eventually emerged, in the new situation of the Enlightenment, with the rise of the critical movement. The literal sense was again insisted on, but with two possible results. Either it could be shown that the historical sense of scripture was in fact false, calling the veracity of Christianity as a whole into question. Or one could explore the historical meaning in order to abstract from it timeless theological truths, hoping that these would refresh areas of contemporary life that the literal sense could not reach. It was the tensions implicit here that gave birth to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates about New Testament theology. Would historical exegesis provide the church with the material for its proclamation, or would it provide the problems which that proclamation would have to deal with or skirt around? How can the historical and the normative readings be combined? In other words, is ‘New Testament theology’ in its combined sense a viable proposition?
Two ways of making it viable which have been explored turn out upon examination to be ultimately unsatisfactory. The first, which brings together thinkers from Lessing in the eighteenth century to Bultmann in the twentieth, follows the line indicated above, of doing the historical work in order to move beyond it to an ultimate truth which is beyond space and time, outside history altogether. What then emerges is a timeless message, a timeless truth, or a timeless call to decision. This is the thing we can use today. Such a ‘timeless theology’ is then the real object of the historical quest. If and when we discover what the beliefs of the New Testament writers were, we can, like theological archaeologists, unearth the essential substructure of Christianity in order to carry it off and display it elsewhere, making it available for all generations in some kind of museum. ‘Theology’ then becomes the ‘real’ thing that the New Testament is ‘about’, the real fruit that emerges when the outer skin of historical circumstance is peeled away. This is often stated in terms of some aspects being ‘timelessly true’ and others being ‘culturally conditioned’.
The problem with this programme is that the skin does not peel away so cleanly. It is very difficult to produce a ‘theology’ from the New Testament that is couched in ‘timeless’ categories, and if we succeed in doing so we may justifiably suspect that quite a lot of fruit has been thrown away, still sticking to the discarded skin. All of the New Testament is ‘culturally conditioned’: if that were to disqualify an idea or a theme from attaining ‘relevance’ to other periods or cultures, the New Testament as a whole is disqualified.
Two outworkings of this method, in twentieth-century scholarship, have been (1) demythologization: the attempt to move away from the culture-specific first-century forms of speech and thought in which the timeless message or call was clothed, and (2) form-criticism: the means of analysing material, which at face value offers historical narratives about Jesus, in such a way as to let it reveal the (supposedly) ‘timeless’ faith of the early church. Both these movements have cultural and theological roots not only in modern critical movements but in pre-modern pietistic ways of reading scripture, extracting a ‘message’ from passages whose literal sense might not have offered one. The whole process goes back, ultimately, to the allegorical exegesis of the Fathers.33 Here is a not inconsiderable irony within the Bultmannian agenda, which grows out of Protestant theology, insisting on a message which breaks out of the apparent strait-jacket imposed by history and the law and offers free forgiveness, grace, a new start. In doing so, it still emphasizes the literal sense of scripture, at least in relation to the gospels—but only in order to insist that the literal sense must be transcended if the true voice of scripture is to be heard. The gospels are actually ‘about’ Christian faith in Jesus rather than Jesus himself. The events themselves can become relativized: notoriously, even Jesus can become simply an early preacher of the timeless message, his death a bare event that (somehow or other) set in motion the early faith of the church, that primitive ‘experience’ which, as expressed in the writings of the New Testament, became the really normative phenomenon.34 This proposal is subject to the damaging criticism that it has not given to history, or creation, sufficient weight for them to be taken seriously within the reading of the New Testament, in which both seem to be enormously important. This first model, moving from history to timeless truth, brings large problems with it, and cannot any longer be affirmed without serious difficulty.
The second model was proposed by the ‘biblical theology’ school of the 1950s and 1960s.35 In philosophical terms, this school opposed the idealism of Bultmann with a kind of realism. The New Testament is given authority not because it witnesses to timeless truth, but because it witnesses to the mighty acts of the creator god within history, and especially in the events concerning Jesus. The text is then revelatory, and hence authoritative, insofar as it bears witness to the ‘real thing’, that is, to the event(s). This model can be combined with the view of church history that sees it starting off in a ‘pure’ period, and thus with some of the ways in which, as we saw, the study of early Christian history can be used in a normative programme. But this in turn appears not to do justice to the Protestant insistence on the text itself as being divine revelation. Nor has this model succeeded, either in highlighting the events that are to count as revelation, or in providing a clear theological account of how such a revelation is to be conceived.
