Introduction
Part 1: Introductory
Part 2: Why choose?
Part 3: What convinced them?
Part 4: Research and faith
Part 5: Two callers
Part 6: The Resurrection
Part 7: Translate to pew
Part 8: Three phone calls
Part 9: Closing statements
They were joined by two conservative voices -- Luke Timothy Johnson, author of The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, and N.T. Wright, author of Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Christian Discipleship. Johnson and Wright added their unique perspectives to this evolving conversation. Also joining the conversation was Deirdre Good from the faculty of General Theological Seminary, where she is a New Testament professor with a special interest in the Gnostic Gospels.
Linda:
Well, I don't know about you, but everywhere I turn these days, it seems that Jesus is there--that is the debate about the historic Jesus. As you've seen from the opening graphics of tonight's program, the quest for the historical Jesus has permeated nearly all forms of media. What's going on? Is all this attention just a calculated public relations campaign by the Jesus Seminar to draw attention to itself? That's the opinion of one of our more outspoken panelists here tonight. Or, is there a deep seat ed interest in knowing who Jesus really was and how that impacts or doesn't impact on our faith today? I'm Linda Hanick, Good Evening and welcome to ETCN's follow-up program to Jesus At 2000.
I have here with me tonight in New York, where what going to be a very lively panel discussion--welcome everyone--and we're going to continue the conversation that began in Corvallis Oregon. But, before we meet everyone here, we have a special guest who is coming to us live from Texas and that is Tom Wright. Good Evening Tom!
N.T. (Tom) Wright:
Good Evening, Hello.
Linda:
It's good to see you and hear you. Tom is the Dean of Litchfield Cathedral in England. He's also a New Testament scholar. And, presently Tom, I understand, you are on a tour of the United States giving a seminar on "Jesus Then and Now". How's it going?
Tom:
It's going very well. We had a wonderful seminar in Orlando, Florida a couple of days ago, and we're looking forward to being with the seminar here in Dallas tomorrow, then Oaklahoma City the next day, and Chicago the day after, so it's going very well.
Linda:
You're probably getting a better tour of the U.S. than most of us sitting here tonight. Well, we're going to be coming back to you shortly with our opening questions, but before we do let's meet our other panelists. Sitting on my far right is John Dominic Crossan, who we're going to be calling "Dom" for short. Dom is a retired professor of Biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago. You are now presently living in Florida where you are writing. I know you are here in New York not just for this b ut you're up at Alburn Institute. What are you teaching up there in the next couple of days?
John Dominic Crossan (Dom)
Well, Tom went to Orlando, so I left Orlando and came to New York. (chuckles) I'm doing a continuing education course in Alburn yesterday, today and tomorrow on the Historical Jesus.
Linda:
I suspect we're going to get a lot of interesting comments because you'll be bringing them in from both places. Sitting opposite from Dom Crossan is Deirdre Good. And Deirdre comes to us this evening from the faculty of General Theological Seminary where she is a New Testament professor with a special interest in the Gnostic Gospels. Deirdre, we're so glad to have you. And I know, Deirdre was the downlink panel discussion coordinator here in New York during the Jesus at 2000, so you really have heard a lo t of what people have been thinking and reacting.
Deirdre:
Yes, I think there's a great deal of interest in the subject. My parish is here and some of the seminary students are here so it's very exciting.
Linda:
On my left is Marcus Borg who we got to know well out in Corvallis Oregon in the floods. Marcus has just returned from a two week trip to Israel where you've been with your wife Marianne, and a church group. He is the Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University and the author of "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time". Any new insights in Israel while you were there?
Marcus:
Yes as a matter of fact, primarily from seeing Bethsaida a brand new site that's just on the verge of being open to the public and also the magnificent excavation south of the Temple Wall in Jerusalem. Very impressive historically.
Linda:
On my right so I can keep my eye on him tonight is Luke Timothy Johnson. Luke comes to us from Atlanta where is the Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler Theological Seminary and Evory University. He is the author of "The Real Jesus". Everything I read in the last couple weeks says that you're a former Benedictine monk and the father of seven children.
Luke:
I'm pleased to report that this did not happen simultaneously. It did happen in sequence and in fact the youngest of our children will be graduating from Indiana University day after tomorrow so I'm flying out there to take part in that.
Linda:
So the tuition payments will end.
Luke:
Luckily.
Linda:
What will you spend your time and money on? (chuckles)
Ok, let me say right up front that two of our panelists here Marcus and Dom as many of you know are members of the Jesus Seminar. But our program tonight is not about the Seminar itself. What we want to do this evening is look at some of the questions and issues that have been raised by the work of the Seminar on the historical Jesus and to see if together we can explore this territory on a new level. So, why don't we begin. What I'd like to do is, I'm going to ask an opening question. Tom, I'm going to start with you in Dallas. If each of you can take a minute and a half, no longer, so that our viewers can get a sense of you all stand on the landscape of you image and model of Jesus. The question, Tom, is the question that Jesus posed to Peter, "Who do you say that I am?"
Tom:
Well, I think the critical thing to say is that Jesus believed he was living at the climactic moment of history. He wasn't just a teacher of general timeless truths or even of a general political agenda that might be applied any time any place. He believed he was standing at the corner of history - the corner of Israel's history and hence because of Israel's calling, the corner of world history. And he believed that it was his vocation to announce God's Sovereign Rule - God's Kingdom if you like - not jus t in the ordinary Jewish sense of God is going to be "King or the Romans are going to get their come-uppance" but in the much more specific sense that now at last God was going to be King of the whole world, everything was going to be different. And he believed that it was his calling to take Israel and hence the world around that corner once and for all time. And one of the words that got attached to that in various senses was this word "Messiah" or "Christ" but Jesus redefined that around himself. He drew upon himself the whole picture of Messiahship that different Jews in that period might have been sketching in different ways. And within that again Jesus believed that he had the vocation to deal with the radical evil that had infected the world once and for all. And that is why he not only announced the Kingdom of God, he lived it, he enacted it symbolically, and ultimately he died for it. And that is at the heart of what it meant for Jesus to be the one who would bring the world to its great climatic moment.
Linda:
OK, Tom let's hold that thought. Dom, "Who do you say that I am?"
Dom:
What's most important for me about Jesus, is that he didn't ask that question. Jesus didn't talk about himself. He talked about the Kingdom of God. The "Our Father" is not a prayer to Jesus. It's Jesus' prayer about the Kingdom of God. So if I were to try and summarize it, Jesus is located in the situation which is terribly specific. It's in Lower Galilee, under Antipas in a time of Roman urbanization. And what Jesus said is this system as here represented is not the will of God. The Kingdom of God stands opposed to it. So if I were to put it in a sort of a sound bite in honor of the medium in which we are in, as a historian I reconstruct Jesus as "a peasant with and attitude". (chuckles) But as a Christian I consider and believe that that attitude is the attitude of God.
Linda:
OK. Can I still say "Who do I say that I am?" even though it's not historically true?
Dom:
I come very close to saying the exact same thing that Tom says. I am the one - if you ask Jesus - who asks you to live the Kingdom, to enact the Kingdom, and to live out of the Kingdom as I do. I am the one who invites you to take the Kingdom, to enter the Kingdom.
Linda:
We're going go across the table here to Deirdre Good. Deirdre, who do you say that Jesus is? What is your image?
Deirdre:
Well, for me first of all, Jesus is a Jew in the first century. I think you'll find some common ground amongst all of us there. But the Judaisms of the Second Temple period are quite diverse and so we need to say more about what it meant for Jesus to be a Jew - certainly one who practiced Judaism. He, I think advocated paying the Temple tax, I think advocated adhering to purity laws. So, I think as a religious man primarily that's a major part of Jesus' identity. I think also the proclamation of the proximity of God' s Kingdom is terribly important not so much as the guaranteed surety but rather as the invitation. I think for me the important thing is that Jesus doesn't proclaim the message of God's Kingdom once but in many and various ways the parables of which we have many in and outside the canon are examples of the constant challenge of God's Kingdom. I think the message that the Gospels present us with - and they too are affecting who all Jesus is - is that in course of Jesus' life the meaning of who he is is to b e worked out. In other words it's not a sound bite here and now, That's not the answer once and for all, it's rather who do you say Jesus is and the totality of his life also being that question.
Linda:
OK. We'll get back to some of the issues that raises, but Marcus, who do you say that Jesus is?
Marcus:
My image of Jesus actually combines two images of Jesus in a dialectical relationship - an image of the Pre-Easter Jesus and and image of the Post-Easter Jesus. By the Pre-Easter Jesus I mean of course, Jesus as a figure of history before his death. And I see my image of the Pre-Easter Jesus that he has a spirit dimension to him, a wisdom dimension to him, a political dimension to him. And of those three the one that I highlight most in my own work is that he was a spirit person, that is one of those people with an experiential awareness of the sacred. A Jewish mystic if you will.
But to return to the three, he was a God-intoxicated Jew who was a wisdom teacher and a social prophet. And then by the Post-Easter Jesus I mean what Jesus became after his death. It's the Jesus of both Christian tradition and experience. Both nouns are important. By the Jesus of Christian tradition I mean the Jesus who emerges in the New Testament in the Gospels and ultimately also in the Creeds. And of Christian experience I mean the Post-Easter Jesus is actually experienced as a living reality both then and now. And then in a nutshell my image of the Post-Easter Jesus would be th at the Post-Easter Jesus is the Son o f God, the Wisdom of God, the Word of God, and ultimately One with God.
Linda:
Luke, who do you say that Jesus is?
Luke:
I begin with the belief that Jesus is a living person. So the response to that question is that Jesus is risen Lord, Jesus is Lord. And as a living person, I think the images that we have for Jesus are multiple, as multiple as the experience of Jesus that continues in the world. The sacramental experience of Jesus. The experience of Jesus in prayer. The reading of Jesus out of the pages of the Gospels. So, thinking about Jesus as a living person, I find it impossible to attach a single image. Jesus is as richly diverse and multifaceted as my wife Joy is - actually more than my wife Joy is. No offence to Joy but an honor to Jesus. When I first met my wife, I felt fairly confident about being able to say who she was. After 20 years of marriage I find that it's less and less possible to reduce her to a simple image or to a single story. She constantly reveals herself in new ways.
And when I read the pages of the Gospels, I find the same multi-faceted rendering of Jesus. Each of the Gospels renders Jesus in different ways - Jesus as Prophet, Jesus as Revealer. If I were to say that there's some central governing image of Jesus in the Gospels, that for me the most telling, the most normative, I find it in the narrative rendering of Jesus as the suffering obedient Son of God who in radical obedience to God gave his life in loving service to others. That image of Jesus I find perva des the Gospels and the other early Christian writings and gives some kind of normative shape to the continuing experience of Jesus in the Church.
Linda:
OK. Now listening to all of you, I could say I've just heard five Gospels portraits of Jesus. Why do I have to choose? Do I have to choose? Can we bring all of these together? Where do any of you see really strong differences that really matters to the Christian faith?
Tom:
Can I jump in here? What we have around the table is Deirdre, Marc, Luke, Dom and Thomas. And since I'm Thomas here, I get the Vaudeville seat. I think the biggest difference between what certainly I'm saying and Dom and Marc are saying (I'm not sure yet about Deirdre and Luke on this occasion) is that I believe Jesus understood himself to be living at a unique moment - the unique moment - in Israel's history and the world history. This is what I mean by the technical term Eschatology. I don't think that's about simply a new experience of God or a new idea about organizing one's life which might apply at anytime. I think it's the critical difference between those who see Jesus standing at the turning point of all history and those who think he was simply a teacher of some sort who might in principle have been looking at any time. That's the main difference I think.
