sayings or narratives?

I'm currently reading William Arnal's essay, "Major Episodes in the Biography of Jesus: An Assessment of the Historicity of the Narrative Tradition" (Toronto Journal of Theology 13/2 [1997]: 201–26). Arnal is a member of the [in]famed Jesus Seminar, and anyone familiar with their work will find Arnal's work squarely within that tradition. (I don't intend this polemically, even though I disagree vociferously with the Seminar; and, to be fair, Arnal takes a number of Seminar Fellows to task at a number of points, including John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and even Robert Funk.)

Arnal questions the historicity of three key events in the life of the historical Jesus: his baptism by John, his tantrum in the Temple, and his Passion ("suffering"). These events are "key" not simply because they are normally understood as watershed moments in the life of the historical Jesus; they are "key" because they are almost (almost!) universally accepted as historical. But Arnal's argument isn't just that these three events were fabricated by Jesus' followers after his death (though he does argue this). Arnal goes further to offer "a general point about the narrative tradition in the Synoptics":

I believe that a reasonable case can be made that the stories developed out of motifs in the sayings tradition. Sanders very much to the contrary, the narrative tradition can be understood as a result of a narrativization of themes already present in the sayings tradition, as interest in Jesus as a teacher modulated into a desire to make Jesus himself a champion and paradigm of the community ethos generated by those sayings. (Arnal 1997:215; emphasis in the original)

Anyone familiar with the history of the historical study of Jesus knows that the distinction between the sayings and narrative traditions has played a storied role in the historical Jesus scholarship. The so-called "third quest" has largely privileged the narrative tradition (see Arnal's reference to E. P. Sanders, above), though I get the impression that some third-questers try to remove the distinction rather than invert it.

Here, however, is my problem with Arnal's argument (and with any Jesus historian who privileges the sayings tradition and actively derides the narrative tradition). Arnal offers his "reasonable case" that the narratives he examines arose from motifs in the sayings tradition, but nowhere does he justify the bifurcation between sayings and narratives in the first place. What historical basis does he have for presuming that Jesus' earliest followers preserved/passed on his teachings but were uninterested in narratives about him? Additionally, what historical basis does he have for assuming that, once Jesus' followers did develop an interest in stories about Jesus, they didn't have any and so had to turn to what they knew from the sayings tradition in order to fabricate some?

I know of two usual answers. First, Jesus' sayings are demonstrably more similar across the three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) than are the accounts of Jesus' actions. Some historians (not necessarily Arnal and/or the Jesus Seminar) have used this empirical observation to justify the bifurcation between sayings and narratives. Second, and more importantly, a number of scholars, mostly associated with the Jesus Seminar (and here I would include Arnal) privilege the sayings source, known as "Q" (= material that appears in Matthew and Luke that does not appear in Mark), in their reconstructions of Christian origins. Since Q largely comprises sayings and not narratives, the assumption is that Jesus' earliest followers (or at least a subset of Jesus' earliest followers) cherised his teachings and had little or no use for stories about him.

Even leaving aside the hypothetical nature of the so-called Q-document, this second point rests on some dubious assumptions. First, it assumes that the Q-document, assuming it did actually exist, corresponds to the theology of a specific, identifiable group of Jesus' earliest followers. Second, it neglects that Q as currently reconstructed does indeed contain a number of narrative features. Third, again assuming that a Q-document actually existed, it assumes that reconstructions of that document from the material in Matthew and Luke give a reasonably accurate portrait of the Q-document. Joe Weaks's PhD dissertation, "Mark without Mark: Problematizing the Reliability of a Reconstructed Text of Q," should convince us to put such confidence behind us.

In sum, the choice between sayings and narrative traditions in historical Jesus research is a lark. Neither is epiphenomenal of the other; both were of utmost importance to Jesus' earliest followers. Jesus was remembered as an authoritative teacher (so Mark, passim) whose halakha put Torah into proper perspective (see, e.g., Mark 7.1–23; Matt. 5.17–20; Rom. 3.21–31, among many others). But he was also and simultaneously remembered as a powerful prophet/healer/exorcist, whose words calmed the seas, cast out demons, and silenced his enemies (e.g., Mark 1, 4, and 5). Any reconstruction that privileges the sayings over the narratives or the narratives over the sayings has already started off on the wrong foot.

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.

contrasts (or, not ridiculicity)

In contrast to that other article I was reading, Samuel Byrskog's 2003 review of Rudolf Bultmann's classic, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition [1921; ET: History of the Synoptic Tradition (1963)] strikes me as both fair and appropriate. I have my own disagreements with Byrskog's approach to memory and oral tradition, but his evaluation of Bultmann's work and its legacy seems pretty cogent to me. So I appreciate the force with which Byrskog gives the following blunt assessment:

The fundamental problem with Bultmann's method is not its inherent skepticism toward the historicity of the tradition. Occasionally he grants a good deal of continuity to the tradition; and skepticism is indeed part of all critical investigations. Rather, what is essentially problematic is precisely that his method does not work as a tool of historical inquiry. (Byrskog, "review of The History of the Synoptic Tradition" [JBL 122/3 (2003)], 554; emphasis added)

Byrskog goes on to demonstrate the unworkability of Bultmann's method; this is not simply dismissive invective. And so the blunt assessment is not only warranted but also welcome.

ridiculicity

I'm reading a fairly ridiculous article by Helmut Koester. His short piece, "Written Gospels or Oral Tradition?" (JBL 113/2 [1994]: 293–97) responds to Edouard Massaux's argument that the written Gospel of Matthew bore significant influence on other Christian texts of the first two centuries CE. Koester, of course, argues that apparent Matthean tradition in 1 Clement, Ignatius' letters, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others actually stem from oral tradition. And it seems to me that Koester says a number of silly things. For example:

When pieces of tradition are quoted and used in early Christian authors, their function in the life of the community is usually maintained. Indeed, it may not even be necessary to refer to them as traditions related to Jesus. This is most clearly the case in Paul's allusions to sayings of Jesus in Romans 12–14, in 1 Peter, and in the Epistle of James. As far as writings such as 1 Clement, Barnabas, and the letters of Ignatius are concerned, use of sayings of Jesus and allusions to them would seem to be natural continuations of this practice, whether or not Jesus is explicitly mentioned as an authority. Sayings of Jesus were known because they had been established as parts of a Christian catechism; the passion narrative was known because it was embedded into the Christian liturgy. (Koester 1994:297; emphasis added)

The entire perspective informing this paragraph seems absurd to me. Notice how Koester privileges a tradition's "function in the life of the community" over its significance as a "tradition[] related to Jesus." When, for example, a Christian text says something like, "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse" (Rom. 12.14), that text is clearly performing certain functions among the Christian community. However, when another text narrates Jesus saying something to this effect (e.g., Matt. 5.43–48), the latter text is less authentic because its communal function has been muted. (That is, in Romans 12 Paul is overtly trying to persuade the Roman Christians to think and behave a certain way; in Matthew, the Evangelist may be endorsing certain patterns of thought and behavior, but his endorsement is covert, masked by the overt aim of narrating the life and teaching of Jesus.) I can't help but wonder where Koester thinks Jesus' followers procured the traditions that were at work in their communities if not from the teachings of the historical Jesus. I'm not even claiming that such traditions had to actually stem from the historical Jesus; only that the tradition's significance as a "tradition[] related to Jesus" must be more salient than any purported "function in the life of the community."

But even more to the point, I don't understand how Koester can claim that Jesus' teachings "were known because they had been established as parts of a Christian catechism," or that "the passion narrative was known because it was embedded into the Christian liturgy." Koester is clearly a fan of putting carts before horses. Where does Koester think Christian catechisms and liturgy came from if not from the sayings and passion of Jesus, among other things? Instead, the teachings of Jesus and the passion narrative were known because they were foundational to the beliefs and practices of Jesus' followers. As a result, their catechisms and liturgy reflected his teachings and passion. While the catechisms and liturgy might have been vehicles of the traditions of Jesus' teachings and passion, they were not the motivation or reason for knowing these traditions. Otherwise, Koester needs to explain what motivated the church's catechisms and liturgy.

Ridiculous.

getting ready for SECSOR 2011

The SECSOR 2011 meeting is this weekend (4–6 March) at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, KY. The pictures look gorgeous, and I'm excited to get on the road. I'll be presenting my paper, "Speaking of Jesus: 'Oral Tradition' beyond the Form Critics," in the SBL New Testament section on Saturday evening. I've been working on this paper for over a month, and I think it's pretty good. But I would think that, wouldn't I?

In the spirit of open and public academic discussion and debate, I've uploaded my paper to both Scribd and Google Docs. I'll embed the Scribd version below. If, for some reason, you prefer Google Docs, you can use the link I've included. Both documents are completely public.

The highlighted numbers in the paper refer to the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. I've tried to upload the .pptx file to Scribd and Google Docs, but it didn't display properly in either place. If you're interested in seeing the PowerPoint, leave a comment here and I'll happily e-mail it to you.

UPDATE: I've finished the handout that I will distribute to anyone determined to listen to my paper. Like the paper itself, you can find the handout on Google Docs, or you can see the embedded Scribd version, below.

Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics
Speaking of Jesus: "Oral Tradition" beyond the Form Critics (handout)

thinking poorly about Mark's audience

As part of my senior-level undergraduate course on Mark's gospel I've assigned James Edwards's commentary in Eerdman's Pillar New Testament Commentary series (The Gospel according to Mark [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002]). Edwards argues that Mark was written for gentile Christians in or near Rome. While I don't have a problem with this position (though neither do I subscribe to it), I do have a problem with Edwards's favorite argument in its favor.

Whenever Mark translates an Aramaic phrase or a Jewish custom (e.g., Mark 5.41–42; 7.2–5), Edwards makes a comment regarding Mark's gentile Roman audience. And whenever he does so, I make a point to explain to my students how unnecessary such comments are. But now Edwards has crossed the line from claiming more than the data demands (a common and, in my view, acceptable practice) to making claims that simply aren't true. Let me explain.

In his comments on Mark 7.34 ["Jesus looked up into heaven and sighed, and he said to him, 'Ephphatha' (which means, 'Be opened')."], Edwards drops a footnote in which he claims, "The need to translate an Aramaic saying into Greek again indicates that Mark is writing for non-Jews" (2002:225, n. 28). But this simply isn't true! At the very least, such a view assumes that every Jew in Mark's world understood Aramaic.

Instead, we need to recognize at least two basic facts, both of which require explanation. First, Mark includes Jesus command in an Aramaic form. Second, Mark translates the Aramaic command into Greek. Edwards focuses on this second datum and infers, therefore, that Mark must be writing for non-Jews. But, as I've already said, this goes too far. The most we can say with confidence is that Mark is writing for people who know Greek but do not know Aramaic.