A further problem for both models is caused by the diversity of the material. In order to produce a ‘normative’ statement out of the New Testament it is practically inevitable that one will emphasize one part of the text at the expense of the rest. This functions, at both a scholarly and a popular level, by means of elevating certain parts of the theology of the New Testament, for instance the theology of Paul, into a ‘canon within the canon’. Such a method is often justified by appeal to the principle that the harder parts of the Bible are to be interpreted in the light of the easier ones. It is remarkable just how long a life this ‘principle’ has had, considering the blatant subjectivism which it contains.36 What is ‘harder’ or ‘easier’ will of course vary enormously from one generation, and cultural setting, to another: witness he varying fortunes of ‘apocalyptic’ in our own century.37 This is not to say that one should not operate with some kind of an inner canon: all interpreters do, whether they admit it or not, in that all come to the text with some set of questions that begin the encounter. The question then is: what should we do with this starting-point? Should we use it simply as a way in to the material, remaining conscious of its implicit bias? Or will it be used as a Procrustean bed by which to measure, and condemn, the other bits that do not fit? The former may be possible in theory, but the latter is very tempting.
The largest problem faced by the ‘New Testament theology’ project, particularly within the Bultmannian paradigm and its variations, is what to do with Jesus. ‘New Testament theology’, strictly speaking, does not include the teaching (or the facts of the life, death and resurrection) of Jesus, but merely the beliefs of the New Testament writers about Jesus, or perhaps those beliefs expressed mythologically in terms of Jesus-stories. It is the odd nemesis of the Protestant principle of sola scriptura that one of the basic models to which it has given rise has little place within its hermeneutical structure or authority-system for Jesus himself, since he was the author of no New Testament book. From this point of view, Bultmann was perfectly correct in the famous opening sentence of his New Testament Theology: ‘The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.’38 Here we see the line that runs from Melanchthon to Bultmann and beyond: once we grasp the pro me of the gospel, the idea that God is ‘being gracious to me’, we no longer need Jesus to be too firmly rooted in history.39 But the criticisms of Christianity put forward by Reimarus and others, not to mention the revisionist schemes of many Jewish writers in our own day, will not be satisfied with the retreat from history exemplified by Kähler, Bultmann and Tillich. Nor will the problems of the modern scholarly portraits of Jesus, such as those by Sanders, evaporate. If Jesus was as Reimarus, or Schweitzer, or Sanders, have portrayed him, then the church needs at the very least to revise its faith quite substantially.
In addition, as we will see in Part IV, there is a particular oddity about placing ‘New Testament theology’ as a norm over against Jesus himself, as was done classically by Bultmann. It is perfectly true that the New Testament presents us with Paul’s, Mark’s, Luke’s, etc. theology about Jesus, so that Jesus’ own theological beliefs cannot be read off the surface of the text. Some would say that the real Jesus can not be rediscovered at all, being now so thoroughly overlaid with the evangelists’ theologies; others would say that he should not be searched for at all, since to look for Jesus behind the evangelists is to look for a historian’s construct (or another ‘ideal’ figure) rather than the Lord whom the earliest Christians worshipped and followed. But even to say this much implies that the New Testament writers did not think that they were setting up, by means of their writings, an authority over against that of Jesus. It has been customary to say that the New Testament writers ‘did not think they were writing “scripture”;’ and though, as we shall see, that formulation may need to be revised, not least in the light of recent redaction-criticism, it is certainly true to the extent that for them the place where Israel’s god had acted decisively for the salvation of the world was not in their taking pen and ink to write gospels, but in their god’s taking flesh and blood to die on a cross. Their own work was conceived as derivative from and dependent upon that fact. Thus, while it is true that Jesus and his own belief-system is not, strictly speaking, ‘part of New Testament theology’, this does not mean that Jesus and his proclamation should be relativized in favour of the ‘real thing’, i.e. New Testament theology.40 One might say instead, so much the worse for ‘New Testament theology’ itself: if it does not contain the decisive proclamation of Jesus, it cannot itself be the be-all and end-all of the divine revelation, the ultimate locus of authority, the ‘thing’ that all study of the New Testament is bent towards finding.
