An Appraisal of Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev’s Jesus Christ : His Life and Teaching , Vol. 1, The Beginning of the Gospel John Fotopoulos Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, Volume 3, Number 1, 2020, pp. 89-98 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/joc.2020.0005 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757665 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] ESSAY REVIEW An Appraisal of Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev’s Jesus Christ: His Life and Teaching, Vol. 1, The Beginning of the Gospel JOHN FOTOPOULOS his book is the first in a series of volumes in English translation of the Rus- sian language Начало Евангелия (Nachalo Evangeliia), written by Metro- politan Hilarion Alfeyev, chairman of the Department of External Relations Tof the Moscow Patriarchate. Alfeyev states that this series is not a conventional biography, while also claiming that the series has “a biographical character since its central theme is the human story of Christ” (xi, emphasis Alfeyev’s). Alfeyev explains that his aim is “to reproduce the living image of Jesus on the basis of the sources available and to present his teaching as it is reflected in the Gospels” (xii). He adds that it is important for him to “prove to the reader that Jesus was precisely the One whom the Church accepts him to be” (xiv), while also stating that he is “interested primarily in the human story of the Son of God, his earthly biography, which begins with his birth” (xv). Alfeyev pledges that his study of the Gospels will seek out above all “that which relates directly” to Jesus’s “person, character, biogra- phy, and teaching” (xiii). Alfeyev opens the present book with an eight-page foreword and then divides the volume into eight chapters. Chapters 1–2 (In Search of the “Historical Jesus”; The Sources) primarily address Alfeyev’s approach to the Gospels and his views on gospel composition. Chapters 3–8 (The Son of Man; The Son of God; The Prophet of Naza- reth of Galilee; Jesus and the Disciples; Jesus and His Opponents: The Beginning of the Conflict; Jesus: His Way of Life and Character Traits) survey aspects of Jesus’ life as understood by Alfeyev’s particular reading of the Gospels. Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Jesus Christ: His Life and Teaching, vol. 1, The Beginning of the Gos- pel (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 578 pp. ISBN: 978-0-88141-608-4. Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 3.1: 89–98 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press 90 JOURNAL OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN STUDIES Alfeyev states that his series of books is written primarily for: [a] “non-believ- ers, those who doubt and who are hesitant,” while also giving answers to “those who believe that Jesus never even existed”; [b] “those who admit that Jesus existed, but do not believe that he is God”; and [c] those who may identify as Christians “but relate to the Gospel narratives skeptically or view the Gospels through the prism of the criticism to which it [sic] was subjected in the works of Western specialists on the New Testament in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (xii–xiii). Although Alfeyev (a specialist on St. Symeon the New Theologian [ad 949– 1022]) does occasionally give a nod to historical-critical scholarship on the New Testament (47), he regularly rejects the methods and positions held by the major- ity of New Testament scholars. Alfeyev promises to stand “firmly on the soil of the Gospel text as the fundamental source of reliable information on Jesus” (49), but a significant weakness of the book is that Alfeyev generally approaches Jesus and the four Gospels using an uncritical hermeneutic that is prone to harmonizing and historicizing disparate gospel material. Consequently, many of the historical and exe- getical arguments that Alfeyev makes are unconvincing, while other such arguments exhibit imaginative conjecture rather than insightful New Testament interpretation. Given Alfeyev’s context in Russia, where the post-Soviet vestiges of atheism are still present, one might argue that Alfeyev’s intended readers and aims may be pastorally significant. But since Alfeyev’s context is unique to the Russian situation and does not correspond to any English-language audience, it is difficult to see how this trans- lation serves as much more than an attempt to countermand the very methods and findings of contemporary New Testament scholarship. Alfeyev asserts the four Gospels’ “essential similarity” and argues that the Gos- pels’ contradictions actually support “the reality of the events described,” whereas if the Gospels were a “hoax” the four evangelists “would certainly have made sure to check their information with each other” (13). Indeed, Alfeyev claims that the Gospels’ “differences bear witness to the fact that there was no collusion between the evangelists” (13). Alfeyev supports his position by approvingly quoting Patriarch Kirill of Moscow who compares the four evangelists to several people who witness a road accident and thus have similarities and differences in