Chris Keith Archives - Reading Acts

Keith, Chris and Larry W. Hurtado. Jesus among Friends and Enemies: A Historical and Literary Introduction to Jesus in the Gospel. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2011. 352 pages, pb. $27.00. Link to Baker Link to Logos

[This is part two of my review of this book, part one (the “friends”) is here.]

Turning to the enemies of Jesus, Loren T. Stuckenbruck examines the greatest of enemies, “Satan and Demons.” This chapter is highly detailed and an excellent resource for the wide ranging and diverse opinions in the Jewish world of the second temple period on the origin and current status of evil and the Evil One. In fact, Satan is not a particularly common name for the Evil One in Jewish literature of the first century. Stuckenbruck surveys the various names used in the literature. In the Gospels, Satan or the devil are mentioned frequently as they oppose Jesus and his ministry. Stuckenbruck Includes a brief but fascinating discussion of demon possession in this chapter since this phenomenon appears regularly in the gospels. The chapter also includes a survey of apocalyptic literature that describes the origin and activities of demons.

Anthony Le Donne describes the Jewish leaders who opposed Jesus: the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes. Beginning with the Hasmonean dynasty, Le Donne gives a basic history of the Saducees and Pharisees as they developed in the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt. While these two groups are well-defined, “’Scribes’ is a category that overlaps with almost every aspect of the Jewish power matrix” although they were ultimately elite power brokers (204). Turning to the Gospel accounts, Le Donne points out that the Gospels are stories, and stories need some sort of villain to give contrast to the hero. In the Gospels it is often the case that the Pharisees who complain about the activities of Jesus, providing him an opportunity to teach on that topic (Sabbath, purity laws, etc.). The Pharisees are not always portrayed negatively; Luke occasionally describes Pharisees in a positive light. By the time of John’s Gospel, Nicodemus could be described as “ambiguous loyal,” not praiseworthy, but not an enemy. This chapter might have been improved with a brief note on potential anti-Semitism in the Gospels, and the Pharisees are so well-known that they merit a chapter by themselves.

Helen K. Bond contributes a chapter on the “Political Authorities” in the Gospels: The Herods, Caiaphas, and Pontius Pilate. As with the Pharisees in the previous chapter, the Herodians could fill an entire chapter (or monograph), and Bond herself has written monographs on Caiaphas and Pilate. She begins the chapter with a survey of the Hasmonean period leading up to the appointment of Herod the Great. The chapter extends to Herod Antipas since he ruled Galilee at the time of Jesus. The chapter does not offer too much detail on Herod’s building projects, although the continual building up of the Temple is in the background of Jesus’ ministry. Shoe gives an excellent sketch of the family of Caiaphas, including a brief mention of Caiaphas ossuary. For Pilate, Bond surveys material from Josephus and Philo and demonstrates that Pilate was a cruel and insensitive governor of Judea. After the historical material, she surveys the material in each gospel of each of her three topics, making for more than a dozen sections (the Herodians are sometimes treated separately). As is well known, the Jewish leaders are portrayed negatively in the gospels while Pilate fares well compared to his reputation in history.

Finally, Holly J. Carey discusses the chief “enemy” of Jesus, Judas Iscariot. As the betrayer of Jesus, most people would immediately think of Judas as an enemy of Jesus. Since there is no real historical material on Judas outside of the New Testament, Carey offers an interesting review of the various legends that developed about Judas in the early church, culminating in the Gospel of Judas. While most of the early fathers vilified Judas, this apocryphal text portrays Judas as a faithful disciple. Carey points out that this Gnostic book was known in the early church although a copy of it was not discovered until the 1970s and it was not published until 2006. (There was a great deal of hoopla when the National Geographic Society bought the text and published it as a lost manuscript, implying that it was suppressed by the church as heterodox.) After her examination of the material on Judas in the Gospels, Carey offers two fascinating sections on Judas’s freewill (did he have a choice?) and his motivations for betraying Jesus.

Chris Keith and Larry W. Hurtado offer a concluding chapter on “Seeking the Historical Jesus among Friends and Enemies.” This chapter serves as a mini-introduction to the rise and fall of the criteria for authenticity. As is well known, there is a growing dissatisfaction with these mechanical methods made popular first by Jesus Seminar, primarily because they do not result in much. Rather, the method suggested by Dunn in his Jesus Remembered (Eerdmans, 2003) has gained traction in the last decade. The chapter does not really form a conclusion to the book, since the bulk of the book did not employ the criteria. Most of the friends and enemies in these essays are known from history and the ones that are not historical characters are not subject to the criteria (God and Satan, Angels and Demons, the Disciples and Judas).