If the project of ‘New Testament theology’ is as full of problems as this, why should anyone want to continue with it? Why are we faced, in both popular and scholarly work, with frantic efforts to locate, distill, salvage or even invent something that can still be called ‘New Testament theology’, and that will serve as the substance of academic courses and as the starting-point for church life, preaching, mission and evangelism? The answer, I think, is threefold. First, the theological sector where this task has been carried on most urgently is Protestantism, and Protestants still regard the New Testament as in some sense or other the ‘real’ authority for Christians. Second, the philosophical context of much of this work has been Idealism, which has been happier with abstract ideas than with concrete history; so theology, seen as a set of such ideas, attains a privileged status. If the New Testament is ‘authoritative’, this authority has been deemed to lie in the theology that it contains. Third, the practical context for ‘New Testament theology’ has been the church’s perceived task of addressing both itself and the wider world with a word from the true god. ‘New Testament theology’ is believed to fuel preaching. The problems which this model has run into have driven some to object that it was foolish to look for authority, coherence or even relevance in the New Testament; that objective historical study should abjure all such a prioris; or that the project simply collapses back into that articulated by Wrede three generations ago or Räisänen three years ago (‘objective’ description of religious writing in its historical context). It has caused others to try to restate a way of still doing something which can be called ‘New Testament theology’, which can still hold on to description and prescription and have both lines running through the New Testament, or at least some of its so-called ‘major witnesses’. I suspect, however, that the right way out of this jam is not backwards to Wrede (Räisänen), nor by means of a sideways expansion into a revised and postmodern Bultmannism (Morgan), but on into a wider category, with a new view of ‘authority’, ‘theology’ and ‘relevance’.
Within any traditional Christian scheme—invoked here not as an a priori to settle historical matters, but as the necessary foundation for showing how traditional Christian judgments have in fact worked—all authority belongs ultimately to the creator god; and if (as traditional Christianity has gone on to say) this god is made known supremely in Jesus, then Jesus, too, holds an authority that is superior to all writing about him. Many, of course, will suppose this to be a false antithesis, since what we know about Jesus we know precisely in these writings. But this will scarcely hold within mainline ‘New Testament theology’, in which, as we have seen, it is axiomatic that the gospels do not give us direct access to Jesus, but only to the theology of the evangelists and their predecessors. If all authority belongs to the creator god, it is a matter of some delicacy to describe how such ‘authority’ comes to be vested in the New Testament, and what the limits of this might be.
The three approaches we have examined thus far (early Christian history, and ‘New Testament theology’ in two distinct forms) have continued to be pursued within the guild of New Testament scholarship. Much of the ‘normal science’ of New Testament studies (to use Kuhn’s phrase)41 has proceeded to fill in the paradigms represented by Wrede’s historical agenda, Bultmannian ‘New Testament theology’, and the vestiges of the ‘biblical theology’ movement. It is, after all, large agendas like this that give the meaning and purpose, the sense of excitement, to the detailed activities of biblical scholars, in commentaries, articles and monographs. From the Enlightenment’s thirst for history there has flowed the quest for Jesus, producing endless problems, but also possibilities, for scholar and church alike. From the Bultmannian thirst for New Testament theology there have flowed, among other things, major studies of Pauline theology and major reconsiderations of the gospel traditions. From the post-war ‘biblical theology’ movement there have flowed, among other things, essays on ‘salvation-history’. New agendas have come into play, not least the post-war desire to free Christianity and the New Testament from the suspicion of complicity in the Holocaust (or, alternatively, to blame them for it). There has been no shortage of activity on all fronts.