The really interesting question, I think, is: Why did Mark include the command in Aramaic in the first place? Answers will be speculative, of course. But I can think of two: First, there was a power associated with Jesus' actual spoken words, and so Mark included those words even though he wrote for a Greek-speaking audience. We have remains of hundreds of magical papyri, mostly from Egypt, that attest the perceived power of foreign words (somewhat like the pseudo-Latin of Harry Potter). But second—and here's where Edwards goes astray—the presence of both the Aramaic command and its Greek translation may suggest that Mark is writing for a multi-ethnic (and multi-lingual?) audience. If so, then Mark may preserve the Aramaic/Judaic form of much of his tradition because many among his audience were well positioned to appreciate its preservation, but he explains the Aramaisms/Judaisms because others (many?) among his audience would not have understood them.

At any rate, if you're convinced, along with Edwards, that Mark writes for gentile Christians in/near Rome, then you need to provide some explanation why Mark includes words like, Ephphatha, or Talitha koum, or Elōi, Elōi lema sabachthani. Certainly the gospel story is intelligible without them, so why does Mark bother to include them at all?

see you in Louisville

I just found out today that my paper, "Speaking of Jesus: 'Oral Tradition' beyond the Form Critics," was accepted by the (SBL) New Testament section for the 2011 SECSOR meeting. That meeting will be held the weekend of 4–6 March, 2011, in Louisville, KY, at the Galt House. Here's my paper's abstract:

Oral tradition has been a live analytical concept in gospels research at least since the form critics but especially since Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel (1983). Recently, numerous high-profile publications in Jesus and gospels research attest the ascendency of memory as an equally live subject in the exploration and explanation of Christian origins. One by-product of this confluence of issues—oral tradition and memory—has been a renewed discussion of form criticism and its legacy. The apparent connection with the form critics’ aims risks misdirecting contemporary exploration of the early Christians’ use of oral and written traditions down potentially blind alleys. This paper offers three specific areas that distinguish—or ought to distinguish—contemporary oral-traditional research from form-critical inquiry. First, contemporary scholarship conceptualizes orality in terms broader than merely the transmission of tradition. Second, contemporary scholarship problematizes the construction of trajectories as explanatory models of Christian origins. Third, contemporary scholarship highlights both the similarities and the differences between oral and written expressions of tradition and explores the interface between the two. As a result, contemporary scholarship would be well-served by fostering an abrupt rupture between the current interest in the oral Jesus tradition (and the constitutive role of memory therein) and the procedures and products of Formgeschichte.

My thanks to the SBL NT section committee for approving my proposal. You can find more information about SECSOR at their website.

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.

---

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."

Albert Baumgarten and sources of the gospels

In Albert Baumgarten's essay, "Pharisaic Authority: Prophecy and Power (Antiquities 17.41–45)" (Common Judaism: Explorations in Second-Temple Judaism, edited by Wayne O. McCready and Adele Reinhartz [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008], 81–96). Baumgarten presents a compelling analysis well worth the time it takes to read it, but it also betrays an assumption that is both (i) common among historians of Second Temple Judaism and (ii) badly in need of correction.

Baumgarten gathers Jewish sources and what they might reveal about Pharisaic practice of and reputation for trading in religious matters (esp. knowing the future). I was particularly impressed to read his intention to move outward from Josephus "to other ancient Jewish sources, notably the New Testament and Qumran" (85; my emphasis), as part of his analysis. First, the identification of the texts of the New Testament as "Jewish sources" (rather than, perhaps, anti-Jewish sources), and second, the realization that their relation to Second Temple Judaism is analogous to the DSS represent appropriate adjustments in our approach to the New Testament at least and perhaps all of first-century CE Christian texts.

But then when Baumgarten turns to consider Matt 12.22–9 (the Beelzebul controversy) and Jesus' interaction with Pharisaic opponents, he aligns Matthew alongside other written texts (and nonextant texts at that!) rather than positioning the evangelist within the world of interaction among Second-Temple Jews. When Jesus asks the Pharisees, "by whom do your own people drive [the demons] out?" (Matt 12.27), Baugarten says, "This passage suggests that the author of the Gospel of Matthew had access to a source that attributed to the Pharisees the ability to exorcise demons" (91; my emphasis).

Why does this passage suggest anything about the sources to which Matthew had access?! Why are we so uncomfortable with the notion that the evangelists (and other tradents of the early Jesus tradition) were themselves experienced participants in the world they inhabited, including their experience reading, performing, enacting, recalling, celebrating, transmitting, and teaching from the stories from and about the sacred scriptures and Jesus of Nazareth?

Most importantly, even if Baumgarten's heavily text-conversant model of the ancient world were appropriate, nothing about Matthew's text would actually suggest a source attributing exorcistic prowess to the Pharisees. As Baumgarten notes (253, n. 49), the Lukan parallel to this pericope (Luke 11.14–22) handles the identity of Jesus' opponents differently but contains the same question, "by whom do your own people drive them out?" Again, on the presumption that we should analyze the evidence in terms of written sources and textual manipulation, the most we could say is that Matthew appears to have had access to a source that attributed exorcistic abilities to Jesus' opponents, and someone—whether Matthew himself, Matthew's source, or someone else we cannot know—thought it made sense to attribute these abilities to Pharisees.

Of course, I don't see any justification for the immediate appeal to sources and especially to the view that, even if written sources are found behind our texts, our texts generate meaning vis-à-vis their sources. I realize the question of how an author manipulates his or her sources sheds light on their own writings, but in the hand of redaction critics comparative analysis has tyrannized any attempt to understand the gospels as autonomous expressions of the Jesus tradition.

