Synoptic Gospels

Did Disciples of Jesus Keep Notebooks?

One of the assumptions of Form Criticism is that the disciples did not write anything down during Jesus’ lifetime or even in the earliest years of the church. The teaching and activities of Jesus were passed along as oral tradition through teaching and preaching. The more radical / early Form Critics imagined that no one cared to write anything down because they believed Jesus would return so soon there was no time for writing books. The assumption is, Jesus wrote nothing and neither did his disciples. In fact, the disciples are often described as illiterate peasants who could not have written down his words even if they wanted to! Bart Ehrman makes this point in his Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet as well has his recent How Jesus Became God. Jesus lower-class peasant followers “spoke Aramaic rather than Greek. If they did have any facility in Greek, it would have been for simply for rough communication at best…Peter and John are explicitly said in the New Testament to be ‘illiterate’” (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, 45).

Coffee and MoleskineMichael Bird challenges the assumption that none of Jesus’s early followers would be interested or capable of writing his words down in order to help the recall his teachings later. I his recent The Gospel of the Lord (Eerdmans, 2014) Bird takes serious the possibility the disciples kept notebooks even in the lifetime of Jesus. Like Bird himself confesses, I am skeptical about the claim any of the disciples were literate enough to have written down key teachings of Jesus, let alone take notes in the contemporary academic sense. There is little evidence the disciples were “scribal literate” (to use Chris Keith’s phrase) and no physical evidence for such notebooks exists. While 2 Tim 4:13 could be read as a reference to such a notebook, it is not certain and some will object 2 Timothy is apocryphal and late.

Nevertheless, there is some evidence for listeners taking notes in order to “capture the gist of speeches” (Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, 148). He cites a number of ancient sources that indicate some took basic notes for the purpose of guarding one’s memory. Cicero describes Cato as wanting to “read the note-books of Aristotle” over his holiday as a way of refreshing his memory (Cicero, Fin. 3.3.10). Notebooks are not necessary neat collections of texts, some teachings of the stories were “left in the form of note-books. This distinction occasionally gives them an appearance of inconsistency” (Cicero, Fin. 5.5.12). Bird offers several other Jewish and Christian examples in addition to the Roman texts cited by Keener. The practice of testimonia, or thematic collections of scripture was used in the early Church. Justin knew of twenty-six topically arranged collections of sayings of Jesus (Dial Tryph. 15-17, Bird, 47)

These examples are more appropriate for the Gospels, since the disciples were “more like Qumran” than trained scholars in the Hellenistic world described by Cicero! Bird concludes that it is “highly probably that notebooks were used by Jesus’ own disciples and by later adherents in the early church” as a memory aide (Bird, 48). I think Bird needs to contend with the objection that even if later (post-Resurrection) followers kept notebooks, Jesus’ own disciples were by in large illiterate. I think this might be done for a few, perhaps even Peter, James and John. They were not the lowest strata of a peasant society because they appear to have owned boats and had hired men working for them. If they were followers of John the Baptist from the very beginning, perhaps they had been given some synagogue training over and above what a “lowly peasant” normally receives.

If this is the case, then jotting notes about the words of Jesus to use in later teaching and preaching is not too-farfetched. I doubt they had their hipster moleskines, anything written would have been to aide memory. The upshot of all this is that the source of the Oral Tradition sought by Form Criticism is the disciple of Jesus who listened carefully and remembered, and perhaps wrote a few notes as well.

 

What is Source Criticism?

Source Criticism and Form Criticism both attempt to get behind the text of the gospels in order to understand how the written Gospels were formed. As the name implies, Source Criticism seeks to identify the sources the Gospel writers used when they wrote their gospels. For the most part, the Synoptic Gospels are treated separate from John, since Source Criticism is easier to do when studying the Synoptic Gospels since they are so similar in content and order.

The Synoptic Problem

Source Criticism is necessary because of what has become known as the “Synoptic Problem.” There are many parallel passages between Matthew, Mark and Luke. Sometimes the wording is identical, sometimes it is very similar, but there are some examples of very different wording.

