From Luke_Johnson@info.harpercollins.comThu Mar 28 13:07:38 1996 Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 09:05:11 -0500 (EST) From: Luke Johnson To: Jesus2000@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Week Six Response (Johnson) Dear Dom and Marcus: The sense of frustration expressed by Dom has been mine from the beginning. I joined this "debate" reluctantly, since I doubted that much precision would result from quasi-public notes written under deadline by three authors already deeply committed to positions carefully worked out in published form, particularly when two of the participants basically agreed on principles and procedures and the third wrote his book in the first place to call those principles and procedures into question. I will respond first to Dom's long response to my question concerning the "Give to Caesar" logion, and then the questions he put to me, before turning to Professor Borg's opening statement for this week. The generous length of your response, Dom, is appreciated. You are, I am more than willing to agree, consistent in your approach. The effect of your response is to confirm my sense that your reconstruction of Jesus as a historical figure is fundamentally governed by the framework derived in the manner you have described. And you are correct: any challenge to your reconstruction must put that framework and your way of assessing "authentic" materials, into question. That is what I tried to do in my book. You wanted me to respond concerning Gal 3:28: you ask, "what would have happened to him if he had taken all three ["dichotomies"] with equally forceful commitment?" It is a good question, but much more complex than it appears. I presume you take Gal 3:28 as enunciating a radical egalitarianism within the church, and are suggesting that Paul only carried this through with regard to Jew and Gentile, not male/female or slave/free. Before addressing your hypothetical, it would be necessary to agree, a) that Paul's statement was intended to issue in a social levelling (so that there would literally be no slaves or free) "in Christ" rather than a relativization of status markers within the community, b) that Paul saw such levelling as the essential expression of the church's mission to the world, so that this utopian arrangement would eventually also be that of the wider world, c) that Paul himself eradicated differences between Jew and Gentile in the community. I could not agree to these three premises as I have stated them. Indeed, I find the interpretation of Gal 3:28 to be problematic in current scholarship, precisely because it seems to be granted a certain "obviousness" that it does not possess. The fundamental issue, I think, is whether Paul intends "difference" to remain within the assembly or not: are maleness and femaleness to be eliminated altogether, or are they to be transformed from markers of power and status to the basis for reciprocal gift-giving? I would suggest, Dom, that your commitment to an understanding of "the good news" (to use a neutral term) in terms of a commitment to a change in the social order (an "unbrokered kingdom") dominates, indeed shapes, your reading both of Paul and of Jesus. And I think you are straightforward enough, and sincerely convinced of the rightness of that commitment, to agree that this is the case. To turn more briefly to the two other questions you put to me. The first concerns my summary of Jesus'character: how did I derive it, and why is it so vague? It may be helpful here to back up for a moment. First, for my own uses and for the theology of the church, the image of Jesus in the four canonical gospels is extraordinarily rich and complex, and not to be reduced to a single summary. Second, I offered my character sketch as an important element of "the historical Jesus" that was oddly missing from other reconstructions, yet which had as m,uch claim to being "multiply attested and early" as any others. In fact I remain puzzled why, if you agree with the summary of Jesus as obedient to God and in service to humans, so little of this found its way into your framework or into the pieces you used. I am not the only one to remark on the way in which Jesus' special way of talking about God and responding to God finds so little emphasis in your reconstruction. Third, I determined this character sketch by means similar to your own, using the criterion of multiple attestation; the difference is that I used the narrative fragments in early epistolary literature, and the narrative emphasis of the canonical gospels. This differs from your approach, which does not use Paul except as his letters might confirm a specific saying, and which begins by deconstructing the nearrative rendering of Jesus in the canonical gospels. Fourth, in the chapter of my book called "What's Historical about Jesus,"I provided a range of statements concerning the activity of Jesus that, in my view, could be verified historically. My sketch of Jesus' character was not ever intended to be read apart from all these other observations. Nevertheless, I think it important to repeat what I have already stated many times, not least in response to Professor John Meier: since the selection of materials concerning Jesus in the early church was already determined by interpretation of Jesus, we cannot simply take that selection and move it about to fit other interpretations! To put it another way: those parts of the tradition that we can historically verify are neither complete nor self-interpreting. Finally, Dom, you ask me to locate myself within the three options you present: a) the historical Jesus is unimportant for Christian faith; b) the historical Jesus is important for Christian faith but must be found within the New Testament; c) the historical Jesus is important for Christian faith but must be found within contemporary standards for such research. A fair question. I must, however, answer it within the framework of my own understanding of the terms. Since by "historical Jesus" I have consistently meant "the Jesus capable of being reconstructed by means of critical historical inquiry," and since by "christian faith" I have consistently meant "the faith of the church in the real Jesus who is raised from the dead and lives with the life of God as Lord, and who through the Holy Spirit continues to encounter humans," I can answer your question straightforwardly, no to all three options. But if the question is put: "Was Jesus truly and fully human, and did he , as the Gospels attest, preach the Kingdom of God and heal and give his life in obedience, and is this human Jesus continuous with the one Christians proclaim as risen Lord, and are the canonical Gospels true and reliable witnesses to the meaning of his earthly life and its significance for other humans," then my answer is emphatically, yes. I have already expended too much of my time and your patience, but I want to respond briefly to your formal statement, Marcus. It contains may interesting observations, and I could easily go down the list of them saying "I agree with this one," or "I disagree with that one," or "I'm nor sure about that." But I resist so doing, just as I resist putting my own list on the board. My reason is simple. In my understanding of history, it means more than scholars having and expressing opinions; it involves the making of arguments, the examination and weighing of evidence, the debate over the better reading of texts. My objection to your own books from the beginning has been that they contain far more assertion than argument. Thus, although you are correct in observing that you and I tend to agree on more points, I actually take stronger exception to your historical practices than I do to Dom's, for although he reaches positions that I find historically problematic, he does so in a consistent and well-argued fashion (even though I criticize some of those arguments). As a historian, I do not think it responsible to continue simply identifying "positions" as though there was any particular point to "what Johnson thinks." There is not, any more than there is any particular weight to be attached to "what Borg thinks." What matters is good historical method. In similar fashion, theology is based on the faith of the church, not my own idiosyncratic rendering of it. As a theologian, I place myself squarely within the creed that is recited by my community at every Sunday Eucharist. Only within that framework do I assume the liberty to begin to define, not "what I think" but what the texts are saying concerning such issues as the relationship between Jesus' human body and the resurrection body, between the present power of the spirit of Jesus and the "body of Christ" that is the church. Once more, not "what Johnson thinks" but what understanding of these matters best builds up the church in an appropriate understanding of the gift it has been given, is the point. In all of this, I resist the reduction of the mystery within which we live and for the sake of which we live, to a problem that can be solved like a borken carburator.