Conclusion. One of these reasons this collection is valuable is that a few of the chapters cover characters that are not the usual fodder for a historical Jesus study. While there are a number of books on John the Baptist or Judas, there are few that are interested in Mary Magdalene, the Bethany Family, and the Beloved Disciple, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Overall I find this a worthy collection that offers some detailed study of characters in the Gospels that are rarely examined closely.

NB: This book is available as a part of the Logos Jesus Studies collection. I offer my thanks to Logos for kindly providing me with a review copy of this book. This did not influence my thoughts regarding the work.

Jesus among Friends and Enemies is a unique idea for a Historical Jesus book. Strictly speaking, this is not a book on Jesus, but rather the characters who encounter Jesus in the Gospels. Some react favorably and are “friends” while others reject Jesus and are labeled “enemies” of Jesus. Each chapter offers a historical sketch about the character from history and tradition, then a brief overview of their role in the Gospels. Sidebars appear throughout the text explaining technical terms or offering a closer look at something mentioned in the chapter. In the Logos version, these sidebars appear as grey boxes interrupting the flow of the chapter (as they do in the paper version). There are also a few photographs which are faithfully reproduced in the Logos version. The sidebars expose a flaw in the way Logos handle footnotes in the iOS app since some sidebars have notes that do not correspond to the rest of the notes on the page. Each chapter ends with a “for further reading” section.

I found this a fascinating book and ended up writing far more than a normal book review. I will therefore dived the review into two installments, covering the introduction and “friends” here, and the “enemies” and conclusion in the next post.

Chris Keith offers an introduction in which he surveys what can be known about Jesus. He begins with agrapha, the sayings of Jesus which appear outside the canonical Gospel. These sayings were preserved because Jesus was seen as a wise man by many ancient sources. Josephus, for example, calls Jesus a wise man. Both Tacitus and Suetonius considered Jesus a rather foolish character who founded and equally foolish band of followers. Keith briefly reviews the apocryphal gospels, including the infancy gospels and the gospels of Peter and Thomas. After sampling this widely diverse literature, Keith compares it to the portrait of Jesus in each of the four canonical gospels. His emphasis in this section is the narrative first of Mark then Matthew and Luke and finally John. For each gospel he answers the question “Who was (or is) Jesus?” and tries to highlight the way each gospel is distinctive from and similar to other canonical Gospels. This very brief survey indicates that the Gospels offer a multifaceted view of Jesus.

Edith Humphreys covers “God and Angels” in the first chapter, neither of which I would have considered as a “friend” of Jesus. Nevertheless, this chapter is a survey of second temple literature on the rather broad topic of God and monotheism. In addition Humphreys surveys this literature on the topic of angels. Here she is able to bring a great deal of information from such books as 1 Enoch. The “earliest Christian writers were informed by this lore of angels and expected their readers to understand such tantalizing details” (45). Turning to a narrative of the Gospels, Humphreys points out that the main character in each of the Gospels is God. Although angels figure significantly in each of the Gospels, the focus of the writers is squarely on Jesus.

In Chapter 2 Michael Bird introduces John the Baptist. Perhaps more than any of the other characters in this book, John the Baptist has generate the largest secondary literature. This is perhaps due to his ongoing legacy as well as the tantalizing possibility that John’s ministry was somehow connected to Qumran. (Bird deal with this possibility in a sidebar, although it is not clear if the sidebars come for the article authors or not.). He begins this chapter with the lone statement in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities that mentions John the Baptist. Bird creates a list of seven items that can be known from Josephus. These resonate with the Gospel narrative but the canonical Gospels go beyond these things in the service of their theology. In fact, “They also interweave traditions about the Baptizer into their own narratives in order to present him as a crucial figure in God’s revelation of his Son to Israel” (74). Bird traces the development from Mark to Matthew and Luke, who adopt material from Q to present John as “an apocalyptic preacher of repentance and judgment” (78).

