What the facts in the life of our Lord are, and what the
meaning of these facts is for our faith, is of vital concern to us. To one who
is not acquainted with the course that Biblical criticism has been running in
these latter days, it may seem strange that there should be any discussion of
the topic at all.
He could very possibly be thinking: “The facts of the
life of Jesus?
Why, they are what I read about in the Bible, especially in the
Gospels of the New Testament!”
Such an attitude would of course be absolutely
proper and the one that has always been held by those who believe that the
Bible means what it says and what Christians who believe the Bible have always
understood it to mean.
Sad to say, today the prevailing current in theological
thinking at large runs in quite a different direction, and even in the bosom of
church bodies that once clung to the literal understanding of the history
related in Scripture the thought is being tolerated, even espoused, that one
cannot be too absolutely certain as to just what the facts of Jesus’ life
might have been (this because of the negative criticism of the Scriptures that
has come to the fore so strongly in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries); or (and this is the direction criticism is taking of late) even if
we should know with greater certainty more about the actual facts of
Jesus’ life, that such knowledge would finally be of very little value to
us since, it is contended, the ultimate questions of our being have to be
answered on other terms than are those described for us in the confessions of
faith which the church has traditionally held.
We shall here make the endeavor to see what the
attitudes have in the past been regarding the historical facts of our
Lord’s life and how we are to evaluate the contemporary efforts being
made to deny completely any significance in such facts or at least drastically
to downgrade their meaning for this jet-age world.
The New Testament Itself Speaks
Concerning the Facts of Jesus’ Life
In the current welter of discussion regarding the
knowability of the facts of Jesus’ life, it is well to keep in mind how
the truth of our way to salvation has been revealed to us by God Himself: by
that deliberate act of God who called the writers of the Old Testament (prophets)
and the writers of the New Testament (apostles) into His service and by the
power of His Holy Spirit made them so completely His own that their words,
though spoken by them, and often after inquiry, deliberation, consultation, and
research, were the very Word of God, and that by virtue of the fact that they
had been made God’s “slaves,” that is, beings whose will was
no longer their own but that of the Lord who had called them into His service.
The last of the “classical” dogmaticians
dwells on the fact that ultimately it was the mercy of God that prompted Him to
provide for His revelation in a written scripture and call the prophets and
apostles to their appointed task.
He also stresses the point that the
designation of “apostle” ought not be denied to the evangelists
Mark and Luke in view of an even wider use of the term in the New Testament.
The apostles were to bear witness to Christ, in the
first place to His resurrection (Ac 1:22; 2:32) but also to all the details of
His earthly life (Ac 2:22–24).
It was just to these concrete, historical
facts of Jesus’ life that the Apostle Peter appealed so confidently. When
Peter spoke the words Acts 2:22–36, he was addressing an as yet
non-Christian audience.
Acts 3:12-16 Peter again speaks of the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus, this time to the crowd that gathered in Solomon’s
Portico after he and John had healed the lame man at the temple’s
Beautiful Gate.
In neither case did these contemporaries reject the
apostle’s evidence as to the historical facts of Jesus’ life to
which he had referred. By personal experience they were in full possession of
these facts. In a similar vein, (censored) writes:
…half a generation later, Rabbi Saul the
tentmaker, who had given opinions “in the name of Rabbi Gamaliel,”
as the saying was, when on trial before King Agrippa, can still confidently
appeal to the common knowledge as to the historicity of the account of the life
and death of Jesus the Carpenter, the unlettered Rabbi of Nazareth, who dared
to give decisions in His own name.
In the first century neither Peter nor Paul had any
trouble convincing either their Jewish or their Gentile hearers of the
historicity of those facts that stand at the very heart of the Christian faith.
These facts had occurred, at the farthest, within the memory of many men then
living. The apostolic interpretation of these facts was not so universally
accepted, but on the facts themselves there was no argument.
What the hearers of Peter and Paul accepted without
question, namely, the historicity of the facts pointed to concerning the
earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth, that modern criticism denies out of hand.
And the most common reason alleged for such denial is the fact that the New
Testament books that tell of the life of the Lord are not primarily historical
documents at all but are of a theological nature and derive ultimately from the
gospel preaching of the first generation of Christian missionaries.
On the
basis of this New Testament material, so the argument runs, the hard-core facts
of His life cannot be learned, since the primary objective of these books is
homiletical and not historical.
Furthermore, so it is claimed, we are absolutely lacking
the materials for what would be a first-class modern biographical study of
Jesus of Nazareth.
His mental and psychological development remain a closed
book. Hence, a modern biography is impossible; hence, the biographical facts
contained in the gospels simply cannot be accepted, not as historical data,
that is, but their meaning must be arrived at in some different way.
The allegations just referred to have become the stock
in trade of “the historical-critical approach” to the scriptures,
of “the new hermeneutic,” in fine, of all those who deny the verbal
inspiration of the Bible, its clarity in the sense in which (censored) used that
term, and the presence of miracles in the usual sense of the word both in the
process by which God gave His revelation in written form to men and in the
narratives which this written revelation contains.
At this point we need not
examine further the modern view of the preaching of those who first proclaimed
the gospel of a risen and victorious Savior (the “kerygma of the early
church”).
In his study Luke: Historian and Theologian I. Howard
Marshall of the University of Aberdeen has with great clarity and abundant
documentation shown how, in the modern view, the preaching of the earliest
church was a proclamation without any historical content: that it was not a
summons to accept historical facts on which a faith might be grounded, but that
it was simply a challenge to accept a person.
The “kerygma” of the
early church was then nothing but ”
the fact that such a person as Jesus of Nazarath very probably existed
but that no other statements about him could be made with absolute confidence.
The conflict of interest between historian and
theologian would, we may be sure, have been a thought utterly strange to Luke,
the writer of our third gospel.