Poirier on NT introductions and the synoptic problem

I just finished reading John Poirier's article, "The Synoptic Problem and the Field of New Testament Introduction" (JSNT 32/2, 179–190), a very brief piece that surveys the treatment of source-critical hypotheses among introductory discussions of NT research. Naturally, Kloppenborg and Tuckett don't receive very much treatment since they don't exhibit the neglect Poirier is chronicling (see p. 185, n. 17). Poirier doesn't mention Mark Allan Powell's Introducing the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), presumably because Powell's book was published after Poirier's article was in the process of publication. This adds to the impression, I think, that Poirier has put his finger on an on-going problem (see Goodacre's discussion here) rather than chronicling a problem with past research.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I should say that I myself am not a proponent of the Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre approach to gospel relationships, but neither am I convinced against it. Rather, what I like most about the ascendancy of this set of arguments is the reminder that the results of source-critical inquiry must be plugged back into Christian origins scholarship (including gospels scholarship) with a healthy respect for the contingency of those results. We will certainly have to debate what constitutes healthy respect for this contingency, but certainly the cavalier confidence in Markan priority and Q that characterized NT research in previous decades (including the just-completed Naughties) does not.

a brief comment (well, almost)

As I wrap up Chris Keith's book, The Pericope Adulterae, the Gospel of John, and the Literacy of Jesus (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), I found the following particularly interesting:

Regardless of whether PA was oral or written, GJohn's absorption of PA demonstrates that, into the second and third centuries, written gospel texts, even authoritative ones, functioned in a 'performance mode' in light of the texts' scribe (or performer) and readers (or [intended] audience). The interpolator was both a reader of GJohn's author and an author in his own right, modifying GJohn in light of his (intended) audience. PA is thus primary evidence that long-held assumptions that written tradition was 'fixed' while oral tradition was 'free' are incorrect. (Keith 2009: 259)

Keith's point about the problematic assumptions upon which NT scholarship has depended since at least the rise of form criticism in the first third of the twentieth century is dead right. If we accept any literary explanation of the synoptic gospels' interrelationships (e.g., the Two-Source Hypothesis or the Farrer Theory), we are similarly hard-pressed to explain how later evangelists could handle the text(s) at their disposal without a sense that they were falsifying those texts. The answer (or a significant part thereof) must be the altogether different conception of fixity current among ancient Christians. Moreover, this conception of fixity (for the early Christians clearly and demonstrably did think their traditions were fixed and stable, despite [and even in the face of] the variations between them) applied to both oral and written expressions of tradition and was capable of, among other things, incorporating interpolations such as PA.

But that's not actually what caught my interest, and so I've emended this post's title by adding the parenthetical qualifier. I was particularly pleased to see Keith's suggestion that the [written] text of John's gospel functioned along the lines of a performance of the Jesus tradition. This idea has not, unless I've missed it, played a significant role in his argument throughout The Pericope Adulterae; it is, on the other hand, a significant aspect of my argument in Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance, and Text (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010). The idea of the written texts themselves—texts that have been subjected to intense examination in all their minutiae and presumed to exist in a stable form similar to our familiar NA²⁷ or UBS^4rev—as performances of the tradition rather than the final expressions of the tradition will likely be one of the (if not the) most significant advances in gospels scholarship in the next generation. But then again, I would say that, wouldn't I?

"unstable," but not "developing"

I'm wrapping up my review of Richard Horsley's Jesus in Context this morning. As I began reading Horsley's conclusion (pp. 224–228), I found an occasion to articulate the basis for some of my disagreement with Horsley's argument. This articulation has been difficult precisely because Horsley asks many of the questions I think need to be asked and examines many of the established assumptions and procedures in biblical scholarship that have gotten us into the mess we're in (to say things a bit too strongly). In other words, Horsley is having exactly the conversation I think we need to be having, and for that I praise his book.

Nevertheless, I think he does miss some important facets of that conversation, and these need some illumination. Horsley begins his concluding thoughts in this way:

As we have seen, recent research is undermining some of the assumptions on which standard study of the Gospels previously depended. We can recognize now that there were no stable written texts of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John in late antiquity. the written texts were "unstable," that is, they kept developing, in part because any texts in antiquity, whether written down or not, were generally recited or "performed" before groups of people. Oral communication was predominant, even in literate circles. (Horsley 2008: 224)

Whatever we might think about the gospels, one of the things about which we can be most confident is that they were, indeed, not stable in the sense in which we think of stability. I am sitting in my office surrounded by bookshelves lined with printed texts, every single one of which has a copyright notice even before the title page and has been printed through a highly developed process that guarantees that every copy of that book is identical, even to the point of reproducing any errata. What's more, when I refer to these texts, I am careful to do so precisely and exactly, in part because I know that any one can check my references in their own copies of those texts.

The gospels did not have any of these features. Of the thousands of copies that survive as manuscripts, none of them are identical. While most of the differences are relatively insignificant, some are rather important. How/Where does Mark's gospel end? Where does the story of the woman caught in adultery belong in the canon, if anywhere? Similar questions attend every book of the New Testament. Does Paul, for example, tell his readers that they have peace with God [ἔχομεν; echomen], or does he exhort them to pursue peace with God [ἔχωμεν; echōmen; Rom 5.1]? This instability doesn't just attend the transmission of the written text but also the performance of the traditions contained therein. In other words, just because the written text of Matt 5.3–12 has a very specific number and order of beatitudes doesn't mean that every time the Matthean evangelist performed Jesus' covenantal sermon he began with that specific number/order of beatitudes. Obviously, when Luke performed a similar tradition, he had a different number of beatitudes, but I would also suggest that the Lukan evangelist also may have performed that tradition differently before as well as after writing the text we call Luke.

