Greg Monette on the criterion of embarrassment

Greg Monette has raised some helpful questions about the criterion of embarrassment and especially my essay in Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne, eds., Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (T&T Clark International, 2012). You can see Greg's post here. I thought I would put my response here (since I'm not doing anything else with this blog ;-) ).

Greg,

This is very interesting. Thank you for this discussion. I'm going to focus my response on three issues: (I) the promise of the criterion of embarrassment, (ii) the problem with the criterion of embarrassment, and (iii) the use of embarrassment to study other historical figures/events. (In other words, I'm going to leave the Mormon issue aside, though I appreciate how you're using it as a heuristic entrance into the question.)

First, the criterion of embarrassment is built upon a very useful and insightful observation (which I make forcefully in my STRUCTURING EARLY CHRISTIAN MEMORY; see pp. 59–61) that the past imposes itself in various ways onto the present. That is, we simply cannot ignore aspects of the past that we might wish to ignore, whether those aspects are traumatic, widely known, embarrassing, or whatever. The criterion of embarrassment rightly capitalizes on this point, noting that Jesus' tradents can hardly be imagined "fabricating a story where the Son of God was thought of getting his power from the devil" (as you say). If Jesus' opponents widely accused him of being aligned with the devil, then it is all the more likely that his followers would have to address that reputation and not be able to ignore it. This is the power of the criterion, and I hope it's clear that I am in no way refuting this point.

Second, however, the criterion of embarrassment is entirely impossible to apply. The fact is, we simply do not know what the Christians found "embarrassing" and what they did not. To stick with the example you offered (and which I quoted), the Beelzebul controversy does indeed accuse Jesus of demonic allegiance, but it also nicely tees up Jesus' opponents for a rhetorical butt-kicking that conclusively demonstrates the "arrival" of the kingdom of God (Matt 12.28||Luke 11:20) and Jesus' superiority over his opponents. If the charge of demonic possession and/or alliance was rhetorically useful for the evangelists, then how can we really say they demonstrate any particular "embarrassment" at the charge? The crucifixion provides an even better example: On the one hand, nothing is as embarrassing as a crucified messiah, but on the other hand nothing was as kerygmatically useful—even central—to Jesus' followers than his crucifixion (and even the biblical mandate for his crucifixion; e.g. Luke 24). This is the point of my essay: These data only become embarrassing when we plot them into a certain historical narrative (e.g. "Jesus' followers felt embarrassed by his baptism by and submission to John and so would never had created that tradition") rather than a different narrative (e.g. "Jesus' followers saw a chance to augment his reputation by linking him with the more popular prophet, John; only later, once Jesus' fame had eclipsed John, did his alleged baptism create problems"). But this is a critical problem: The criterion of embarrassment was supposed to identify facts that we could plot into an historical reconstruction, and now we see that the criterion itself already depends on a pre-established reconstruction in order to verify (or falsify) any particular datum.

Third, these problems are mitigated when we're studying other historical figures, not because they are qualitatively different from Jesus but because—often—we simply have much more historical data to work with. Let's imagine that someone wanted to apply something like the criterion of embarrassment to study the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Obviously, the widespread agreement that Saddam Hussein had WMD, when contrasted with their post-invasion absence (I'm trying to keep my language neutral), could be perceived and discussed (and even verified) using the logic of embarrassment. But we have LOADS of evidence—from recordings and transcripts of Bush addressing the public, Colin Powell before the UN, reports from other nations (especially the UK), and even statements from Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton—all of which confirming that in March 2003 America was adamant in its claim that Iraq had WMD and that this justified military action. With the gospels, by way of contrast, we don't have anything like this: no contemporary documents from Jesus' opponents expressing suspicion that Jesus was in league with Beelzebul, no reports from Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire or Parthia claiming that a popular new prophet was widely considered demonic, not even parallel accounts of other Jewish figures having been popularly acclaimed exorcists but suspected of working with the prince of demons. So while these data might have been preserved in our gospels despite the embarrassment they caused Jesus' followers, we simply do not know. When studying other historical events/figures, especially in the modern era, we have more data available to verify this hypothesis.

Does that help?

Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity—the schedule

On The Jesus Blog Anthony Le Donne and Chris Keith have published the schedule for the up-coming Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity conference in Dayton, OH (4–5 October 2012). If you've been meaning to register for the meeting but have been putting it off (or didn't know where to do so), click here for the conference website ($70 registration; $10 lunch).