Luke:
I think another difference is the degree of confidence that one has in our ability to say as Tom just did, Jesus thought of himself in this way or that. And to some extent, my approach I think, is distinctive by being on the one hand affirming very very strongly the experience of Jesus as resurrected Lord, which is a religious affirmation and a certain degree of caution about the ability of history to adequately comprehend Jesus. And I resist for example, Tom's confidence in saying "Jesus saw himself". As a critical reader of the Gospel, I find it difficult to get inside Jesus' head historically. And I think it raises a real issue of appropriate historical standards.
Linda:
Dom, your eyebrows are knitted, so...
Dom:
I would never consider I'm getting inside of Jesus' head, because I don't think I could get inside my own head very securely or anyone else's head. I can see what they're doing in terms of their vision and their program. And that's what I'm talking...
Linda:
Who do you mean "they"?
Dom:
Jesus. Sorry. I can see what Jesus is talking about if he says, as I think he does, blessed are the destitute. I can figure out what he might mean by that. To get inside his head, I can not do with Jesus, because I can not do with anyone in that sense. So it's not that I'm protecting Jesus with a sort of cocoon of unknowability. That really has to do with all of us. But we can see the program and I do not want to protect Jesus from history.
Linda:
How... Deirdre go ahead.
Deirdre:
I just want to say in regard to your first question whether we must choose between what Tom has mentioned as five alternatives one answer might be that in fact we shouldn't choose between any of them, but we should include as many other voices as possible in the conversation we knew other than the colleagues who have written and are writing on the historical Jesus and we know those in our faith traditions and outside of our faith traditions. In other words, from the point of view of the knowledge question, the totality of the interpretations is the beginning of the answer to the meaning of Jesus, rather than saying can we or can we not get inside his head.
Tom:
That may be so, (if I may jump in). I think the critical difference is between trying to do psychoanalysis of a figure of the past -- and I know that does happen in some pseudohistorical attempts -- but I agree with Dom, if that's what you mean by "getting inside of Jesus' head", then none of us should be trying to do that. What we can do in principle with any figure of the past about whom we have reasonable information, is to talk about their motivations, what so to speak "made them tick", not at the level of Freud would understand or whatever but at the level of "what was he driving at - what was he getting at". So I think if we can keep that distinction, then I agree to this extent with Dom Crossan over against Luke Johnson, we can ask those questions about Jesus and indeed I want to say as a Christian, we have an obligation to ask them.
Marcus:
I would simply say that I think that we can know quite a bit about the intentionality of Jesus as I understand Tom to be using that notion. But I'm skeptical that we can know very much about what kind of role Jesus himself felt himself to be playing in all of that. Because it's precisely there that the community is most reflecting on what is the real significance of what has happened here. And so as a historian I have to systematically suspect those Post-Easter explanations of Jesus' role at the center of history and so forth.
Luke:
I agree and I think that apart from the question here is the degree to which history can get at certain things. And I think that a large part of the conversation has revolved not about whether Jesus should be protected from history, Dom, which I don't think I think is perfectly legitimate, to engage the figure of Jesus historically. And I think as simply as an intellectual task this is legitimate to historical questions about Jesus. I think where I differ from certainly from Tom and I think from both of you -- Deirdre has not published her own version of this yet so I can't respond to her's as such, but I think where I differ is in the way in which we can feel confident about that reconstruction. It's not that we're protecting Jesus from historical examination. The question the way I pose it is: When history tries to do what history can not do, does not the subject itself become distorted and does not historical method become distorted?
Tom:
Well the question of whether history can do this or not is precisely the question that is open, and that's what the whole discussion is about and that's why I agree with Deirdre that we need to listen to one another as colleagues within the discipline and so which bit of evidence are you using and how does that fit together. And we do this with all sorts of other figures of ancient history about whom we know actually far less than we know about Jesus, whether it's Alexander the Great or Claudius Caesar or whatever, we are doing critical readings of texts. That doesn't stop historians saying 'here is the general picture - this is how it makes sense'. There is a certain knowing which is proper to historical knowing. And that includes -- I think if I might address Marc just for a second -- includes the possibility that we can study people's awareness of their own vocation. We know for example that St. Paul (whatever you might think of him), we know that he really did believe that he had vocation to be the apostle to the Gentiles. We likewise know that John the Baptist believed presumably that he had a vocation to go and splash water over people in the Jordan. Now, if we could say that of figures about whom we really don't have nearly as much information as Jesus, I don't see why we shouldn't in principle say Jesus believed he had likewise a unique vocation to do these certain things at the climax of God's Plan for Israel and the world.
Marcus:
The enormous difference of course is that we have Paul's own self statement about that but we don't have anything like that from Jesus.
Tom:
Well I think we do actually, I mean that parable after parable we have all sorts of things where Jesus is saying things obliquely but which continually reflect back on himself so that I think it's a great oversimplification, if I may say so to Dom, something he said earlier to say, 'well, Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, only then it was the Church or whoever came and talked about Jesus. Again and again Jesus says all sorts of oblique things which when you cash them out point back at himself. That's why he constantly says 'if you have ears then you'd better listen'. It's a way of saying 'figure it out - work it out'. The interesting thing historically about that is that the early Church had no such reticence - they came right out 'He is the Lord, He is the Messiah, He is the Savior'. And when we find those very reticent statements, I think as a historian 'where do they belong historically'. I think they belong much better in the ministry of Jesus himself than later in the early Church.
Dom:
That is a fundamental question of evidence. The evidence as I read it is that the Kingdom of God is the most securely early statement that Jesus talks about. I mentioned the "Our Father". That's not a prayer to Jesus. That's a prayer about the Kingdom of God. Now I take that very seriously. Jesus could talk about himself. I don't think he did and my lead challenge is: is talking about Jesus the safest way of avoiding talking about the Kingdom of God.
Tom:
Absolutely not. That's not at all my agenda, as I think you know Dom. I am very keen that we talk about the Kingdom of God and that we see that not simply as a one level one dimensional idea. If somebody in first century Judaism says 'the Kingdom of God is happening here and now' that inevitably carries a self-reference which says 'join this movement'. There's no question Jesus was at the head of a movement. I know from Marc's work that he thinks Jesus intended that should be so, that he was a movement founder or catalyzer. And it seems to me there is therefore precisely because he is saying 'here is the Kingdom of God here and now' there is an implicit self-reference.
Linda:
Luke, you want to jump in?
Luke:
I would like to jump in, always ready to jump in. Tom, I'd like to return to your point that we base historical judgements on figures about whom we have much less information than Jesus. That's certainly true, but your statement could be turned the other way, in some sense that's the problem with Jesus. Very often our judgements on historical figures are based on the thinnest of evidence. And because we have only a tiny bit of evidence, we go ahead and make those judgements. The really critical issue with Jesus is that we have at one level very fine evidence written within 30 or 40 years of his death, but the critical problem is that these versions can not be made absolutely to cohere - absolutely to agree. And the sorting out of these versions, the sorting out of the images of Jesus, what might be called the historical task is one which seems inevitably in the whole history of the quest for the historical Jesus to end up with reconstructions which represent selections out of that data which more often than not reflect the proclivities of the investigator. And that's where the debate comes in.
Tom:
I agree of course that's what's happened again and again within the whole debate. There's no question about that. What matters then is that within our scholarly discourse we say "well, you managed to get these bits of the data into this picture" and "I managed to get those bits of the data into some other picture". Let's see if we can't actually expand our categories a bit more so that there are different categories that might stretch all our minds and all our perspectives where we might actually be able to get more of the stuff in. That's what good history does. It doesn't leave the data scattered around all over the floor labeled with different colors. It says our task is to get the data in, and to do so in a coherent way. And I still believe that is actually in principle a possible task, not least because Luke, I hear what you say about the narrative shape of Jesus and what we know about him from that point of view and I say 'yes, but there's a lot more that will actually fit into that when we really understand it'.
Linda:
Now as someone who has been reading a lot of the magazine articles that have been coming out the way the debate is shaping up in the public media is that one has to make a choice between history and faith. Are you saying that, Luke? That we either go with the narrative or one goes with the history. Is there a possibility of bringing the two together?
Luke:
Well, I think the question is, as the title of my book put it, "Who is the Real Jesus?" If Jesus is in fact risen Lord, Jesus is a living presence, then the experience of Jesus, the personhood of Jesus, who Jesus is is an ongoing process, an ongoing revelation in the light of which his entire identity must be evaluated. If that is true, as I claim that it is, then the Gospels that read Jesus from the same perspective, that is to say from the perspective of his resurrection are truth, in other words they capture his true identity. Now the difficulty is of course that getting at what is historical in the earthly Jesus - if I could make that distinction - or coming up with a historical reconstruction of the earthly Jesus, runs into the same problem that we've been talking about, namely, the disagreements between the sources and this faith perspective. Where I disagree with some of my colleagues here, is I sense that what they are doing is making that historical reconstruction normative for faith. As Dom put it, Jesus vision should be our vision. And Marcus has said something very similar, we should see things the way Jesus saw them. And I find that makes a very fragile historical reconstruction trump the images of Jesus in the Gospel which are images shaped by faith. And I find that very difficult.
Marcus:
If I may come in here. I think that's an inaccurate representation of what I am in fact am saying and have said that for me as a Christian both the Pre-Easter Jesus and the Post-Easter Jesus are relevant for faith and I don't see the Pre-Easter Jesus as normative over against the Post-Easter Jesus. I think there are points at which some of the post Easter developments can be questioned in light of what we can know with some level of probability about the Pre-Easter Jesus. But my own position has been "both and" and not making the historian the arbiter of what Christians may believe.
Tom:
If I may jump in here and ask Marc: To what extent is this different from the old split between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith? I have wondered in reading your recent stuff, Marc, to what extent you can actually claim anything other than a private personal experience for your Post-Easter Jesus that you worship and that you are devoted to. I want to know, how do we plot the continuity -- this is a question to Luke as well actually, because I think that Luke and Marc here are actually quite similar in having a Jesus over there and a Jesus over there who are significantly different and yet you want to have some sort of continuity -- how do you know, in other words, that the Post-Easter person or that the canonical person or whoever that you are talking about really is Jesus. Why call him Jesus if he isn't exactly the same as the one who was doing what he did before he was crucified?
Marcus:
For me in part it's because the Post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition and not just the Jesus of private religious experience, so the images of the New Testament itself provide a form of control. And secondly I used the phrase without explanation in my initial statement. I see these two images of Jesus as being in a dialectical relationship with each other - a back and forth conversation if you will - so that there's a sense in which I'm willing to say the Pre-Easter Jesus was the incarnation of the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Spirit of God and so forth, so there's continuity at that level.
Tom:
But you would also say he didn't know any of that, he didn't believe any of that, he didn't think any of that at the level of even vocation.
Marcus:
Probably I would say that, yes.
Tom:
But isn't what you are then saying about the Church tradition as being the larger thing, than you as just an individual which I hear. Isn't that still in essence a private game which the church is playing and which somebody else from outside -- and this is where of course the question of the historical Jesus comes around...