In his foreword to the gospel, Luke indicates,
in the dedication of his two-volume work to “His Excellency
Theophilus,” that Theophilus has been instructed in the facts of the
Christian faith, and that Luke wishes to strengthen him in this faith by making
available to him the results, in literary form, of extensive research and
interrogation of witnesses (Lk 1:1–4).
He wants to accomplish this
certainty by merely telling the facts of the gospel story in an orderly
way.—
The “order” Luke has in mind surely is not that of
chronological sequence alone but rather an order implicit in the nature of the
narrative itself which he is about to present
Luke accomplished
his purpose of establishing the “certainty” concerning the facts of
Jesus’ life by placing an emphasis on precisely those three items that in
the second and third centuries were to be the bulwarks of the church’s
defense against the Gnostics.
These were the authenticity of the witness to our Lord’s life by His
apostles, the propriety of the orthodox church’s interpretation of
Scripture as opposed to that of the gnostics, and the unbroken series
in which the eye-witness testimony to the facts of Jesus’ life was passed
on from the time of Jesus to the writers’ own times.
The facts that have come to light concerning
gnosticism’s attack on the church since the discovery of the Coptic
Gnostic library at Nag-Hammadi
in Egypt during the 1940’s have made us aware what a deep-rooted
aberration the movement was and how it had been infiltrating the thought of the
church from the earliest times;
so there is every justification to read Luke’s preface to his two-volume
work as his own indication of how he intends to mount his attack on this form
of gnostic or docetic teaching that minimized the importance of the historical
Jesus and substituted the wildest of theosophic speculations.
In the work of Luke, then, as in all the New Testament, historical fact and
theological interpretation of that fact do not stand in opposition. The facts
of Jesus’ life demand theological interpretation simply because they
concern the life of Jesus of Nazareth, true man and true God, the Savior of the
world. It becomes very apparent, as we read their works today, that those who
see the interests of theologian and historian as mutually exclusive categorically
reject the thought that the Incarnate Logos appeared among men to fulfill the
plan proclaimed and the promise made in the protevangelion of Genesis
3:15.
As the New Testament writers present it, then, the
Christian faith is based on historical facts, miraculous facts indeed
(resurrection, ascension, a ministry filled with deeds that defy the accepted
“laws of nature”), but still actual occurrences within the time and
space of men.
In the matter of gospel-historicity, it is especially
the Gospel of Luke that has been under attack, undoubtedly because of
Luke’s own claims in his preface, Luke 1:1–4, that eyewitnesses to
the historical facts therein recorded had “turned over” or
“passed on” to the writer the facts concerning whose reliability
they themselves could bear witness; that he had himself carried on careful
research both in existing written documents and on the basis of such oral
testimony as he had received.
A frequently repeated attempt to impugn the historical
accuracy of Luke in both the Gospel and Acts is to allege that the speeches in
Acts are composed in the manner of ancient writers of history. Here the words
of the great Greek historian Thucydides are regularly quoted when he explains
how the many speeches in his writing came into being (Thucydides I:22):
As to the speeches, it was my habit in each instance to
report the speaker as saying what was most appropriate to the occasion but to
stick as closely as possible to the overall intention of the words actually
uttered.
The entire matter of this misuse of “poetic
license” by ancient imitators of Thucydides is discussed (with generally
negative results) by Henry J. Cadbury in Beginnings of Christianity.
The rebuttal of the learned Theodor Zahn is entirely adequate. He remarks that
the statements of Luke in his preface would scarcely seem consonant with the
declared habits of Thucydides, but that “We must surely reckon Josephus
among those imitators of the style of Thucydides whom Lucian
castigates in his How (not) to Write History 26. Many passages in
Josephus prove he belongs there. But Luke never so, neither in the Gospel nor
in Acts.”
In addition to the many rectilinear proofs that can be
brought for the historicity of the New Testament writings and in particular
those of Luke, there also exists a vast amount of what we could call
“unconscious corroboration.” These are the many instances where the
writer—and we shall show only a few instances from Luke—has said
something, or brought a statement in a certain way, that would not have been
put this way had the writer not been the careful, research-historian that Luke
professes to be. Or had he been an out-and-out falsifier, he would in very
obvious fashion have gone about pretending to give concrete details in a story
in order to make it sound all the more like a real narrative of a real event.
Anyone who has read in the apocryphal writings allegedly relating to New
Testament facts and figures, will readily recall a sheaf of examples of such
patent straining for verisimilitude. Merely to page through M.R. James’ The
Apocryphal New Testament or any of its counterparts would furnish an almost
endless number of examples.
A falsifier will inevitably overstate his case.
How different it is with the New Testament! Luke 8:3 we
read of “Susanna and many other women, who were rendering service to them
out of their private resources.” Why single out this one lady, and allow
the rest to fade away in anonymity as “many others”? Mary of
Magdala, Joanna wife of Chuza, a well-known official, could have been mentioned
by one who was merely trying to make his made-up story look real. The same
thing simply could not have been true with regard to this otherwise unknown
Susanna. Obviously, she was a Christian lady well-known to the Christian circle
in which Theophilus moved, and in his sober narrative of events Luke is simply
recording what he had found to be the case.
Again, the way the writer at Luke 4:20, 8:41, and 13:14
speaks of the Jewish synagogue, its services and personnel, agrees entirely
with what men knowledgeable in the history of Jewish worship have presented as
the usual state of affairs in the first century.
At Luke 8:43 a considerable section of the most weighty
textual tradition we would muster omits the statement about the woman with the
hemorrhage of such long duration that she had spent all she had on doctors
and still had not gotten any better. Manuscripts Vaticanus, Bezae, a third
century papyrus now in the Bodmer collection, and representatives of six early
versions all omit the statement. The rest of the textual tradition in
manuscripts and the versions retains the statement. What are we to make of the
matter? Obviously some early editor of the New Testament, thinking to do honor
to Luke the Physician, omitted the statement, and he was followed by that small
number who leave it out including the weighty Vaticanus. But surely Luke had
written the facts as his study had shown them to be. Again, Luke was merely
being factual.