If you're coming, don't forget to purchase a copy of the volume, don't forget to purchase a copy of the book, Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (T&T Clark International, 2012). If you can't make the conference, then buy two copies!!

Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity

As Mark Goodacre has already noted, the Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity Conference, scheduled for 4–5 October 2012, has been moved to Dayton, Ohio. I recently received the following announcement:

The 2012 Jesus Conference will be held Oct. 4 and 5, 2012 in Dayton, OH. The co-hosts are United Theological Seminary and the University of Dayton's Center for Scriptural Exegesis, Philosophy, and Doctrine. We're very excited to partner with these institutions and their fine faculty. More information concerning registration, schedule, etc., will be forthcoming.

(Please see the United Theological Seminary and the University of Dayton's Center for Scriptural Exegesis, Philosophy, and Doctrine websites.)

The conference will feature discussion and elaboration on the book, Jesus, Criteria and the Demise of Authenticity (T&T Clark International; forthcoming). If you follow the link you can find a preview of the book. The publisher's description reads:

Criteria of authenticity, whose roots go back to before the pioneering work of Albert Schweitzer, have become a unifying feature of the so-called Third Quest for the Historical Jesus, finding a prominent and common place in the research of otherwise differing scholars. More recently, however, scholars from different methodological frameworks have expressed discontent with this approach to the historical Jesus. In the past five years, these expressions of discontent have reached a fever pitch.

The internationally renowned authors of this book examine the nature of this new debate and present the findings in a cohesive way aimed directly at making the coalface of Historical Jesus research accessible to undergraduates and seminary students. The book’s larger ramifications as a thorough end to the Third Quest will provide a pressure valve for thousands of scholars who view historical Jesus studies as outmoded and misguided. This book has the potential to guide Jesus studies beyond the Third Quest and demand to be consulted by any scholar who discards, adopts, or adapts historical criteria.

When I hear more (registration procedures, housing, costs, etc.), I'll let you know.

(See also T&T Clark International's blogpost about the book.)

on second thought . . .

Over on Exploring our Matrix James McGrath has responded to my comments on Tom Holmén's treatment of the authenticity criteria in the Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus (see here for my original post). While some of his comments are a bit unclear, I get the impression that he thinks I'm wrong about redaction criticism. James is a good man, and I respect his opinion. So I've gone back and had a rethink on my comments. And on second thought . . . No, I really was onto something helpful. Lemme 'xplain.

A Google Image search for "James McGrath is wrong" came up with this. Why?!

James points to Dale Allison's recent work, Constructing Jesus (Baker Academic, 2010) and rightly notes the similarity between our arguments. I confess, I've been reading quite a bit of Allison this summer, including Constructing Jesus but also two of his previous books (Jesus of Nazareth [Fortress Press, 1998] and The Theological Jesus and the Historical Christ [Eerdmans, 2009]) and some articles in various places. And while I've learned a lot from Allison, the truth is he and I were already thinking in similar directions.

I'm not sure, however, why James moves directly from Allison's approach (which he [Allison] calls "recurrent attestation") to raise the issue of oral tradition [OT]. Certainly I've had a lot to say about OT in the past, but Allison doesn't spend very much time, if any, dealing with OT, and I didn't mention OT in my post even once. The problem with redaction, it seems to me, is more one of the function of tradition and how Jesus' followers apprehended the stories from and about Jesus rather than the medium (oral performance, written text, etc.) in which they accessed those stories.

James makes a good point—one many media critics conveniently overlook—that written texts could influence later authors, sometimes directly, in antiquity. Some discussions (Werner Kelber and Richard Horsley come to mind) wrongfully give the impression that written texts were rare in the ancient world, and that writing was as obscure as IT technical assistance. In actual fact, writing was (nearly) everywhere, and written texts in the first centuries CE were common enough that Luke could even portray a small gathering of Jews in Nazareth as having an Isaiah scroll at hand (Luke 4.16–30). Whether or not Luke is accurate here, he clearly expects his readers to accept the image of Jesus reading a written text in his hometown! Written texts functioned differently in antiquity than they do in contemporary Western contexts, and they influenced other written texts in multiple ways. But certainly one of those ways is that later authors could copy from earlier texts, and they could edit (= redact) their source texts in ways that suited them.