In Chapter 3 Warren Carter begins with the discussion of disciples in general. He compares the four lists of the disciples, and wonders if there was even a fixed roster of 12. The number 12 seem stable but the lists vary. In addition sometimes others are included in the term disciples, such as Jesus is female followers in Luke 6:30-36. Carter concludes that “there is good historical reason to conclude that Jesus gathered disciples,” although the later traditions of their activities remains dubious at best (87). Turning to the gospels, Carter describes the disciples in Mark as “sustained failure” because they consistently misunderstood Who Jesus was what he was trying to teach them. But is it the case, as Carter suggests, that Mark has a “frequently negative presentation of the disciples” (92)? This is possible since there is a contrast between the disciples and the demons or the Gentiles. In fact, Matthew and Luke are far more positive then marking his presentation of the disciples.

Two features of this chapter stand out. First, the chapter seems the most connected to the methods of historical Jesus research. Carter deals with the criteria of authenticity to determine whether Jesus disciples. For some both conservative and less, the use of these criteria is problematic. I personally not that bothered by the use of criteria (especially since in this case I happen to agree with the results). Second, Carter makes use of the Gospel of John, which is normally not used much in a Historical Jesus study. He points out that disciples mentioned 70 times even though the Twelve are only mention four times.

Richard J. Bauckham’s essay on “The Family of Jesus” is one of the more fascinating in this book, probably because so little is known about Jesus’s family. Unlike the prior essays in this collection, Bauckham begins with the biblical material because there is simply very little material outside of The Gospels for him to use. He does cite the testimony of Hegesippus to the effect that Jesus’ family waned property in Nazareth, but there is no more extra-biblical material on the family of Jesus. Bauckham does deal with the well-known problem of Jesus his brothers in the New Testament. First how are they related to Jesus? Bauckham concludes that they were children of Joseph and Mary born after Jesus. Second, he deals with the fact that all of Jesus’s brothers he came significant leaders in the early church. He cites here the Gospel of Thomas which describes James as “the righteous.” Bauckham describes James as a leader in Jerusalem, but “the other brothers of Jesus worked as traveling missionaries” (111) based on 1 Cor 9:5 (the brothers Jesus had taken wives). My first impression was that this verse referred simply to Christians rather than the literal brothers of Jesus. But Bauckham cites Julius Africanus as evidence that Jesus’ Brothers participated in missionary activity (111).

Dieter T. Roth’s chapter on “Mary Magdalene, the Bethany Family, and the Beloved Disciple” studies some of the most enigmatic characters in the Gospels. While Mary Magdalene has been made famous by The Da Vinci Code, the others characters in this chapter are less well-known. Roth begins with the face that there are two women named Mary and an unnamed sinful woman in Luke 7:37–38 who are often conflated in church history. After showing that he was dealing with different women here, Roth examines apocryphal evidence concerning Mary Magdalene. Most of this evidence he dismisses, and rightly so. The picture from Scripture is that Mary Magdalene was an important disciple of Jesus but not his secret wife, etc. less is known about the Bethany family Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Lazarus only appears and John but Mary and Martha appear in Luke10:38-42. The enigmatic beloved disciple appears only in John and there are a bewildering number of suggestions in the literature for his identity. Roth does not solve this problem nor does he even give his preference for the identity of the beloved disciple. Rather, he describes the role of the beloved disciple in John’s Gospel.

David M. Allen discusses two “Secret Disciples” of Jesus, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. These two friends appeared in John’s account of the burial of Jesus (John 19:38-42). Nicodemus also appears in John 3 as a skeptical yet friendly questioner and again in John 7:45-53 as a defender of Jesus. There is little historical data for Nicodemus although there is an apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which Allen briefly discusses. Following the suggestion of Richard Bauckham, Allen observes that there was a wealthy priest by the name of Naqdimon ben Gurion (b. Giṭ. 56a) who may represent a later member of Nicodemus’s family. Even less can be known about Joseph of Arimathea. Other than his role in Holy Grail myth, he rarely appears in apocryphal Gospels. Unlike Nicodemus, Joseph appears in Mark 15:43 and parallels where he requests permission to bury Jesus. Mark describes him as “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God,” a phrase Allen understands as a reference to being a pious Jew, like Tobit. Matthew adds that Joseph was a wealthy man and Luke comments that he was a member of the council who did not agree with the verdict to execute Jesus.

[This review continues in the next post, the “enemies.”]