Linda:
We have everyone here shaking their head on that one.
Dom:
That comes dangerously close to caricaturing people's position. No, I don't think that's true at all. When you talk about the fact that we very often see our own image, that's a bad habit we've picked up from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We have four Gospels. Each of them understands the historical Jesus. Each of them goes back to the Twenties as it were. They tell of Jesus that makes sense to the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. Four different Jesus's. That's where I learned to do it. That's what happens in a Gospel. So as I understand it, the destiny of the Christian Church, always over and over and over again, to try and understand the historical Jesus as their Christ of faith. It's a dialectic -- I accept Marc's term completely. Both parts of it are eternally valid because our models are in the New Testament. We've got four of them.
Linda:
I'm going to jump in here to tell our viewers that we're going to be putting our 800 number up on the screen. We welcome you to call in. There's also a fax number for those of you who don't the telephone there. So you can call in if you have questions. (Numbers onscreen)
Linda:
What is it about the historical Jesus which convinced people in the First Century that he was an incarnation of God? It seems like that happened very early on - historical and the faith.
Dom:
If I for example was a peasant in lower Galilee, had been dispossessed by the urbanization of Herod Antipas and this was part of the whole Roman system and everyone was telling me this is part of life and then somebody stands up and in the name of the radical justice of Israel's God, says "no way, this is not God, this is not the Kingdom of God -- the Kingdom of God is against this". Then I have to make a choice, where do I find God? And if I like, and start finding it with Jesus, I am beginning what I'm going to call somewhat anachronistically the beginnings of Christian faith. Now of course, not Christian over against Jewish, but this is the beginning of faith for me. Faith of course for me before Easter.
Tom:
Can I just say...
Linda:
Do you want to let him go? Shall we let him go?(chuckles) Very quick and then your comment.
Tom:
I just what to say that I don't disagree at one level with what Dom is saying, but it seems to me he's screening out systematically the great chunk of evidence which says that not only is this just a social protest such as might happen any time any place, but this is the unique climatic moment where God is becoming King. And when we study in detail and historically for all it's worth what Jesus actually means by that it's not just a protest against the Roman system, Antipas' system -- it's a way of saying that there is a different way even of being revolutionary. Jesus is a double revolutionary. He is revolutionary both against "the system" and against the normal way of being revolutionary.
Dom:
But you surely know I agree with that.
Tom:
Yeah, but we have different ways of hashing it out.
Linda:
OK, Luke
Luke:
I'd like to pick up on Tom's statement on continuity because I think it does represent kind of a dividing line between approaches here. You asked the question "what would make somebody consider the historical Jesus to be incarnate God?" And I think that's a splendid way of posing the question. First it raises the conceptual issue of: should we talk about the earthly Jesus or the human Jesus as opposed to the historical Jesus? And that's a distinction I have been trying to make, namely, too...
Linda:
Wait a minute. You're distinguishing the earthly from the historical?
Luke:
That's correct. Because when I use the term historical it's a very ambiguous term and it can mean several things. It can mean this person who lived and acted and so forth - all of whom we agree we can know something about. But there is also a historical Jesus who is the historian's reconstruction of Jesus. We have to be very careful not simply to equate those those two things. And that's part of the difficulty here, that very often, we make, I make statements about who Jesus is in the Gospels with considerable confidence because it's the Jesus of this Gospel. If you were to ask me, can I verify that as a historian, I quiver, because I think, no. That historical task is more daunting. Do I as a reader...
Tom jumps in:
But that's what other historians do all the time.
Luke:
I know that Tom. I'm talking about me as a historian. I have a higher, ah, lower quiver tolerance than others. (chuckles)
Tom:
Let me encourage you to be bold and actually try it out.
Luke:
The second point however is this, that certainly all of us around this table or sitting in these chairs, even in Dallas are going to affirm that there is some kind of continuity between the human person Jesus and the person confessed by the faith to be risen Lord. What I think that Tom downplays and I think my colleagues here tend to downplay is the discontinuity that is the resurrection experience. And the way in which the death of Jesus as Paul says was "a scandal and a stumbling block" and in a sense the contradiction of his Messianic claims, and that it was the resurrection experience, the experience of the empowerment of Jesus in the community that led them to re-read his life in the light of that resurrection and in the light of the symbols of Scripture and render him as he is rendered in the Gospels. And it's not a simple continuity between Jesus said and they did. Something enormous. There's an enormous chasm, experiential chasm, between those two things.
(Tom starts to speak)
Linda:
OK, Tom. I want to draw out Marc and Deirdre. You two are kind of quiet over here and I suspect you have a lot to say. Go ahead.
Deirdre:
I'd like to speak to Luke's observations only. I think for me, the fact that we have the canon, Luke, that is to say we have the four Gospels and we have Paul, means that at least for the fourth century people were concerned to present a totality namely of the Pauline confessions about Jesus, the post-Pauline, and those other confessions in Hebrews and Revelations, alongside the four Gospels. So, if I were to sit as I do and ask myself about the discontinuity between the experience of the resurrected Jesus in Paul and the evidence of the four Gospels, I would sit in that tension between the 27 books of the New Testament. I think the canon attests that we must work beyond that impasse between the two things. And I think if I might hesitate one small observation, really to do with my interest in the meekness of Jesus, one can move from Paul into meekness without the historical Jesus. You know this from II Corinthians 10, "shall I come to you with a rod or shall I come to you in meekness". But Matthew moves into meekness through Christology, through the totality of the person of Jesus. So, isn't it interesting that here really from opposite sides we have some combination of attestation about one little piece of evidence.
Luke:
And I agree with you totally. If one asks how could one historically verify or validate meekness, one realizes that one is dealing with something which is very difficult to talk about historically.
Marcus:
To respond to your question, Linda, about "what is it about the historical Jesus that would have led people to say this is an incarnation of God?" It's important to realize that he was an ambiguous figure to experience. You could conclude he was insane and so forth. But why some people might conclude he was an incarnation of God, I think could be summed up in his healings, the presence that people sometimes felt around him, and his social passion as a voice of religious peasant protest. I think those things together could account for people following him as a manifestation of the sacred.
Tom:
Presumably that could simply be reduced Marc, to Jesus as a prophet. I mean, all that you said about healing and people following him, etc, could have been said of Elijah or some of the other great prophets. I don't see that that actually gets you through to something which is that in continuity with the Church's post-Easter confession. And if while I'm talking I can just say to Luke, I'm astonished if you think I don't recognize the huge cleavage between Good Friday and Easter, if you like. Yes, all the Messianic dreams were shattered on Good Friday and yes, they had to rethink the whole darn thing after Easter. I think we're coming to that in the second half, so I better not say more about it right now.
Linda:
Let's hold off on that.
Marcus:
I was just going to say I think the resurrection or Easter is the decisive event as well that accounts for the community speaking of him as being the Incarnation of God. But I think there were aspects of him as a historical figure that could lead to a sense that the sacred is present here.
Linda:
I'd like to just ask questions which will take us a little bit outside but it's about the historical method. I find it very disconcerting when I read that a historian says that an event didn't happen and I realize I was basing my faith on that. What do you all think of that as you're doing the historical research and you say "we don't think this actually happened" and "this actually happened". Are you giving us the theological implications? Are you concerned about the theological implications? Or, are you just doing the work of history and letting us worry about that? When I say "us" I'm speaking for someone in the pew.
Dom:
I would see history and faith, within at least catholic Christianity (I am leaving aside Gnostic Christianity -- Deirdre might want to talk about that -- I'm going to leave that aside). Within catholic Christianity history and faith for me are in the dialectic. That means that you can't cheat on either of them. You can not let on that history replaces faith and you can not let on that faith can make off history either. So that if you say for example, Jesus walked on the water, then I want to know, "Is that an historical statement?" reconstructed by historians or is that a statement of the power of Jesus say within the Church to save the disciples and the Church from floundering in the waters. I want to know what that is because if we're making an historical statement, we have to say it is that. If it's a symbolic religious statement we have to say that. We have I think let those slide into one another too often.
Luke:
Part of what I have tried to bring to this conversation is to begin to make those distinctions a little bit more clearly. We have become so historicised in our consciousness in the West that we tend to equate what can be known historically with all knowledge. We tend to equate the historical with all reality and I think that it is very pertinent to say that something can be true without being historical. To give an example: I think of any statement in the Gospel, that in Matthew 18:20, where Jesus says "where two or three are gathered...there am I in the midst." Most critical historians would find that very difficult to say, Jesus, that can be historically verified. It's found in only one Gospel. It suits Matthew's theology. It has a parallel in rabbinic sayings, where two or three are gathered to study Torah, there the Shekinah is in their midst. And yet I submit that for Christians it is perhaps the truest statement in the Gospel. Where two or three are gathered, Jesus is in their midst. That is to say, this is what Christians affirm. When they gather in Jesus' Name, Jesus is present.
So there is the possibility that something can be true (existentially true - religiously true) but not historically verifiable. On the other hand, if Jesus said it and we could verify that he said it historically and then he died and nothing happened it would be historically correct but existentially false. That's an important distinction.
Marcus:
I think we would all agree with that and my shorthand way of putting that is that truth must not reduced to historical truth.
Dom:
But if you are saying historical truth you must be able to do it accurately.
Linda:
We're going to take a phone call and we can keep this going. We have a caller from San Diego. Her name is Harriet. Good Evening Harriet?
Harriet at University of San Diego:
My question is this: Given the distinction between Pre-Easter and Post-Easter Jesus, what do you take to be the ontological status of Post-Easter Jesus? Does he have objective reality, that is if the tradition and theological reflection surrounding him had not developed, would he exist, be the Second Person of the Trinity and have the properties ascribed to him in the Creeds of the Church? Note: I am not asking whether he is a physical being in time and space. I'm asking whether in your view, he exists objectively independent of human thought and human stories.
Linda:
Marcus, since she used your terminology and I don't have an immediate answer, I'll let you take it.
Marcus:
Let me just say it is an exceptionally well-phrased question and does not leave much wiggle room. What I can say with some certainty is that the Post-Easter Jesus is part of the phenomenology of religious experience. And I can also say that the post Easter Jesus as ultimately one with God is real. What I have no idea about at all is if the Post-Easter Jesus would exist if nobody had ever talked about the Post-Easter Jesus, if nobody had ever experienced Jesus after his death as the Face of God, and so forth. I don't know how to get a handle on that at all. But the Post-Easter Jesus as the Face of God or ultimately One with God, I see as ontologically real.
Tom:
There's a basic problem about theory of knowledge at this point, isn't there. The theory of knowledge question is "How do we know that the fridge light goes off when the door is shut?" We're in exactly the same sort of bind there and until we actually address those theory of knowledge questions, I don't think we'll get much further with some of those Jesus questions. And the question is, you have to be able say, it seems to me, "yes, Jesus is real. Jesus does exist. Jesus is there as the human face of God". And it happens also to be the case that because he is that, all sorts of people believe in him. The fact of Jesus' existence is not simply the construct out of everyone else's faith. I don't think that's what Marcus is saying, but until we've teased out that theory of knowledge theory a bit more I don't know that we'll be able to nail it down.
Linda:
OK, well let's get back to that. Do you want to answer?
Luke:
I love it when Tom talks epistomology. (chuckles) (several talking at once)
Linda:
We're just going to warm up, the second half will get us there.