It is to this range of interlocking issues that the present chapter, and indeed the present volumes, address themselves with, I hope, some new and positive proposals. We need to do both history and theology: but how? Ultimately, the present project is part of the wider task—which I believe faces modern Western culture in its entirety, not only theologians or Christians—of trying to rethink a basic worldview in the face of the internal collapse of the one which has dominated the Western world for the last two centuries or so. And it is precisely one of the features of the worldview now under attack that ‘history’ and ‘theology’ belong in separate compartments. The challenge is now before us to articulate new categories which will do justice to the relevant material without this damaging dualism—and without, of course, cheating by collapsing the data into a monism in which one ‘side’ simply disappears into the other. This challenge is faced in all sorts of areas, of which the study of the New Testament is only one. But before pursuing this further we must look briefly at the third element in the study of the New Testament. If we are to be historians and theologians, we must also be literary critics.
There are still some New Testament scholars for whom the phrase ‘literary criticism’ means the application to the New Testament of the critical questions and methods made famous in the first half of the century. Source-, form-and redaction-criticism were the order of the day, and some wish they still were. A good deal of professional New Testament studies has been concerned with such things, and, with them, the historical analysis of the intention of the writers or transmitters of the material that we now find in the New Testament.
This world, however, has changed beyond all recognition in the last few years. The rise of postmodernist literary criticism (see chapter 3) has made the essentially modernist disciplines—of investigating the early community that handed on traditions, of trying to uncover complex literary sources, of unpicking what precisely the evangelists were doing with those sources—look decidedly passé. The new emphasis in gospel studies is not on the creative evangelist so much as on the text in itself. The study of the phenomenology of reading, and the application of this to what happens when today’s readers read the New Testament, is an increasingly popular field.42 And it has recently been argued that, since historical criticism seems not to have produced the goods that critics were looking for, a sideways step into the world of (postmodern) literary criticism might help. Since what we are there doing is observing how readers appropriate things for themselves, maybe this will produce a new and satisfying reading of the New Testament.43
This provides, in effect, a new way of being Bultmannian. Instead of doing history in order to uncover timeless truths, we will study (biblical) literature to receive messages that transcend space and time. It is an attempt to accomplish, within postmodernity, what Bultmann’s package failed to accomplish within modernity. As such, this proposal moves away from the sterile positivism of Wrede and Räisänen, and opens up possibilities for giving an account of how texts can speak afresh in situations other than their original ones. In particular, unlike the classic forms that Bultmannian theology has taken, this method has the inestimable advantage that it begins from and studies the known (actual texts) instead of the unknown (early Christianity as it may be reconstructed from between the lines of the New Testament).
But the proposal is still faced with some serious questions. It is not clear, from within the model, why one should be reading the New Testament to achieve this effect. Why should one not read, as of equal value, the Gospel of Thomas, or Pirke Aboth, or for that matter Pride and Prejudice? Likewise, it is not clear what continuing status the model gives to history, nor why, within its own terms, one should focus on literature specifically. Why not early Christian art or artifacts? Is it just that literature is more obviously amenable to postmodern study? Or that the overshadowing of the whole area by one complex text—the New Testament—misleads us into thinking that the whole task can be undertaken in terms of texts? In particular, it is still not at all clear where Jesus might fit in to such a reading. Is it enough to say that when we read the parables we are meeting, at however many removes, a literary version of his own originally oral works of art? And, in particular, how will this method avoid the slide into subjectivism? We shall have to pursue these questions further in chapter 3.
At the same time as the postmodern shift in emphasis to reader-oriented study, historical study of the literature in its original context has continued. But it has searched for quite different phenomena from its predecessors. Biblical specialists are at last following their classical colleagues in abandoning the endless and tortuous search for exactly reconstructed sources.44 We have seen a spate of studies recently on ancient rhetorical and literary conventions and forms, and an insistence that New Testament research should take note of these.45 This is, from one point of view, simply filling in a new gap in Wrede’s programme, attempting to place the New Testament documents on the historical map of their day. At the same time, it functions as an attempt to assess the likely reception of the writings within their own communities, which is, effectively, a modernist (historical) analysis of a postmodern phenomenon. For too long scholars have assumed that the readers of (say) Paul or Matthew were basically similar to modern readers, so that something that seems difficult to us would probably have seemed difficult to them. The study of ancient rhetoric and writing conventions exposes this sort of massive anachronism for what it is. As such it is greatly to be welcomed. Though not by itself a complete way of reading the New Testament, it can clearly make a major contribution to the overall task.
