Tom Holmén on the criteria of authenticity

I'm currently reading Tom Holmén's entry, "Authenticity Criteria," which appears in the Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus (edited by Craig A. Evans; New York: Routledge, 2008, 43–54). The piece is frustrating, at least to me, because Holmén continues to advocate an atomistic approach to reconstructing the "historical Jesus." In this approach, a critic will take an individual piece of the tradition (e.g., Luke 11.20 par.) and run it through a battery of tests. If the piece passes the battery, it then features in his historical reconstruction. If not, the piece is discarded.

But things are even more complicated than this. Holmén also advocates identifying and, again, discarding secondary additions to the tradition (e.g., many scholars, but not Holmén in this context, view the phrase "in spirit" in Matt. 5.3 as a later addition to something Jesus probably did say, which is more pristinely preserved in Luke 6.20). While this sounds good (who wouldn't want to identify corruptions in the tradition and remove them?!), in practice NT scholars have never been able to pull this off. The problem may be with NT scholars (we're just not smart enough to pull this off, or more charitably, perhaps not enough evidence has survived for us to distill authentic and/or original material from latter additions). But I think it more likely that the problem lies with the approach Holmén and traditional NT scholarship have advocated.

Instead of putting two or more parallel passages beside one another and arguing that this or that feature of one of the passages is later and secondary (what NT scholars call "tradition criticism"), NT scholars need to learn to accept the multiformity that lies at the heart of the Jesus tradition and to stop trying to reduce the extant multiforms to a single original forebear. For one thing, nothing gives us the right to suppose that Jesus ever said anything only once (even such striking and context-bound sayings as, "Give to Caesar . . ." or "Let the dead bury the dead . . ." may have been said on multiple occasions). But for another, what we have preserved for us in the Gospels are not more-or-less original traditions and the corruption of those traditions in later texts. The multiforms provide, instead, stereoscopic access for us to see the types of things Jesus' followers could say about him that (i) made sense of Jesus to themselves, (ii) made Jesus relevant and applicable in later situations, and (iii) illuminated appropriate and desirable courses of actions in the face of new and challenging questions.

So did Jesus say, "Blessed are you poor," as Luke has it, or "Blessed are the poor in spirit," as we read in Matthew? Perhaps both, perhaps neither. As a historian, I simply cannot prove that one or the other or either of them accurately records words that Jesus spoke on any given occasion. But what we do have preserved in the Gospels are two authors who attribute to Jesus strikingly similar (but not identical) sayings, and both seem to understand Jesus in similar (but, again, not identical) ways. This is exactly what we ought to expect, again, as historians, if the authors of Luke and Matthew had any access, direct or indirect, to the real Jesus.

More importantly, their portrayals of Jesus speaking his blessing on the poor (in spirit?) were sufficiently plausible to (i) be accepted, (ii) preserved, and (iii) disseminated. If Jesus was not the kind of person to bless the poor, spiritual or otherwise, such portrayals should have been less plausible in the first century. If Jesus was actually a friend of the rich and an elitist with regard to the poor, our extant sources have simply forgotten too much of the truth for us to know it. But if he actually pronounced blessing on the poor and preferred the socially marginalized, then our sources have preserved exactly this image of Jesus, and we are able to know something about this Jesus on the basis of their testimony. This is a significant (though not new) conclusion of historical scholarship on Jesus. But none of it, I would stress, depends on identifying secondary or later additions to the tradition and removing them. Such historical-critical approaches are, I think, well beyond their sell-by date.

Irenaeus reading Matthew

In Adversus haereses 3.8, Irenaeus apparently counters Marcion's differentiation of Jesus' Father from the God of the Hebrew Bible. As part of his answer, Irenaeus offers an extended discussion of Matt. 6.24 and 12.29. Here are the Matthean texts, according to NA²⁷:

Matt 6.24:	Matt. 12.29:
Οὐδεὶς δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν· ἢ γὰρ τὸν ἕνα μισήσει καὶ τὸν ἕτερον ἀγαπήσει, ἢ ἑνὸς ἀνθέξεται καὶ τοῦ ἑτέρου καταφρονήσει. οὐ δύνασθε θεῷ δουλεύειν καὶ μαμωνᾷ.	ἢ πῶς δύναταί τις εἰσελθεῖν εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν τοῦ ἰσχυροῦ καὶ τὰ σκεύη αὐτοῦ ἁρπάσαι, ἐὰν μὴ πρῶτον δήσῃ τὸν ἰσχυρόν; καὶ τότε τὴν οἰκίαν αὐτοῦ διαρπάσει.
No one is able to serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.	Or how can anyone enter the strong man's house and plunder his possessions, unless first he bind the strong man? Only then will he plunder his house.