Luke:
I believe that we can in response to the question. I think that we can say that Jesus is real even if nobody had thought about him. And that is a statement that can not be verified except in the kind of experiences that Marcus is talking about. But the point of those experiences is that they are not simply interpsychically generated. That they are an encounter with "other". That in fact often people find themselves encountered when they would not want to be encountered by the One who is "other". And so in answer to our caller, I feel very confident in simply saying "yes" to the answer.
Linda:
Deirdre, Dom, do you want to jump in at any point?
Dom:
I would say yes. What I would say is that the risen Jesus is the historical Jesus available to anyone at any time and place who has faith. But I will not separate even by talking Pre or Post Easter the historical Jesus from the Risen Jesus. The question I will ask is "Does your Risen Jesus have wounds?" The body may come from Heaven, but I want to know where the wounds come from. They come from history. I want to know "Is the Risen Jesus wounded?"
Luke:
The ontological question is the reality of spirit. And if...
Dom:
Which one? A wounded spirit.
Luke:
And this gets us into the next half. If following Paul, the body of the Risen Lord is the Soma Christu, the body of the Messiah is the community of believers, then it is surely wounded and it surely has wounds. But the ontological question is the reality of the Spirit. Can we say that that which we do not see, but which shapes our minds and hearts, which transforms human freedom is real or is it simply fantasy, then I come down on the side of saying it's real.
Dom:
I would insist again. You could have spirit and it could be real, but if it's not wounded it's not Jesus. I really mean wounded in the sense that if somebody doesn't know what this is...
Linda:
What do you mean by that when you say wounded?
Dom:
I mean on the cover of Newsweek, for Easter they showed a picture of the Transfiguration, which means there are no wounds in the Transfiguration. Jesus when he appears in Christian art in Christian mysticism is always wounded. It's the historical Jesus who is the Risen Jesus - not two different Jesus'. It is the historical Jesus as Spirit.
Linda:
Are you saying it's not the glorified Jesus but it's the Jesus who suffered?
Dom:
It is the glorified Jesus who carries the wounds. I will not divide those two things.
Tom:
But what I find lovely in your statement Dom, is that in some sense I hear you saying exactly what I've been trying to emphasize about that fundamental character of Jesus inscribed in the Gospels as the one who gives his life in service to others -- namely is the wounded one - the crucified one -- and it is that character of the human Jesus rather than the accumulation of his specific deeds and words which is the Jesus born by the spirit and replicated in other human lives.
Dom:
But let me back up now. Once you have the wounds there, somebody might ask, "I had this revelation of this person with holes in his hands" and I might have to say, "that's Jesus", and you say, "well, what's this stuff?" Well, he was crucified. Well, why was he crucified? It must be very evil people who crucified him. Well, no, he did some stuff that really got people very annoyed. And we thought he'd do the very same thing. So, I find once the wounds are there, the life's going to come in and that means the word, and that means the deeds, and that means enough to really provoke people to crucify him. So that all comes in with the wounds for me. That comes in with the risen Jesus.
Linda:
Tom you look antsy. Do you want to jump in?
Tom:
Well, I'm interested by the different views of Resurrection which are coming up here and I'm trying to be restrained and keep them for the second half of the program. I very much agree with Dom about the continuity between the wounded Jesus and the reasons why he got wounded, which I think is one of the fundamental questions which we have to address, the continuity between that Jesus and the Risen Jesus. But from reading Dom's work I suspect that he and I mean something very different then by the Risen Jesus as also I think Luke does in his statement - which there's a long history to this of course that the Risen Jesus is the Soma Christu, the body of Christ which is the Church. I think the idea that Jesus died on the Cross and rose into the Church as though that is the meaning of the resurrection - I find that actually very very puzzling in terms of how we analyse this Jewish world of the First Century using that sort of word.
Linda:
Well, we're going to take a brief break and we'll be right back. This is only a couple minute break where you can stand up in your chairs and stretch.
Actually I'm just hearing that we have a caller, so would we like to take that caller before we take a break? OK. Where are you from and what is your question?
Beverly:
My name is Beverly. I'm calling from Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. And my question is: I can see how the work our scholars are doing has furthered the academic debate about who Jesus is, but I fail to see how that work serves me as Beverly Christian sitting in the pew who has an image of Jesus that seems to serve my faith very well. What are you doing for me? How does that help me?
Linda:
OK, well I think that's - you know we were going to get to that later, but let's take that now.
Marcus:
To respond compactly, there are millions of Christians for whom our work has no real significance, because their image of Jesus still works for them.
And maybe it might be an interesting argument to make that their image of Jesus should be affected by our work, but if your image of Jesus works for you and generates compassion in your life, you don't need us, but there are millions of Christians in my experience for whom an older image of Jesus has ceased to be functional.
And these people tell me that they have found the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins to provide a bridge back into wholehearted participation in the Christian life.
Tom:
Could I come in with that? Because part of what Marc said I agree with and part of it I think I radically disagree with. I think it would be very comfortable to say, "if it works for you just carry on with that".
What the historical study of Jesus does is to challenge ideological and idolatrous visions of Jesus which can often just split off a little way from the historical reality, but then when you take those lines further up you get into all sorts of stuff and in our own century we have seen in the 1930s in Germany, people manufacturing a Jesus who was suitable and convenient for them, and it was precisely because of that in 1953 one of the great German scholars Ernst Caseman said, "we have to do historical Jesus research to protect the Church from idolatry and to enable us to announce the truth about God and about Jesus".
And in my experience that's something that needs to be done for each generation, not just to help people back into faith - I agree with Marc that can happen - but to challenge potential idolatry.
Linda:
Well, I was going to say, is -- you were probably going to say something more profound -- but I... (chuckles) Isn't any reconstruction of Jesus really a projection of your own mental landscape, or the culture of the times, or the sign of the times?
I mean I'm wondering if a lot of the people who are finding the bridge back are people who have been wounded by the institution or are skeptics who have been raised in an enlightenment way of knowing which is "it's true if you can verify it"?
Luke:
I think that I have not doubt that the popularity of some of the Jesus books and Marcus and Dom have written too, that are extraordinarily powerful have had an influence on drawing people back to an interest in Jesus and perhaps an interest in Christianity. Part of my question is similar to Tom's point and that is, I'm quite sure it's the Christian Jesus they're being drawn back to - that's the genuinely scandalous Jesus of the Gospels.
The Jesus who... I don't think that Jesus the charismatic challenges our age or Jesus the prophet of the egalitarian society is nearly so counter cultural as you all suppose. I think in fact it's beautifully crafted to our late Twentieth Century desires and proclivities. It is a Jesus indeed I think Dom in some sense your Jesus is almost a most comfortable Jesus to get with, especially for late Twentieth Century academic who doesn't want an egalitarian world. I don't think...
Linda:
I actually find your Jesus very uncomfortable.
Dom:
I have not the slightest intention of living like my Jesus.
Tom:
OK, good.
Dom:
My grandparents in Ireland lived as peasants and it took me two generations to get away from that and I've not the slightest intention of going back to it.
(various panelists speak at once)
Tom:
Could I just jump in and challenge Dom on that, because I remember Dom you said a couple of years ago in a conference. I remember because I scribbled it down at the time.
You said, "I decided to describe what I saw about Jesus. Whether I have the courage to live up to it, I don't yet know." Are you saying that now you're saying, "well, I tried that and it doesn't work and I'm not going to try anymore".
Dom:
No, I'm saying exactly what I said then. The Jesus that I describe, scares the living daylights out of me because he says "the Kingdom of God is against the normalcy of human life" and I live by the normalcies of human life and rather like them. And if Jesus is right, we're all in trouble. But not the Roman Empire.
Linda:
Well, that's what I find uncomfortable about his image. You're... Do you want to jump in there?
Marcus:
Hmmm. I was going to come at it from a slightly different point of view. The charge that we recreate Jesus in our own image. Often times of course we do that and it's not just scholars who do that. But then I would immediately add, we can only see as much as we've seen.
And thus there's an inevitable kind of connection between the subjectivity and experience of the historian and what the historian is able to see and hear in text. We can only see as much as we've seen.
Luke:
I would like to go back to Deirdre's point that is that I think Tom is quite correct that the Jesus of the Gospels must always be a check against the tendencies to create Jesus in our own image. If I understand Deirdre correctly, I hope that you're saying something similar to something I am saying and that is that we don't have to call history the images of Jesus that we find in the four Gospels. That Jesus, the Jesus of Matthew and Mark and Luke and John does everything that you want your historical Jesus to do.
(Luke is speaking directly to Dom at this point, then towards Marcus and now to all in general.)
I mean that's where you got this stuff - from the pages of the Gospels - and does much more. And that Jesus in the Four Gospels does not only challenge the structures of human society, but challenges the structure of human existence -- the reality of sin, the reality of forgiveness, the reality of transformation. And it seems to me that by trying to eek out a rather thin stable historical Jesus, we loose the rich resonances of the literary Jesus of the Four Gospels who is truly the most shocking and challenging and scandalous Jesus.
Marcus:
Apparently, you want to go for an either or at both ends.
Dom:
Exactly.
Linda:
OK, we're going to take a caller before break, Tom from Santa Rosa, California. Good Evening Tom.
Tom: (caller)
Good Evening. My question concerns the Gnostic Gospels. I would like to know if the Kingdom of God is significantly different in the Gnostic tradition and in that tradition does the fact of the Crucifixion become less important. Or to put it another way, is there more continuity between the Pre and Post Crucifixion Jesus. Thank you.
Linda:
Ok, caller, I'm going to throw that question to Deirdre to start us off.
Deirdre:
Well, two things I suppose. The Kingdom of God first of all and then the question about the crucifixion. The Kingdom of God traditions do appear in the Nag Hammadi texts. If you take the Gospel of Thomas as Gnostic, which of course is open to debate - the Gospel of Thomas opens with a statement about the Kingdom is not in the sea because the fish will get there first and not in the sky because the birds will get there first, the Kingdom of God is within you - among you - something like that. So, in answer to the questioner, yes, of course there are Kingdom of God traditions outside the Four Gospels.
The second question, the question about the Crucifixion. The Nag Hammadi texts have a lot to say about the crucified Jesus and I think perhaps I'll take this opportunity to clarify that not all of the Nag Hammadi texts are docetic. That is not all of them present a view that Jesus only seems to be human. And the Laughing Jesus was an early book on this particular topic - Jesus divorced himself from the Jesus on the cross and just simply stood by watching in great amusement as a crucified Jesus seemed to die - and didn't really. In fact the material reality of the crucified Jesus is very much a part of some of the Christian Gnostic texts like the treatises on the Resurrection for example. The reality of the Resurrection is very much a part of that branch of Valentinian Gnosticism. So, I think you've got as much variety of speculation about the Crucifixion in the Nag Hammadi texts as you have outside the canon as you have within the canon on the question of Crucifixion. Now you've worked also Dom on these texts, you might want to say some things there.
Dom:
If you look at the Gospel of Thomas for example, you can see the difference. The Kingdom is very much the kingdom of ascetic celibates - those who have withdrawn from the world. The Kingdom is within you in that sense. It's anti-apocalyptic--it goes back to the Garden of Eden as it were to reinstate the predivided state of the first androgenous being as it were and it comes up in celibate asceticism. That is also a reply to Jesus and Jesus is the Living One and I think if we had Thomas here we'd say "you mean the Resurrected One", he'd probably say, "Hmmm, you would say the Living One - yesterday, today and tomorrow always there - what do you mean resurrected? I am talking about the Living Jesus."
