f9

1. Introduction

The study of early Christianity, of Jesus and Paul, and especially of the theology of the whole movement and of individuals within it, is conducted by means of the study of literature. (The only exceptions to this rule are the occasional relevant coin, inscription, or other archaeological find.) We must therefore enquire, in general terms at least, what literature does, how it works, and how best to treat it. The question, what should one do with the New Testament, is a special case of the general question, what should one do with any book. This conclusion presses particularly upon us in the late twentieth century. The tide of literary theory has at last reached the point on the beach where the theologians have been playing, and, having filled their sandcastle moats with water, is now almost in danger of forcing them to retreat, unless they dig deeper and build more strongly.

Current questions about literature have close affinities with those we have already examined.¹ We are faced once more with problems about knowledge, albeit highly specialized ones. First, we need to discuss the question of reading itself: what is going on when a reader encounters a text? Second, we need to ask what literature itself is; thirdly, in the light of this, what the task of criticism may be. Since this will lead us into the question of Story once more, we must then look in more detail at the way in which stories function. Finally, we must apply all of this in more detail to the New Testament.²

We may begin, though, with some examples that will help us along the way.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor.

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no-one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart a strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no-one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Aye, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hooves were gone.³

What should we do with a piece of writing like this? We may content ourselves, if we wish, by commenting on de la Mare’s poem in terms of literary art, such as alliteration. The still, soft sense of the forest is conveyed by the string of ‘f’s in the fourth line; the return to silence, as of a pool once disturbed and now regaining stillness, by the ‘s’s in the penultimate line. We observe the effect, and explain the method. But there are broader effects worth pondering. The title of the poem is ‘The Listeners’; not, perhaps, the title we would choose ourselves (‘The Lonely Horseman’, ‘The Moonlight Rider’?). It throws attention in one direction even as the introduction to the poem is pointing elsewhere. It invites the reader to ponder: who are these phantom listeners? What are they doing? Who made the rider promise to come back, and where is he or she now? The tension between title and poem, only partly resolved by the listeners becoming the subject of the second half, combines with all the unexplained allusions (‘Tell them … I kept my word’) to create the effect of a great and solemn mystery, to which we are nearly privy but not quite. We realize, in fact, that we are witnessing the climax of a much longer and more complex drama, pregnant, out of sight and full of significance. We are, in fact, drawn irresistibly into the world of a story—and a story, moreover, which, like the modern ‘short story’, invites us to share its world as much by what it does not say as by what it does. The effect of the poem is more than the sum total of the rhymes, the assonance, the evocative setting. These all fall within (and of course, since the poem is a good one, they enhance) the wider effect of the story itself. Something similar, I shall suggest, is true of the gospels. And throughout these discussions we are met by the question: how open is the poem to new ways of being read? What would count as a ‘correct’ reading, and how important is it to try to achieve such a thing?⁴

Let us take a second example. In Thomas Mann’s celebrated and alarming novel Doctor Faustus we are introduced to Adrian Leverkühn, a brilliant composer who has invented an entirely new method of writing music.⁵ Mann alludes almost at once to the composer’s Faustian pact with the Devil, and then pretends (in the person of the narrator) to be cross with himself for letting such a major theme out so soon. But the real major theme remains hidden, only surreptitiously being revealed, as the novel draws on to its stupendous climax. In parallel with the life-story of the composer is set the life-story of modern Germany, culminating in the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. Only in the last sentence of the novel is the parallel finally made explicit, as the narrator looks at the ruin of his friend Leverkühn and at the ruin of his homeland, and combines the two: ‘Gott sei euerer armen Seele gnädig, mein Freund, mein Vaterland’—‘God be gracious to your poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland!’⁶ Here the effect is of a massive and sustained critique of twentieth-century Germany, from within, by one who has loved her and now grieves over her. The effect is achieved by large-scale juxtaposition and parallelism, never overstated, only gradually emerging from the shadows. It is, in other words, the story itself that has the effect, behind all Mann’s brilliant musical reconstructions (it is a bold novelist who describes fictitious pieces of music) and characterizations. And part of the power of the story, within Western culture, lies precisely in Mann’s retelling of the Faust legend in such a way as to subvert some other tellings, notably Goethe’s. This, he is saying, is what the story is really all about.

Once again, there are remarkable similarities to all of this in the gospels. And, once again, the question presses: how much of all this can we, or must we, ‘get right’, and how much remains open to new readings and interpretations?

For our third example we return to territory by now familiar. In Jesus’ parable of the Wicked Tenants, as told in the synoptic gospels, we find a classic example of a subversive story. Its parallel with the vineyard story in Isaiah 5 gives us a starting-point, as Mann’s conclusion gives us a fixed point from which to work back. This is the story of Israel; it was already a tragedy when Isaiah told it, but now it has become more intense, more poignant. It is now the story not only of a landowner and his tenants, but also of a father and his son. This element, too, is subversive: in the Old Testament it is Israel who is the beloved son of the creator god, and now there is apparently a son who stands both in Israel’s place and over against Israel. We observe how the story is built up in stages to its climax: (1) the vineyard is prepared, (2) the owner sends the messengers, who receive increasingly rough treatment, (3) finally the son is sent, rejected and killed. There remains the conclusion: (4) the vineyard will be taken away and given to others. The dramatic sequence is complete, and (interestingly, as we will see) essentially tragic: the vocation of the tenants, taken in isolation and pushed to its limits, is the cause of their own downfall. Called to be tenants, they aspire to be owners. As in much tragedy, we have here an essentially Promethean emphasis. We can thus already see how the story works in its context; how it works within itself; and where to locate it on a general map of stories. Once again, we may ask: how important is it to get these details right? And a further question: what difference, if any, does it make if we read this text as part of ‘holy scripture’?

(i) Introduction

With these examples in mind, we turn to the question: what happens when we read? The remarks in chapter 2 about the nature of knowledge must now be applied to this specific area. What kind of ‘knowledge’ do we gain as we read?

Readers in the modern West are often tempted to give a naïvely realistic answer. I pick up a newspaper and read it; the authors tell me what happened in the world yesterday. The ‘telescope’ of the text is simply a window, gazing out on reality. I read a history-book, and so discover simply ‘what happened’ at some moment in the past. But then one day we read in a newspaper, or in a history-book, an account of something we know about through a different source. This makes us stop and think. All of a sudden, naïve realism looks worrying, and so we lurch instead towards a naïve reductionism along the phenomenalist model: the words are not ‘about’ reality, but are simply ‘about’ the opinions of the writer. A shift has occurred: instead of looking ‘through’ the writer and the words at the event, I begin to suspect that I am looking only, or mainly, at the writer. The telescope has become an angled mirror: what is seen is not an event, merely an author. This can be demonstrated diagrammatically as follows:

Reader	Text		Author		Event
naïve realist ------->		------>		------>
- reading text, gaining access to author and thence to event
phenomenalist ------->		------>		------>
				<------
- reading text, gaining access to author, but event is illusory

