My third biblical studies book review is
An Introduction to New Testament Christology by Raymond Brown. I love it, so this is going to be a very long review. I'm going to focus on the approaches we take to scripture as illustrated in the book. If you want to know what else it talks about, you'll need to go read the book. I give it two thumbs up. Now on to my disjointed review.
Raymond Brown begins quite early to describe different approaches to understanding Christ, or Christology. Besides identifying High and Low Christology (High discusses the divinity of Christ, while Low rejects or ignores it), Brown sweepingly categorizes approaches into five categories: Nonscholarly Conservatism, Nonscholarly Liberalism, Scholarly Liberalism, Bultmannian Existentialism, and Scholarly (Moderate) Conservatism. Of course these don't capture all the nuances that Brown is aware of, but they describe some trends and camps that it can be useful for the student to understand. I'll provide a few excerpts about the various groups.
The Divisions
Nonscholarly Conservatism
Even
though the Gospels were Written
some 30 to 70 years after the ministry of Jesus, they are assumed to
be verbatim accounts of what was said in Jesus’ lifetime.
In other words, everything in the Gospels is assumed to be exactly what happened. While most of us Mormons aren't fundamentalists--particularly not regarding the Bible--this is an approach we often implicitly take, unless we have somehow been trained or trained ourselves to look more critically. Fortunately, it works for understanding lots of good things.
Nonscholarly Liberalism
At
the opposite end of the spectrum is the view that there is no continuity
between Jesus’ self-evaluation and the exalted Christology
of the NT documents. Such liberalism dismisses NT christology as
unimportant or as a distortion, and has often been closely associated
with the thesis that Jesus was just an ethical instructor or social reformer
who was mistakenly proclaimed to be divine by overenthusiastic
or confused followers (with Paul sometimes seen as the chief
instigator).
These two camps have had much rather unfortunate interplay that we see in many, if not most, public presentations of religion.
On
the conservative side, as I have explained, many Protestants reflect
the reaction of an earlier generation to the destructive aspects of
radical biblical criticism; and most Catholics remain unaware that
their church and its scholars have moved beyond views taught in
catechism in the first part of the 20th century. On the liberal side, there
is a tendency to invoke what the latest scholars are supposedly saying,
according to reports in the media. Despite the differences among
scholars I shall desciibe below, their efforts pay tribute to the truth
that christology is so important an issue for religious adherence that
one should not express judgments without seriously looking at the
evidence.
Scholarly Liberalism
This
differs from nonscholarly liberalism in several important ways.
It recognizes that the NT is shot through with christology from beginning
to end and that its authors claimed far more than that Jesus
was a moralizer or a social reformer. Nevertheless, as the classification
“liberalism” implies, it does not accept the high christological evaluations of Jesus in the NT as standing in real continuity with
his self-evaluation. In short, high christological evaluations are regarded
as mistaken.
I should explain what Brown means by continuity. He means, did Christians in the time of Paul believe the same things as Christians in the time of Jesus, and did Jesus actually teach the things (and mean the things in the way they were interpreted) that the first Christians believed? The question is, did Christian thought change (it did), and if so, how did it change?
Scholarly liberalism has also influenced many who lean toward the views of nonscholarly liberalism. This is the kind of thinking that is pervasive in internet discussions of Mormonism, with varying degrees of usefulness.
Somewhere
in between nonscholarly liberalism and scholarly liberalism is the view of those who have read scholarly liberal works (the weaknesses
of which they do
not subject to suflìcient criticism) but whose view of Jesus is
really determined more
by their reaction to the suffocating fundamentalism in which they
were raised.
I'm sorry to say this flatters neither the individual nor the culture that raised them.
Returning to the scholarly views, Brown makes this observation regarding their beliefs:
The
historical Jesus
was, in fact, a preacher of stark ethical demand who challenged the
religious institutions and the false ideas of his time. His ideals and
insights were not lost because the community imposed on its memory
of him a christology that turned him into the heavenly Son of
Man, the Lord, and Judge of the World-indeed, into a God. Without
that aggrandizement he and his message would have been forgotten.
But if in centuries past such a christological crutch was necessary
to keep the memory of Jesus operative, in the judgment of the liberal
scholars that crutch could now be discarded. Modern scholarship,
it is claimed, can detect the real Jesus and hold onto him without
the christological trappings.
Brown, himself, doesn't fall into this camp (he's a Catholic Monk), but he takes their scholarship seriously and has sifted through it--I like to think on behalf of those of us who believe and are unwilling to wade through the sludge of unwarranted assumptions made by unbelievers. My thanks go out to him for this work.