Linda:
OK, we're going to take a very quick break now for those of you in your audiences just to basically stand up and stretch break. When we return, we'll look at the Resurrection. How important is it to you that the tomb was empty? And we'll have a concluding session "What do I tell my congregation or students about what I've heard tonight?" How do I bring this back home? We'll be back in three minutes.
Linda:
OK, we're back. We hope you had a few minutes to stretch and we're going to move on. The conversation keeps going and the topic that keeps coming up is that of the Resurrection. So we're going to move right to that topic. And what I'd like to do is what we did when we opened. I'd like to do a round robin.
Actually I threw out two questions during the break and I got vetoed on both of them. One was: "How important is it to you the tomb was empty?" and "Is the Resurrection a mystery of faith or a tangible verifiable experience?"
The panel would like to know "what about the Resurrection?" so we're going to start there. Tom, we're going to go to you first in Dallas.
Tom:
Right. I think the important thing about the Resurrection is to start off with the big picture and say, it's a puzzle why Christianity got going.
We know of lots of other movements in the First Century that had a prophetic or a messianic or some sort of leader and one after the other after the other they all ended with the death of the founder.
Why didn't Christianity end there granted that it was from the very beginning a messianic movement? Earliest Christianity was messianic to the core. All the actual evidence we've got - as opposed to some of the concocted evidence that some people discover - said it's messianic.
But at no point anywhere else do we have a movement that has a messiah who was actually somebody who was executed by the occupying forces. If you backed a messiah in the First Century and he got killed, it shows you backed the wrong horse. You either therefore give up the movement or you find yourself another messiah.
One of the most interesting things about early Christianity is nobody ever said that James the brother of Jesus was the messiah even though he was the one who survived and was the leader of the movement for the next generation.
So we have to say, why did it become a messianic movement? Second thing is, why did it stay as a Kingdom of God movement granted that it hadn't overthrown the Romans? This is a problem for Dom I think. Wasn't his Jesus really a failure? Isn't he still really a failure?
And then thirdly, why did they use this word resurrection which as Dom said, isn't a word that Thomas would have liked. Why did they say resurrection when to Jews as we know from the time of the Maccabees that meant bodies coming out of tombs, people being transformed into new bodies.
Not resuscitation but going through and out the other side. Why did they use that word if what had happened was a wonderful spiritual experience? It's for those reasons that I can not explain early Christianity as a historian without the Resurrection of Jesus right in the middle of it.
Linda:
OK, so why did it get going? Dom?
Dom:
To answer why the term resurrection was used. It was used for example by Paul, because as far as Paul is concerned, the Resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the general resurrection, "the first fruits of them that sleep" as he calls it.
Jesus is the beginning of the general resurrection. There is no idea of a individual personal resurrection. It's not just that Jesus like Elijah taken up to Heaven, so it stands or fall with that. Now if Paul was here tonight, I would say, "after 2000 years, Paul, how is your metaphor doing?"
Tom:
Oh...it's not a metaphor...
Dom:
Wait a minute. It is. "The first fruits of them that sleep" is a metaphor.
Tom:
Oh, that is a metaphor.
Dom:
It likens the Resurrection of Jesus to the beginning of the harvest of the general resurrection. Now a 2000 years delayed harvest is straining a metaphor Tom. It really is.
Tom:
How long do you think the world's been going Dom? Two thousand years isn't a very long time within the total span of God's creation.
Dom:
I think it is to strain a metaphor, however. Let me go back to Paul. Paul on the other hand says something which I think nobody has done any better about. He says two things.
The same Jesus, totally different. He will not give on either one. It's not a different Jesus, it's the same Jesus. But it's not the same Jesus after a hard weekend coming out of the tomb. The same Jesus totally different. And then he goes back into metaphors again.
It's like the seed goes down and comes up totally different, but it's the same seed totally different. Now I think Paul's got it exactly right. The same Jesus - what I would say the historical Jesus in a totally different mold - that's what Paul says. And I think he's absolutely right.
Luke:
I love the way this conversation's going.
Dom:
It's going downhill right? (Chuckles all around)
Luke:
No no no. I love it because it ... I would answer this question that we need to distinguish between... And I agree with Tom.
That one historical question that begs for answer is: Why as Gamaliel pointed out so helpfully in Acts 5, you know this messiah dies his movement scatters, this one dies his movement scatters, and he seems to have missed the point that this one died and his movement gathered.
Without the Resurrection Christianity becomes even more difficult to understand historically. But I like the fact - and what I missed in some of the historical Jesus books is that we are bringing Paul into the discussion.
And I think that it's extremely important to recognize that there is a difference between the Resurrection as this sort of eschatological experience or this transformative experience - experience of power - which we find in our earliest Christian writings of Paul, and the narratives about what happened on Easter
Day which are written years later in the light of those experiences and reflect a deeper understanding of who Jesus was and so forth.
I think so often conversations go awry by trying to trace the origin of Christianity to an empty tomb or to a handful of visions when it really is a powerful transforming experience that kicks it off.
Linda:
Deirdre?
Tom:
But you can't have the experience without the event. That's the critical thing...
Luke:
I'm not saying that, Tom.
Tom:
But did the event create the experience or is it really just about an experience so that somebody else can come along and say, "well, I haven't had that experience..."
Luke:
The event...
Tom:
You say the event but what is the event?
Luke:
I'll defer. No, I mean we're getting into...
Linda:
Do you think the event can be historically verified?
Luke:
No. Obviously if by definition the Resurrection of Jesus is Jesus entering into God's life and becoming life giving spirit and Paul says in response to somebody, well what does the resurrected body look like and he says "you fool" which was his response after all.
If by definition Jesus enters into the life of God, becomes life giving spirit, that is, not containable within the categories of time and space, then by definition it's not a historical event, because historical events have to do with human events in time and space. Q. E. D.
Linda:
Marc?
Marc:
As I see it the Resurrection is true independently of whether or not there was an empty tomb. And for me the truth of the Resurrection - as I think it is for Luke as well - and I won't speak for Dom at this point - but the truth of the Resurrection is grounded in the experience of Jesus as a living reality after his death and those kinds of experiences it seems to me to have gone on in the centuries ever since.
The truth of the Resurrection is exactly what is expressed by the Emmaus road story, that the Risen Christ journeys with us even now whether we know that or not. And thus I can quite contentedly be agnostic about the very specific question of whether or not the tomb was empty or whether the body of Jesus was eaten by scavengers.
I think that the question of the empty tomb in a way is a red herring. It's irrelevant to the question of whether or not Easter is true, whether or not Jesus is truly Risen Lord.
Linda:
Deirdre?
Deirdre:
There is a whole genre of material, post-resurrection Gospels, which are generated from the experience of the Resurrected Jesus.
And I think, no matter what one thinks about material outside the canon, the fact that we have this body of literature means that for many people within the Christian tradition and outside it, it was a generative experience, so that if we want to include Paul, I think we might also include other post-resurrection Gospels as well which we have from these early periods of history.
I think Marcus, if I could just speak to the empty tomb, the difficulty about dissociating the empty tomb from the resurrection experience has a little to do with the question of the witness of women. Once you discredit the empty tomb experience, you tend to displace the presence of women in the earliest narratives of Christianity.
You do of course have resurrection experiences as far as women and men are concerned, but I think you are privileging a certain class of information that doesn't allow the totality of experience of early followers of Jesus, women and men, peasants and Romans to be part of the ongoing witness of tradition.
(several try to speak at once)
Linda:
Marcus and then Tom.
Marc:
I actually find the presence of women at the tomb in the stories the most puzzling feature of the stories and the one that makes me most hesitant about simply dismissing the empty tomb stories. I think however, one could account for the presence of the women at the tomb from the fact that the women are present at the Crucifixion, so if you are creating the narrative it's a natural continuation to have them then present at the tomb.
Plus I would add the fact that they are portrayed as present at the tomb, surely says something about the status and leadership roles of women in the early community whether there was an empty tomb or not.
Tom:
I think that Deirdre's point is right and we need to follow up on that, but if one was creating as Marc says, a narrative about how it may all have happened, one would never have done it like that. The stories in the Gospels just don't make sense as somebody sitting there 50 years later saying, well let's spin a yarn about how it might have been.
And I think when Marc says that the Resurrection is simply the experience of people which just goes on and on and on, I feel that is a failure to grapple with the real historicity of the Jewishness of all of this.
As Paula Fredrickson, a colleague of ours, has argued in various places, the early Christians really did believe that when they said resurrection they meant a body that had come through death and out the other side leaving an empty tomb behind it. And I think even Ted Luderman and skeptical scholars like that would agree that that's what the early Christians thought they were talking about.
And you see, I'm delighted we've got Paul on the table, but let's go back to the beginning of First Corinthians 15: 3-7 where Paul is quoting a tradition which he says he got right at the very beginning - this isn't even in the 50's - we're talking about pretty certainly something in the 30's here - and he says Christ was buried and was raised.
And I think if you'd said to Paul, "Well, I've had this wonderful experience of the presence of Jesus in my life, whether or not there's an empty tomb." I think he would say, "You don't understand how that Jewish language about resurrection functions."
The Jews had language for talking about wonderful spiritual experiences but to say "the resurrection has occurred" when quite manifestly all the other things that they were expecting to occur around with that haven't occurred.
I think it incomprehensible unless there really was an empty tomb and quite possibly some women seeing what was going on there.
Linda:
OK, everyone's signalling me here. Do want to follow up and then... Dom, go ahead.
Dom:
I would like to say something to Deirdre about the women. As I understand it, it was Mark who created the empty tomb story and he told the story about women who went to the tomb to embalm Jesus and therefore didn't believe that he wasn't there which they should have and then didn't tell what they were told to do.
On the other hand it's the same Mark who had the woman, an unnamed woman anoint Jesus for his death, which means she's the first person in Mark's Gospel that believes what Jesus has been telling the disciples one time after another - I'm going to die, I'm going to rise - and the disciples say yeah, yeah, whatever, and now finally there's a woman who says, "well, alright I believe so I better anoint you now for your death or I'll never get a chance".
She is the woman that Mark says is the first Christian, and that's before Easter. His picture of those women at the tomb is not laudatory to women as far as I'm concerned.
Linda:
Luke?
Luke:
So many interesting things are put out on the table that one wants to pick up all of the threads and weave them into a magnificent tapestry. Luckily my fingers are incapable of doing that.
But I would agree and disagree with you Tom on this point, if I might just pick up the last thing you said and that is quite right, Paul does refer to witnesses in First Corinthians 15:3 and it's extraordinarily important. But he does not tell the narratives. Now I would simply make a distinction between three things that I think are components of the New Testament's evidence about the Resurrection.
One kind of evidence is what we've been talking about is the experiential. Paul's own experience. "Have I not seen the Lord?" The source of community outpouring of the Spirit that are reflected in the Pentecost story and in Paul - say Galatians 3:1-5.
Secondly a kind of tradition of witnessing that Paul can make reference to including himself at the tail end, but including others as well.
And thirdly the narratives. And I think that the narratives, the renderings, the literary renderings have a basis in the reports. They have if you will a historical basis. They are part of the history of the witnesses, but their rendering surely contains part of the experiential dimension as well.