A good example of this shift, in a ‘neutral’ area, can be found in the painting of Monet. Monet began, like most painters, painting objects in the real world: bridges, cathedrals, his garden, his wife. As Impressionism became, so to say, more impressionistic, and particularly, and interestingly, as his own sight deteriorated, he began to paint more and more not so much the objects as they were but his impressions of the objects, so that in his middle period we find ourselves looking—often, to be sure, with great delight—not at a quasi-photographic picture but at the depiction of someone’s sense-data. But, by his own account, Monet became less and less interested in the sense-data that the objects themselves were presenting to him, and more and more interested in the patterns and shapes, the colours and movement, which he was simply imagining. In his later works we find him moving towards sheer abstraction. This summary of Monet’s progression is, of course, like a good deal else in this Part of the book, a gross over-simplification, but it will suffice to make the point.⁷

We may suspect, in fact, that most people lurch from one position to another depending on circumstances. English people tend to think of themselves as robust realists: we just observe the facts and describe them, we just read the text as it is. But (as we saw above) as soon as we read a newspaper report of an event we know something about, we are aware of the difference between the journalist’s point of view and our own: and as soon as we engage (for instance) in personal counselling we become aware that one person can, in all apparent innocence, superimpose or ‘project’, on to his picture of another person, phenomena which are purely inside his own head. To revert to the example of journalism, what we often see (for instance in television documentaries, or pseudo-documentaries) appears to the reader or viewer as straightforward fact; but what is actually going on is very likely (a) the reporter’s idea of what ought to be occurring, projected on to an apparently ‘real’ world, (b) this idea appearing as ‘his point of view on reality’, and (c) this point of view appearing as reality itself.⁸ When you agree with the point of view, you tend to watch as a realist (this is how things actually are); when you disagree, you quickly become a phenomenalist at the author/event stage (it was just her point of view) or even a subjectivist (she simply made it all up).

All this may seem a little remote from the world of the New Testament. But in fact it strikes us in the face as soon as we pick up a modern book on the gospels. The German scholar G. Strecker has recently published a book on the Sermon on the Mount.⁹ On the back cover we are told, with an air of triumph, that the Sermon on the Mount does not represent what Jesus said, but rather contains Matthew’s own theology. That, I submit, is not primarily an exegetical or even a historical judgment: it is a philosophical one. Strecker is inviting us to move from the risky ground of making claims about Jesus himself to the apparently safer, more secure ground of saying that this is the state of Matthew’s own mind.¹⁰ We read the Sermon on the Mount and we ask ‘Is there anybody there?’ The answer is no: not in the sense of an original speaker, a Jesus sitting on a mountain talking to the crowds. There is only Matthew. We have jumped from realism, right over an empiricist reading (Matthew’s impression of Jesus) and landed in phenomenalism (Matthew’s state of mind). The apparent force of Strecker’s proposal has comparatively little to do with first-century history, and a great deal more to do with late-twentieth-century habits of mind and reading.

Or take, as another example, the usual account that is given of Josephus’ description of the Pharisees. He talks about them as though they were a philosophical school, with opinions about determinism and so forth.¹¹ Now nobody doubts that there were Pharisees, and that they did have opinions; but everybody doubts that they were really like Greek philosophers. Here we opt for a cautiously empiricist reading: Josephus, we say, is giving his perception of the Pharisees, or more accurately the perception which he knows will be comprehensible to his pagan audience. This perception is not merely an idea in his own mind, but nor does it correspond exactly to the way things actually were.

A third example comes from recent oral tradition, but it is interesting for all that. I am assured by several eyewitnesses, research students in a university I visited recently, that one of their professors solemnly asserted in public that Rudolf Bultmann was not influenced by theological or philosophical convictions when studying the history of the synoptic tradition, but was engaged in purely ‘objective’ historical research. This claim, which flies in the face of Bultmann’s own account of historical and hermeneutical method, involves anyone holding it in a complex position: positivism in relation to Bultmann’s writing about the early church (he just told it like it was); scepticism about Bultmann’s own account of what he was doing (he said he had presuppositions,¹² but we know he didn’t); and phenomenalism, according to Bultmann himself, in relation to the early church and its writings about Jesus (they wrote ‘about’ Jesus, but they were really, for the most part, talking ‘about’ their own faith).

One very important variation on these themes has been the concentration, in some parts of modern biblical study, on the community that may be presumed to stand behind a text. Just as, in many quarters, historical study of Jesus via the text has given way to study of the evangelists, so, ever since the rise of form-criticism seventy years ago, the focus has been not on a referent beyond the text but on the communities that transmitted traditions. Even where form-criticism has given way to redaction-criticism, study of the evangelists has often focused simply on their church and community setting. ‘Community’ has thus functioned as an alternative sort of referent, beyond or behind the text:

Reader ¹³		Text		[Author]		Community
	------->		--------->		--------->

This move has, for many twentieth-century theologians, more obvious hermeneutical and theological usefulness: we know (we think) what to do with a community and its theology, but an event is harder to handle. But it will soon become obvious that the ground could be cut from under even this redaction-criticism by some sort of a postmodern reading of the gospels, which would deny the propriety of finding even Matthew’s own mind, let alone that of his ‘community’, within his gospel, and which would insist instead on the interaction between reader and text (or even between the reader and his or her own mind) as the only locus of ‘meaning’. These readings are all inherently unstable: the philosophical reasons why they come into being in the first place (Cartesian anxiety about predication of actual referents) will swallow them up in their turn.

All of this means that the phenomenon of reading, at any level other than the naïve, has become very confusing. People have read great literary texts on the one hand, and the Bible on the other, in a bewildering variety of different ways. Sometimes they have been naïve realists. Shakespeare is telling a story about Julius Caesar, and that is all there is to it. Sometimes they have heard echoes of something else: perhaps he is discussing tyranny and democracy in general? Might he be using Caesar as an allegory for a tyrant closer to home? How might we tell? De la Mare is telling a story about a horseman and an empty house. Is that all? Is he perhaps ‘really’ talking about someone looking for ‘God’? Is he talking about modern literature itself, with its sense that there used to be an author ‘inside’ this text, but that now there is nobody at home? How might we find out?¹⁴ Mann is telling a story about a fictitious composer. But he is also, quite certainly, telling a story about modern Germany. In doing so, he is of course revealing his own opinions and beliefs, which are fully ‘involved’ in the reality of which he writes. Here, the means by which we may decide the matter is quite clear: his last sentence gives the clue, in an artistically appropriate manner (i.e. without any deus ex machina effect).¹⁵ So, in the same way, Jesus tells a story about tenants in a vineyard. (Or, to put it less naïvely, the gospels tell a story about Jesus telling a story about tenants in a vineyard.) But many readers have concluded that the story which at one level is ‘about’ the vineyard is ‘really about’ ‘God’ and Israel. What we are faced with, I suggest, is confusion at a variety of levels:

Reader		Text		Author		Event
					----->	vineyard
	----->		----->		----->	‘God’/Israel
					----->	early church
					<-----

Equally, many devout readers, finding the merely historical to be hermeneutically uninteresting, have read the text as a story about themselves. How might we make sense of this? Will it do simply to say that the biblical writers were also telling the story of ‘God’, and, since ‘God’ is always the same, the story can become ‘our’ story today? At what point, in other words, does the analogy with Thomas Mann hold—that the writer in each case was ‘really’ writing about Germany/‘God’, and that Leverkühn/Jesus was just a (fictitious) ‘vehicle’ for this ‘real’ interest? At what point, and why, might this analysis break down? It looks as though we are here faced, in a pre-critical anticipation of some post-critical readings, with the following situation:

	Reader		Text	Author	Event
		------>
	devout reading of text
		<------
translated at once into message about reader
		------>	[divine inspiration]
possibly explained by postulating ‘God’ as the referent/source of the text

Substitute the possibility of some textual structure for ‘God’, and we have here a working model of some structuralist readings: take away that possibility, and we have, embedded in the pietist tradition, exactly the same account of reading as we find in the postmodernism of Barthes, Derrida, Rorty or Fish (see below). What matters is ‘what the text says to me’.