Bultmannian Existentialism
It's hard for me to describe this coherently, although Brown and Sanders both taught me something about it in their respective books. Bultmann (and some of his contemporaries and followers) accepted the methods of the 19th and early 20th century liberal scholars, but rejected their rejection of high christology. They downplayed, however, the literalness of much of the NT message in favor of emphasizing the importance of what we Mormons might describe as the Atonement in modern life. It doesn't really matter if certain events or sayings literally happened or came unmodified from Jesus. The challenge to find salvation applies to us, today, and Jesus and his message (whether from Jesus or from the early Christians) are powerful messages to help humanity. Will we accept the great things God has done for us, rather than rely on our own powers as advocated by scholarly liberalism? (That's my best attempt at translating what I learned, but I warn you it may be seriously flawed)
Scholarly (Moderate) Conservatism
. . . they posit a christology in the
ministry of Jesus himself. They would be divided on whether that
christology was explicit or implicit. Explicit christology would involve a
self-evaluation in which Jesus employed titles 0r designations already
known in Jewish circles. Implicit christology would relegate such
titles and designations to early church usage but would attribute to
Jesus himself attitudes and actions that implied an exalted status
which was made explicit after his death.
Explicit christology, which seemed to
be fading, got new life in the late 20th century. “Son of Man”
remains a title that many scholars think Jesus used of himself.
“Messiah” remains a title that others may have used of him during his
lifetime, whether or not he accepted the designation.
These scholars may only be conservative relative to liberal scholars, but the ongoing differences of opinion among scholars about such fundamental views of Christ is something to keep in mind. When people claim "broad scholarly consensus" on a New Testament issue, unless they are talking about something very specific and limited, it seems like good advice to take some care in accepting the assertion--even if it comes from an expert. To quote Brown:
This survey shows that scholarship has
come to no universally accepted positions on the relationship
of Jesus’ christology to that of his followers, except that the extreme
positions on either end of the spectrum (no difference, no continuity)
have fewer and fewer advocates.
Topics
Jesus' Omniscience
One of the most interesting discussions early in Brown's book was that of Jesus' knowledge of things. Since Jesus was God, did he know everything during his mortal life? As Mormons we don't find it hard to answer no because Joseph Smith put Jesus' growth in wisdom and stature, line upon line, into the Doctrine and Covenants, giving us a second witness on the subject. The New Testament doesn't provide such a simple solution. Brown illustrated how what is shown in the New Testament can be used to answer this question. He showed passages where Jesus displayed knowledge beyond what could have been available to his senses, and passages where Jesus seemed to lack knowledge. I'm still getting used to how scholars like Brown and Sanders collate and interpret the various evidences in such potentially meaningful ways. Brown doesn't answer the question, but he does show the New Testament evidence that one must deal with to come up with a intellectually responsible answer, and gives some hints as to how different people have answered the question. Here is part of Brown's summary:
This chapter has reviewed a range of
the ordinary and religious knowledge manifested in the Gospel
accounts of Jesus, and throughout there were signs of limitation.
Those who depend on a theological a priori argument that, because
Jesus was “true God of true God,” he had to know all things, have
a difficult task in explaining such limitations. They must resort to
the thesis that he hid what he knew and deliberately manifested
limitations in order not to confuse or astound his hearers. That
explanation limps, for his hearers are portrayed as confused and
amazed in any case. Since there is at least one recorded statement
where Jesus says that the Son does not know, most biblical scholars
will not accept such an explanation and will query the validity of
the a priori claim for omniscience.
On the other side of the picture, even
in the partial range of Jesus’ sayings considered thus far, there
is real difficulty for those who assume that Jesus presented himself
as just another human being. Under (A) we saw traditions that Jesus
manifested knowledge beyond ordinary human perceptiveness, and under
(B) We saw Jesus’ authority in interpreting Scripture and his
absolute conviction that God would punish Jerusalem and the Temple
and make him victorious despite his sufferings. All this corresponds
well to the repeated evaluation of him during his lifetime as a
prophet, one of those specially sent by God to challenge the
covenanted people. Probably most a priori approaches to Jesus from
the “true man” side of the spectrum would accept “prophet” as
a historical self-estimation of Jesus, but would argue that he could
have been no more than that. However, in the last elements that we
discussed in this chapter (B ##8-10) there were already indications
that the truth may have been more complicated. Jesus saw himself as
so important that rejection of him (not only of God’s message)
would constitute the cause for divine action against Jerusalem and
the Temple. Indeed he was remembered as saying “I will (or am able)
to destroy.” Jesus claims that he is not only to be made victorious
(translated by his followers, perhaps post factum, in terms of the
resurrection of the Son of Man) but also to have a final role (as the
coming Son of Man) when God completes what was begun during his
ministry. This goes beyond the claims of OT prophets and manifests a
uniqueness in Jesus’ self-estimation. He is not simply one of those
whom God sends but the one to bring God’s plan to completion.