But two problems strike at the heart of redaction criticism, and it seems to me that those who accept the results of redaction-critical analyses haven't addressed either of them:

• First, the pattern of changes across an entire text aren't always consistent. Sometimes an author will spiritualize his source text, and at other times he won't. In such an instance, should we say that author exhibits spiritualizing tendencies? If so, should the fact that he doesn't always spiritualize his source text encourage us to conclude that our author is inconsistent? Or is his tendency to spiritualize "moderate" rather than "thoroughgoing"? So Matt. 5.3 is "spiritualized" while Luke 6.20 is "more original." But what about Matt. 7.11||Luke 11.13, where Matthew's Jesus promises "good things/gifts" from the heavenly Father, while Luke's Jesus promises "the Holy Spirit"? Which text is "spiritualized": Matthew, Luke, or Q? As we can see, this problem is only accentuated when we're dealing with a situation in which the source text is no longer extant and we have to reconstruct it by comparing two texts that we believe copied from the same source. So did Q, if it existed, report that Jesus blessed the poor, and Matthew spiritualized this blessing by giving it to "the poor in spirit"? Or did Q pronounce blessings for the poor in spirit, and Luke, with his demonstrable interest in the materially poor and his desire to couple each blessing with a corresponding woe (here, "But woe to you rich . . ." [Luke 6.24]), redact his source to fit his needs? And what if Mark Goodacre is right, and in actual fact Matthew is Luke's source?! Despite James's confidence that in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, "time and again there are additional words or phrases which, when compared with Luke, seem clearly to be additions to an earlier shorter form, and reflect redactional interests of the author," redaction critics simply cannot be sure what is original, what is secondary, or to what extent secondary changes put us in contact with an author's real or consistent theological or ideological motivations.
• Second, if we approach the problem from the other direction (forwards, from Jesus ➞ the Gospels, rather than backwards, from the Gospels ➞ Jesus), the issues are radically different. Now, instead of trying to explain multiple forms of a similar saying in terms of a singular original which has been redacted, we need to ask whether it is reasonable for us as historians (this is important, given the apologetic questions James alludes to and avoids at the end of his post) to suppose Jesus only said some things once or in only one way. Could a historical Jesus that looked more like the Lukan Jesus ("Blessed are you poor") have also said something more akin to the Matthean Jesus ("Blessed are the poor in spirit")? Perhaps not. But if not, redaction critics and historians of Jesus need to explain why. If the two statements, however, are both recognizable as words of Jesus, then much of our historical analyses will have been running headlong down blind alleys. (I suspect this is true in any case, but whatever.) In actual fact, however, I'm not asking the question, Did Jesus say both, "Blessed are you poor" and "Blessed are the poor in spirit," because I don't approach either Luke or Matthew as verbatim records of the ipsissima verba Jesu ("the very words of Jesus"). Instead, both present images of Jesus speaking. My question, then, is: To what extent do Luke's and Matthew's images of Jesus speaking overlap, and to what extent do they diverge? And here I'm just not sure that the divergence between Matt. 5.3 and Luke 6.20 is all that significant. Both speak authentically about the historical Jesus, in my judgment, not because both preserve actual words spoken by the historical Jesus but because both convey impressions of the actual message of the historical Jesus. I would even suggest that there are more than two ways this saying could have been uttered by Jesus and/or preserved in the tradition. If next week we unearth a heretofore unknown text that records Jesus' words as, "Blessed are you who are poor today, for tomorrow your reward is here," I would see in this text an authentic image of the historical Jesus. Would this be a more accurate record of the ipsissima verba Jesu? I wouldn't know.

All of this, then, makes extremely tenuous any effort to reconstruct a tradition history on the basis of the extant remains of the ancient world to which we still have access. Let us return to the first beatitude. Our interpretation of Luke and Matthew—as evangelists and theologians—depends entirely on our reconstruction of their source and our interpretation of the differences between their source and their texts. Again, did Q read ". . . poor in spirit," and Luke edited it to enable him to match it to a corresponding woe (after all, what would ". . . rich in spirit" even mean?!)? Or did Q read simply, "poor," and Matthew has changed it? If the latter, is this a "spiritualizing" redaction, or did Matthew mean more-or-less the same thing as Luke? And again, what if the Farrer-Goodacre hypothesis is closer to the truth behind the Synoptic Problem, and Luke relied on Matthew (and there is no Q)?! Then not only is Matthew's "poor in spirit" not redactional, but Luke's unqualified "poor" is a redaction of Matthew itself! And again we'd have to ask, Did Luke mean more-or-less the same thing as Matthew? But what, then, does the first beatitude's tradition-history look like? Is it one of the following, both of which reflect a Two-Source Hypothetical solution to the Synoptic Problem?