Until we think clearly about this set of problems, we will not really know what is happening. Many ‘critical’ methods look so properly ‘neutral’, but in fact encapsulate whole philosophical positions which are in themselves contentious and highly debatable. All this seems to me to call for a more thorough analysis of the different stages in the process of reading texts.

(ii) ‘Is There Anybody There?’

We have already seen that, while naïve realism imagines itself to have direct access to the event or object spoken of in the text, a more phenomenalist reading realizes that it can only be sure of the author’s viewpoint. This is a less ambitious claim. It is harder to refute. It seems altogether safer. But it is not the end of the road. The examples just discussed deal with the relation between the text and the reality it purports to describe. The same problems occur when we deal with the relation between ourselves and the text. I said earlier that the aim of criticism is to describe the effect of a piece of writing and to show how that effect is achieved (this may of course include negative comments about either phase, effect or means). But can we say that the author ‘intended’ to create this or that effect? In plotting the effect that we have observed, are we reading the author’s mind? ‘Is there anybody there?’

The enormous debates at this point occupy whole books in themselves, and we cannot enter into it in any detail. But we may note the movement of criticism this century, and comment on it a little.¹⁶ As an example of what has come to be known as the ‘New Criticism’, we may take the issues raised by C. S. Lewis in his famous debate with E. M. W. Tillyard.¹⁷ Lewis launched a strong attack on that style of criticism which seeks to unearth, from the work under consideration, details about the life, habits, emotions and so forth of the author. That, he claimed, is not what criticism should be about. The response from Tillyard attempted to put a moderate case for retaining, within a proper criticism, some element of comment about the writer.¹⁸ But Lewis’s line won the day. Much modern study of literature has simply rejected the idea that we have access to the mind or intention of a writer. The road to hell is paved with authorial intentions: all we have is the work itself, seen as an independent entity. What matters now, it seems, is the interaction of reader and text, not of reader and author via text. ‘Is there anybody there?’ we ask, as we read our ancient text, or for that matter our modern one. But all we sometimes imagine is a host of silent listeners, who bear witness that we have kept our word, that we have returned to the overgrown and beforested text. The phantoms will know that a reading of the text has occurred, but the house itself—the private world where the writer once lived—remains locked and barred.

Lewis, of course, was not recommending this position in all its starkness. He was reacting to a particular overemphasis, and stressing (as in his Experiment in Criticism) the importance of the effect that the text has on the reader.¹⁹ This points towards the modern authorless reading, but does not itself embrace it. As with so many debates, there was (or so it seems to me) right on both sides. Lewis was entirely correct to reject the idea, which is the product of a marriage between romanticism and empiricism, that criticism either could or should attempt to work out, by reading between the lines of the poem, what the author had for breakfast that morning, or whether he had just fallen in love with the housemaid. These, of course, might themselves be the subject of a poem, either explicitly or allegorically; that would be quite a different matter. Part of the difficulty, clearly, lay in the fact that many nineteenth-century poets were basically talking about their own states of mind and emotions, and this lured critics into imagining that to discover such things was the normal business of all literary criticism. Thus was the text freed from the burden of the author:

Reader		Text		Author	Event
	----->		----->
			<-----

I shall argue in a moment that the proper rejection of a criticism bent simply on discovering the inner life of the poet, and on reducing the ‘meaning’ of the poem to terms of that discovery, has pushed itself too far (in a way that Lewis, we may say in spite of the position here discussed, did not intend) when it absolutizes the poem to the extent of rejecting not only the desirability, but even the possibility, of knowing the author’s intention. In biblical studies, this is the move made from ‘composition-criticism’ (what was Luke doing in writing his work as a whole?) to ‘narrative-criticism’ (never mind Luke, what is this book as a whole doing in itself?).²⁰ But if the focus of study now falls on the text itself, what is to be said about the text, if we are not to smuggle in authorial intention after all? At this point there are several possible moves, all of them with significance for biblical studies.

First, it has been a commonplace of mainline Western hermeneutics, at least since Schleiermacher, that it is possible, indeed likely, that the poet, or the evangelist, was writing at one level, of conscious intentionality, but that we can detect within the poem levels of meaning of which, in the nature of the case, the writer was unconscious. This is a grander version of the well-known phenomenon of the unintended pun, which may perhaps reveal, at a Freudian level, something of which the speaker was unconscious. It may be that we can see, with the advantage of hindsight or psychological analysis (Freud is read these days as much by literary critics as by psychologists), that he or she was internally or externally influenced without realizing it, so that the poem points in directions which have only subsequently become clear, and perhaps could not have been imagined by the writer. We may actually know more about the author than was, and that could have been, present to his or her mind at the time.²¹ This, of course, is in itself a kind of pseudo- or shadow-intentionality, and may well be thought not to have escaped from the problems of the ordinary sort.

Or, second, it may be that, by projecting a similar method on to a wider screen, the poem might serve as evidence for the deep structure of all human thought, which then becomes the real object of the critical enquiry, to be organized, along with other anthropological data, into conclusions about the nature of human beings and their societies. This is the way in which the movement known as ‘structuralism’ proceeds: from text to deep structures of thought, and thence to conclusions about a reality which lies beyond ordinary consciousness. Such structuralism appears as one of the modern versions of Platonism—the attempt to get behind the phenomena to analyse what is ‘really’ there.²² The attraction of such a movement may perhaps lie partly in the fact that it appears to avoid the problems which beset much biblical exegesis of a certain type, namely, the problems of always going behind the text (either to the ‘events described’ or to the author’s mind) in order to get at the real meaning. How much better, more ‘scientific’, if the universalizable meaning is contained deep within the text itself. Authorial intention got in the way of universalizability; deep structure is much more effective.²³ For these and other reasons, a whole range of writers, especially in North America, have tried to look at the texts in this new way.²⁴ In these works we see the reintroduction into biblical studies of a question which should have been asked all along, but which has been bracketed out for most of the modern critical movement. Critics have tended to ask two sorts of questions: (a) What event does the text refer to, and what do those events mean? (b) What theological ideas did the author of this text have? ‘Meaning’ is located, in these models, in the one case in the events themselves, in the other in the beliefs of the writers. The newer formalist or structuralist literary criticism, however, looks for meaning in neither of these, but in the literary form or structure itself.²⁵ How might we find ‘meaning’ there, and what might we do with it when we had found it?