How carefully Luke carried on his own historical
investigation may be illustrated from his addition of the detail at the end of
the 17th verse in the fifth chapter, and the power of the Lord was directed
toward Jesus’ doing miracles of healing. Both Mark (2:1–12) and
Matthew (9:1–8) relate the same matter. Only Luke has this specific
detail, one that his own investigation had led him to emphasize.
All three synoptic Gospels have the pericope concerning
“new wine in old wine-skins.” Only Luke concludes with the saying
(Lk 5:39): And no one who has had aged wine asks for unaged; for he says,
Aged wine is mellow. Also the ancient students of the Bible were having
trouble with this verse. A number of the fathers simply omit the verse, as does
the “western text.” Variants in two important text types show that
from an early period scribes felt they could create an acceptable sense for the
passage by making some alterations. Very few manuscripts (but these include
both Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) read the saying as translated above. The problem
seems to have arisen because it was not recognized that also sayings of Jesus
have to be read with varying degrees of seriousness. Zahn seems to have hit
upon the right thing also in this passage, for he remarks about the passage
revealing, on Jesus’ part, a tolerant and kindly insight into the foibles
of human nature. He understands the verse to caution “those who turn to
the new not to be too much disturbed by criticisms from those who cling to the
old.” He suggests that here Our Lord displayed a good sense of humor.
Most certainly, though the other records omit the saying, the researches of
Luke showed him that Jesus had said this on this occasion; so the evangelist
included the saying here since it served the overall purpose he was pursuing in
the writing of this Gospel.
That the evangelists recorded sober fact concerning the
life of the historical Jesus must also be recognized from this that what Jesus
foretold of his suffering, death, and resurrection did not at all agree with
his apostles’ preconceived notion of what the Messiah should be like.
When Jesus spoke of his end, the things said were completely beyond them
(“They regularly missed the point of what was being told them,”
Luke 18:34). They simply could not have manufactured the great facts of our
salvation as these were carried out by the Lord.
The Apostle John adds his testimony concerning the historicity
of Jesus. It runs like a refrain through his First Epistle that
“we”—that is, John and the other followers of Jesus who were
eyewitnesses to the great facts of our salvation—have
“heard,” “seen,” “observed,”
“touched,” this life everlasting which appeared to us (1 Jn
1:2). Surely here John was countering the rising proto-gnosticism that was so
very soon to make its all-out effort to deny to the Christian faith its
concrete historical reality and transform it into another figment of the
imagination such as was all the mythology of the movement that was to become
the great destructive heresy of the second century. John’s defense
against false doctrine is to point to the facts of the life of the historical
Jesus.
The Apostle Peter in erecting his defense against the
vagaries of gnosticism he sees coming does this by pointing to the historical
fact of the transfiguration of our Lord (2 Pe 1:16–18), the same Lord who
had prophesied the death (1:14) which is also standing so closely before him.
Modern criticism has made much of what it calls the
“historicizing” of the Gospels. By this it means that it was the
later generations of the church, the believers of the last decades of the first
century, who introduced historical data into their preaching of the Christian
faith and that the first preaching of the faith had known no such references.
On the basis of the brief survey of New Testament statements concerning the
historical Jesus we have just made, we must agree with Marshall, who says:
We are thus justified in asserting that the primitive
preaching did contain historical references and that it included statements
which were meant to confirm the historical character of these references.
Historical Facts in the Earliest
Post-Apostolic Writers
As we now move into the first quarter of the second
century, we see that the first leaders of the church after the days of the
apostles, the so-called “Apostolic Fathers,” with almost
litany-like repetition, stress the historical facts of signal importance in the
life of Jesus of Nazareth: his arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. In
fact, R. McL. Wilson, a specialist in this area of historical studies, insists
that during the second and third centuries “the main point at issue was whether
the Christian faith could be detached from its biblical and historical bases
and presented as a form of Hellenistic theosophy.”
Bulking large in the “Apostolic Fathers” are
the letters one Ignatius of Antioch wrote to a number of churches. This
statement found in the Letter to the Trallians (9:1) is characteristic of many
found throughout Ignatius’ literary remains:
Don’t listen, then, whenever anyone tries to make
a point to you apart from the Jesus Christ who was of the tribe of David, born
of Mary. For he really and truly was born; he ate and drank; in all truth, he
was persecuted at the time of Pontius Pilate, was really crucified and really
died.
The insistence on placing the passion of our Lord
“at the time of” Pontius Pilate (the “under” of our
Creed, the sub of the Latin) arose, of course, from the attempt of a
gnostic-related movement of those early days that denied to the Lord Jesus a
real body of flesh and blood and kept on insisting that the “body”
the disciples thought they saw was a mere phantom, one that did not even leave
footprints on the soft sand! (The apocryphal gnostic “Acts of John”
93.)
Magnesians 11:1 stresses that “His passion and
resurrection occurred at the time of the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate.”
Our salvation, Ignatius says, was “truly and surely accomplished by Jesus
Christ, Who is our Hope.” And to the Smyrnaeans (1:2) in a similar vein
he writes that our Lord “was truly of the tribe of David according to the
flesh but Son of God according to the will and power of God, truly born of a
virgin, baptized by John.…that at the time of Pontius Pilate and of Herod
the Tetrarch he was crucified in our stead in the flesh.”
These Facts Stated in the Works
of Learned Defenders of the Faith
In the second half of the second century a converted
philosopher, Justin by name, called “The Martyr,” addressed a
well-constructed defense of the Christian faith to the Roman emperors of his
day. We know this learned, high-level appeal for just treatment to be accorded
to the Christians as Justin’s Apology. In chapter 35:9 of this appeal
Justin writes: “…that this happened (the details of the crucifixion
as recorded by the four evangelists) you are able to learn from the court
records of the time of Pontius Pilate.”