• [word of Jesus] ➞ "Blessed are you poor" [Q] ➞ "Blessed are the poor in spirit" [Matthew]
• [word of Jesus] ➞ "Blessed are the poor in spirit" [Q] ➞ "Blessed are you poor" [Luke]

Or does it look more like this, reflecting the Farrer-Goodacre Hypothesis?

• [word of Jesus] ➞ "Blessed are the poor in spirit" [Matthew] ➞ "Blessed are you poor" [Luke]

Or does some other explanation more accurately reconstruct the first beatitude's history of transmission? From an analysis that moves back-to-front, I simply cannot tell. From an analysis that moves front-to-back, I'm not sure why any of our reconstructed tradition histories have the singular "word of Jesus."

Finally, let me assuage James's concerns regarding Christian apologetics. As a historian I would not be impressed with any argument that Jesus said both, "Blessed are you poor," and, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" on specific occasions, and that Luke and Matthew both preserve a record of those specific occasions. This simply misunderstands what the Gospels are. Both are reports of the type of speaker/teacher Jesus was, and both, in my estimation as a historian, are plausible (and consistent with each other!) images of the historical Jesus. I don't feel the need to choose between them not because both are accurate but because the difference is interpretive and not all that significant! Whether or not my analysis provides succor to Christian apologists really isn't my concern. I'm not at all doing what James warns against:

I won’t say more at this point about the approach that has Jesus say things in as many different ways as they appear in the Gospels, since that view seems more appropriate in the realm of conservative Christian apologetics than in scholarly discussions. If we cannot know for certain which form of a saying is original, that does not justify treating all of them as original.

Instead, I'm doing exactly what James commends when he says, "On the contrary, as experts in orality emphasize, it is more fitting to say that there 'is no original" in such circumstances." This prevents us from engaging in tradition-historical analyses. It does not stop us from pursuing the historical Jesus (as Allison demonstrates throughout Constructing Jesus).

So, no . . . I'm not wrong.

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.

thoughts on the limits of historical description

I begin with an obvious point: Humans exhibit significant limitations regarding the ability to describe and/or reconstruct the past. I have two such limitations primarily in mind, though perhaps there are others. First, processes of human perception already filter through the sensory data assaulting our senses and limit what we notice about the world around us. As we move through the ever-moving stream of the present, we don't even notice some things (how windy it is on an average day, how many people walked past my office door in any given hour, etc.). We remember even less (I almost certainly noticed things that happened on 11 September, 2000, but I can't recall any of them).

Second, our language is limited in its capacity to describe and communicate the things we do notice and remember about the real world, and what utility our language does have already directs interpretation of the events we're attempting to describe. For example, if I tell you about "what happened" to me at the bank, you expect a certain type of story (perhaps I slipped on the wet floor, or I found a $10 bill on the counter). If, however, I tell you about "the incident" in which I was involved at the bank, you expect another type of story (such as I couldn't get in because the police had barricaded an armed robber inside).

Such easily documented considerations have typically urged historians to exercise caution in what we think we know about the past. And rightfully so. But we have run the risk of being immobilized in our attempts to know anything meaningful and authentic about the past with any degree confidence. So I enjoyed Gerd Theissen's comments in this regard, from his 1996 essay, "Historical Scepticism and the Criteria of Jesus Research: or, My Attempt to Leap Across Lessing’s Yawning Gulf” (SJT 49: 147–76):

So human inability to give a genuine account of truth implies the equal inability totally to refashion everything according to certain interests and intentions. As we are axiomatically convinced of human imperfection before we have studied a single source, so—provided our source material is sufficiently complex—we are protected a priori from the suspicion that everything described in these sources is fictitious. (Theissen 1996:155)

Theissen's comments echo things written by folks such as Michael Schudson, Barry Schwartz, and Gary Alan Fine, all of whose works are finding their voice among biblical scholars. This is a helpful development in biblical historical criticism.

on the hermeneutics of authenticity

In a 2009 article in The Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, I argued that one of the [many] problems facing the criteriological approach to identifying authentic sayings of the historical Jesus in the Gospels involves the hermeneutical decisions that precede such identifications. In other (hopefully simpler) words, when NT scholars judge a particular logion an authentic saying of Jesus (or, more typically, when they reject a saying as inauthentic), they do so on the basis of a particular interpretation of the saying in question. The argument looks something like this:

• A particular verse claims that Jesus said x.
• X means interpretation-of-x.
• Jesus could not have ever said and/or meant interpretation-of-x.
• Therefore, x is inauthentic.