Lack of SourceThe baptism of Jesus is an example of a problem passage where one of the gospel writers appears to have changed the one of the others.  In Mark 1:10 and Luke 3:22 the voice from Heaven addresses Jesus saying “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”  But in Matthew 3:17 the voice addresses John the Baptist (or the crowd) saying “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”  Clearly this is a singular event, only occurring one time in Jesus ministry.  How are we to account for this apparent change by Matthew?

Another difficult passage is Matthew 19:17, Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19. Each of these parallels describer the same event.  In Mark and Luke, a rich young ruler comes to Jesus says “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  In Matthew, the “Good Teacher” is simply “Teacher” and the question is “What good thing must I do to get eternal life?” One of the two writers reports the question in a different form although they do not change the essential point of the question. Perhaps Matthew’s motivation is to avoid the potentially awkward problem of Jesus not wanting to be called “good.”

Possible Solutions

One possibility is Matthew wrote his gospel first, Luke used Matthew to write his gospel, then Mark wrote last, reducing the two longer gospels by removing some of the longer sermons found in Matthew and Luke (the Sermon on the Mount, for example). Alternatively, Mark could have written first, Matthew used Mark’s general outline and supplemented it with long sermons by Jesus. Luke then used Matthew as his main source, supplementing it with his own material.

A second possibility is Mark wrote first, and Matthew and Luke wrote more or less at the same time, using Mark’s Gospel as an outline. They supplemented Mark’s Gospel with sayings of Jesus drawn from another source. This would account for the general outline of Mark present in both Matthew and Luke as well as the common body of Jesus sayings in Matthew and Luke. Scholars called this “sayings source” Q, short for the German word Quelle, source. (I will have a bit more on this source in the next post). This two-source hypothesis is sometimes supplemented with two additional sources, the material unique to Matthew (M) and Luke (L), such as the Birth Narratives.

A third (less likely) possibility is complete independence. The Gospel writers did not know each other and collected similar material. There only appears to have been some literary dependence because the material all comes from the same common source.

Any one of these solutions (or the bewildering number of variations on them) are at least possible and there is no “liberal or conservative” answer here. What is a problem for some beginning Gospels students is the point of the exercise. What does it really matter if we read Matthew or Mark as the earliest Gospel? Does it really matter if Matthew used Mark and Q to write his Gospel? Sometimes Source Criticism seems like a pointless exercise.

I would suggest that Source Criticism is important because it establishes continuity between oral teachings of Jesus and the written Gospels. If there was some sort of a sayings source, it stands between Jesus’ original words and the gospel of Matthew. Source Criticism also reduces the possibility of early Christians simply creating words to put in Jesus’ mouth. Source criticism also helps illuminate the theological interests of the Gospel writer.

Is there anything to fear from probing into the origins of the Gospels using the methods of Source Criticism? Or maybe a better question, is there anything to gain from Source Criticism?

Biblical Criticism?

Huck and JimPeople often misunderstand what the word “criticism” means when applied to the Bible “Biblical Criticism” sounds like “I am going to criticize the Bible.” Biblical criticism must have been invented by the Devil (or at least German liberals) in order to destroy the foundations of our faith. But this is not the case at all! “Critical study” refers to the close analysis any text, as opposed to a surface reading.

For example, when I read a novel like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, I usually just enjoy it as a story. But I have a collection of essays on Mark Twain that study the book from various historical and literary perspectives. (There are many of these studies, go search Amazon!) These essays are written by scholars who are reading the book more deeply and attempting to study it on a “critical level.”