Third, there is an analogy between this level of enquiry and the suggestion, sometimes made within more traditional biblical exegesis, that there exists, over and above the author’s meaning, a sensus plenior, by which an ‘inspired’ text actually says more than the author realized at the time, with the Holy Spirit filling in the blank of authorial ignorance, or bringing about an ‘unintended’ prophecy by which (for instance) Caiaphas speaks a word of the Lord even when intending to say something else. The recognition of such a sense, and the possibilities for allegorical and other exegesis which it opens up, have at various stages of the church’s reading of scripture been ways of allowing for the experience of Christians that the biblical text ‘speaks’ to them in ways that the author might not have imagined.²⁶ We thus have a new range of possibilities:

Reader		Text		non-authorial meanings
	------->		------->	‘more than the author intended’
			------->	deep structure
			------->	sensus plenior

Such proposals—the last of which, clearly, is found within the New Testament itself—are ways of ensuring that meaning is not limited to authorial intention. Whether or not we go the route of structuralism, we have to make allowance for a je ne sais quoi which lies beyond what the author explicitly had in mind at the time. It does not take much thought to see that criticism cannot shut the door on such a possibility, even though it may find it hard to handle either descriptively or hermeneutically. But (just in case someone might think that this has landed us back in the subjectivist’s reading of the text) this does not mean that authorial intention is unimportant or, in the last resort, indiscoverable. A complete account of intention is of course impossible. Knowledge of entire motivation, such as was dreamed about by early behaviourists, recedes like a rainbow’s end the closer we get to it.²⁷ But, as has often been pointed out, it is still very difficult to maintain a ‘pure’ subjective reading. Even ardent structuralists would want to maintain that they are talking about something, and that their books, however ‘open’, mean and intend certain things and not certain other things. It remains, at least in principle, possible to know an author’s basic intention, and to know that one knows it; for instance, by checking one’s reading with the author in person (one thinks of Barth’s approving comments on Hans Küng’s attempt to read his mind on the subject of justification).²⁸ There is nothing odd about saying ‘the government intended this legislation to have the effect x, but in fact the effect was y’, when x and y are clearly incompatible; there is nothing in principle odd in saying that an author intended effect x (shall we say, high tragedy) but achieved effect y (uproarious farce) instead; but we have thereby directly accused the government, or the author, of incompetence or failure. But in a book that we mean to take seriously, it amounts to a fairly serious criticism to say ‘the author intended x, but the book means y’. To suggest that such a comment is irrelevant is like insisting that the hare cannot in fact overtake the tortoise because, as is well known, he merely keeps on halving the distance between them into ever-smaller portions. The philosophical tricks by which authorial intention has been dismissed from the reckoning are in the last analysis no more impressive than the well-known mathematical trick which keeps the hare in permanent pursuit.

One problem with the attempt to provide an analysis which goes beyond the text but not to the author is the lack of control. There is little agreement between structuralists as to what will count as the deep structure of a passage or book, and how we might know when we had found it. And, as the Reformers argued, though there may indeed be a sensus plenior to Holy Writ, it is difficult to tell the difference between that and the projection on to the text of a theological idea or belief acquired by some other means. If one then appeals to the ‘literal sense’ as the control, has one really learnt anything new from a passage by the plenior method?

The difficulties with all of these potential models for getting ‘beyond’ the text without going through the author’s mind have meant that many critics, as we saw, have insisted on bringing the focus of attention back simply to the text itself. But, once we have made that move, why should we stop there? Does not the same thing apply at the first stage? The naïvely realistic view of that stage—the ‘reader’ simply reading the ‘text’—can itself be made to collapse: in good phenomenalist style, all I am really aware of in the presence of this text is my own sense-data. The whole thing ‘deconstructs’ into the feelings, thoughts, and impressions I have in the presence of the text:

Reader		Text	Author	Event
	----->
	<-----

—so that there is not only no event, not only no author with an intention, but now not even a text. And this will result in a multiplicity of possibilities of ‘reading’, with endless and often minute analysis at which those outside the game may well look with considerable scepticism.²⁹ This position, which might seem the death of all reading or criticism, has of course in turn become the jumping-off point for whole new schools of literary criticism, of which ‘deconstructionism’ proper is only one: Stephen Moore, in his recent book, plots stages in recent criticism that can be labelled by such writers as Kermode, Fish and ultimately Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.³⁰ The idea of this school, put absurdly simply, is that the only thing to do with a text is to play with it for oneself: I must see what it does to me, and not ask whether there is another mind out there behind the text.³¹ And of course if that is so there is not much point discussing the text with someone else. There will be no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ reading; only my reading and your reading.³²

I think it will be clear just how well this latter position will appeal to many elements in contemporary consciousness. We live in a relativistic and pluralistic age, an age which places self-fulfilment above the integration of self with other selves. There are, of course, many different criticisms that could be advanced against this whole view of the world. It traces its philosophical and indeed literary ancestry through Foucault and Nietzsche in particular, and shares with them something of the nihilism that is (in my opinion) the twin ugly sister of the positivism that still clings to some parts of contemporary culture. I shall, however, save such criticisms for different contexts, for one reason: that, so far, deconstructionism in all its strange glory has not yet really burst upon the world of New Testament studies, and so falls strictly outside our purposes here. There have been some attempts to introduce it, notably in the various works of the brilliant writer J. Dominic Crossan.³³ Crossan, despite being read quite widely, has not been followed by many others as yet, perhaps because, as Moore has pointed out, his work subverts itself through his insistence on trying, at the same time as he is deconstructing the texts, to discover the historical Jesus through and behind them.³⁴ The way is hard that leads to genuine deconstructionism, and those who follow it consistently are few.

Most Bible-readers of a conservative stamp will look askance at deconstructionism. But its proposed model is in fact too close for comfort to many models implicitly adopted within (broadly speaking) the pietist tradition. The church has actually institutionalized and systematized ways of reading the Bible which are strangely similar to some strands of postmodernism. In particular, the church has lived with the gospels virtually all its life, and familiarity has bred a variety of more or less contemptible hermeneutical models. Even sometimes within those circles that claim to take the Bible most seriously—often, in fact, there above all—there is a woeful refusal to do precisely that, particularly with the gospels. The modes of reading and interpretation that have been followed are, in fact, functions of the models of inspiration and authority of scripture that have been held, explicitly or (more often) implicitly within various circles, and which have often made nonsense of any attempt to read the Bible historically. The devout predecessor of deconstructionism is that reading of the text which insists that what the Bible says to me, now, is the be-all and end-all of its meaning; a reading which does not want to know about the intention of the evangelist, the life of the early church, or even about what Jesus was actually like. There are some strange bedfellows in the world of literary epistemology.

Often, of course, practice has been better than theory, and a word from the readers’ god has been heard despite the awful muddle that readers and interpreters have got themselves into. That simply shows, if anything, that this god is gracious, and perhaps has a sense of humour. It does not excuse a failure to think, or to work out more carefully what is, or ought to be, happening when people read the gospels. But to take such a discussion further at this point would require a consideration of the sorts of reading that are appropriate for different sorts of writing, and for the gospels as a special case; and that must be deferred until considerably later.