The argument to the contrary proceeds along similar lines:

• A particular verse claims that Jesus said y.
• Y means interpretation-of-y.
• No one other than Jesus could have ever said and/or meant interpretation-of-y.
• Therefore, y is authentic.

The following two quotes from my article are especially appropriate here:

Some criteria, however, have an exegetical function that has gone unremarked in a number of studies. That is, a given logion’s meaning shifts under the weight of our assessment that it differs from extant Jewish and Christian traditions. As an example, James Crossley has challenged a common interpretation of Mt. 8.22‖Lk. 9.60 (‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead’) in which Jesus ‘was prepared to override biblical law and common piety concerning the burial of dead parents’. This passage’s ‘dissimilarity’ from previous and subsequent teachings, on discipleship or otherwise, has earned a favourable assessment among a broad cross-section of critics. Crossley, however, doubts that this passage portrays Jesus as being ‘prepared to say that following him superseded the Torah’ and ‘therefore prepared to challenge the adequacy of the “Mosaic dispensation”’. Whether or not we find Crossley’s reinterpretation of Mt. 8.22‖Lk. 9.60 persuasive, we should note that his criticism pertains to the interpretation of this logion as dissimilar from its religio-cultural milieu and not its authenticity. In this case, the criterion of dissimilarity seems to have motivated an interpretation of this logion that the text itself does not require. (164–65)

And a little later on:

As always, we deal here with probabilities rather than certainties, and therefore a more provisional use of the criteria is warranted rather than the flat declaration ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’. When we pose the question of ‘dissimilarity’, for example, we ought to ask what it means for the interpretation of, say, Lk. 4.25-27 if we posit its origin in Luke’s redaction/creation of Jesus tradition to frame the programme of Luke–Acts, on the one hand, or in the proclamation of Jesus, on the other. The assessment of ‘inauthentic’ too often presupposes a particular interpretation of the tradition being assessed. The question of ‘dissimilarity’ from later Christian theology requires us to note that the traditions to which Jesus refers in Lk. 4.25-27 are involved in political polemic against Israel, but this polemic, as Luke presents it, originates from and remains within Israel. On what basis can we presume, a priori, that Jesus as a Jew could not have levelled theological, social, or political criticism against his own ethnos? That Luke’s programme was overtly concerned with the extension of God’s blessing to the gentiles is, therefore, less relevant to the question of Lk. 4.25-27’s authenticity than to this text’s significance in its current context. (166)

As so often within NT scholarship, this point is not new. D. G. A. Calvert, in an article published in 1972, makes exactly the same observation with respect to the criterion that states, "A saying is authentic if it contains elements that could not be from the Church":

The weakness that [Dennis] Nineham reveals in this pillar argument is that whether we regard a saying as impossible of invention by the Church depends entirely on the interpretation we give to the saying. ("An Examination of the Criteria for Distinguishing the Authentic Words of Jesus," NTS 18 [1972], 216)

Calvert's article was published five years before I was born, and yet historians of Jesus as diverse as E. P. Sanders and the Jesus Seminar continue to ignore the hermeneutical assumptions underlying their employment of the criteria to authenticate sayings purportedly spoken by Jesus. We should be able to do better than this.

a classic of NT scholarship

I just finished reading a classic piece of New Testament scholarship, Morna Hooker's essay, "On Using the Wrong Tool" (Theology 75 [1972]: 570–81). I'm currently working on two essays, one espousing an end of form-critical influence over contemporary NT media and memory studies and one on the "demise of [the criteria of] authenticity." Hooker's essay contributes to both pieces nicely and has a number of acerbic turns of phrase (I intend this as a compliment). For example:

First, and most obviously, [form criticism] is a literary tool. It tells us about the form of the material; it examines the shape of a piece of tradition and classifies it. This be interesting to those who like doing that sort of thing, but I do not think it is particularly illuminating to be told that a miracle story is a miracle story . . . At this stage, form-criticism is being used simply as a literary tool, to sort the material into piles according to its shape—and my reaction is a somewhat bored but polite "How interesting". (571)

That's beautiful. Hooker then goes on to discuss (and concede) form criticism's utility for probing the function of this or that unit of Jesus tradition in the early communities of his followers. As I read this section, I kept objecting that Dibelius and Bultmann weren't really after the tradition's form or even it's function; they sought the tradition's origin. This, in my estimation, is the egregious over-reach of form-critical analysis.