What I find interesting is the way Irenaeus's concerns as he reads Matthew are so utterly different than the evangelist's concerns in recording Jesus' words. Of course, none of the evangelists dealt with teachings quite like Marcion's, so any appeal to the gospels in this regard is going to apply the texts to situations to which they never envisioned being applied to in the first place. Even so, the way Irenaeus reads Matthew cuts so strongly against the grain of the text that the text itself is barely recognizable.

To illustrate this "cutting across the grain," let's consider Irenaeus's reading of Matt. 12.29. This verse is part of Jesus' response to "the Pharisees" (12.24), who accuse him of casting out demons in the name/power of "Beelzebul, the prince of demons" [ἐν τῷ Βεελζεβοὺλ ἄρχοντι τῶν δαιμονίων].¹ Jesus answers their charge with the images of (i) a divided kingdom and (ii) a divided house (12.25), and then applies these images to Satan's [ὁ σατανᾶς] kingdom/house (12.26). In 12.27 Jesus likens his own exorcistic practice to that of "your sons" (viz., those associated with his accusers); in 12.28, however, Jesus isolates his exorcisms as the harbinger of God's kingdom. Matthew 12.29, then, continues these images/themes (house, Satan, God, inter- rather than intra-house conflict). That is, Jesus' exorcisms demonstrate not that he is in league with Beelzebul but that Satan has been bound and has his domain plundered.

Irenaeus recognizes that, contextually, the "strong man" [ἰσχυρός] of 12.29 refers to Satan. And, just as clearly, the one [τις] who binds the strong man is Jesus (note the strong first-person reference in 12.28: εἰ δὲ . . . ἐγὼ ἐκβάλλω [but if I am casting out . . .]). But in other respects Irenaeus pursues a different program than Matthew. In the gospel, the point of Jesus' saying in v. 29 is that Jesus overcomes rather than serves the satan, the enemy of God's people; the focus is on the contrast between Beelzebul and Jesus. In Adversus haereses, the point of Jesus' saying becomes the connection between Jesus and the Creator God, against whom no created thing could reasonably be compared. "[F]or not he alone, but not one of created and subject things, shall ever be compared to the Word of God, by whom all things were made, who is our Lord Jesus Christ" (Haer. 3.8.2). The link with traditions of creation in both the Hebrew Bible (Gen. 1–3; Isa. 55) and the developing canon of NT texts (John 1.1–14; Col. 1.15–20) are intentional; notice that Irenaeus immediately proceeds to offer a meditation on the proper relation of the created order vis-à-vis the Creator and the language that befits this relation (Haer. 3.8.3).

Certainly my expertise in Christian history in the second through fifth centuries is very limited. But I suspect that this hermeneutical development—in which the gospels' witness to Jesus is being pressed in service of christological debates significantly different than those the evangelists engaged in—would continue until its climax in the great ecclesial councils, especially Nicaea. I can't help but wonder, though, the extent to which writers such as Irenaeus may have been aware that they were wielding the texts in alien arenas and for alien purposes even as they felt themselves constrained to honor and faithfully preserve the heritage of the past. For all Irenaeus's hermeneutical innovation in reading Matthew, he seems to have felt genuinely that Marcion had crossed the line in shaking off the constraint of the past and developing a scandalously new theological program.

(Of course Marcion, for his own part, apparently thought he was restoring, not repudiating, the heritage of the past. But that's a discussion for another post.)

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¹ For a detailed discussion of "the Beelzebul controversy," see chapter 7 of my Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text (ESCO; London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 174–210.

Justin Martyr and the Sermon on the Mount

As I read Justin Martyr (1 Apol. 15–17; available online from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library) I notice a familiar feature of Justin's reading of the Sermon on the Mount/Plain. This section of Justin's Apology cites extensively from Jesus' Sermon, and I think it does so largely from its lengthier version in Matthew. At one point, however, Justin clearly quotes (or cites from memory) a non-Matthean version of one of Jesus' sayings. Compare the following:

Justin, 1 Apol. 16:	Matt. 19.16–17:
And when a certain man came to Him and said, "Good Master," He answered and said, "There is none good but God only, who made all things."	Just then one man approached him and said, "Teacher, what good thing shall I do so that I might have eternal life?" He answered him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? [Only] one is good."