Protests, then, against the postmodern readings of the Bible are likely to be ineffectual. Unless, that is, those who care about serious reading of the gospels set about exploring ways in which to articulate a better epistemology, leading to a better account of what happens when a text is being read, a better account of what happens when a sacred text is being read, a better account of what happens when a sacred text which purports to be historical is being read, leading to a better account of what happens when the gospels themselves are being read. Any philosophically minded literary critics looking for a worthwhile life’s work might like to consider this as a possible project. I would not pretend that I am sufficiently competent to attempt it myself, nor would I have the time and patience. But, since this chapter is already turning into a tour de force of areas where I am not (to say the least) totally competent, I ought to say how I think such a project might proceed.

(iii) Reading and Critical Realism

What we need, I suggest, is a critical-realist account of the phenomenon of reading, in all its parts.³⁵ To one side we can see the positivist or the naïve realist, who move so smoothly along the line from reader to text to author to referent that they are unaware of the snakes in the grass at every step; to the other side we can see the reductionist who, stopping to look at the snakes, is swallowed up by them and proceeds no further. Avoiding both these paths, I suggest that we must articulate a theory which locates the entire phenomenon of text-reading within an account of the storied and relational nature of human consciousness.

Such a theory might look something like this. We (humans in general; the communities of which you and I, as readers, are part) tell ourselves certain stories about the world, and about who we are within it. Within this storytelling it makes sense, it ‘fits’, that we describe ourselves as reading texts; as we have already seen, even deconstructionists themselves write texts which they want others to read to discover what they, the deconstructionists, intend to say.³⁶ Within this text-reading activity it makes sense, it ‘fits’, that we find ourselves, at least sometimes and at least in principle, in contact with the mind and intention of the author. Discussing the author’s mind may or may not be an easy task; it is in principle both possible and, I suggest, desirable.³⁷ I for one shall never be convinced that de la Mare did not intend the obvious ‘surface’ effects of his poem, even though the deeper meanings are, as we have seen, a matter of speculation, hypothesis and discussion. He might, for instance, have written about them elsewhere himself.³⁸ Nor can I believe that the parallel between Leverkühn and Germany never occurred to Mann while he was writing his novel.

At the same time, it is important to stress that both of these authors wanted their readers to think about the subject-matter of their works, not about them as authors for their own sakes. Their work points neither back to the reader nor inside their own heads. They are constructing neither mirrors nor kaleidoscopes. They are offering telescopes (or perhaps microscopes, which are really the same thing): new ways of viewing a reality which is outside, and different from, reader, text and author alike, though of course vitally related to all three. It thus ‘fits’ with the story we tell about ourselves and the world that texts and authors should point to realities in the world, to entities beyond themselves. Only a very naïve reader would suggest that the only referent of the poem was a horseman and an empty house in a wood, that the only thing described by Mann’s novel was a demon-possessed composer, or that the only reality portrayed in the parable was a tragic everyday story of the grape-farming community. Describing the real referents in such cases is the complex task of serious literary criticism, to which I shall shortly turn.

What we need, then, is a theory of reading which, at the reader/text stage, will do justice both to the fact that the reader is a particular human being and to the fact that the text is an entity on its own, not a plastic substance to be moulded to the reader’s whim. It must also do justice, at the text/author stage, both to the fact that the author intended certain things, and that the text may well contain in addition other things—echoes, evocations, structures, and the like—which were not present to the author’s mind, and of course may well not be present to the reader’s mind. We need a both-and theory of reading, not an either-or one.³⁹ Similarly, we need a theory which will do justice, still at the text/author stage, both to the fact that texts, including biblical texts, do not normally represent the whole of the author’s mind, even that bit to which they come closest, and to the fact that they nevertheless do normally tell us, and in principle tell us truly, quite a bit about him or her. Finally, we need to recognize, at the author/event stage, both that authors do not write without a point of view (they are humans, and look at things in particular ways and from particular angles) and that they really can speak and write about events and objects (in the full sense of event and object explored in chapter 2) which are not reducible to terms of their own state of mind.

There is a sense, which we cannot explore in detail here, in which this demands a full theory of language. We need to understand, better than we commonly do, how language works. Words which describe events function regularly and properly on all sorts of levels, because events themselves function on all sorts of levels. What a Martian might have seen was human beings putting pieces of paper in little tin boxes; what the politicians at the time saw was a tense election in progress; what the historians will see is the turning-point at which a country moved from one era to another. Language is regularly used to refer to all three levels of ‘event’—physical actions, significance perceived or imagined at the time, and significance perceived later—in all sorts of subtle ways, through metaphor, symbol, image and myth. This is inescapable, and needs no apology.⁴⁰ And such language itself performs many extra functions: it edifies, annoys, amuses, evokes associations, creates new possibilities of understanding, and so on. The danger is that we set up some sort of reductionism. We might imagine that what we call ‘significance’ is something artificially ‘added on’ to the actions (in fact, nobody would have bothered to stuff paper into the boxes if they had not thought they were doing something with wider significance); or that words which invest physical actions with their significance are thus simply decoration or embroidery, to be seen as ‘mere metaphor’. (Alternatively, of course, the event can be lost in the significance.) This alerts us once more to the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘bare event’, as we shall see in the next chapter when discussing history. And if all this is true of language in general, there are special rules and cases within historical writing; within systems of religious language, other special cases; within sacred texts, special cases within special cases; within the gospels, which combine all these and more besides, a highly complex set of questions and problems. Even to begin to address these issues here would take us too far afield.

I suggest, then, that the epistemology which I outlined earlier—that which sees knowledge as part of the responsibility of those made in the image of the creator to act responsibly and wisely within the created world—results, at the level of literature, in a sensitive critical realism. We must renounce the fiction of a god’s-eye view of events on the one hand and a collapsing of event into significance or perception on the other. Until we really address this question, most of the present battles about reading the gospels—and most past ones too, for that matter—will be dialogues of the deaf, doomed to failure. But, for a start, I suggest a possible hermeneutical model, to be explored more fully on another occasion. It is a hermeneutic of love.

In love, at least in the idea of agape as we find it in some parts of the New Testament,⁴¹ the lover affirms the reality and the otherness of the beloved. Love does not seek to collapse the beloved into terms of itself; and, even though it may speak of losing itself in the beloved, such a loss always turns out to be a true finding. In the familiar paradox, one becomes fully oneself when losing oneself to another. In the fact of love, in short, both parties are simultaneously affirmed.⁴²

When applied to reading texts, this means that the text can be listened to on its own terms, without being reduced to the scale of what the reader can or cannot understand at the moment. If it is puzzling, the good reader will pay it the compliment of struggling to understand it, of living with it and continuing to listen. But however close the reader gets to understanding the text, the reading will still be peculiarly that reader’s reading: the subjective is never lost, nor is it necessary or desirable that it should be. At this level, ‘love’ will mean ‘attention’: the readiness to let the other be the other, the willingness to grow and change in oneself in relation to the other. When we apply this principle to all three stages of the reading process—the relation of readers to texts, of texts to their authors, and beyond that to the realities they purport to describe—it will be possible to make a number of simultaneous affirmations. First, we can affirm both that the text does have a particular viewpoint from which everything is seen, and at the same time that the reader’s reading is not mere ‘neutral observation’. Second, we can affirm both that the text has a certain life of its own, and that the author had intentions of which we can in principle gain at least some knowledge. Third, we can affirm both that the actions or objects described may well be, in principle, actions and objects in the public world, and that the author was looking at them from a particular, and perhaps distorting, point of view. At each level we need to say both-and, not just either-or.