  • In the case of Mark Twain, scholars often explore his view of racism in the late nineteenth century, but there could be books written on the history, geography, or culture of Twain’s books.
  • Perhaps there are some early, unpublished notes from Twain outlining the story of Huck Finn which shed light on how the novel came together. Someone might have alternate printings of the original story, questioning what the original wording Mark Twain intended.
  • There could be articles written on earlier versions of Huckleberry Finn, comparing the character in Tom Sawyer to the later versions in Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective.
  • Someone might specialize in exploring the sources Twain used to when he wrote the story of Huck Finn (newspaper stories about escaped slaves or life on the Mississippi river).
  • Books could be written on the “archaeology” of Huck Finn, illustrating what homes and businesses looked like in the mid-1800s.
  • A literary critic might explore how Twain wrote the story on a structural level, or explore the implied author versus the implied reader.
  • A feminist critic explorea Mark Twain’s view of women (here is an example on Academia.edu)
  • A post-colonialist critic might explore what the novel says about oppressed people in the American South. (Here is an example on Scribd.)
  • There could even be anti-imperial readings of Huck Finn exploring Mark Twain’s view of the American government. There are many Marxist approaches to the story of Huck Finn.

I will admit the world of Mark Twain scholarship is not as broad as biblical scholarship, and rarely are people enraged at critical readings of Huck Finn as Christians sometimes react to “critical readings of the New Testament.” But I am amazed that many of the “critical readings” of the New Testament can applied to virtually any literature. My point is simply that the Bible can be explored from many different angles and with a variety of agendas. Some of these are quite profitable and shed a great deal of light; others are not particularly interesting (to me).

“Biblical criticism” therefore refers to this kind of study of the Bible. It is possible to apply historical methods of study to the Bible in order to explore the origins of the Gospels. It is possible to apply literary methods to the Gospels to explore how the writers told the story of Jesus. It is possible explore the sources the writers used and how they adapted them to their own theological purposes. Various sociological and political methods can be used to understand first century Galilee better and therefore to understand Jesus’ own ministry among the people of that region.

This sort of study is not a devotional reading, nor is it a church Bible study. In fact, biblical criticism is not even the kind of study your pastor does when preparing a sermon, although a pastor should take advantage of tools of scholarship using critical methods. I think it is extremely important we not only understand these approaches, but also see how they can contribute to our reading of a story far more important than Huckleberry Finn.

Over the next few posts I will define some of the more common forms of biblical criticism popular in the history of Gospels study. In each case, the goal of scholars engaged in this kind of work is to get at what the Gospels are about. For the most part these scholars did not desire to destroy God’s Word, but to explore it at the deepest levels possible.

Evangelical Faith and Historical Criticism

Evangelical FaithJust yesterday I received a new book edited by Christopher M. Hays and Christopher B. Ansberry, The Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2013). The book is a collection of essays on somewhat controversial topics raised by biblical scholars who attempt to study the Bible as a historical document and covers some of the same ground as my list few posts. This is just a quick overview of the book although I plan a full review soon. I have only read the chapter on Historical Jesus studies since I am covering that topic right now.

The book is concerned with evangelical scholarship and the findings of historical criticism and argues that a conservative interpreter of the Bible can be both “critical” and “evangelical.” Two clarifications are necessary before reading this book, however. By critical (or “historical criticism” in the title), this book means contemporary scholarship rather than nineteenth century Protestant liberalism. Those two are not always the same. The authors of the essays in this collection are discussing the current state of critical scholarship rather than examples of older Historical Criticism. By evangelical, this book means orthodox Protestants who believe the Bible has authority in matters of faith and practice. Evangelicals are those who understand the Gospel as something that reconciles people to God through the atoning death of Jesus. What is missing in the definition as given on pages 17-18 is a direct reference to inerrancy as defined by the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. Nor does “evangelical” refer to political conservatism. It is unfortunate that the label “evangelical” has been co-opted by the media to describe American political conservatives from Fred Phelps to George W. Bush.

After an introduction by Hays, there are four chapters covering Old Testament issues (historical Adam, The Exodus, Deuteronomic Covenant, and Prophecy). The sixth chapter on pseudepigraphy and canon is mainly concerned with the idea of an author and the problem of some Pauline letters, James, 2 Peter and the traditional authors of the Gospels. Chapter 8 treats the problem of Paul in his letters versus Paul in Acts. Ansberry and Hays offer some concluding comments on doing “faithful criticism.” These are all current issues in conservative scholarship and most have generated a fairly substantial secondary literature. Google “historical Adam” for example, or read some of the reviews of Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. I cannot recommend using the word “myth” in some institutions; even talking about Q is enough to cause problems in some academic circles. For the most part, these are not just controversial: they are raging bitter debates among conservatives, the sorts of issues that can get you fired from a conservative church or seminary.