So I was delighted to read,

Form-criticism, then, tells us something about the shape of the material, and it attempts on the basis of that shape to tell us something about the way in which the material was being used—about its function within the community. It is at this stage, it seems to me, that the form-critic gets carried away. For he next tries to deduce, from the material which he has before him, what the earlier forms might have been; it is at this stage that he begins to use form-criticism as a historical tool. . . . The trap into which the form-critic so often falls is that he equates the Sitz im Leben with the origin of the material; the Sitz im Leben is not simply the "setting" of the material but, according to Fuller, its "creative milieu". (572, 573; all italics in the original; citing R. H. Fuller, The New Testament in Current Study [1963], 40)

I simply cannot understand how anyone as creative or insightful as Dibelius or Bultmann or any number of their impressive and inquisitive protégés ever actually thought that the dissolution of the written Gospels into individual pericopae and the form-critical analysis of the remaining textual shards ever did put them in touch with the first moment of this or that story from and/or about Jesus. To return to Hooker, she accepts Fuller's point (re: Sitze im Leben as "creative milieu[x]"), "so long as by 'creative' is meant 'that which licked the material into its present shape" (573). Isn't that a lovely image?! But no, we're not talking about "licking into shape" this or that saying of Jesus; too often we think we're looking into the birth of the Jesus tradition. For this task, form criticism is patently "the wrong tool."

Most of the remainder of the essay concerns the criteria of dissimilarity and coherence. Her insights on the assumptions undergirding the criteria and how critics have employed them to verify or disqualify a saying as actually something Jesus may have said are stunning. Simply put, she sees clearly the full range (or at least a broader range than is normally seen) of issues involved with adjudicating authentic tradition on the basis of reputed dissimilarity from Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, etc.

Unfortunately, Hooker was not able to envision an alternative historical-critical research program, and so she asks, "And what tools should he use in this task? He must, alas, use the tools we have been discussing, for there are no others, and there are unlikely to be any better ones discovered" (580–81). I'm reminded of Dale Allison's book, Jesus of Nazareth (Fortress Press, 1998), in which he came to the very same conclusion:

This state of affairs does not, however, mean that we should lay them aside. For in truth we have nothing better in the scholarly toolshed; at least I have not turned up anything better. Apparently we must reconcile ourselves tot he unhappy fact that our methods are defective and may often mislead us. Probably, as will be explained later, our best recourse is to figure out how to improve and use our existing indices, unwieldy as they are, under the guidance of an interpretive model established independently of those indices. (1998:6–7)

Of course, over ten years later Allison threw down the criteria and pursued a different historiography of Jesus (see my posts here and here). I will be interested to see how Hooker responds to this new state of affairs when she writes the forward to the upcoming volume, Jesus, History, and the Demise of Authenticity, of which both Allison and I are contributors.

One last quote from Hooker, simply because I think it gets at precisely the problem that hampered critical history of Jesus programs, particularly (though not solely) in the second half of the twentieth century:

The fact that I have questioned the value of form-criticism and certain other critical methods as tools in getting back to the Jesus of History does not mean that I am trying to offer comfort to those who have all along maintained a traditional "conservative" approach. I venture to suggest that I am being more radical than those who are commonly labelled "radical". For it seems to me that conservative and radical alike have both succumbed to the temptation to seek for certainty—and to believe that it can be achieved. The "radical", though he may eschew the old form of certainty, is seeking another. He looks for some kind of scientific verification—a litmus paper test which can be applied to the sayings of Jesus, which turns either pink or blue, according to whether they are or are not authentic, so that he may sort his material into neat piles.