The first name-worthy Latin writer to issue a defense of
Christianity, Tertullian, speaks in similar fashion in the 5th and 21st chapters
of his Apology. He invites his readers, the magistrates of the Roman Empire, to
consult their official imperial records for the facts of the life-story of the
Lord and there read how the “whole story of Christ was reported to
Caesar, who at that time was Tiberius, by Pontius Pilate.” Their official
archives would verify the truths spoken of concerning the earthly career of
Jesus of Nazareth.
In at least nine different places Justin Martyr refers
to the Crucifixion of Jesus as having occurred “at the time of Pontius
Pilate, procurator in the time of Tiberius.”
We may be very certain that these learned men, using the
languages of the Empire in their defense of the right of the Christian Church
to exist, were sure that the facts of the earthly life of Jesus were of extreme
importance, were, in fact, the very basis upon which that Church’s faith
rested.
In his study of “The Teaching of the Old Roman
Creed” in the work on Early Christian Creeds J.N.D. Kelly admits
that:
It is significant that in all the Ignatian contexts in
which the dating UNDER PONTIUS PILATE occurs the writer is pressing home, as
against Docetic denials, the reality of Christ’s experiences. So, too,
the first of the extracts of St. Irenaeus cited above (Adv. haer. 2, 32,
4) is avowedly aimed at heretics who allege that Christ wrought His miracles
“in appearance.”
In continuing the discussion, however, Kelly asserts
that “…if a few passages can be quoted with such an unambiguous
anti-Docetic bias, it is impossible to detect any such innuendo in the great
majority of them.” The real reason for the early insistence on historical
dating of the passion of Jesus Kelly believes to find elsewhere:
…in the fact that the saving story of which the
creed is a recapitulation is rooted in history. A date was called for so as to
bring out that these events did not happen anywhere or at any time, and that
the Gospel is not simply a system of ideas. For once Rufinus succeeded in
hitting upon the truth when he remarked: “Those who handed down the creed
showed great wisdom in underlining the actual date at which these things
happened, so that there might be no chance of any uncertainty or vagueness
upsetting the stability of the tradition.” Without anyone saying so in so
many words, the instinct of the Church recognized the need for a historical
reference.
Kelly seems to have rather overstated his case. Granted,
“the instinct of the Church” was correct in seeing the need for
such historical reference. But the instinct of the Church could not have been
unaware of the need to counter the Docetic heresy. It needs to be remembered
that every statement of the Apostles’ Creed was aimed at a definite
doctrinal error that was rearing its head during the second century. What Kelly
calls “anti-Docetic bias” and the need for definite historical
connections ought not be treated as two separate entities: they are merely the
opposite sides of the same coin. A comparison between the writings of the
anti-heretical church fathers and the very documents of these heretics discovered
at Nag-Hammadi shows that the fathers rather understated their case against the
opponents. Nag-Hammadi shows that the Gnostics were even worse heretics than
the fathers made them out to be. The “instinct of the Church”
realized where the problems were. And the fathers stated them, sufficiently,
and yet always definitely.
Allegorizing Exegesis Ignored
the Historical Facts
Sad to say, the importance of a stress on history also
in connection with the earthly career of Jesus, as this was recognized by the
early Christian creeds and the early church fathers, at an early stage in the
history of interpretation faded before an all-consuming devotion to the use of
allegory in interpretation of the Biblical text. By the time of Martin Luther
it was insisted that Scripture had a four-fold sense and schoolboys were
obliged to memorize a Latin jingle that stated what each one of these four
senses of sacred text was or at least in which connection it was to be found.
“Allegory shows what you are to believe” ran the verse. But since
allegory in principle cut itself loose from every concrete historical basis, by
its use almost any passage whatsoever could be adduced in support of almost any
doctrine any expositor had in mind. An example would be the treatment accorded
the word “Jerusalem” at Galatians 4:25f; the word was to be
understood in four different ways: literally, it meant the city in Palestine; allegorically,
it meant the church of the Lord; anagogically, it pointed to the heavenly city;
morally, it signified the human soul.
At times different terms were used for the second, third, and fourth classes
named; sometimes everything but the “literal” meaning was lumped
together into a single class with a name like “figurative,”
“tropological,” or even “allegorical.” At other times
the three classes were reduced to two. But the effect was always the same.
Since any other “sense” than the literal was in principle held to
have equal validity with it in the interpretation of a passage, the general
tendency from ancient times on was to ignore completely the exegesis of the
word (the answer to the question, What does it say and mean?) and go on
immediately to some subjective application of the word (the answer to the
question, What does it mean to me?).
To the pagan scholars of Homer in Hellenistic Alexandria
it was the most natural thing in the world to allegorize the Homeric myths,
either because it was felt that these stories of the gods were in some way
vehicles of esoteric knowledge, or, in a more practical vein, because many of
the stories told of the gods and goddesses, if understood literally, would have
made these deities guilty of conduct that was universally regarded as immoral
for a human being. So then the argument went: if the words that are read speak
of immoral deeds done by the gods, they must have another meaning than the one
these same words generally convey since it is impossible that gods do morally
reprehensible things. Thus, myths in Hellenistic paganism were allegorized.
Hellenistic Judaism obviously borrowed the habit. Philo
of Alexandria, the Jewish preacher who philosophizes in Platonic fashion about
the books of Moses, manages to find contemporary Stoic and Platonic meanings in
the words of Moses by ignoring completely what the words that stand there
actually mean. To him the four rivers of Eden are not four streams of water
that run downhill in obedience to the law of gravity but rather the four great
Stoic virtues of contemporary pagan philosophy: prudence, self-mastery,
courage, justice (Allegorical Interpretation, I. 63). The only direct
connection between the words of Moses and these Stoic notions is the number
four. But Philo simply asserts: “This means that” in total
disregard of the meaning of the words as they stand there.