We have now briefly examined the major components of the task of reading the New Testament, in terms of some modern discussions and their direction. What we now require is a creative synthesis of all of them. We must try to combine the pre-modern emphasis on the text as in some sense authoritative, the modern emphasis on the text (and Christianity itself) as irreducibly integrated into history, and irreducibly involved with theology, and the postmodern emphasis on the reading of the text. To put it another way, we need to do justice, simultaneously, to Wrede’s emphasis on serious history (including the history of Jesus), Bultmann’s emphasis on normative theology, and the postmodern emphasis on the text and its readers. Each of these, of course, is inclined to claim sole rights, and to resent sharing territory it regards as its own. But such grandiose claims should be resisted.46
We seem unlikely to find this way forward by the route of positivism (see chapter 2), or by the search for timeless truths, or by simply concentrating on my reading now. I suggest that the only way to combine what needs to be combined is by means of a fresh examination of what a contemporary Christian literary, historical and theological project might look like. That is the aim of Part II. In the course of this task we will tell some stories about the way these tasks are done which will, I hope, subvert some of the stories told about them elsewhere. Not to allow for this possibility would be to close the range of conceivable historical and theological answers ahead of time in a quite unacceptable fashion. In the contemporary world, with all its uncertainties about controlling paradigms, we have a chance to address these tasks in new ways. It is to be hoped that this will contribute, not merely to private edification or academic satisfaction—though these should ideally be taken care of en route—but to wider goals, not least advancing the ‘kingdom of god’. That, however, is to run some little way ahead of the argument.
In the light of Part II, we need to advance some hypotheses about the historical situation within which the New Testament writings were born. This will involve a historical reconstruction of the Judaism and Christianity of the first century. We know a good deal more about ancient Judaism than we used to, and I shall draw on this new knowledge in some detail in Part III. The reconstruction of early church history has less frequently been attempted, and the lack of materials has resulted in a certain amount of fantasy. Our particular task, to describe Christianity between 30 and 150 AD without discussing Jesus or Paul, is somewhat artificial—rather like discussing European music from 1750 to 1850 without mentioning Mozart and Beethoven—but it must be attempted for two reasons. First, it is important to set up as clearly as possible the historical context within which the two major subjects, Jesus and Paul, may be studied. Second, virtually all our information about Jesus comes in the form of documents in which we meet traditions handed on, and eventually written down, by Christians some of whom were living in that early period and addressing its particular needs. We must therefore understand something about the early church itself in order to be able to read the gospels with proper historical sensitivity and care. This is the subject of Part IV, and will enable us to reach, in Part V, a preliminary restatement of some of the key issues. There is, of course, an inevitable circularity here, but, as I shall show in Part II, it is in no way vicious; it is the necessary circularity of all serious historical and indeed epistemological reconstruction.
This will set the scene for the subsequent volumes, dealing with Jesus, Paul and the gospels. In each area there have been many new waves of study and interest in recent decades; but this has not been integrated either historically or theologically. In attempting this large task, I am writing something like the ‘New Testament theologies’ which have been written from time to time, but am also conscious, as I argued earlier, of the differences between the classic formulations of that model and the way in which I conceive the task and goal.
This first volume, then, in one sense introduces the entire project at hand, but in another stands by itself. It argues for a particular way of doing history, theology, and literary study in relation to the questions of the first century; it argues for a particular way of understanding first-century Judaism and first-century Christianity; and it offers a preliminary discussion of the meaning of the word ‘god’ within the thought-forms of these groups, and the ways in which such historical and theological study might be of relevance for the modern world. And if these tasks are in one way simply preliminaries to the task of going in and possessing the land itself, that may be no bad thing. If the tenants had heeded the owner’s instructions, there would have been no dispute about the vineyard. If the children of Israel had heeded the Deuteronomic warnings, there would have been more milk and honey, and less misery and injustice, when they eventually crossed the Jordan.