But I balk somewhat at calling this instability development because of the evolutionary trajectories that have structured our thinking about gospel traditions at least since the advent of form criticism. Whether or not Horsley intends "developing" in this sense, he is bound to be read this way among biblical scholars. I suggest that the texts' movement—French scholar Paul Zumthor uses the term mouvance in a highly technical sense—was a feature of its function rather than its development. In other words, later texts (Matthew and Luke?) were not "more developed" than earlier ones (Mark? Q??) even despite the differences between them. Instead, in very many instances, the differences between them manifest the tradition's transcendence of written texts. The Jesus tradition was evoked by the written texts rather than contained by them, and shifts in the text were shifts in respect to the larger Jesus tradition rather than shifts in the tradition itself.

I should say that the tradition itself could shift, could develop, and we may see that in the relation between the synoptic gospels and John, and again with the Gospel of Thomas (and even within Gos. Thom., if we follow April DeConick), and certainly in some of the other texts that call themselves gospels. But we don't detect that development in the tradition as a whole by tracing minute changes in wording. Despite the sometimes awesome changes a single word can manifest (e.g., "Spirit of God" versus "finger of God" in Matt 12.28||Luke 11.20), the tradition often remains intact even as the evocation of the tradition responds to the dynamic and vibrant life of the communities cherishing, preserving, and living within the memory of Jesus.

playing the gospels

Over the last couple years I've been trying to think about the gospels less like written books and more like musical scores. I was led in this direction, I'm sure, by John Miles Foley (especially Imminent Art [1991], The Singer of Tales in Performance [1995] and How to Read an Oral Poem [2002]), who uses the term libretto to refer to the written manifestations of oral tradition. Questions still abound: Does the libretto embody an oral performance (transcript)? Does the libretto enable oral performance (script)? Does the libretto function as part of oral performance (prop)? Etc. But these are fundamentally different questions than traditional gospels scholarship has learned to ask.

For me, the biggest gain that comes from thinking of the gospels as scores rather than books derives from the cultural function of both in our own milieu. We read books directly; they are their own "things." Not so with sheet music. Even accomplished musicians, who can "read" a musical score, are acutely aware that looking at the lines and notes on the page is only the first step of interpretation. We haven't read the music until we've heard the music, no matter how long, how closely, and how carefully we've looked at the page. But here's the point: The marks on the page were meant to be performed! A musical score doesn't give you the option to just look at it and analyze it; you're already misunderstanding the text if you don't play the music. Important as sheet music is, it doesn't exist for itself. It pleads with us to look beyond the page and to hear the music.

So also, I think, with the gospels. We have printed synopses that help us see the patterns of similarities and differences between the four gospels (and especially Matthew, Mark, and Luke). We have commentaries that discuss every word and phrase found in the text. We have even stratified the texts, attributing this layer to Mark, this to Q, this to the evangelist, and so on. We've inspected not only every note of the libretti in front of us but also every jot and tittle. But New Testament scholarship has largely missed the music and refused to hear the text. I'm beginning to wonder if the gospels, like sheet music, don't exist for themselves. We have to move beyond reading the gospels. We have to get to the Jesus tradition to which the gospels point.

My thoughts here are very preliminary, and I need to work them out still. But Richard Horsley has found himself asking the same question, as I found out this morning as I started chapter 3 of Jesus in Context (2008). Horsley remembers a conversation with some of his students:

One of the students, a performing musician, responded by drawing an analogy from music. It seemed to her like Gospel scholars tend to focus on one or two measures of a score at a time, but never realize that the notes on that score are merely symbols for parts of larger melodies, fugues, and movements or of whole choruses and arias, cantatas, and operas. They have not yet discovered the work as a whole, much less considered what it would be like in performance. (2008: 56)

Horsley is talking about context, primarily, and preparing to talk about performance. And he's right on both counts: We need to account for the story as a whole rather than merely its parts in isolation, and we need to account for the medium (or media) in which most people accessed that story. But I'm not concerned, primarily, with either context or performance. Both of these issues, for me, raise larger questions about tradition. If the early Christians spoke more broadly about Jesus than the simple reading of four (or more) texts, if the early Christians lived in the shadow of that broader speech rather than of a written canon, if the Jesus tradition manifested itself in symbols, art, song, behavior, images, rituals, longings, and so on, then how can we read the gospels and hear the tradition to which they point, of which they are embodiments, and in which they find their resonance? These questions, I think, are much more important than the standard, source-, form-, and redaction-critical analyses that have dominated the field.

[N.B. Let me be clear about what type of questions I'm asking. I ask these questions first as a historian and only secondarily as a Christian, though of course this second identity is the more fundamental one for me. But you don't have to worship at the altar of Bach or Mendelssohn to recognize that their score point to their music. Horsley does not write from a perspective of faith; I do. But I'm raising historical and literary questions, not theological ones. Even if a person doubts that the texts enable us to hear Jesus they should still recognize that the texts were meant to make us hear something.]

a slight variation on a common theme

I'm currently developing a lecture entitled, "Jesus and Torah," for my first-year Gospel Narratives course. Few things, for me, are as difficult to introduce in a two-hour discussion with beginning students. I'm beginning my discussion, after a brief definition of Torah, by looking at Matt 5.17–48. I understand vv 17–20 as introducing the six Antitheses of vv 21–48, and I retain the label Antitheses because I think it aptly describes the rhetorical structure of these sayings (but not Jesus' relation to/view of Torah!). Finally, I should say that I understand the entire Sermon on the Mount in strongly covenantal terms (rather than, say, ethical terms). Matthew, I think, is clearly presenting Jesus in ways that evoke the Sinai narrative, though (I think) in some surprising ways.