In the days before Martin Luther it was not that the
historical facts of the earthly life of Jesus were doubted or challenged. This
was not the case. Not until we come to the modern world do we find that the
obvious literal meaning of the words of the evangelists about Jesus’ life
are flatly denied as conveying objective truth and then interpreted by a
newly-named but still the same old process of allegorical interpretation, that
ignores the meaning of the words being read and makes some
“relevant” application. Now however the name for the process has
become “historical-critical” approach to the Bible, or
“existential interpretation,” or “meaningful exegesis.”
More of this when we come to speak of the New Testament interpretation that is
very contemporary with us.
Though an allegorizing interpretation did not deny the
facts of Jesus’ life nor doubt the authenticity of the apostolic word, so
long as interpreters lean toward allegorizing, they will automatically
side-step if not entirely ignore the full import of the first, the primary, the
originally intended literal meaning of a passage. Here it is the method that is
at fault. For it sees in the concrete details of a passage, be that narrative
or figurative language, direct support for the details of an already formed and
passionately defended dogmatical system. It is then this dogmatism that
obscures the single intended sense which the inspired writer meant to convey.
Witness the way symbolical applications of the blood and water that flowed from
Jesus’ side to the Two Sacraments have tended to obscure the obvious
intent of the apostle and eyewitness (Jn 19:34), namely to stress the absolute
reality of Jesus’ death. (The comments of Bengel on the passage are still
worth reading.)
Luther’s Thinking on the
Understanding of Statements of Fact
Luther’s work of reformation in the church that we
associate with October 31, 1517, was preceded by another reformation, this time
one in Luther’s own approach to the understanding of Scripture. As
lecturer on the Bible in the University of Wittenberg, Luther had long since
come to the conviction that the time-honored four-fold sense of the Word simply
had to be abandoned. In principle, if not always in practice, his insistence
put an end to the speculative allegorizing that had dominated the church since
the days of Origen and Jerome. How strongly Luther felt on the subject he
reveals in remarks he makes on the scholastic exegetes. He calls them insipid
and no-good dreamers, to whom exegesis has become a game, for “they play
with the sensus literalis, allegoricus, moralis, anagogicus; men call
them doctors, scholastici. Good! They are really scholastici, actors and
buffoons” (WA, I, 507).
In his study on “The Task of Exegesis” in
the Festschrift for C.H. Dodd, The Background of the New Testament
and its Eschatology, E.C. Blackman writes concerning Luther’s insight
that the understanding of the literal meaning of a passage was an indispensable
preliminary to any further interpretation. He says:
Luther’s term sensus grammaticalis is
perhaps to be preferred: the plain meaning of the words as their author
intended them with reference to his contemporary situation. Whatever
development or application of meaning is attempted by the exegete must be
anchored in this meaning. But he must go on to elucidate the perennial meaning
of the text, that is, the significance of it which makes it contemporary for
the reader today. This has been called the spiritual sense, even by Luther who
rejected the multiple sense of the Schoolmen. But Luther is quite emphatic that
it is not an addition to the literal sense, but contained within it, and only
discerned after thorough study of the literal sense.
When Luther enumerates the books of the New Testament
that present the cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith, Justification by
Faith Alone, he puts John’s Gospel at the top of the list together with
his First Epistle. Then follow the chief epistles of Paul and First Peter.
Luther made these his choice as the books a Christian should virtually get by
heart because in them he found the doctrine of Christ so clearly presented (Christum
treiben) (WA,
DB 6, 10). In the sixteenth century the truth and value of the facts of the
historical Jesus were not in question among responsible people. From what has
been said about Luther’s attitude toward the “grammatical
sense” it would appear that he accepted without reservation the historical
facts of Jesus’ life. A cursory reading of Luther’s sermons on the
Gospel texts for the church year in his Hauspostille will demonstrate
how to the Great Reformer what the Scriptures said about the earthly life of
the Savior simply were historical facts not to be questioned.
Criticism’s Challenge of
the Historical Worth of New Testament Statements
Any real historical value has been denied to the New
Testament statements regarding the life of Jesus by a movement that results
from the convergence of two informing principles: a formal principle that
espoused a rationalistic humanism, which denied to God any place of importance
in the world whatsoever; and a material principle that treated the books of Scripture
as the products of the spirit of man, therefore on a par with the sacred books
of all religions and books whose ultimate meaning was to be grasped by
isolating and identifying the component documents, written or oral, out of
which the books of the Bible as we know them were, at some time or other,
thrown together.
The two movements ran side by side, though the
beginnings of the dogmatical attitudes of rationalistic humanism become evident
before there was any great attempt made at literary or source criticism.
English deism and Spinozist pantheism were the first to make a supernatural
revelation of the thought of God to man either impossible or unnecessary: deism
completely separated God from the world, pantheism identified the two with the
result that God was actually eliminated. Now reason, preempting the place given
to revelation, reigned supreme.
At this juncture the modern principles of
“literary” criticism came into play. It began when around 1800 men
began to argue that the Homeric poems could not be the products of a single
poetic genius but must be collections and editings of previously existing
materials: sagas, legends, myths.
The method soon spread to the Old Testament and then to
the New. Men imagined that they could identify and characterize a number of
previously existing written sources behind the Pentateuch and the Gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Moses could not have given the church the five books
that bear his name nor could the apostles who appear as Matthew, Mark, and Luke
have given the church the Gospels that bear their names. At best, an early form
that somewhat resembled our Mark must have come into existence at an early
date, somehow or other in connection with the preaching of Peter, but this was
then drastically revised and amplified and altered to give us the three
synoptic Gospels. The names attached to them would at best be meaningful
symbols; at worst outright attempts at forgery.