Every chapter in the book is interesting and worthy of in-depth discussion, but I want to focus my attention on the seventh chapter, which is devoted to studying the Historical Jesus. I asked in the previous post whether an evangelical can use the tools of historical criticism without accepting all the philosophical foundations lurking in the background of these methods. Michael J. Daling and Christopher Hays contribute the chapter on Jesus studies in the book and begin with the simple observation that Historical Jesus studies are among the most productive in biblical scholarship. There are dozens of monographs and essay collections published each year making significant contributions to the study of Jesus and the Gospels and many more less significant contributions. Daling and Hays therefore summarize four particular areas that seem to be perennial points of interest for scholars working in and around the Gospels, although three of their points are all related to miracles.

First, what did Jesus claim about himself? For much of the last 100 years, scholars have read Jesus’ self-designation “son of man” either as eschatological (usually citing Dan 7:14) or as meaning “human” (non-eschatological). If it is eschatological, is Jesus claiming to be a messiah, and if he is, what exactly does “messiah” mean to a first century Jewish audience? Since we are reading the words of Jesus as reported by his later followers, some scholars dismiss Jesus as an eschatological teacher. He was not trying to “establish the kingdom of God” nor did he see himself as fulfilling prophecy in any way.  His later followers thought that about him, but Jesus did not think he was a messiah. On the other hand, it is at least possible Jesus had some messianic self-awareness. Even the most skeptical of scholars will accept as fact that Jesus gathered followers, and that he designated twelve of them as his “apostles.” Almost everyone agrees Jesus taught something about the “kingdom of God,” although there is a great deal of ink spilt on defining what the kingdom was. What would a Jewish audience in Galilee think of a Jewish teacher who gathered twelve disciples and taught about the kingdom of God? It is at least possible (if not likely) they would have heard echoes of the Hebrew Bible and the twelve tribes of Israel. I would include Jesus’ description of his ministry in terms of a wedding celebration another echo of messianic ideas from the Hebrew Bible, and there are many others as well.

Second, Daling and Hays list miracles as a major problem for historical studies of Jesus based on the assumption miracles do not occur. I plan on returning to this issue later, but for now let me observe this is a major dividing point between an evangelical biblical scholar and a non-evangelical since most evangelicals do not dismiss the possibility of miracles occurring before reading the text of the Gospels. This is true for the two “big miracles” Daling and Hays discuss, the virgin birth and the resurrection. For many Christians, these are non-negotiable miracles involving Jesus, so to deny the virgin birth is tantamount to denying the faith! Since we are reading reports of miracles by devoted followers of Jesus, many scholars dismiss them as legend-making. However, if we understand miracles in the context of a messianic Jesus, then healing and resurrection are part of the eschatological landscape. A messiah that does not do miracles is more suspicious, at least from a Second Temple Period perspective. Since the virgin birth became a kind of litmus test to detect liberalism in the early twentieth century, few conservative scholars would openly question why Jesus is presented as “born of a virgin” in Matthew and Luke.

I can certainly recommend The Evangelical Faith and the Challenge of Historical Criticism for readers who want to read more deeply on these controversial topics. The essays are excellent examples of faithful Christians interacting with the tools and methods of historical criticism, asking questions of the text and struggling with issues on an academic level. In most cases, they are open to the possibility that a faithful Christian can hold views that are “less than conservative.”

 

The Gospels and Historical Criticism

“…in the second half of the eighteenth century, in connection with the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, within Protestant theology the insight began to prevail that the Bible is a book written by men, which, like any product of the human mind, can properly be made understandable only from the times in which it appeared and therefore only with the methods of historical science.” Werner Kümmel, The Theology of the New Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1973), 14.

