From Rowland: an in-your-face response to Witherington about Jesus scholarship, from an erudite liberal Episcopalian priest…
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May 27, 2007
What a Friend We Have in Jesus …
By Harry T. Cook
The title of this essay was my second reaction to reading the following from a recent Episcopal News Service dispatch:
What Have They Done with Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories And Bad History—Why We Can Trust the Bible from HarperCollins Publishers, by Ben Witherington III. Strange theories about Jesus seem to ooze from our culture with increasing regularity. Ben Witherington, one of the top Jesus scholars, will have none of it. There were no secret Gnostic teachings in the first century. With leading scholars and popular purveyors of bad history in his crosshairs, Witherington reveals what we can – and cannot – claim to know about the real Jesus. The Bible, not outside sources, is still the most trustworthy historical record we have today.
The first reaction was, “Really?” In the first place, whoever Witherington III is, he is not a top Jesus scholar. That level is reserved to John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and a few other lesser-knowns. Your essayist counts himself among the journeymen in the field, in that the research that has occupied his time in the study for most of the past 45 years concerns the texts treating of the personage commonly referred to as Jesus of Nazareth.
If the blurb from the Episcopal News Service is a true representation of what Witherington has to say, then his work cannot be called scholarship. It can and should be called a tract. His website proclaims that he is a “top evangelical scholar.” I think the second adjective in the previous sentence negates the meaning of the noun. One is a scholar or not a scholar. A scholar does not shill for a point of view.
Insofar as I know, what can accurately be called “New Testament studies” has excreted no “strange theories about Jesus.” What those of us who ply that trade, sans agenda, have been working on are the relevant extant texts and what can be known about their provenance – that is to say, under what kind of circumstances they may have been uttered or written and what their greater historical context might have been.
As for “trusting the Bible,” one might as well as say he or she trusts the town library. Because the Bible is nothing more nor less than a library-like collection of documents and scraps of documents composed in a variety of languages and dialects by various people at various times with various agenda.
You can trust such a collection to yield the occasional glimpse of original intent that may not at first be evident. How long, for example, did it take for some scholar to figure out that the word anwqen (anothen) in the third and seventh verses of John the third chapter might have been intended as a kind of double entendre? The word can mean “anew” or “from above.”
You cannot trust the Bible to do what it could not possibly do, and that is to present some monolithic truth of any matter. No more so a library. That is my problem with the church’s promotion of the Witherington book.
As for the character or personage of Jesus, even the most cursory scholarship of the canonical gospels (the four that appear in the New Testament) reveals quite different Jesuses. As for “history,” you cannot credibly allow the divergent birth narratives in Matthew and Luke to appear under the rubric of history. The same can be said of the resurrection narratives. What’s left? The signs-and-wonders narratives?
What Witherington apparently did not consider – or he considered but declined to deal with it – is the fact that the documents known as gospels are proclamations, not accounts, high drama but not journalism, myth rather than item-by-item history. This was evident even to such non-biblical scholars as Thomas Jefferson.
It is the height of arrogance to write a book that says the Bible can be trusted to tell us who Jesus was. It is the height of arrogance to dismiss nearly 200 years of exquisitely careful scholarship demonstrating that Jesus is quite possibly a composite character of a type or even an outright invention of myth-makers, i.e. storytellers. For what it’s worth, my research inclines me to the former rather than the latter.
The actual chroniclers of the period – Tacitus, Suetonius, Flavius Josephus – made only a few vague references to a personage who may or may not have been the one or ones about whom the composers of the gospels wrote. The great apostle Paul glorified the one he called “Christ Jesus” with scarcely an allusion to an historical person. Paul said a vision of a resurrected Christ appeared to him once (see 1st Corinthians 15:8).
My beef is less with Witherington’s book – which I promise to purchase, read and review – but with the official news agency of my church giving it such a promo job. This is what my friend and colleague, Dr. Harvey H. Guthrie Jr., fired off to the agency – Harvey being the sometime dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and a scholar of the Hebrew scriptures:
As a biblical scholar, a priest, and one who considers himself a “traditional Christian,” I object to (the promotion of Witherington’s book). Put out by an official agency of the church, it seems to endorse the opinions of one scholar, Witherington, and to repudiate the opinions of other scholars, like Borg and Crossan, who are as much participants in “traditional Christianity” as is Witherington.
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