Notice that the man asks the Matthean Jesus about some "good thing" [τί ἀγαθὸν ποιήσω], whereas according to Justin the man calls Jesus "Good Master." Significantly, in both Mark's and Luke's version of this pericope, the man addresses Jesus as "Good teacher" [διδάσκαλε ἀγαθέ (Mark 10.17; Luke 18.18)] and asks simply, "what shall I do." What's significant here is that Justin, in an extended passage where he seems to be interacting with the Matthean version of Jesus' Sermon, he inserts the Markan and/or Lukan version of a saying found outside the Sermon.¹

But that isn't what caught my immediate attention. Rather, notice how Justin—like Christian interpreters ever since—struggles with the balance between ethical rigor and vigorous grace exhibited in the Sermon. Notice that, for Justin, those who commit the sins Jesus discusses in the Sermon become objects of divine judgment: "For not only he who in act commits adultery is rejected by Him, but also he who desires to commit adultery: since not only our works, but also our thoughts, are open before God" (1 Apol. 15). This conflicts rather plainly not only with the picture of Jesus' acceptance of the adulterous woman in the spurious Pericope Adulterae (John 7.53–8.11) but also with the authentically Johannine story of Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.

But Justin hasn't replaced the merciful, gracious, forgiving Jesus of the gospels with a more rigorous, demanding Jesus (still less a legalistic Jesus!). For in the same paragraph Justin provides a compelling description of the powerful effect of God's grace at work through Christ:

For what shall I say, too, of the countless multitude of those who have reformed intemperate habits, and learned these things? For Christ called not the just nor the chaste to repentance, but the ungodly, and the licentious, and the unjust; His words being, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." For the heavenly Father desires rather the repentance than the punishment of the sinner. (1 Apol. 15)

Immediately afterward Justin cites Matt. 5.46 in support of this portrayal of a gracious and forgiving God. So in very short space we have a picture of God as (i) rejecting not just those who commit sin but also who desire to commit sin, and simultaneously (ii) as calling sinners and accepting their repentance. This tension isn't peculiar to Justin; actually, I think it reproduces fairly accurately a tension found even in the evangelists' accounts of Jesus' Sermon. This shouldn't surprise us; this section of the Apology [viz., 15–17] really isn't much more than an interpretive expansion of excerpts from the Sermon. Actually, this tension between holiness and graciousness lies at the heart of Christian theology itself. And so, nearly nineteen hundred years after Justin Martyr, we still wrestle with the ways the Sermon on the Mount offers comfort to the meek and the mourning without easing the expectation that God's people would be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (see Matt. 5.48).

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¹ Philip Schaff seems not to have noticed this slippage from Matthew to one of the other synoptic gospels; in his footnote here he cites "Matt. xix. 6 [sic], 17." "Why do you call me good?", of course, is precisely what Jesus does not say in Matt. 16.17, because in Matthew the man hasn't called Jesus good!

Hans Dieter Betz and the Sermon on the Mount

Hans Dieter Betz is probably the most significant student of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7); certainly he is the most significant scholar of the Sermon alive today. Almost twenty years ago Klyne Snodgrass noted twelve publications and/or presentations Betz issued in preparation for a commentary on the Sermon.¹ That commentary, published in 1995, is 736 pages long—longer than many commentaries on the whole of Matthew's gospel!² When Betz speaks about the Sermon, he speaks with authority.

So as I ask the question (see below, in boldface; I would greatly appreciate some feedback here), I realize I'm a gnat pestering a giant of Matthean scholarship. But here goes anyway: In an autobiographical moment, Betz reveals how he became so interested in the Sermon on the Mount:

When I was working on the commentary on Galatians I noticed the unusual number of parallel references, mostly of antithetical parallels, that kept coming up between Galatians and the Sermon on the Mount.³

Does anyone else find it ironic that Betz was steered into the Sermon on the Mount via Paul's letter to the Galatians, especially in light of his strong differentiation between the Christianity behind the Sermon and Pauline Christianity? To be sure, Betz refers to finding "antithetical parallels" between Galatians and the Sermon. But I can't shake the suspicion that Betz employs an unhelpful conceptualization, made influential by F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school, that opposes a "Pauline" Christianity with a "Jewish" Christianity. Certainly "Jewish" Christians could (and did) have problems with Paulinism. But the story of Pauline scholarship in the last quarter of the twentieth century is largely the story of scholars rediscovering that the opposite of the adjective Jewish is not Pauline.⁴ Betz is not unaware of this rediscovery, but I'm not sure how his reconstruction of Christian origins on the basis of Galatians and the Sermon can stand in light of it.

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¹ Klyne Snodgrass, "A Response to Hans Dieter Betz on the Sermon on the Mount," BR (1991), 88.
² Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).
³ Hans Dieter Betz, "The Sermon on the Mount: In Defense of a Hypothesis," BR (1991), 74. Betz refers to his commentary, Galatians: A Commentary of Paul's Letter to the Galatians (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979).
⁴ This is often referred to as "the Sanders Revolution" (in honor of E. P. Sanders) or, more popularly, "the New Perspective on Paul."