Each stage of this process becomes a conversation, in which misunderstanding is likely, perhaps even inevitable, but in which, through patient listening, real understanding (and real access to external reality) is actually possible and attainable.⁴³ What I am advocating is a critical realism—though I would prefer to describe it as an epistemology or hermeneutic of love—as the only sort of theory which will do justice to the complex nature of texts in general, of history in general, and of the gospels in particular. Armed with this, we will be able to face the questions and challenges of reading the New Testament with some hope of making sense of it all.

(i) The Analysis of Stories: Narrative Structure

The way in which stories possess the power they do, by which they actually change how people think, feel and behave, and hence change the way the world actually is, can be seen more clearly by means of an analysis of the essential components which they (stories) contain. Among the many features which have been studied in recent years are: narrator, point of view, standards of judgment, implied author, ideal reader, implied reader, style, rhetorical techniques, and so on. About all this there is a good deal that could be said for which there is here neither time nor space.⁵³ Much attention, however, has been focused on one element in particular, namely, the narrative structure of stories and how it operates; and this element will form a vital part of several arguments I shall advance later in the book. I here follow, more or less, the analysis of stories which was worked out by A. J. Griemas, following the pioneering work of Vladimir Propp.⁵⁴ About this a few preliminary remarks seem necessary.

Griemas’ work has often been incorporated into biblical studies during the last twenty years, in (for example) the work of D. O. Via and J. D. Crossan, discussed briefly above. Generally, this has been done in the service of a formalist and/or structuralist approach, which as we saw has been a way of reading the text, and perhaps attempting to say something ‘objective’ about it,⁵⁵ as distinct from an approach which attempted to locate the text within the history of an author or a community, or to use it as the basis for historical reconstruction. It might be thought, therefore, that to use Griemas is of itself to buy into a structuralist model which is already somewhat passé and is in any case decidedly anti-historical. Against this, and in favour of a cautious use of Griemas-like narrative analysis within the present project, I suggest that the recent emphasis on narrative, within the theories of epistemology, hermeneutics (see chapter 2 above) and historical study (chapter 4 below) demands that we seek an understanding of how narratives work, and that we reuse Griemas within this setting—not to follow him slavishly or in a formalist setting, but within the service of a broader historical and hermeneutical programme. Griemas’ method is doubtless not foolproof, and I shall not here enter into the debates about it.⁵⁶ As usual, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

Griemas’ scheme can best be seen in a series of diagrams. The complexity of these, particularly to those unfamiliar with Griemas and his designs, may seem forbidding, as though one were explaining an unknown by an unknowable.⁵⁷ But the point of what might seem tortuous analysis will, I hope, gradually become apparent. Without close attention to the different phases of how the story actually works, the interpreter is almost bound to jump too quickly to this or that (probably wrong) conclusion, particularly when the story in question is over-familiar through frequent retelling. The requirements of the method force us to slow down and attend carefully at every stage to what is in fact going on. I shall suggest later that failure to attend to the actual story told by Jews and Christians alike—i.e., the story of the Old Testament—was the basic charge that the early church levelled at Judaism. It might also be suggested that a similar failure on the part of contemporary Christians is widespread, and is moreover at the root of a great deal of misunderstanding of the Christian tradition in general and the gospels in particular.

A basic and typical story may be divided up into three moments. There is the initial sequence, in which a problem is set up or created, with a hero or heroine entrusted with a task which appears difficult or impossible; the topical sequence, in which the central character tries to solve the problem thus set and eventually manages to do so; and the final sequence, in which the initial task is finally completed. Thus:

a. initial sequence: Little Red Riding-Hood is given some food by her mother to take to her grandmother, but is prevented by the wolf from doing so;

b. topical sequence: rescue eventually comes in the form of the woodcutter;

c. final sequence: Little Red Riding-Hood is thus able to deliver the food to her grandmother after all.

These sequences can be set out in helpful diagrams, using the following scheme:

The ‘sender’ is the initiator of the action, who commissions the ‘agent’ to perform it, i.e. to take or convey the ‘object’ to the ‘receiver’. The ‘agent’ is prevented from doing what is required by a force or forces, i.e. the ‘opponent’, and is, at least potentially, helped by the ‘helper’. In the initial sequence, obviously, the opponent (which might simply be a defect of character in the agent) is more powerful than the agent and any available helpers. There would otherwise be no story, only a sentence: ‘Little Red Riding-Hood was sent by her mother to take some food to her grandmother; she did so and they were all happy.’ This might be charming, but it is hardly a story. It has no plot. It does not embody a worldview, except possibly an extremely naïve one. Thus:

For all her charm and obedience—the only things she can rely on—the heroine is not able to prevent the wolf thwarting the plan, eating the grandmother, and threatening to eat her too. The mother’s plan of providing food for the inhabitant of the cottage in the wood is receiving a nightmarish twist. But then the topical sequence provides help, as it must if the story is not again to be aborted: ‘Little Red Riding-Hood took some food to her grandmother, but a wolf ate them both’; this again is not a story in the full sense. In the topical sequence, importantly, the agent of the initial sequence becomes the receiver, since she is the one who now needs something, namely, help to get out of the mess. There is no apparent ‘sender’ in this particular instance, as in many sequences in many stories. This poses no problem, and in fact often lends an air of highly effective mystery, as in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where the reader is always aware that even the seldom-seen leaders on either side themselves represent powers which stand beyond and behind them.

Topical sequences take the same form as initial sequences: but in the nature of the case the ‘Agent’ of the first scheme is the ‘Receiver’ of this one, since the agent now needs rescuing or helping. A new ‘Agent’ is therefore required, to bring a new ‘Object’—which will have something to do with releasing the Agent from her plight—to the rescue. More opponents might or might not be added at this stage, too. Thus:

When we apply this to the topical sequence of the folk-tale, this is what we find:

The axe is too powerful for the wolf; the unfortunate girl is rescued; grandmother, having been delivered from the wolf’s stomach (at least in some versions of the story), receives the food at last. The final sequence thus repeats the initial sequence, with the important difference that it is now successful:

So, applying this to our heroine and her gallant rescuer:

John Barton, one of the clearest recent exponents of different methods of biblical study, makes the point that the story demands such an ending: if the woodcutter had freed the wolf and married Red Riding Hood, an entirely different worldview would be brought to birth.⁵⁸ That is of course possible: one can imagine a disciple of Sartre propounding such a thing; but it is not what the story was pointing to all along.⁵⁹ This is the syntax of folk-tales: this is simply how they work. If this syntax is altered, a powerfully subversive movement of thought is brought to expression.