But in my lesson preparation I'm reading Luz's massively detailed Hermeneia commentary, and I can't help but notice that some anachronistic concepts seem to sustain his (and many others') interpretation. What's worse, the assumption I have in mind is never explicitly discussed, which makes it all the more problematic! A commentary might not be the place to engage such things, but given their effect on our exegetical work I think they deserve some attention.

Specifically, I have in mind the assumption that Christianity and Judaism were, already in the first century CE, separate and distinguishable entities. The very opening of Luz's interpretative comments on Matt 5.17–20 he employs this assumption and allows it to drive his reading of this very important passage:

By placing these verses at the beginning of the main part of the Sermon on the Mount before the antitheses, Matthew makes clear that they are fundamentally important for him. At issue here is his relationship to the Mosaic Law and thus to Judaism. (Luz, Matthew 1-7, 213; my emphasis)

I'm not at all convinced that the issue here is "his relationship to the Mosaic Law"; rather, I think the point is rather clearly the interpretation of Torah and, as emphasized in v 20, the proper observance of Torah. Of course, if Jesus ever did say anything like 5.17–20, we would struggle to explain why Jesus would have to explain to his fellow Jews that he recognized the authority of the Mosaic covenant. Certainly at the front-end of Jesus' ministry, as Matthew has placed the Sermon, we have yet to see anything that would make us think Jesus set out to live free of Torah's strictures and ordinances (Moses might have preferred "blessings and curses"). So why should Jesus have to explain his "relationship to Judaism"?

But Luz doubts the authenticity of this passage; at the very least he reads 5.17–20 as speaking "directly to the church" (213). And if Jesus, in Matthew's gospel, has yet to fall foul of Torah, the church, by the time Matthew was written, certainly had. And given the debates attested earlier in Paul's letters and later in Luke-Acts, Matthew writes to a church whose relationship to Judaism was open to question and required some explanation.

The problem with all of this, I think, is that we cannot invoke the neat distinctions between Judaism and Christianity to structure our interpretation of the NT texts. Daniel Boyarin (Dying for God [1999], Border Lines [2004]), among others, has demonstrated the messy interactions between the expressions of Judaism that became Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. We cannot helpfully think of these as two distinct phenomena at any point in the first century CE; even thinking in terms of two phenomena sends us off on the wrong path.

I haven't yet read Luz's interpretation of Matt 5.17–20; I stopped to get these ideas out of my head. But I'm suspicious that he began with what I think is a very problematic assumption: that Matthew had to clarify "his relationship to the Mosaic Law and thus to Judaism." The text offers significantly more potential, I think, if we begin instead by understanding Matthew competing with other Jews (who may or may not have identified Jesus of Nazareth as a prophet or even Israel's messiah) over how to properly understand and practice Torah.

the Jewish gospels?

Time to get back on a favorite hobby horse. In sundry ways I've been asking since 2005 what difference it makes to read the gospels as Christian literature rather than as Jewish texts (for a very blunt tool looking for such questions, see here). But I have reason to raise the question again, and I don't want to miss the opportunity.

In Craig Evans's essay, "The Jewish Christian Gospel Tradition" (in Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries [O. Skarsaune and R. Hvalvik, eds.; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007], 241–77), Evans makes the following observation:

The Jewish Gospel known to Origen may be the earliest of the Jewish Gospels (or Gospel recensions), dating perhaps to the end of the first century or, more probably, to the beginning of the second. (Evans 2007: 248)

Now for some context. First, Evans is pursuing a very difficult task, viz. "to examine the theological and practical emphases, as they may be detected, in the extant fragments of materials widely recognized as Jewish Gospels, and in closely related materials" (242). And he does so carefully and with nuance. Second, Evans spends just over three pages (242–45) discussing "Matthew: A New Testament Jewish Gospel," which he acknowledges "has been traditionally viewed as the most Jewish of the four New Testament Gospels" (242). Just over a year ago I questioned the value of the label "most Jewish", and though Evans isn't asking the same types of question I am, he is sensitive to the "profound and systemic," and even "utter," Jewishness of at least the First Gospel.

But it intrigues me that, even after the decision to apply the label "Jewish" to Matthew's gospel, Evans can still describe this fragment, which he prefers to date in the early second century, as "the earliest of the Jewish Gospels" (see above). Admittedly, Evans is referring to a very specific group of texts when he refers to "Jewish Gospels," and Matthew, I suspect by virtue of being canonical, does not fit within this group. And Evans's use of "Jewish Gospels" to refer to these specific texts—traditionally the Gospel of the Nazoraeans, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Hebrews—is entirely within the mainstream of academic parlance. Keeping in mind that I'm questioning standard practices and not Evans's specific instances of those practices, How useful is our category Jewish Gospel, and what does it reveal about us that we find this label meaningful even while recognizing the "Jewishness" of (at least) Matthew?

Is this actually a problem for biblical (and especially New Testament) research? Or am I chasing vapors?

gospels scholarship at odds with source and redaction criticism?