Now, that's one point. The second point is, I simply...I grow fretful when you say things like "forgetting the Jewishness" and so forth because those kinds of statements become a kind of an "a priori" and I've said to Dom that I think - as I said in the email debate - you have an "a priori" of a sociological type, you know like a peasant.
Or you have what Jews expected. OK, what the resurrection of Jesus had to be in the New Testament because that's what Jews expected a resurrection to be. And I simply think that history does not work by means of "a priori". It tries to take the evidence as messy as it is and tries to figure out, "what were these texts claiming" not what did Jews have to believe if they were going to be Jews.
Tom:
But it's not so much a question of what Jews had to believe if they were going to be Jews, it's a matter of how did Jews conceive of what God was going to do not only for them as individuals but for Israel as a whole and the evidence from the Maccabean period onwards is that they believed God was going to remake the whole world and all the great saints of old were going to rise again and there was going to be this wonderful time - new heavens and new earth and so on.
Luke:
But now this is the difficulty with your book, namely that you choose Palestinian apocalyptic Jews as normative Judaism. There were diaspora...
Tom:
We're talking about Jesus. Jesus wasn't a diaspora Jew. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. That's precisely where Jesus belongs.
Luke:
It wasn't Jesus' belief in the resurrection, Tom, it was Jesus' resurrection that's operative here.
Tom:
Yes, but if Jesus was raised at all, he was raised in or near Jerusalem and it was Palestinian Jews not people from Egypt or Turkey or somewhere who first believed in him.
Dom:
When you read First Corinthians 15, does it bother you that after that initial piece of tradition as it were when he's really talking about the body, and really being pinned to the wall about what the risen body is like, he never says, "well, for example, we saw it, we touched it, we had breakfast with it"?
He never says anything. It's like - that's there and now I have to try and explain what the risen body is like and he never refers back to any experiences - we could touch it, we could feel it or anything of that. It's like here's the tradition, now let's get on with the question.
Tom:
I don't think that's a problem for Paul. I think the critical thing is something that Luke mentioned before that in First Corinthians 15:3-7, Paul says that his seeing of Jesus was the last in the line. He says, I just got in on the coattails of this thing, right at the last minute. Therefore you can not take all of the subsequent Christian experiences of Jesus as the risen one, as the Lord, as the Savior, and say that they're of the same type.
The point of that line in First Corinthians 9:1 is that Paul has seen the Risen Jesus and those who are in his churches, they're perfectly valid Christians but they didn't have that initial experience.
There's another thing that I'd like to put on the table if I might. Some of the recent archeological evidence has reminded us what we should have known anyway, that the sort of burial they had at that time and is mentioned for Jesus in the Gospels is a two stage burial. First the body is laid out on a slab, then when it's decomposed they go back, collect the bones, put them in an ossuary and store them decently and reverently.
Now I put it to you that at no point in early Christianity is it even comprehensible, let alone credible that anyone would have said, "well, it's time we went back and looked after poor old Jesus' bones, we really ought to do that."
Nor is it comprehensible that somebody would go into the tomb to bury another body, because that's what they did with these tombs and say, "whose bones are those. Oh, that was that poor chap Jesus. Well I guess we'd better fold them up and put them away." If they had done that, I put it to you, the whole game would have been over.
Marc:
But surely the reason that didn't happen amongst other reasons is that Jesus was a peasant and secondary burial in an ossuary simply didn't happen for peasants.
Dom:
That's expensive, Tom, that burial you're talking about.
Tom:
It is expensive and the Gospels explain perfectly well how it happened. This is the trouble. It's very easy to reconstruct something if you take all the bits of evidence off the table and say, we don't believe any them, then of course you are free to tell any other story that you like.
Dom:
Yes, but the evidence is problematic. Mark is the one who has the story of the burial. Matthew and Luke are the first very careful readers of it. They see two problems. How do we have this person who is in the power circles of Judea and somehow on the side of Jesus?
Each of them has a problem with that. Each of them has another problem with Mark's story. Mark forgot to mention that Jesus was the only body in the tomb. So each of them has to insist independently that this tomb is brand new and there's nobody else in it, so this person didn't for example didn't put the two robbers in there with Jesus and maybe there would be confusion.
They see a problem with that story. I'm not convinced that story is traditional. I think it's Mark's.
Luke:
Now the conversation is displeasing me. (several of them chuckle)
Luke:
I like your point. It seems to me that this is so often what happens, is that we get down to - where were the bones, what was this, what was that. And the question is "what difference does it make?"
Tom:
Every difference in the world.
(several want to jump in at once)
Luke:
And I think that part of the issue is that quite legitimately for Jews contemporary with Jesus, for those who did not become part of this movement after Jesus' death, for everybody else throughout the ages, who Jesus was is measured in terms of what happened between his birth and his death.
That is the historical framework within which Jesus must be evaluated. It seems to me that what constitutes what we call the Christian game - why does it matter for those of us who call ourselves Christians is that it is what happens after Jesus' death which defines his identity for us.
It makes all the difference in the world. It is the privileged interpretation of the meaning of his existence.
Dom:
Can I say something Tom? In order to bring the debate a little bit further, let me put it this way. Supposing I'm a pagan - and let me concede that and not contest it for the moment - I'm standing outside Jesus' tomb. Let us concede I see the Resurrection - all right?
Tom:
By which you mean?
Dom:
By a body coming out of the tomb.
Tom:
You actually see him transformed and coming out of the tomb.
Dom:
I see at least the stone rolling back or something happen. I see something. I see something. I see whatever you're talking about.
Now, why should I care? Why should I not say, "How absolutely marvelous for Jesus. How nice of God." It's just like Elijah, straight off to Heaven, how nice. It doesn't do much for me, but it is nice for Jesus.
Tom:
The critical thing is that it's not just about Jesus and this is my point with regard to the debate I'm having with Luke at the same time -- that if you just have the resurrection of Jesus and you don't know anything about who he was beforehand, then yes, well this is some guy who died and now he is alive again -- isn't that interesting. The meaning of Jesus' resurrection is constituted by the meanings that were already in the air around the place. One of the big puzzles about early Christianity as scholars have known for years is why do they call him Messiah.
Linda:
How do you explain the change in the disciples? I mean the disciples were people who ran away. Peter denied Jesus and then you have the resurrection and the opening pages of Acts, they're cowards in the room and then you have an experience of the Risen Lord which turns them into these big powerful people, so it's really...
Luke:
Exactly. Here we come really to the difference between where Tom is coming and I think, strangely Dom and I...
(chuckles around)
Linda:
Well, we thought this might happen...
Luke:
We're Catholics, so that's the problem.
Marc:
Put the two Catholics together... (chuckles)
Luke:
But Tom's response is that Jesus' resurrection validates who Jesus was all along, and that's really just what you've said Tom. The question then becomes, he must have been X or Y, to have been raised.
But the point I think that Dom was making is, no matter how renovated somebody is by an after death experience, and no matter how - whether as Ben Franklin says it's a new and improved edition - it remains good news only for that person, unless, UNLESS there is a transformation of the followers.
It is that empowerment which constitutes the resurrection experience it seems to me.
Linda:
So the "out of body experience" of Jesus, that's not what is important, it's the effect of it on the people afterward...
Luke:
It's not that that's what is important, it's the cause for that effect.
Tom:
But the reason why the resurrection means what it means for Jesus followers, is not simply because they have this new experience. It is because they believed - and this is where I still think I am actually on the other side of a great divide from all of you, at least ... I'm not sure about Deirdre ... Fine, ok.
Is that I believe along with Albert Schweitzer, along with Ed Sanders, along with many scholars throughout the centuries that what Jesus was about was not simply a teacher of a timeless truth or the offerer of a new generalized religious experience, however wonderful that may have been, but the one who was destined to bring Israel's history which was God's plan for the world history, focused on Israel, to bring that to it's climax.
And so that the earliest interpretations of the Resurrection have this little phrase, "according to the scriptures". That doesn't mean we can find half a dozen funny little proof texts from Isaiah or Daniel or wherever, it means that the whole scriptural narrative has now come to it's climax and it's wonderful focal point in this so that all the promises of God as Paul says in Second Corinthians now find their yes in him.
The Resurrection says that it it true that the Kingdom of God really has come in Jesus even though it doesn't necessarily look exactly like we thought it was going to - that's a big difference.
Marc:
Well, I would simply underline that as I see it, that way of looking at Jesus is a Post-Easter retrospective interpretation. I think it's true. I just don't think all of that stuff was in the mind of Jesus and embryonically in the minds of all of his followers so that when the tomb was discovered empty and the Risen Christ appeared they realized it was all true. I mean I just don't see it as having developed that way.
Linda:
I'd like to make a little transition and we can continue the conversation of the Resurrection, but let's put it in the context of: How does this information translate out of the circles of academic and out of the circles of those who are doing historical research to the people who are in the pew? What does the rector of a church or a pastor do with this kind of reading, how does he or she bring that into the pulpit, into adult Christian education? What's the impact?
I think that a lot of the media has taken taken that and sort of Time or Newsweek was ... Jesus Seminar voted that the Resurrection didn't happen and the effect is how am I supposed to respond to that?
Luke:
Well, I think that it's really important and since I'm the person in my book who so outspokenly attacked the Jesus Seminar...
Linda:
(in jest) So you weren't ghostwritten?
Luke:
No, I was not ghostwritten.
Linda:
You are the writer, ok.
Luke:
And I do want to emphasize that I don't regard the work of Marcus and Dom as being -- although they are associated with the Jesus Seminar and I have criticized them for that -- I don't think that their books or their work has emphasized what didn't happen and what didn't happen and so forth.
And it seems to me that fundamentally that's a major issue. Whether or not academics themselves -- just to take one part of this question -- Whether or not academics themselves who are working in the Gospel traditions and working with the figure of Jesus are fundamentally taking a stance that we are trying to show what in fact didn't happen or end up with the "non-Jesus Seminar" or whether or not we are trying to come up with a responsible, historical analysis which may or may not be cashed out in terms of use for people in the Church.
But I think in my view there's a fundamental difference between what seems to be the agenda of one group and the kind of conversation we're having this evening.
Dom:
It actually is not quite true. I've been giving an awful lot of interviews for at least four years now. I know what I've said in those interviews. I know what I've said in my books. But the headlines are: "Ex-priest Denies Resurrection". I didn't say that. I really didn't. And my tendency has been not to whine, keep sending letters to the editor and say "I really didn't say that!"
In fact if you read what I said the headline doesn't say that. So, I find that the media has handled me exactly the same way as it's handled the Jesus Seminar. Maybe the Jesus Seminar is a masterpiece of programming and say Bob Funk or myself as it's chairs should get jobs at Madison Avenue, if we're as good as your book says we are by the way. (chuckles)
I think we should really open an office because we have pulled off something. I think really...
Tom:
Might be a very good thing for you all to do.
(chuckles around the table)
Dom:
Well, the issue is, I think, that something happened which we didn't expect. That is that there was a tremendous interest among people about the historical Jesus. They weren't just hearing it as negative -- this didn't happen, this didn't happen -- something was happening that was not programmed, not by anyone that I know of at least, and that I don't think can be dismissed as simply media hype. I think that is failing to face the issue.