We must of course recognize right away that most stories are far more complex than this one. They usually contain subdivisions, plots within plots, and so forth; we shall see in a moment a well-known biblical story that has essentially one plot within another. And it must also be said that a major division of narrative, namely, tragedy, does not fit so obviously into the scheme. In folk-tales, things tend to work out well in the end: this no doubt has a lot to do with the functions that they are designed to serve. I think tragedy can be given an outline of its own, which fits Griemas’ scheme in its own appropriate way. The story I shall presently tell will illustrate this too.⁶⁰

As we shall see, the many twists and turns of the plot of a story, which will mostly fall in subdivisions of the ‘topical sequence’, exhibit miniature sequences of the same form, often right down to small details. Such minute analysis has in fact been practised already on the gospels,⁶¹ with the text being put under the microscope to see what is in fact ‘going on’ behind a narrative whose outward features are often so well known that they prohibit, rather than encourage, fresh understanding. Although this exercise sometimes seems so dense that it becomes in its turn a new barrier to understanding, in principle it can and often does enable us to sort out, for example, where the main emphases of a narrative lie (they may not be at all where ‘normal’ readings of the text have conditioned us to look), and how the diverse parts relate to the whole. There is urgent need for better control within the practice of this method, for finding some ways of assessing the respective assertions of critics who have used it.⁶² I believe, for instance, that many of those who have practised such analysis have come with unexamined presuppositions about the subject-matter of the text which ought to be challenged.⁶³ But in principle narrative analysis is more than just a useful exercise. In an (academic) world that has largely forgotten what stories are, and are for, it is a necessary task if we are to recapture important dimensions of the text.

(ii) The Analysis of Stories: The Wicked Tenants

As an example, let us briefly look at our old friend, the parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mk. 12:1–12 and parallels). Here we find a clear enough structure, which turns out to be a plot inside a plot, the inner plot being essentially tragic. The story begins with the owner planting a vineyard, in order (as it appears) to get fruit for himself, using tenants as his agents, despite (as it appears) their greed:

1. Initial Sequence

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So far, so good. The owner sends messengers to the tenants to get the fruit; this is the first move of the inner story. The tenants, however, turn out to be not only the object of the messengers’ journey but also the opponents to the plan; this precipitates the tragic nature of the inner story, the fact that its conclusion will carry a sad irony.⁶⁴

2. Topical Sequence (1) [= new Initial Sequence for inner story]

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This initial move having failed, the owner sends his son to take the place of the messengers:

3. Topical Sequence (2) [= Topical Sequence of inner story]

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There are now two things that remain to be done if the original plan is to succeed. As the tragic climax of the inner story, the tenants must reap the fate they have sown for themselves. And, as the successful climax of the outer story, the original plan must somehow be accomplished despite the rebellion of the tenants. Thus, first, the owner comes in person and destroys the tenants:⁶⁵

4. Topical Sequence (3) [= Final Sequence of inner story]

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(We will see shortly that the blank in the ‘helper’ position is significant.) Finally, he installs new tenants who will produce the fruit he requires, thus returning at last to the initial sequence.⁶⁶ But instead of the same tenants finally doing what they were supposed to, like Little Red Riding-Hood finally delivering the food to her grandmother, the tragic nature of the inner story means that the original agent must be supplanted by a new one:

5. Final Sequence of Main Story

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What do we learn about the story by this means? Much in every way. For a start, I think we are bound to highlight (more than we might otherwise do) the question of the owner’s intentions. Clearly, they have to do with something beyond the life of the vineyard itself. The vineyard is there for a purpose. Within the historical settings of the parable (i.e. the obvious setting within the work of the evangelists, and the hypothetically historical one within the life of Jesus) the vineyard is pretty certainly Israel; and the story presupposes that Israel is not called into being for her own benefit, but for the purposes of her covenant god, purposes which stretch beyond her own borders.

Second, the role of the son is more limited than it might be thought to be by a less careful reading, over-conscious of a later christology. There is nothing in the death of the son that suggests anything other than the failure of sequence (3), no suggestion within the narrative possibilities that somehow this death might be the means of the story’s turning the corner—except in the negative sense that, having nothing else left to do, the owner must now come and sort out the mess. Within the drama of the story, the son is basically the last, and most poignant, failed messenger. After his failure, there can be nothing but disaster to follow.

Third, we note that in sequences (2) and (4) the tenants appear in two different positions. This may perhaps be part of the essence of tragedy: that characters in the story who are designed to be involved in some other role, as receivers or subjects, turn up in the same story as opponents. (The ambiguous role of the disciples in the gospels, taken as wholes, ought to be considered from this point of view.) Unless another sub-plot intervenes through which they are removed from this category, their part of the story is bound to end in disaster.

Fourth, within the story’s function in its historical contexts, the new tenants who appear as agents in sequence (5) cannot be identified (as one might at first have thought) simply as Gentiles. The owner’s intention was to achieve something through the tenants, and this ‘something’, as becomes clear in various ways in the gospels’ overall narratives, seems to be the blessing of the Gentiles.⁶⁷ The ‘new tenants’, through whom this is now to be achieved, cannot therefore themselves be Gentiles per se, but must be a new group of Jews through whom the purpose will be fulfilled.⁶⁸

Fifth, the blank under ‘helper’ in sequence (4) may hide a significant implication. Blanks in stories are usually pregnant, as we saw in relation to the ‘Sender’ in The Lord of the Rings, and as might be seen in the unmentioned ‘Object’ in de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’. Within the contexts of the story (this comes out clearest in Luke, but is implicit in Matthew and Mark as well) the means by which the owner (Israel’s god) will come himself and destroy the tenants will turn out to be military action taken by Rome. This prepares the way, within the larger narrative of the gospels, for the denunciation of the Temple and the prophecy of its downfall (Mark 13 and parallels).

In addition to these exegetical points, though, there is an issue of much wider significance which this analysis has in principle opened up. The parable, like most of Jesus’ parables, tells the story of Israel—that is, it sets out the Jewish worldview in the regular appropriate manner—but gives it a startling new twist. Once we grasp the storied structure of worldviews in general, and of the Jewish worldview in particular, we are in possession of a tool which, though not often used thus, can help us to grasp what was at stake in the debates between first-century Judaism and first-century Christianity. It was not just a matter of ‘theological’ debate, in the sense of controversy over a few abstract doctrines. Nor can the problem be reduced to terms of social pressures and groupings, in the sense of a controversy between Jews and non-Jews or between observant and non-observant Jews. It was, at a much more fundamental level, a controversy about different tellings of the story of Israel’s god, his people, and the world. And it is in principle possible to plot these different tellings on grids such as those we have just used, to lay out in detail the ways in which the stories were being told, and so to grasp what was really at issue in the first century. Tasks of this nature will be one feature of the remainder of this book and, indeed, of the whole project.

One final reflection. This analysis of the parable opens a window on the way in which stories in the gospels, and the story of the gospel itself, characteristically articulate tragedy within comedy, the failure of one set of agents within the ‘success’ of the overall plan.⁶⁹ The story of Jesus himself, of death and resurrection, suffering and vindication, has this shape; so does the story told by Christians about Israel, the people of the creator god. The story of the Wicked Tenants thus brings to birth the same narrative structure as some of the major presentations of the early Christian worldview.