Okay, so this post's title is a bit of a non sequitur. Source and redaction criticism ARE gospels scholarship, so they can't be at odds, I guess. Even so, I'm very interested in the ways that our über-textual approaches to source criticism fail us when we set about reading the gospels. But first, the usual disclaimer. I am not denying that one or more of the gospel writers may have known one or more of the other gospels. Neither am I denying that earlier gospels were/may have been influential in the development and composition of later gospels. But I am questioning the assumption that the similarities between the gospels are evidence for copying, and that differences between them evidence for redacting. Source critics quite rightly insist that modern objections to copying (or, worse, plagiarism) shouldn't affect our judgments of what the gospels are or how the evangelists produced them. But my point is that the gospels themselves show that copying and editing aren't very helpful ways for thinking about their patterns of similarities and differences.

I'm currently writing a lesson on the twelve disciples that focuses on the significance of Jesus calling twelve disciples and the evidence preserved in the gospels (and Acts, Paul, and even Revelation). Of course, quite a bit of time deals with the different lists of disciples preserved in Matt 10.2–4||Mark 3.16–19||Luke 6.14–16||Acts 1.13. E. P. Sanders (Jesus and Judaism, 98ff.), of course, emphasizes the differences between the lists, while Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 96ff.) minimizes these. Both accept that Jesus was remembered as surrounding himself with disciples, to whom he referred as the Twelve, but Bauckham's thesis requires that the Twelve refers to twelve specific, named individuals who could take (or be assigned) responsibility for the Jesus tradition.

The problem, unless I've missed something, is that the lists aren't identical. This is especially a problem for Bauckham. The differences aren't simply a matter of order; Matthew and Mark both name someone called Thaddaeus, while in both of his lists Luke mentions another Judas, this one the son of James. Critics have gone back and forth asking whether Thaddaeus was also known as Judas; I'm happy to notice that none of our texts suggest this. But there doesn't seem to be any redaction-critical motivations for changing (on the assumption of Markan [or Matthean] priority) Thaddaeus to Judas. In fact, I would be more willing to accept the opposite: That sometime after the first Easter, any remaining disciples of Jesus named Judas would have looked around for another moniker. For that matter, there doesn't seem to be any redaction-critical motivations that could explain the variations in order evident among the four lists.

For that reason, I think, both Sanders and Bauckham invoke oral tradition (or memory) to explain the variations for which we need to account. Sanders says, "In the earliest period (evidenced by 1 Cor. 15.5) noses were not counted. That it was some time before they started being counted is clear from the lists of names" (Jesus and Judaism, 101). Of course, there really is only one name from the Twelve about which there are any questions, so the extent to which the delay between an awareness of the Twelve and a list of who those twelve were is actually not very "clear" at all. Bauckham provides a more helpful theory:

It is quite intelligible that a list of this kind should be remembered as consisting of three groups, with the first name in each group a fixed point in the memory, but with the order of the other three names in each group variable. (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 98)

Admittedly, I'm not sure which source-critical assumptions, if any, Bauckham brings to his analyses. Sanders, if I'm not mistaken, is probably a neo-Griesbachian, but again I could be wrong. Regardless of which solution to the synoptic problem (a peculiarly literary problem, after all) we prefer, Matthew, Mark, and Luke (in some combination or another) should be copying from another, and the list of disciples would be a place that we would expect the most careful copying (if the names of the disciples weren't already indelibly stamped on the tradition). In other words, on the basis of some strikingly similar passages (e.g., Mark 2.1–12 parr.), we postulate that some evangelists copy from other gospels. But if, for example, Luke had Mark's list of disciples available and in front of him, why should he vary either the order of the disciples or, most significantly, substitute Judas the son of James for Thaddaeus?

So the list of disciples in the gospels, and their counterpart in Acts 1.13, suggest that the historical processes source critics have envisaged as descriptive for our gospels' composition are unlikely at least and anachronistic at worst. Even if Luke could read/had read Mark's gospel, and even if the latter was very influential over the former's composition, how do we explain the differences between their lists of apostles? Sanders can't be convincing here, because even if the precise names comprising the Twelve wasn't fixed in early Christian tradition, Luke (who replaces Thaddaeus with Judas son of James) should have known Mark's list!

So on standard source-critical readings, Luke knew his lists differed from Mark's and either didn't care or thought he was correcting Mark. And if he thought "Judas son of James" was another name for Thaddaeus, we would have expected him to tell us that this was his other name (see, for example, Acts 1.23; 13.9). We can't plausibly explain Lukan redaction of Mark here. And we can't assume (as do Sanders and Bauckham) that Luke wasn't familiar with Mark (unless we're willing to jettison source-critical assumptions completely, a move which I increasingly favor). The lists of disciples demonstrate rather trenchantly, I think, that our conception of the Jesus tradition as a textual phenomenon has misled us. Instead, we should appreciate that the Jesus tradition was a narrative world (or, in more sociological terms, a symbolic universe) enveloping, contextualizing, and giving meaning to the written texts. In this perspective, even if Luke had read Mark, Luke was more richly and dynamically rooted in the tradition itself rather than the textual expression of the tradition found in Mark's gospel.

[Update: I should have read further. Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 98) does try to explain the variation in order, at least for the first four names, in redaction-critical terms. Notice how utterly lacking in explanatory power is Bauckham's argument. Why should Matthew and Luke, who keep both sets of brothers together, be more original? Why should Mark have any interest in binding together the three nicknamed disciples? And, most problematically, why should Luke rearrange the first four names in Acts 1.13 simply because Peter and John are prominent characters (3.1–4.31; 8.14-25) and James's death is narrated (12.2)? All of this suggests that we have misconceived what the Jesus tradition is and so missed the dynamics by which it was entextualized in the written gospels.]