Still, as nineteenth century liberalism ran its course,
it was not using a method or philosophy different from that of rationalistic
unbelief of all ages. The “higher criticism” has always in
principle rejected the basic teaching of Scripture and has then invented
reasons why it has been forced to reject, of course always on “scholarly
grounds,” the authenticity and historical reliability of the Biblical
record. The first higher critic in Christianity was Marcion, a thinker with
Gnostic leanings. The Uppsala historian of religions has shown how that which
makes for unbelieving criticism in our world was definitely at work in
Manichaean thinking, one of the late survivals of Gnosticism. Widengran writes:
(The Manichees) maintained (Christendom’s) books
had not been composed by Jesus’ original disciples or, if they had, the
texts were subsequently revised by Judaizing writers and therefore required to
be subjected to strict scrutiny. As a whole they must be regarded as spurious
and interpolated. The Pauline letters, on the other hand, sustained far milder
criticism, and to this degree the Manichees again were true heirs to Marcion.
For the Manichees the guiding principle was to
distinguish the falsifications which attempted to confuse the pure teachings of
the gospel with the views of Judaism, and the criterion was of course the
Manichaean dualistic antithesis between spirit and matter, light and darkness,
good and evil.
As did the scholastic exegetes whom Luther so severely
criticized, so truly did the practitioners of source analysis indulge in
playing games with the words of Scripture. Imagination was given a free rein,
and at the drop of a hat, new documents, new situations, new motivations, new
editors and editorial policies were invented and thereafter dealt with as if
they possessed objective, concrete reality. But the one objective reality, that
in the writers of the New Testament the Holy Spirit was speaking God’s
words to men and that their words were true, factual, and historically trustworthy
in every way—this objective reality was rejected and declared unworthy
even of consideration by men of intelligence and cultural enlightenment.
The Historical-Critical Method:
the Most Radical of Negative Criticisms
About fifty years ago there began in Europe what in some
ways was a radical departure from the approaches of higher criticism, in others
was but a natural development of the method already in operation. By the
1930’s this critical method was spreading to America, and it is still
with us today, though again in an altered form both as to its material and
formal principles.
According to its material principle criticism had in its
stress on the ultimate documentary sources that were poured together to make
our Biblical books still left many questions unanswered. If a primitive form of
Mark was the basic gospel document that was then “improved” on by
“Matthew” and “Luke,” where did this Ur-Markus
come from? Something needed to be done about the material principle behind the
doctrine of gospel origins.
And the formal principle, that optimistic philosophy of
the Age of Liberalism, that saw man capable of endless improvement, that
believed him in an evolutionistic way “day by day in every way getting
better and better,” that saw all men and nations within the foreseeable
future living at peace with one another, that believed disease, poverty, and
every form of distress shortly to be totally vanquished by advances in
technology,—all this fine stuff dreams are made on crumbled about the
heads of the systematic and exegetical theologians of the day, and the
“liberal” interpreter of the New Testament found himself in
increasingly deep hot water. For World War I had happened, nation after nation
tumbling into it. Universal love had turned out to be selective hate, and the
horrors of trench warfare with its barbed wire entanglements, machine guns, and
poison gas had been followed by widespread starvation and despair. Those who
turned to the Word of God for comfort found little consolation in the
“assured results of criticism” that had been the theological
nourishment of a whole generation of professional interpreters of the
Scriptures. The assurance that there had once existed not one Isaiah but a
whole raft of them and that Paul’s epistle of optimism and joy, that to
the Philippians, was really something welded together out of at least two
letters—all this was cold comfort to a soul crying out in anguish. The
keynote of contemporary thought was being struck by the watchwords: Angst
- Despair - Death.
Then somebody dug up the long-neglected writings of a
Dane of the the mid-nineteenth century. Theologically trained, he had never
taken a parish, but spent a considerable patrimony publishing his own
pseudonymously produced writings which no one was buying. Constantly at war
with the established church, he turned from a pessimistic view of society to a
pessimistic view of his own inner life. Man’s existence in this world was
beset by the unending necessity of making decisions in matters of limitless
consequences for himself. Whichever way such a decision went, the maker of it
would bear the dire results, but he could not avoid making the decision, like:
Shall I study theology or sell life insurance? Shall I emigrate or stay here in
Denmark? And it was this Dane’s fundamental thesis (it will be recognized
by now that we are talking about Søren Kierkegaard) that only while in
the throes of such weighty decision making was the individual actually living
the life of a human being. And the more open-ended he was to the future the
closer he came to a state of “authentic being.”
Now, Søren Kierkegaard stoutly maintained that he
was not a theologian (with which judgment one would heartily agree), nor a
philosopher (ditto), but a writer of belles-lettres. However that may be, many
theologians took him seriously and soon there appeared, inspired by the
“Either-Or” thrust of SK’s thinking, what became known as the
“dialectical theology.” The details of this way of thinking do not
concern us here except insofar as these theologians took to applying their
point of view to the interpretation of the Bible. Now as never before critical
students of the Scriptures insisted over and over again that “particular
historical facts are not the presupposition of faith.” And here they were
thinking especially about the historical facts of the Resurrection of Jesus as
the basis of all Christian faith and hope as Paul speaks about them in First
Corinthians 15:12–19. Dialectical theologians insisted that the
interpreter’s responsibility was to understand the message of the texts,
not as a system of teaching, but as something of meaning for “theological
existence today.”
It will be readily recognized that here the principles of the thought of
Søren Kierkegaard are merely being stated in theological terms.
Side by side with this turning to dialectical
understanding came a development in the material principle behind the doctrine
of gospel origins. This new development of the 1920’s was form criticism,
called by the Germans Formgeschichte.