(iii) Jesus, Paul and the Jewish Stories

The parable of the Wicked Tenants, obviously, does not stand alone. Telling stories was (according to the synoptic gospels) one of Jesus’ most characteristic modes of teaching. And, in the light of the entire argument so far, it would clearly be quite wrong to see these stories as mere illustrations of truths that could in principle have been articulated in a purer, more abstract form. They were ways of breaking open the worldview of Jesus’ hearers, so that it could be remoulded into the worldview which he, Jesus, was commending. His stories, like all stories in principle, invited his hearers into a new world, making the implicit suggestion that the new worldview be tried on for size with a view to permanent purchase. As we shall see in the next Part of the book, Israel’s theology had nearly always been characteristically expressed in terms of explicit story: the story of the Exodus, of the Judges, of David and his family, of Elijah and Elisha, of exile and restoration—and, within the eventual Hebrew canon, the story of creation and the patriarchs overarching all the others and giving expression to their perceived larger significance. Jesus was (in this respect) simply continuing a long tradition.

If it is true that all worldviews are at the deepest level shorthand formulae to express stories, this is particularly clear in the case of Judaism. Belief in one god, who called Israel to be his people, is the very foundation of Judaism. The only proper way of talking about a god like this, who makes a world and then acts within it, is through narration. To ‘boil off’ an abstract set of propositions as though one were thereby getting to a more foundational statement would actually be to falsify this worldview at a basic point. This is not to say that we cannot use shorthand phrases and words to refer, in a few syllables, to a complex story-form worldview which it would be tedious to spell out each time. Thus the phrase ‘monotheism and election’ (see chapter 9 below) does not refer to two abstracted entities existing outside space and time. It is a way of summoning into the mind’s eye an entire worldview. In this, as we shall describe presently, Israel told and retold the story of how there was one god, the creator, and of how he had chosen Israel to be his special possession, and of how therefore he would eventually restore her fortunes and thereby bring his whole creation to its intended fulfilment. To provide the whole explanation each time would be impossibly wordy. It would also, in any case, be unnecessary—provided one remembers that, like so many theological terms, words like ‘monotheism’ are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology, not mere childish expressions of a ‘purer’ abstract truth.

What sort of stories are most characteristic of Jews in this period? As we have already suggested, stories of all sorts can express the set of beliefs held by most Jews, including the belief that their god was the creator of the world; but this belief (unlike various forms of dualism, for instance) most naturally and characteristically comes to birth in stories about events in the real world. That is, when creational and covenantal monotheists tell their story, the most basic level of story for their worldview is history. To say that we can analyse stories successfully without reference to their possible public reference, and therefore that we cannot or should not make such a reference, is to commit the kind of epistemological mistake against which I have been arguing in the last two chapters. It is to deny referent by emphasizing sense-data. If we fail to see the importance of the actual historical nature of some at least of the stories told by Jews in this period, we fail to grasp the significance, in form as well as content, of the stories themselves. It is only if we insist on reading Jewish stories within a set of cultural assumptions alien to their worldview and underlying story that we can imagine them to be talking either about a god who does not act within history or who will one day, with a sigh of relief, bring history to a full stop.⁷⁰ But this is already taking us too far off our present target.

What is true of pre-Christian Jewish stories is also true of early Christian ones. If Jesus or the evangelists tell stories, this does not mean that they are leaving history or theology out of the equation and doing something else instead. If, as we have seen, this is how Israel’s theology (her belief in the creator as the covenant god, and vice versa) found characteristic expression, we should not be surprised if Christian theology, at least in its early forms, turns out to be very similar. What we have to do, as historians, is to find out how to call up the ancient worldview to modern gaze, so that it can be discussed clearly, and so that new moves that were occurring within it may be plotted with historical accuracy. We have, in other words, to learn to read the stories with our eyes open. That part of the historical task which deals with the worldviews of the societies and individuals under scrutiny must involve itself with the careful investigation of the stories, implicit and explicit, which they told to one another and to the world outside.

Thus, as we will see in Part IV, when the early church told stories about Jesus these stories were not, as might be imagined, mere random selections of anecdotes. They were not without a sense of an overall story into which they might fit, or of a narrative shape to which such smaller stories would conform. From the smallest units which form-criticism can isolate to the longest of the early Christian gospels, the stories that were told possess a shape which can in principle be studied, plotted, and compared with other tellings of the Jewish, and the Christian, story. These somewhat obvious tellings of the Jesus-story will form an important part of our later argument.

But what about Paul? Surely he forswore the story-form, and discussed God, Jesus, the Spirit, Israel and the world in much more abstract terms? Was he not thereby leaving behind the world of the Jewish story-theology, and going off on his own into the rarefied territory of abstract Hellenistic speculation? The answer is an emphatic no. As has recently been shown in relation to some key areas of Paul’s writing, the apostle’s most emphatically ‘theological’ statements and arguments are in fact expressions of the essentially Jewish story now redrawn around Jesus.⁷¹ This can be seen most clearly in his frequent statements, sometimes so compressed as to be almost formulaic, about the cross and resurrection of Jesus: what is in fact happening is that Paul is telling, again and again, the whole story of God, Israel and the world as now compressed into the story of Jesus. So, too, his repeated use of the Old Testament is designed not as mere proof-texting, but, in part at least, to suggest new ways of reading well-known stories, and to suggest that they find a more natural climax in the Jesus-story than elsewhere. This whole theme must of course be fully explored later; here I simply mention it in case anyone should think that Paul was in fact an exception to the rule I am formulating. In fact, he is an excellent example of it.

Our task, therefore, throughout this entire project, will involve the discernment and analysis, at one level or another, of first-century stories and their implications. Stories, both in the shape and in the manner of their telling, are the crucial agents that invest ‘events’ with ‘meaning’. The way the bare physical facts are described, the point at which tension or climax occurs, the selection and arrangement—all these indicate the meaning which the event is believed to possess.⁷² Our overall task is to discuss the historical origin of Christianity, and, in complex relation to that, the theological question of ‘god’; and the thicket where the quarry hides, in each case, may be labelled Story. For the historian, trying to understand the worldview, mindset, motivation and intention (see chapter 4 below) of Jesus, of Paul and of the evangelists, to hunt for the quarry means not least to understand the stories the characters were telling, both verbally in their preaching and writing, and in action in the paths they chose to tread; to see how these stories worked, where their emphases lay, and particularly where they constituted a challenge, implicit or explicit, to the stories told in the Judaism and paganism of the day. We must give, as we have seen, particular attention to the difference, as well as the similarity, between the stories they told which functioned without relation to possible referents in the public world, and those that would lose their point unless they concerned historical reality. And, in attempting this complex task, the theologian will find that the question of ‘god’ cannot fail to be addressed at the same time.

I am not here concerned to discuss what label we should assign to this composite task (Literary Criticism? History? Theology?). That it faces the historian and theologian as a necessary task, in principle a possible task, and in the current state of scholarship a vital and timely task, I am quite certain. And it is surely obvious where we must look next. Having examined knowledge and literature, we are now in a position to examine one particular sort of knowledge, one particular sort of literature. We must move inwards, from story to history.