Tom:
Can I address the question that we were asked to address which is to do with what the relevance is for the preaching and teaching of the Church? I mean, I actually do this week by week, that's part of my job to be a preacher and to be a teacher to quote, ordinary folk, whatever that means, and I find again and again two things particularly, one that there is an enormous interest in actually getting away from anachronisms from false readings of the Gospels and saying, "look at what these words meant then" as opposed to how people may have gradually slipped into reading them subsequently.
And so there's an awful lot of work to be done there, and I find a lot of intelligent ordinary lay folk are very keen to do that. But then particularly, Christianity is not about offering people good advice, it's about offering them good news. The Jesus Seminar's Jesus, the Jesus you get from these reconstructions of early Thomas and early Q, is a Jesus who gives you good advice.
That is not what you find either in the Gospels, the canonical Gospels, the narrative that Luke talks about -- which I'm perfectly happy with -- nor is it what you find I think when you do the real reconstruction of Jesus himself. You find good news of an achievement and the Church's task and the Church's possibility is to implement that achievement for the world. As soon as you stop talking that language, you start talking about "here's a new religious experience, you might want to try it on for size".
I see a great gulf between those who are simply offering people or communities a new religious experience and those who are saying Jesus achieved something which we must now implement for the world. That was Albert Schweitzer's vision as a result of his work on Jesus, by putting him into his Jewish eschatological context, which by the way Luke, isn't a funny "a priori" that you drag in from somewhere, it's just called serious history.
When you do that serious history, you result in an agenda and that agenda is what needs, I think to be preached today.
Linda:
Marcus do you want to address, 'cause what I've been hearing you say is that you find something very different in the letters that you receive, in the responses as opposed to what you've described?
Marcus:
And Dom and I've talked about this too. Namely, our mail as well as the responses we get when we're on the road, and Tom I'm sure you've had this experience too, is that the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins as we practice it, though it's not our works in particular, but this whole approach is done by all scholars involved in it or most scholars involved in it, has made it possible for these people to be Christians again.
And as I said during the first hour, I think in the last forty years or so for many main line Christians an older image of Jesus has ceased to be persuasive.
It's that composite image of Jesus that many of us received as children where the Post-Easter Jesus and the Pre-Easter Jesus are uncritically mixed together and people have a sense that they're supposed to believe that that image is historically true.
Those people for evangelical reasons need to hear the kinds of differences that we're talking about tonight -- the differences between the Pre-Easter Jesus and the Post-Easter Jesus. I think that's not only theologically extremely helpful, but I think it's evangelically necessary in our time for millions of mainline Christians.
Linda:
I'm going to let Luke go and then I have a question for Deirdre. Luke?
Luke:
Two points. One of which is that I really do think that in response to what you were saying, that this talk about Jesus is responding to a deep sense of need. I'm not sure that the way we're coming at it really gets at what that need really is. I suggest this in two ways.
Number one, I do think there's been a disastrous lack of preaching the Gospels. That is to say, of really preaching and teaching in churches about the figure of Jesus as rendered in the Gospels. I make a distinction however between that analysis of the Jesus of the Gospels and a reconstruction of the historical Jesus. So that is my first point.
And so I'm not quite sure that the historical Jesus issue is really functional to what the need is which is to encounter the Jesus of the Gospels.
Secondly, although I am certainly being hoist by my own petard in being in the media and being part of this conversation, nevertheless, I do feel that the needs of the population are best served by attending to our primary cultural institutions of the Church and the academy and what we really need to do is to have people in seminaries learn how to interpret these texts not simply as information about history but as text that can be religiously transforming. That's extremely important.
And secondly, we need to have these Gospels taught and preached in churches. So this media jump start, I think, may serve that function, but I don't think ultimately it is the answer.
Linda:
Deirdre, how is this debate playing out in the seminary, because you're very in touch with seminary students? And also, how is it playing with feminist theologians?
Deirdre:
I think...the debate by which you mean the Jesus Seminar debate? Is that what you mean?
Linda:
Well, the emphasis on the historical Jesus and whether things need to be verified in order to be true.
Deirdre:
Well, I think it's of eternal interest to seminarians to have something to say about Jesus that is convincing and that speaks from their own faith perspective.
I think there is a little degree of skepticism about the promotion of what seems to be a somewhat one sided debate. Shall we say, certain presses publishing material to do with the historical Jesus. And I might just cite HarperCollins.
And Luke I'm just following along you suggestions here since you mentioned them. There are many people working as we know around the world on these historical questions about Jesus and so why do we have a particular press involved in this?
But now to the question that you -- the second question was something to do with feminists -- the reaction amongst feminists scholars. I think we're all members of Society of Biblical Literature which is an organization of scholars that meets annually. And the historical Jesus section of which at least Dom and Marc are a part is one section of a very large gathering of scholars, maybe ten to twelve thousand people that meet.
I don't know if both of you would care to comment on the women who were members of the Jesus Seminar, but looking at the roster of the women who have published in the Five Gospels, at least who are mentioned in the Five Gospels, there are not a vast amount of them. So my initial reaction Linda, to your question would be there is some interest but there is not considerable interest in this whole debate.
I think the interest of feminist scholars would be elsewhere when it comes to the questions of Christian origins. I don't know if this is of concern to members of the Jesus Seminar at all.
Dom:
To me as a member the chair of one, and the chair of the other, the historical Jesus section, yes. Because first of all it's very difficult to get male people who have spent their career working on the historical Jesus. It's almost a dangerous subject. To say that they're working on Paul or Mark, that's so, but on the historical Jesus there's very few in the whole world who are really doing it programmatically their entire life.
I don't know of a single feminist scholar who has written a book on the historical Jesus. I do not mean a book on Christology, I do not mean a book on something else that mentions the historical Jesus. And I think it's possibly, if I may guess -- my point of view -- I think it's a suspicion about this great big transcendental male hero that we have been given -- and who needs another male hero. And I think that's the way I read it myself. I may be totally wrong but I keep wondering "how can I get people on my steering committee who are experts on the historical Jesus?"
Deirdre:
What do women in the Jesus Seminar say?
Dom:
We can get Karen King in there. Kathleen Corely. Sarah Lang. Maybe three that I can think of who are there fairly regularly.
Linda:
OK, one more comment then we have some telephone calls.
Luke:
I think that's part of the -- as I understand from some women scholars -- part of the difficulty for some feminist scholars is basically the sort of positivistic view of history involved in much of this research. And a great deal of feminist theory and feminist thought has moved away from the sort of understanding of history which dominates historical Jesus research. I think that's a pretty straightforward reason...
Dom:
I would have to correct you on that. As far as I'm concerned, historical reconstruction is something that you do over and over again. The best you can do at any given time is your best at any given time. So when I talk about historical reconstruction, when I talk about what history is, it means historical reconstruction and public debate.
My book on the historical Jesus is tuned and dated to a certain period of time, but that's our job to do our best for that moment. It's not historical positivism. It really isn't.
Luke:
I don't think your work. I meant Jesus Seminar.
Tom:
Surely the point that Luke is making is the point that Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza made last November in the SPL conference in Philadelphia, that we none of us come to this history as flies on the wall without any agendas of our own.
What we are doing is continually bringing together who we are theologically, personally, etc. together with the historical task. Now I agreed with her then, I agree with her still. And I'd regard that as one of the contributions that sometimes feminist theologians have been able to make to what has often been a rather arrogant and male dominated positivism.
Linda:
OK, I'm going to jump in here because we have some telephone calls and we may get back to this with the telephone calls. I believe we have a call from Grosse Point MI, and this is Jim on the line. Good Evening Jim and what's your question.
Jim: (telephone call-in from South High School)
Hi, my question is for the Jesus Seminar people, Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.
I'm a Med student and I work at a hospital where I come across a lot of dying people whose hope is in a trust in the promise of Jesus Resurrection as proof that they will share in that Resurrection themselves, such as Paul said, "if Jesus was not raised from the dead, neither are we" and "we are to be pitied more than all people".
Then the Jesus Seminar comes along with seventy plus scholars and says on the holy day of Christianity, Easter, that Jesus never raised from the dead. My patients are smart enough to realize the implications of that statement. If you can come across and say, Jesus never said, "I am with you to the end of the age", we have no reason to believe that he is with us right now.
I choose to read about the historic Jesus scholarship and challenge my own viewpoints on who Jesus was, but what about those who get broadsided by your public announcements and the media? Now I hear... OK, good.
Linda:
You know, we really feel the passion of that comment and you are dealing with people who are in a life and death situation and this is a very meaningful conversation and I suspect that Marcus is going to say that the research is not an anti-compassionate.
Marcus:
Two quick comments. One, the truth of the statement, "Lo I am with you always even to the end of the age" is not in the least dependent upon whether or not the historical Jesus said that statement. I think the truth of that statement again is known in our own experience of the Spirit of Christ.
About the Resurrection, the media in fact very erroneously reported what the Jesus Seminar concluded about the Resurrection.
What we said was that we don't think anything happened to the corpse of Jesus except the normal processes of decay or whatever happens to all corpses, but that we think that the followers of Jesus including Paul and Peter for example had visions of the Risen Christ, obviously after the death of Jesus, so we were making a distinction between resurrection and resuscitation and we were saying the Resurrection of Jesus does not intrinsically involve something happening to a corpse.
The media reported that as we denied the Resurrection. So, that's just a clarification and I think beyond that the word of comfort to your patients should have nothing whatsoever to do with what the Jesus Seminar says or doesn't say.
Linda:
Is there a risen Christ Spirit today? Would you all agree with that?
Dom:
Yes, for Christians, of course.
(nods and general agreement amongst those in the studio with Linda)
Linda:
Tom? Did you hear me Tom?
Tom:
No sorry I didn't.
Linda:
A risen Christ Spirit today. Would you agree that there is a risen Christ Spirit today at work in the world?
Tom:
The Spirit of Christ of course was let loose in the world as Dorothy Sayers once said. And I...
Linda:
I think what happens when you say that the press reports that the Jesus Seminar says that the Resurrection doesn't exist, that in the minds of the general public and people on the hospital ward is that what you're saying is that the power of the Holy Spirit through the Risen Christ is not valid. And that's what I hear in that man trying to say...
Tom:
No, I think there is something else going on there because what Marc just said made a very clear distinction translating the word resurrection from meaning something that actually happened to Jesus' body into meaning the experience the visions of Peter and Paul, interestingly not the women in that statement.
And that is a translation which I think is historically quite illegitimate. I think you can show historically that can not be what the early Christians really thought they were really talking about.
And in particular I'm worried about this because the whole thing about Judaism and Christianity is that it's about a Creator-God who affirms and re-affirms the goodness of creation.
And if you take these little steps away that and say, "Well, Jesus' body stayed in the tomb. That's alright. We have an experience which transcends that" ultimately that can be, not always is, but can be the first step towards precisely that we're "denying" Gnosticism. That's dualism which Dom has accused Luke of interestingly in his whole historical method.
And I see that as profoundly disappointing and discouraging. If God really isn't so concerned for this world after all, and you've just got a nice experience to go on. I believe in the God who raised Jesus because He loves and cares for and is in the process of saving the created world -- that is the good created world.
Linda:
OK, Luke and then we're going to take another question. We have a number of questions.
Luke:
I do think that the issue, and again I exempt what we're doing this evening which is perhaps more satisfying and sustained conversation on the subject that I've had, I do think that it's disingenuous to think that if one makes oneself available constantly to the media, that the media by its very nature is not going to turn things that way.