This new theological discipline—at many
universities and schools it soon became that—sought to get the message of
the gospels by first of all considering their separate component parts, called
pericopes, that is, the separate sayings of Jesus, the reports of the miracles,
of his passion, of his resurrection, and the like. These were to be studied,
not as they stand in the New Testament, but as they were thought to have
circulated among the early Christian communities in oral form, passed on from
one to another. The missionary preaching of the first generations of Christian
teachers had to do, so it was claimed, strictly with the proclamation of Christ
as the Lord (the kerygma). The kerygma was not supposed to have had anything to
do with the historical facts of the earthly Jesus: these circulated in the oral
tradition of the pericopes. Being transmitted orally, the pericopes were
undergoing constant modifications, not on the basis of any historical research
into reliable testimony concerning the historical Jesus as this was carried on
by Luke for his Gospel and Acts, but rather on the basis of the interests and
needs of that particular worshiping community. The inevitable result of this
line of approach to the story of our Lord’s life will have to be that the
Gospels tell us very little about the historical facts of Jesus’ life but
a great deal about the history of religious thinking in the Christian
communities in which the several pericopes finally took form. To what
degree anything of historical worth is to be found in the Gospels at all
depends upon the notion of the particular critic one happens to be reading at
the moment, but in general the thesis is stoutly defended in this
historical-critical, dialectic-theological, form-critical approach to those
documents that speak of the earthly life of our Savior: they are first-rate
historical documents, not for the age of which they treat, the life of Jesus of
Nazareth, but for the age in which they came into being, the later decades of
the first century! To form-criticism the tradition about Jesus is not faithful
to history!
Is there need for any further justification of the
contention that the historical-critical approach to Scripture is the most
radical of the many modern methods of unbelieving Biblical interpretation? It
is not so much that the method denies the facts that are the basis of our
faith. This denial too it is guilty of in many cases. Of greater importance for
our immediate concerns is that the approach denies that we even have the
possibility of knowing these historical facts which from the first century on
have been the solid basis of the Christian faith.
The New Hermeneutic: Old Method,
Some New Names
While the 1950’s were the decade of Karl Barth
with his dialectical theology, and the 1960’s became the time of the
reign of Rudolf Bultmann, the 1970’s bid fair to become the time when the
“name theologians,” the people who write the New Testament
commentaries in the various series that have been with us from youth on up and
who are writing the lead articles in the religious encyclopedias that will
continue to be used for many years to come, will prove to be the students and
disciples of the famous man from Marburg, people now referred to as “the
post-Bultmannians,” the protagonists for the New Hermeneutic.
Let it be clear from the outset that this is neither new
nor a viable theory of Biblical interpretation. It is essentially German
university theology, as the form of the name it has given itself would
indicate.
Rather than being something new, however, it is but a
further development of the material principle found in Form Criticism; as to
its formal principle, it has merely substituted for the loosely-knit thinking
of Kierkegaard the more precisely-stated and elaborately-worked system of a
professional philosopher, Martin Heidegger.
If that were possible, however, this New Hermeneutic
would seem all the less to make us confident of having solid historical facts
upon which to base our faith. The great mentor of the movement, Rudolf
Bultmann, has gone so far as to state that the demand for historical certainty
is a sign of “unfaith.” In his An Introduction to the New
Hermeneutic Paul J. Achtemeier has put the matter very fairly and plainly
while speaking about “availability of historical knowledge about Jesus of
Nazareth”:
Bultmann…argued that such knowledge is
unavailable, and rightly so. All we need to know about Jesus is the fact that
he is the revealer. That alone is enough to make us realize that we are not our
own masters, and that our own quest for security is fruitless. Any further
knowledge about Jesus as a person would simply contribute to our desire to
achieve self-security apart from God. Indeed the very desire to possess such
knowledge is an act of unfaith. It represents the desire to have our security
located somewhere other than faith in God, who destroyed all human security.
Bultmann’s successor at Marburg, Ernst Fuchs, who
has also written very extensively on the hermeneutical problem, speaks in
similar fashion about any “attempt to find some proof for the truth of
faith.” Again we quote from Achtemeier: “Any such attempt to
provide proof for the truth of faith is completely at odds, says Fuchs, with
true faith.”
And how has this New Hermeneutic gone about even further
to “spiritualize” the facts of the historical Jesus?
In two ways. It has introduced a new element into the
process of Formgeschichte and it has turned even more definitely to the
acceptance of a system of thought that simply bypasses the existence of
anything like a real God by taking up within itself the existential philosophy
of Martin Heidegger. Concerning the latter it is enough for our present purposes
merely to note what the effect has been of the incorporation of such a system
of thought into a method that is to expound Biblical texts. We again let
Achtemeier speak:
The new hermeneutic is therefore not limited to
exegesis; it is a way of doing theology (emphasis ours), and it will be
better understood if that is kept in mind. Otherwise, much of what is said will
seem to wander far from the more limited task of interpreting New Testament
text, and will seem to lack exegetical justification. Further, because it is a
way of doing theology, the new hermeneutic will at times seem to move in ways
for which insufficient exegetical warrant is provided, had its proponents
intended to limit themselves merely to such interpreting. Rather, the new
hermeneutic, as a way of approaching theology, is, its proponents would argue,
based on sound exegesis but not limited merely to an exposition of texts.
“Interpretation” (hermeneutic) means making sense of (and thus
interpreting) human existence rather than simply deciphering texts, and to
carry out such a program the new hermeneutic sets its sights on the whole area
of theology.
It is however rather with the material principle behind
the new hermeneutic that we have here to do. This concerns the introduction of
a new (imaginary) process in the attempt to explain how the Gospels and Acts as
we now have them came into being. This is referred to as Redaktionsgeschichte, redaction criticism, the study
of an alleged process of editing.
It will be recalled that Formgeschichte thought of the raw materials
out of which the Gospels finally happened into being as being separate units of
gospel material circulating through the early Christian world in the form of an
oral tradition. These units, the pericopes, the new hermeneutic imagines, were
now taken up (whether in their oral or already in some written form seems
immaterial) and were worked over in editorial fashion. And here’s the nub
of the matter! This was not, say these people, a process of editing as we might
know it, one aimed at eliminating linguistic crudities, straightening out
inconsistencies, and establishing something of a uniformity of style between
the several sources of material that had come from a variety of places: some
Christian, others Jewish, still others obviously Hellenistic (and hence pagan).