Sitz im Leben: an exposé

Brandon Wason has as good an introductory discussion on Sitz im Leben as one could ask for here, including a reference to a recent article by Samuel Byrskog. I'm intrigued by the short quote Wason provides from Byrskog's article. If I read him rightly (which is hard to tell in any case, but especially without the context of the rest of his article), Byrskog advocates a fairly significant shift in the concept Sitz im Leben from its original form-critical function. That is, for the form critics a pericope's Sitz was conceptualized as a generative context which added not just shape but also substance to the Jesus tradition. But I think Byrskog is proposing a less dramatic conceptualization of a pericope's Sitz as a formative context in which social context influences the tradition's expression. Again, if I read Byrskog rightly, this would be a more responsible use of Sitz im Leben in gospels research, though we would still need to remember that factors other than social context—including the tradition's performative history—were also formatively influential in the expression of traditions from and about Jesus.

[In differentiating the formative and generative dynamics of early Christian traditioning processes, I gratefully acknowledge the influence of the discussion in Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, "Jesus Tradition as Social Memory," in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity (Semeia Studies 52; ed. A. Kirk and T. Thatcher; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 25–42.]

synoptic problem miscellania

Last month Mark Goodacre posted a very brief response to recent discussions amongst bloggers on the synoptic problem. I link to it here only because the erosion in the confidence with which NT critics hold to the Q theory is fascinating. Not simply that many scholars no longer "believe in" Q (the theological-esque language is interesting here), but that even many of those who do support the Q hypothesis do so more tepidly.

Goodacre's post is well worth reading, and the links worth following. Note also the article by E. P. Sanders referenced in the comments section.

fossils and facts

I'm taking a (brief) break from commenting on April DeConick's series, "Creating Jesus," and want to comment briefly on Mark Goodacre's comments on knowing the historical Jesus. Like DeConick, Goodacre works with an awareness of the ways in which modern readers—scholarly and lay, I would add!—put Jesus together when we read the gospels and work out our reconstructions. Goodacre, in his post, "Historical Jesus Missing Pieces Addendum" (see the original post here), invokes the spectre of paleontologists fitting together fossilized dinosaur bones (and the sometimes humorous results) to understand how we, too, "put together" the bits and pieces available to us to understand Jesus.

I cannot stress enough how much I think the general approach taken by Goodacre and DeConick needs to be appreciated and incorporated into our own thinking about Jesus within the church. Neither scholar is necessarily saying that we can't really know about Jesus (to be sure, there are some who say this), but both caution us to remember that what we do know and what we think we know are only parts of the picture. There are so many things about Jesus we cannot know, ranging from minor details (what did he prefer to eat, did he have a lisp, and so on) to more important information (what provoked him to "go public," how did his understanding of God develop, and so on).

What's worse, the things the gospels do tell us about Jesus are often affected by the things we don't know, which adds an element of contingency to all of our talk about Jesus. Goodacre, in fact, uses the slightly different but related image of a puzzle to ask, What if key pieces are missing? As Goodacre has sensed, this is an important question that may have catastrophic consequences on all of our scholarship. In my own work I have asked exactly the same question with respect to understanding the gospels, suggesting that our knowledge of how the texts "worked" in their first-century contexts is hugely hampered by our inability to observe them at work. That is, for all the talk about the many written sources about Jesus potentially floating around in the earliest centuries of Christianity (for example, in The DaVinci Code, or even in Luke 1.1–4!), we simply don't have any access whatsoever to the way normal Christians spoke about Jesus and the way our textual remains related to that way of speaking. And I can't help but suspect that this is a "key piece" indeed.

But for those of us more accustomed to accepting the canonical gospels for their testimony about Jesus, the question of missing pieces can be reframed slightly. There are indeed many things we would like to know about Jesus, things about which the gospels are simply silent. But the gospel writers did convey what they considered were the key pieces. For many people this simply won't be good enough, and I can certainly understand and sympathize with this. But for those people who hold to some view of the texts as "inspired" (however we understand that term), the biblical portrayal(s) of Jesus will, in the end, be sufficient. But I think I'll stop now before I begin to channel the shade of Martin Kähler!

bias in the field

I'm currently writing a lecture on source criticism, which has forced me to reread some material on the subject. I've read quite a bit of Mark Goodacre's very significant work in this area, both in traditional print formats as well as his considerable collection of online resources. A constant refrain in Markan (Goodacre, that is) discourse on source criticism concerns the bias in the field to privilege the Griesbach and Two-Source hypotheses and then to argue the superiority of the latter (largely on the basis of the strength of Markan [the evangelist] priority). Where, asks Goodacre, is the thorough and even-handed discussion of the Farrer-Goulder perspective?

I'm certainly no proponent of any of the literary solutions to the synoptic problem. As I argue in Structuring Early Christian Memory, as well as in an article I'm writing for JBL, there are very problematic assumptions underlying the confidence with which NT scholars have employed literary paradigms to pursue source-critical agenda. Even so, as I read Stein's article on the Synoptic Problem in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, I'm amazed that the Farrer hypothesis isn't even mentioned in the listing of the "most common explanations involving interdependence" (786). Apparently the demonstration of Matthean and Lukan independence on p. 790 suffices to dismiss Farrer (and Goulder and Goodacre) without even mentioning them!

Again, I'm no disciple of the Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre school. But Goodacre's discussions of the Synoptic Problem (admittedly, most of his writings are post-1992) are extremely careful and well-argued. The fact that the institution of source critical inquiry apparently doesn't (or didn't) mind ignoring a major challenge to its dominant narrative suggests, at least to me, that that narrative and its influence over gospels scholarship is susceptible to serious, even catastrophic, blind spots.