And that was part of my difficulty with the Jesus Seminar's strategy, and that is that what happens is that because of the limitations of what the press can do -- things -- mysteries that have confounded and perplexed and preoccupied centuries of thinkers is reduced to an either or, a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
You know, is there a body or is there a Spirit. And it's a trivialisation of matters that ought not to be trivialized and that's why we need to find contexts in which we can address them in a sustained way and not in simply a kind of single lecture or a sound bite or something like that.
Linda:
Donald from Buffalo, thank you for hanging on with us, what's your question?
Donald: (from Canisius College, Buffalo, NY)
My question is: If Jesus body was eaten by dogs at the foot of the Cross, how can we continue to say the Apostles Creed? I can understand that there can be a resurrection of spirit, but the Creeds say there is a physical resurrection and that's a direct conflict with some of our tenants of faith.
Linda:
OK, I'm assuming that's for Dom, go ahead.
Dom:
The resurrection involves the body. As far as I'm concerned it's not Jesus' Spirit. It's the historical Jesus experienced spiritually. That's not the same as a spiritual Jesus. There's only one Jesus for me. The historical Jesus experienced either in the ordinary historical way when he was alive or experienced now as the Risen Jesus.
But it's the same Jesus. So what happens to Jesus' body -- this body here -- is not important for me, but when Paul insists that the physical body becomes a spiritual body, that means for me the historical Jesus becomes the Risen Jesus.
Body counts because the historical Jesus comes over. The wounds are on the spirit. Now that's not possible. I doubt if any Greeko-Roman would bring Julius Caesar back from the grave with the wounds on him.
A glorified body which is wounded is precisely right for me. That is the historical Jesus as risen Jesus.
Tom:
And the reason why the glorified Jesus has wounds is precisely because the Jesus, the historical Jesus -- I totally agree with Dom about that -- really did rise from the dead on Easter morning. And He still had those wounds.
Dom:
Right, but you do understand that when you say 'rise' at that moment you do not mean the same thing as I do.
Tom:
No, I think that's right. I think we're talking about two very different things, though I think Dom your language I would like to get you to clarify it more, perhaps not now but some other time, because I think we're still slipping there somewhere.
Linda:
OK, we have two quick comments here. Luke and then Marcus.
Luke:
So much of our conversation whether we're using terms like "history - historical"... we are dealing with mysteries that require the utmost precision. And yet we are using popular parlance. We are really not making the sorts of distinctions that are necessary.
I simply ... especially for those who are calling in and for those who are watching this, all of us - I think here and in Dallas recognize that the very concept of body is one of the most deeply problematic in philosophy. What is it that constitutes a body? What is it that constitutes a self?
And when we, you know ... Am I the same body that I was when I was born? Well, in one sense yes and in another sense not. And somehow identity is involved with body and yet identity is not simply identified with body.
And when we do not make these kinds of thoughtful distinctions and try to make our language more precise, what we do is find ourselves once more into a position of a Siskel and Ebert review of the Resurrection. Body or no body? Then it really distorts the whole issue.
Linda:
Marcus very quickly.
Marcus:
Yeah, I would add, Donald I think it is we are speaking to, very quickly that the Creed does not say the resurrection of the physical body, it speaks of the resurrection of the body. And as we know Saint Paul can refer to a spiritual body in deliberate contrast to a physical body, so one can say, "the resurrection of the body" without meaning protoplasm.
Tom:
I think it's enormously important to say that the way that you read that bit in First Corinthians is not about a platonic spiritual versus physical or fleshly distinction. It's about a body constituted now by spirit and I think the exegesis of First Corinthians 15 has to emphasize that.
Paul is a Jew who doesn't believe in this disembodied spirit. He believes in the transformation of the physical body -- as he says very clearly at the end of that chapter.
Marc:
Yes, he also says, "flesh and blood shall not inherit the Kingdom of God". We disagree about this of course.
Linda:
OK, we're going to move on. We're going to take one more question from a caller and then we'll start to wrap up. I believe it's Amy from Maine? Good Evening Amy. Are you still on the line?
Amy: (caller from Bates College, Lewiston, ME) I want to ask: Regardless of whether or not Jesus was crucified and resurrected, he taught a truly good and compassionate way of life and inspired a new spirituality. That such a person was divinely inspired seems obvious to me. I ask you why is the resurrection was important for faith and to follow and believe in Jesus' teachings? Why is there need of proof?
Dom:
I would say there is absolutely no need of proof for me, Amy. What it is, is this historical Jesus, who I hope if I'd been there, I would have believed in before the Resurrection, though I probably would have been on the wrong side, I'd suspect. I probably would have been with the intellectuals saying, "one the one hand - on the other hand".
Let's imagine for the moment I was on the right side. What the Risen Jesus means is that when Paul is speaking to people at Corinth, poor people by the way whose philosophical language is not very exact, Paul has to make sense to them why they should care. He has to be able to make sense to them that they must be able to experience the historical Jesus.
Now the historical Jesus is gone so how can he be in Corinth? That's what Paul must make them do. He can make them believe in Paul. He must make them believe in the historical Jesus experienced spiritually or transcendentally or any term like that. That's why the Risen Jesus is important, because it's the historical Jesus for now.
Tom:
But I think the critical thing there is, Amy, that Jesus never was simply a teacher. If he was simply a teacher telling us how to live a better way of life, then actually I don't think he was a great success.
He might be a nice ideal along with other nice ideals, but as I'm sure Luke would say, the narratives of the Gospels -- and I believe this does really reflect what was going on in the work of Jesus himself -- these stories, this real Jesus who I think is the same as the Jesus who actually lived in real history, was not simply about teaching people a nice way to live.
He was achieving something which was the radical defeat of evil and then telling his followers that they must go out and implement that. And that is very different from just some idea about how you might want to order your life.
Dom:
Could I ask you, who are you really talking to? Who is this Jesus who tells you nice pleasant things? Whose Jesus is this?
Tom:
The Jesus who teaches timeless truths. Amy our caller mentioned something about a Jesus who teaches a good way of life.
Luke:
Perhaps Stephen Mitchells' Jesus.
Dom:
But it's also a timeless truth to say that we must say, attack the structure of evil. That's a timeless truth too.
Tom:
Well, yeah, but that's not the level I think at which Jesus is most fundamentally operating. It's interesting that this question has brought us back to the very first thing I said two hours ago, that we're talking either about a Jesus who is a teacher or a Jesus who actually does and achieves something.
Luke:
We don't want to go back to where we were two hours ago.
Linda:
No, we want to go forward.
(general chuckles)
Luke:
We want linear not circular. I do think that one response to Amy might be that it's important because it's either true or not. That part of what we are all trying to figure out is the way in which these ancient texts speak to us about reality, about truth.
One way of getting at that is to use the categories of history. Another way of getting at that is using the categories of religious experience or theology or whatever. But I think, Amy, that it's not given to any of us to pick and choose which part of it we simply want to go with. That's been one of my criticisms of some reconstructions is that they move too far in that direction, so that if we like a part of the Jesus bit, then we go with that.
I think we really do have to deal with the testimony of the Gospels as they are and to come to grips with that. It's not a question of what works for us, it's a question of what's true.
Linda:
OK, we're about out of time. We just have a few minutes and I would like to throw out a question for all of you. And again I'll ask you to be very brief. What have you heard tonight from another person that is going to provoke you to think about Jesus in a new way? Dom?
Dom:
I don't remember the person's name, but the person who worried about the people dying. They may not all be Christians, so I presume that those who are not Christian also have a hope that they can die with dignity.
Linda:
Anyone else heard something new tonight from another person?
Luke:
I heard everything new from Deirdre, because I hadn't heard from her before and I was delighted to hear it. I think I heard from Dom and Marcus a much more nuanced understanding of some of their positions vis-a-vis the Resurrection than I had heard before and found that extremely interesting.
Tom:
I would completely agree with that. Marcus and I have had long conversations about the Resurrection and friendly walks that we've had together and I look forward to having more of those, but I think we did actually take one or two steps towards clarifying that.
And I'm particularly interested by what Dom said both saying that Jesus demands this total allegiance which would make us radically different and that he finds that very scary, because my experience of Jesus has been fairly similar. But the more I've done historical Jesus research, the more in a sense scarred I get and wonder what is going to be demanded of me next.
Linda:
Deirdre?
Deirdre:
I'll jump in Marcus, and I'll leave you with the last word. I think for me, the value of the time and place, to pick up on Luke's remark, is that there's a degree of consensus. I think we've been able to have conversation that isn't polarized. And I think sometimes email debates can do that.
I think this is your question about time and place, Luke, maybe assessing in which there's a genuine conversation. I think that's a terribly important thing. I think hearing from people in person as opposed to reading what is a fixed statement in print, even if there's a reprint, even if there's a second edition, I think that's terribly important. I think that's the value of the particular setting we're in right now.
Linda:
Marcus?
Marcus:
Oh, final words are always so daunting.
Linda:
I get the final word. (chuckles)
Marcus:
Oh, good! And when you asked the question I thought, oh, wait a minute, you're asking me to remember what happened tonight, and I've been so immediately in the present, that that's quite impossible.
Linda:
Well, something you're going to take with you.
Marcus:
But something I will take with me and it's rather personal in a way, is meeting Luke Johnson for the very first time, to echo a good book title.
(chuckles around the table)
Marcus:
And I must admit like you very much as a person even though you and I have had our squabbles in print and on email and so forth, and that's something I'll take away with me tonight. That's very important.
Linda:
Well, I do get the last word, and the last word is that the hope of this whole teleconferencing medium, The Episcopal Cathedral Teleconferencing Network is to create a forum such as this where people can get together and talk about topics and go deeper, hear from people out in the field who are interested.
So, I would like to thank all of you for coming. I know that for some of you this has been quite a journey. Marcus and his wife made a special stop in New York from Israel. Deirdre came by subway. Luke came up from Atlanta and is heading for his daughter's graduation tomorrow. And I know Dom you're off to New York. And of course Tom, we want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule as you're touring around to join us from Dallas.
We hope all of you enjoyed this evening's program. We have some information which I'll be running past you at the end here, but on behalf of everyone here at Trinity Church we want to thank you for joining us in this conversation this evening. Thank you.
Linda:
We have a couple of pieces of information for you.
First of all if you're interested in any of the upcoming ECTN teleconferences there's an 800 number on the screen (1-800-559-ECTN) for you. You can call that and get information.
Second, we also have available an 800 number from the Trinity Bookstore where all of the authors who are present here this evening, their books are available. I know some of them you can't find in local bookstores and that's one of the questions we always get. (1-800-551-1220 and FAX 212-602-0727)
Also a video tape of this evening's broadcast will be available after May 10th and you can also get a copy of that. (1-800-562-0016)
And then Harper Collins is continuing their email conversation so you can get on board with that.
(SCREEN DISPLAY)
TO SUBSCRIBE TO CROSSTALK
INTERNET ADDRESS
LISTS@INFO.HARPERCOLLINS.COM
MESSAGE
SUBSCRIBE CROSSTALK
And finally, Tom Wright, I know you're going to be back here in October for a continuation of your tour and if you have any interest in those seminars you can call the number on the screen.
(SCREEN DISPLAY)
For information about "Jesus, Then and Now" with Tom Wright call 307-347-3836.
So, thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time!