The redactor (who he was does not matter) took it upon himself to write into
the traditional materials concerning the life of Jesus (and in the case of
Acts also concerning the life of the early church) the particular
theological interests that were of moment to himself, his community, his
immediate environment.
It is especially the name of Hans Conzelmann, of
Heidelberg and Göttingen, himself a student of Bultmann, that has been
associated with this latest enterprise. In 1953 while still at Heidelberg he
published a study in the “theology of Luke.” Its title was Die
Mitte der Zeit.
In 1964 a fourth edition of this work came out Now the author was at
Göittingen and was establishing a definite school of thought in Lukan
exegesis. In 1963 he issued his commentary on Acts in the
“Handbuch” series
and by 1972 students and assistants of his were bursting into print with
doctoral-dissertation-become-books like the study of Luke as Hellenistic
historian by Eckhard Plumacher.
Other men of prominence in New Testament studies have joined this movement,
which is supposed to present an alternative to Bultmann’s program of
radical demythologizing. Unfortunately, if that is possible, under this
approach the historical facts of New Testament history become even more
uncertain.
Conzelmann’s thinking starts with the assumption
that the first Christians lived in the expectation that Jesus would return to
earth immediately. Believers lived in fervent expectation of the parousia. We
do best to quote Marshall’s excellent analysis of Conzelmann’s
doctrine:
The thought of the church had to come to terms with the
new situation; apocalyptic excitement had to be succeeded by a faith adapted to
life in a world that went on in much the same way as it had always done.
Several early church theologians wrestled with this
task, and Luke occupies a prominent place among them. He reinterpreted the
eschatological content of the traditions which he incorporated in his Gospel in
such a way that the parousia was regarded as sudden rather than soon
(emphasis ours) and transferred to the indefinite future rather than expected
at any moment.
The picture we are to get of the situation is then this
that someone (here conveniently labeled “Luke”) took the
traditional account of the life of Jesus that he found in circulation and
edited it by means of changes in a variety of ways so as to reflect in the
Gospel as such the theology of his own much later age, according to Conzelmann,
the time of the Old Catholic Church. Of course, “Luke” could have
been a whole succession of editors, one or more; it really does not matter.
What is important for Conzelmann and the Redaktionsgeschichte school is that it was the
church as such that was here active and bringing its doctrine to expression. To
this way of thinking it is the church that is the source of doctrine.
How strangely like Rome this sounds!
Meanwhile, what has happened to the historical
reliability of statements of fact? In his discussion of the passion story in
Luke’s Gospel Conzelmann answers that question plainly and simply: where
Luke differs from Mark’s account, these variations are editorial
inventions on Luke’s part and are used to express his own point of view.
Let there be no mistake about the abyss fixed between
the method of exegesis here described and that of the Church that has to this
day continued in His Word by profession and in practice. We recognize that the
Gospels are not stenographic or phonographic reproductions of the facts of the
history of our salvation. Admittedly the Gospels, as is the rest of the New
Testament, are preaching. But the content of preaching and the statement of
historical fact do not stand in opposition to one another. Rather, each writer
makes that selection of the many historical facts available to him and arranges
them in such a way and with his chosen emphasis so as to underscore that basic
thought concerning the Savior that is as it were the theme of the sermon he is
here preaching in narrative form. To insist that the Gospels, just because they
are preaching, cannot also be historical is, to borrow a word from a
much-repeated billboard slogan of the present, plain STUPID.
The Inadequacy of the Moderate,
“Evangelical” Approach
There are of course many New Testament scholars of
reputation, outside that tight circle of German university theology to which
the above-described persons belong, who have been most unwilling to follow in
the paths of the radical advocates of the destructive criticism, like the
devotees to demythologizing, redaction-criticism, salvation-history (in a
technical sense), or whatever -ism the particular writer may think is the star
to which he has hitched his wagon. To name a few: C.H. Dodd of England (now
deceased), Krister Stendahl of Uppsala and now of Harvard Divinity School,
Regin Prenter of Denmark. It would go entirely beyond the scope of this study
on the importance of the facts of the life of the historical Jesus even to
characterize the work of these men about which many words of commendation would
have to be spoken. They would not go along with the Bultmannian Dass.
The picture they have of the first disciples of our Lord is that of a group of
earnest, zealous, and faithful men, men neither stupid nor pathological as
unbelieving criticism has often made them out to be. Yes, men who out of a
sincere and honest heart were doing their very best. But men—aye,
there’s the rub—good, honest, sincere men. Nothing more.
Here We Stand!
It has been an important part of our church’s
faithfulness to the motto it has taken for itself, to Continue in His Word,
that all Bible interpretation in its midst be carried on in conscious agreement
with the definition our church’s earliest teachers gave of the process by
which the books of Holy Writ came into being: inspiration by God’s Holy
Spirit of the prophets of the Old and the apostles of the New Testaments, a
process that is in itself a miracle, an action of the God of all grace that
defies all human analysis but that is still the plain teaching of the Bible
itself.
These inspired instruments of divine revelation were
God’s own spokesmen. They stood so completely in His service that their
words, though spoken by them and with their habits of thought and expression
behind them, were still the very words that are God’s revelation of
Himself and His gracious will to us. The words of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
concerning the facts of the life of the historical Jesus of Nazareth are
God’s Word of revelation to us. God wanted His thoughts to be revealed to
us precisely in the way in which these, His chosen spokesmen, spoke them.
Behind the words they spoke—and what is saying the
same thing—behind the divinely inspired self-consciousness of these
writers of the books of the Bible, Gospels and Acts included, we cannot, and
ought not even try to, go.
Their words tell of facts. And this Word of God is
Truth.
W.C. Unnik, Newly Discovered Gnostic Writings.
A preliminary Survey of the Nag-Hammadi find (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1960).
