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Deconstructing Jesus: from Modernity to Postmodernity to Faith1

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Deconstructing Jesus: from Modernity to Postmodernity to Faith1 Deconstructing Jesus: From Modernity to Postmodernity to Faith1 Rollin G. Grams April, 2011 Director of the Robert C. Cooley Center for the Study of Early Christianity Associate Professor of New Testament These are exciting days in Jesus studies. Much is being written on the historical Jesus, and significant challenges to old paradigms in New Testament Christology are being presented. The labours of sensible scholarship are not going to be found on the shelves of your local large bookshop, since they do not sell as well as whatever claims to expose conspiracies, reveal secrets, and unsettle orthodoxy. But solid scholarship is doing more than just exposing the latest hype for what it is: New Testament scholars are still making interesting contributions through the exegetical task of theology. A part of what we are seeing in the field involves a new set of assumptions. Modernist methods of Biblical scholarship, along with its ‘consensuses’ and ‘assured results’, are happily under scrutiny. But Postmodernity can take several forms. Positively, enquiry from a position of belief rather than doubt is now seen as inevitable if not even encouraged. Negatively, a deconstructive Postmodernity—in many ways a ‘MostModernity’—has simply ratcheted up the level of doubt to higher levels of scepticism and turned from trusting methods of enquiry to playing with methods of enquiry in order to arrive at alternative constructions of truth.2 This deconstructive version of Postmodernity takes us into a world of scholarship presented as the exposure of conspiracies, secrets, and scandals. To be sure, challenges to orthodox teaching about Jesus were also the order of the day in the Modern period. According to Albert Schweitzer, it began with Herman Reimarus’ posthumously published work Apology or Defence of the Rational Worshippers of God in 1778.3 For Reimarus, Jesus was a pious Jew calling people to repentance in preparation for the Kingdom of God. He became increasingly fanatical, however, and tried to force God's hand in Jerusalem, only to die on the cross believing that God had forsaken Him. His disciples, who had forgotten how to work and so wished to keep a good thing going, decided to steal Jesus’ body and claim that He had risen from the dead and would return to establish His Kingdom. Here is a major conspiracy on the part of Jesus’ disciples, but, thanks to Reimarus, secrets are now revealed, and they are scandalous for Christian faith. 1 This article is an expanded version of ‘Deconstructing Jesus: Separating Fact from Fiction,’ in Contact (December, 2009). Online: http://www.scribd.com/doc/23980972/Gordon-Conwell-Contact-Magazine-Winter-09. 2 Cf. Rollin G. Grams, Rival Versions of Theological Enquiry (Prague: International Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005). 3 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (Engl. ed., A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1910). 1 Deconstructive Postmodernism still touts the same alternatives to the resurrection that Modernity presented, whether a fabricated story or the belief that Jesus avoided death and lived out his days. There are some differences, however. Authors, publishers, and bookshops have learned how to make money by peddling conspiracy, secrecy, and scandal. Take, for example, the annual publications of Bart Ehrman: Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: a New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006); Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperOne, 2007); God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008); Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (HarperOne, 2009). These works are not, moreover, aimed at Christians trained for ministry at an academically solid seminary, who have really engaged the issues of textual criticism, Gnostic writings, the historical development of orthodox Christianity, and critical issues of Scripture since their own seminary days. Ehrman rather seems intent on disturbing his undergraduate students, deconstructing their faith, and leaving them with nothing. The Athenian elders had Socrates drink hemlock for this, but in our day disturbing the youth is a lucrative and laudable exercise for some university professors. Consider just how one deconstructs Jesus in a Postmodern age.4 Plurality First, argue that, because orthodox Christianity was from the start only one among several perspectives on Jesus, it is not a more credible perspective. Or, more boldly, argue that if a document is independent from the canonical Gospels, it must be earlier. Neither of these ways of reasoning is in the least logical. It is, of course, quite true that from the very beginning there were any number of responses to Jesus. One way to read Mark’s Gospel is to list the variety of responses to Jesus during His public ministry. The idea that the first century initially had a single, solid, orthodox view of Jesus and only afterwards developed views reaching further and further away in heretical directions is clearly false. Views of Jesus in the first century were not like a tree trunk that only pushed out branches at a later date. Yet the correct picture of how things developed will not be the opposite--an upside down tree, with branches in all directions at the beginning and then a particular branch emerging from the mix that would be called ‘orthodoxy’. Rather, there was a ‘normative Christianity’ from the beginning that stood out among the other views of Jesus.5 Five lines of argument are worth considering. 4 In addition to several works cited elsewhere in this article, see also Ben Witherington, III, What Have They done With Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History—Why we Can Trust the Bible (New York: HarperOne, 2006); Darrell Bock and Daniel Wallace, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ (Thomas Nelson, 2007). 5 Arland J. Hultgren, The Rise of Normative Christianity (Wipf & Stock Pub., 2004). 2 (1) When Tertullian (Prescriptions Against Heresies) gave thought to heresies in the late second century, he was able to say that churches known to have apostolic foundations were not heretical. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus at the end of the 2nd century, was easily able to establish the history of bishops for the church he oversaw (Eusebius, H.E. 5.24.2- 7). (2) Our canonical Gospels present the testimony of eyewitnesses, as Richard Bauckham ably argues.6 (3) Over against the view that Jesus did not see himself as the coming Messiah, N. T. Wright and others have convincingly argued that Jesus intended to bring about the restoration of Israel from exile in fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.7 The narrative of Israel and its Old Testament grounding only affirms orthodox Christology over against the Gnostic misdirections of the second century. (4) When we look carefully at the means of preserving the tradition about Jesus, we see that Form Criticism’s assumption of a long period of communities developing the tradition for a variety of purposes apart from eyewitnesses and Redaction Criticism’s assumption that these free floating stories about or sayings of Jesus (pericopae) were eventually edited by late first century authors creates a false perspective on how closely tied the Gospels were to the events of Jesus’ life. As James Dunn has argued, the tradition was preserved with due care for accuracy.8 Consider the important role of teachers in the community, the likely memorization of sayings of Jesus, the role of eyewitnesses in the community, the community’s valuing accurate memories of Jesus, the importance of apostolic custodians of the Church’s tradition, the assumption by New Testament authors of epistles that the churches knew traditions about Jesus,9 the Gospels’ historical interests in their choice of the genre of biography,10 the tendency to check prophecy with tradition, a concern over ‘false prophets’, and the control that a community exercised on the right telling of a story by any story teller. Dunn concludes his argument for the historical veracity of the Gospels’ tradition with the following statement:11 … the differences introduced by the Evangelists, whether as oral diversity or literary editing, are consistently in the character of abbreviation and omission, 6 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 7 N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 2 (Augsburg Fortress, 1997). 8 James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). 9 Paul, Peter, and James alike do not quote but allude to Jesus’ life and sayings. See the list of allusions to Jesus’ teaching in Paul, Peter, and James in Dunn, Jesus Remembered, footnotes 48 and 49 on p. 182. 10 For a thorough discussion of ancient biography and the Gospels’ genre, emphasising historicity, see the introduction in Craig Keener, The Gospel of John—A Commentary, Vol. 1 (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004). 11 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 224. 3 clarification and explanation, elaboration and extension of motif. The developments often reflect the deeper faith and insight of Easter; that is true. But they do not appear to constitute any radical change in the substance or character or thrust of the story told. (5) A rather common deconstructionist view in New Testament Christology has been to claim that the Church came, over time and through its encounter with the Graeco-Roman world, to ascribe deity to Jesus.
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