A Pile of Poohs

New Testament scholarship has certainly produced myriad "piles" in the nearly four decades since Hooker's essay was first published. These, however, have generally lacked the neatness their creators have claimed on their behalf.

a new [or non-]criterion of authenticity

This will be much shorter than my previous post. In Constructing Jesus, Dale Allison defends what he calls "recurrent attestation," that is, when "a topic or motif or type of story reappears again and again throughout the tradition" (20). Allison finds that such recurrently attested themes or motifs are either genuine and authentic impressions of the historical (= "real") Jesus, or the Gospels have fundamentally misconstrued Jesus to such an extent that we cannot employ them to know anything historical about Jesus. Again, such recurrently attested themes or motifs convey genuinely historical information about Jesus even apart from the question of the authenticity of any particular saying or narrative or pericope in the Gospels. So even apart from the question of the authenticity of any particular exorcism story in the Gospels or any particular statement about exorcism from Jesus, the historical Jesus must have been widely regarded as a powerful exorcist if the Gospels are of any historical value whatsoever.

At any rate, I highlight this new [or non-]criterion of authenticity because it appears to me that this is the central approach to Jesus research undergirding Allison's book. Indeed, he says as much:

Recurrent attestation yields much more than [Tom] Holmén imagines, for not all the regularly attested themes and motifs are nonspecific and cursory. I offer this book as the proof. Nevertheless, I agree with Holmén to the extent that recurrent attestation is not sufficient unto itself. It supplies as I hope to show, much more than a minimalist foundation. It is not, however, everything. As I stated earlier, although we may well begin by asking, "What are our general impressions?" we need not end there. (20; my emphasis)

If the number of pages is any indication (nearly 600), Constructing Jesus amply demonstrates at the very least that recurrent attestation is a first word in a very long conversation.

Taylor-made Bultmann, again

In his book, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933), Vincent Taylor has a remarkably perceptive comment about the potential authenticity of material in the gospels that scholars might, for whatever reason, judge secondary. In context, Taylor is discussing Rudolf Bultmann's radical scepticism ("[I]t is not strange that [Bultmann] has been looked upon as Strauss Redivivus" [14]) and the "Barthian sympathies" evident in Bultmann's 1925 book, entitled simply Jesus.

In this book "community-sayings" often become a transparent veil. Bultmann will point out how characteristic they are, and that they could never have been formed if Jesus had not taught this or that. The procedure of the community, he argues, "is the best witness for the teaching of Jesus" (J. 72). The certainty with which the community put the eschatological message into His lips is hard to understand if He did not actually proclaim it, and one cannot doubt that the most important words which demand complete obedience to God's will go back to Him.The book did us the service of showing what ought perhaps not to have been doubted, that a "community-saying" is not an invention ex nihilo, but a construction which could not have existed apart from the movement created by Jesus Himself. (Taylor 1933:14–15)

To many of us, the idea of Jesus' followers creating any saying of Jesus will be inappropriate. But scholars have recently come to appreciate that even verbatim reproduction of another person's words is to (re)create them as our own (not unlike how I have recreated Taylor's words in this post, and Taylor himself recreated Bultmann's words). (Re)Creation is not necessarily falsification. Matthew may have said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," but he did so as a representative of the Jesus tradition and to the community of Jesus' followers. Apparently, Matthew expected his audience to accept that his words were also Jesus' words. Taylor's explanation of Bultmann's work clearly communicates this idea.

Taylor-made Bultmann

One of my perennial interests concerns the way we have distinguished Judaism from Christianity and the various ways this distinction has affected our historical, exegetical, and theological work. A lot of work in the post-World War II era has gone to expose and/or correct the anti-Judaic tenor of a lot of Christian scholarship, but even here the fundamental disjunction between Judaism and Christianity as separate things is frequently detectable.

Rudolf Bultmann, famously, attributed the creation and transmission of many of the miracle-stories in the gospels to "Hellenistic circles," by which I understand him to mean Greek (= gentile) Christian communities. The transposition of the Jesus tradition from Palestinian (= Jewish?) to Hellenistic circles is, for Bultmann, a major source of the distortion evident between Jesus and the gospels. Here, then, is an excerpt from British NT scholar Vincent Taylor explaining how Bultmann would have considered a parable to have escaped relatively unscathed the distorting effects of Hellenization:

For the parables he [viz., Bultmann] lays down the principle that the best criterion of genuineness is the presence of an opposition to Jewish morality and piety or of the eschatological attitude which characterized the preaching of Jesus, always providing that no specifically Christian details are present (G.S.T. 222). (The Formation of the Gospel Tradition [London: Macmillan and Co., 1933], 28)