Historical Criticism makes several assumptions. First, the church has historically misread the Bible.  Modern readers need to strip away the theological layers that have accumulated over centuries.  Christians are people that are irrational and believe in a God without rational reasons It is true many Christians have an irrational belief in God and the deity of Jesus. They believe, although they might not be able to give a clear reason why they believe what they do. In the post-modern world in which we live, there are many who would say that it does not really matter what you believe in as long as you believe in something.

Old BibleSecond, Historical Criticism is philosophical naturalism applied to the New Testament Naturalism is the belief that all there is in the world is this world.  There is no spiritual plane of existence, there are no angels or demons, there is no devil nor is there a god.  Only things that can be submitted for scientific investigation are “real.” In fact, most of the claims of the Bible are impossible to test scientifically, so they are rejected. What sort of test could the Myth Busters create to test the claim Jesus walked on the water?

When naturalism is applied to the Bible, several classic doctrines of the Christian church come under criticism, primarily the deity of Jesus. Jesus Christ was not the Son of God, nor did he ever claim to be.  He might have been a moral teacher, a philosopher, or an ethical example, but he was not divine.  This means that predictions of Jesus are later inventions of the church.  The death of Christ on the cross has nothing to do with atonement for sin. Miracles and supernatural events are assumed to be myths.  Scholars denied that anything can happen outside of the natural laws of science.  Nothing, not even God, can suspend the law of nature.

Third, Historical Criticism the Bible, therefore, is to be interpreted as any book.  For these scholars, the “historical method” became the only way to approach the Bible in an intelligent and modern way.  Notice that this use of the word historical is skewed by the assumption that the Bible has not claim on authority. The claims the Bible makes for itself are not of importance.

Despite these negative comments, I think Historical Criticism has been helpful for New Testament scholarship in a number of ways.  It cannot be said that everything produced by even the likes of the Jesus Seminar or Bart Ehrman are without merit–some of the scholarship by the most liberal scholars is useful for studying Jesus.

First, Historical Criticism has aided in the discovery and interpretation of historical details that relate to the world of the Bible.  Because these scholars were reading the Bible “just like any other book,” they often grounded their studies in the Greco-Roman world, shedding a great deal of light on the text. Second, Historical Critical scholars have been extremely helpful in developing major tools for interpreting the language of the Bible. It is impossible to work with a Greek New Testament or lexicon does not have its origin in historical-critical methods. For example, most of the articles in the TDNT are from advocates of Historical Criticism. While the TDNT has been rightly criticized, it is still a major tool for exegesis. Third, New Testament scholars have paid closer attention to the “Jewishness” of Jesus as a result of Historical Criticism, although this is sometimes in reaction to nineteenth century “lives of Jesus.”  The trend among modern writers is to read Jesus in the light of the contemporary Jewish culture rather than a 20th century political philosophy.

It is possible to use many of the tools of Historical Criticism without accepting every Enlightenment philosophical assumption. But not all evangelicals would agree with this assessment. Norman Geisler addressed this topic in his 1998 Evangelical Theological Society presidential address.  Geisler essentially said that any scholar who uses any of the methods of Historical Criticism is tainted by the philosophical assumptions of the enlightenment. While Geisler made a number of other statements in this paper I wholeheartedly agree with (and was deeply moved by at the time), I think he goes too far in his rejection of many of the “tools of scholarship” in his defense of Evangelicalism and inerrancy. I find myself in agreement with Grant Osborne’s response to Geisler, who accepts the warnings against extremism but concludes that Geisler “unfortunately go too far in their complete rejection of critical tools and their imputation of rationalist tendencies to evangelical scholars not guilty of them” (209).

As Carl Henry said, “What is objectionable is not the historical-critical method, but rather the alien presuppositions to which neo-protestant scholars subject it.”

Is Geisler correct? If we use the some of the methods of Historical Criticism are we (implicitly) accepting all the baggage of philosophical naturalism? Is “evangelical critical scholarship” an oxymoron? Or worse, is it a “a deal with the devil”?

 

 

Bibliography: Norman L. Geisler, “Beware Of Philosophy: A Warning To Biblical Scholars,” JETS 42 (1999): 1-18.

Grant R. Osborne, “Historical Criticism And The Evangelical,” JETS 42 (1999): 188-206.