the evidence that they report (13–14). However, such a four-witnesses-to-a- traffic-accident understanding of the Gospels’ composition promoted by Alfeyev does not stand up to close scru- tiny. Such an approach disregards the evangelists’ use of oral and written sources for the Gospels’ composition, the Gospels’ literary genres, and the evangelists’ com- position of their Gospels in ways that address the needs of their particular church communities. Although Alfeyev does briefly raise the issue of the Gospels’ theolog- ical function as well as the issues of narrative and interpretation within the Gos- pels (14–20), his discussion is muddled and the entire volume does not sufficiently appreciate the narrative arrangement and presentation of material within each gos- pel (referred to by narrative critics as “the story as discoursed”). Rather, in general Alfeyev attempts to explain the great amount of agreement (including verbatim agreement) between the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) as resulting JOHN FOTOPOULOS / AN APPR AISAL of Alfeyev’S Jesus Christ: HIS Life and Teaching 91 from eyewitness testimony and ensuing oral traditions, while also advocating for such an explanation as the source of material in the Gospel of John (19–20). A basic obstacle to such an explanation is that there are occurrences in the Gospels that no others are recorded as witnessing, such as when the veil of the Temple (inside Jeru- salem) was torn in two upon Jesus’ death (outside Jerusalem), or the details of Jesus’ prayer to the Father before his arrest while the disciples were asleep and thus could not have heard his words—details that the evangelists never narrate Jesus sharing with anyone. One particular occurrence in the Gospels that no others witnessed, Jesus’s forty-day period of temptation in the wilderness, and the devil’s subsequent dialogue with Jesus, is explained by Alfeyev by saying he is prompted “to perceive this story not as a historical account, but as a portrayal of a singular spiritual experi- ence that Jesus had in the wilderness and which was a consequence of his extended fast” (300). Although Alfeyev does not understand this as a historical account, he does see the story as a historical tradition coming directly from Jesus himself “who related this experience to the disciples” (300). Even so, Alfeyev does not adequately consider the compositional implications of the verbatim agreement of Matthew and Luke’s temptation accounts, the significant differences between their accounts and Mark’s temptation account, versus the presentation of Jesus in John’s Gospel where there is no temptation in the wilderness and Jesus’s unity with God makes tempta- tion irrelevant—if not unthinkable—for Jesus. Alfeyev does concede that there were no eyewitness disciples that could have “documented” the events recorded in the birth narratives of Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2 (19–20), but he goes on to “suggest that the source for the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel is Jesus’s mother, Mary, while the information contained in the open- ing chapters of Matthew’s Gospel can be attributed to Joseph” (20). Such an expla- nation does not sufficiently take into account many of the irreconcilable details in Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives or the narrative function of each birth account within its respective gospel. To be fair, Alfeyev does state that the two birth narratives cannot be completely harmonized (235) and that the cause of differences in the nar- ratives “is primarily how each of the evangelists understands the events” from a theo- logical perspective (236). However, Alfeyev later asserts (259–65) that differences in the birth narratives “testify to the presence of two witnesses, upon whose evidence the two parallel stories are based” (264), i.e., Mary and Joseph. Alfeyev even goes so far as to claim that the “thoughts of Joseph (Mt. 1.20),” as well as Joseph’s dreams, testify “that the most credible source of information for Matthew is Joseph,” and that Joseph had given details of Jesus’ birth to Jesus’ brothers (such as James the brother of the Lord) who subsequently conveyed those details to Matthew (261). Alfeyev supports this conjecture by referring the reader to the apocryphal Protevangelium of James, containing traditions surrounding Jesus’s birth that Alfeyev posits “could in some parts go back to the brother of the Lord, and through him to Joseph” (262). Alfeyev states, “In spite of its openly apocryphal character, the work is valuable in that it is the first attempt at synchronizing the two divergent Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth” (262). This statement is illuminating because it helps to further show Alfeyev’s 92 JOURNAL OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN STUDIES general approach to the four canonical Gospels that regularly seeks to harmonize differences between the Gospels rather than allowing the evangelists to tell the story of Jesus in their own way, with their own available traditions, with their own theo- logical motifs, and in order to address the needs of their respective churches.