For the believer, like me, in Jesus' divinity, it appears that the Gospels really are filled with evidence that Jesus was limited in mortal ways. For the nonbeliever who would explain away Jesus' divinity by saying he never claimed it for himself, you will have to explain away more than just a couple of disconnected sayings. It appears that actually reading the New Testament limits the possible scenarios more than many people would like.
Brown's Approach
One of the main reasons I love Brown's book is his approach to Christology. He says it thus:
In opting for a desciptive approach to
the NT evidence without embracing “cannot have” or “must
have” presuppositions that stem from emphasizing one side ofthe “true
God, true man” issue, I am not denying that proponents of such
presuppositions have something to Contribute to the overall
christological picture. Objections raised by philosophers and scientists
on one side and corollaries drawn by theologians on the other must
be considered seriously, but they must not be allowed to
determine what the NT reports.
In other words, the evidence doesn't care if you believe it or not. Christ was reported by both his adherents and his enemies as having performed notable miracles. That is evidence, whether you believe the miracles really happened or not. You can look for naturalistic explanations of the miracles (Jesus didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes, that's just a story introduced later), but you have to actually explain the evidence and not just wish it away. Conversely, you can't just pretend that contradictory passages in the Gospels aren't contradictory. You have to face the evidence that is there and not pretend that some of it doesn't exist, or doesn't matter, just because it doesn't agree with your presuppositions. This doesn't mean that Brown doesn't allow wiggle room for honest differences in belief. What he doesn't allow is arbitrary picking and choosing of what he himself will examine when trying to understand the Christ of the New Testament. The implicit invitation is for us to do likewise and really examine the books that we've had in front of us all our lives.
Brown is intimately aware of a number of prejudices found in approaches to New Testament christology. He highlights a couple more in his chapter on Jesus' views of his own mission:
We come now to the most difficult area
for the discernment of Jesus’ own christology-difficult because of
the lack of evidence. After Jesus’ death Christians reflected
intensely on Jesus’ identity, particularly in terms of titles that
expressed their faith: Jesus is . . . Messiah/Christ, or Lord, or Son
of God, or Son of Man, or even God (APPENDIX III). . . here we
confine ourselves to the very limited evidence for Jesus’
application of the titles Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man to
himself or his acceptance of them when applied by others.
Before I begin, some cautions are in
order. First, were we to decide that Jesus did not use or accept one
or the other of these titles, that would be no decisive indication
that Christians were unjustified interpretative combination of
several passages. Yet any affirmation that all this development must
have come from early Christians and none of it came from Jesus
reflects one of the peculiar prejudices of modern scholarship. A
Jesus who did not reflect on the OT and use the interpretative
techniques of his time is an unrealistic projection who surely never
existed. The perception that OT or intertestamental passages were interpreted to give a
christological insight does not assign a date to the process. To
prove that this could not have been done by Jesus, at least inchoatively, is surely no less difficult to prove than that it was done by him. Hidden behind an attribution to the early church is often the assumption
that Jesus had no christology even by Way of reflecting on the
Scriptures to discern in what anticipated way he fitted into God’s
plan. Can one really think that credible?
Brown passes lightly over the prejudice of many believers, this time. We must be careful and realize that there isn't much solid evidence regarding what Jesus thought of himself. Brown is less gentle with the scholarly prejudice that assumes all high christology postdated Jesus' life and words. Once again, here is the double edged sword of detailed New Testament study.
Interesting Excerpts
Jesus' claim to authority:
Worthy of note is that the oracles are
uttered with first person authority, “I say to
you,” quite unlike the prophetic custom of having God speak (“The Lord
says . . .”: Isa 1:24; Jer 2:12; Hosea 11:11; Amos 3:1 1; etc.). Why
Jesus can speak with such personal authority is never explained
in the Synoptic Gospels; indeed that silence over against the
prophets’ explanation that word of God came to them implies a very high
christology wherein the authority to make demands in God’s
name simply resides in Jesus because of who he is.
This certainly never was obvious to me. It seems you can convincingly argue that Jesus' not claiming authority from God as earlier prophets did is, when put together with the things he said and did, a claim to greater authority that the prophets of old.
The resurrection:
The
developing sequence from the way
in which Jesus presented himself during his lifetime to the
way in which those who believed in him presented him afterwards is
more complex than such a sequence would be for any other figure. In
the case of others one might find an adequate explanation for
development in logical, psychological, and other familiar diagnosable
factors; but in the tradition about Jesus a unique factor massively
intervened that goes beyond human diagnosis, namely, the
resurrection. In the publicly received tradition of Israel (i.e.,
what a later generation would dub canonical) no one had hitherto been
raised from the dead to eternal life, and so this claim of faith
about Jesus had an enormous import. Besides heralding a victory over
death, God’s raising of Jesus to glory vindicated both the origin
and the truth of the authority/power that he had claimed and
manifested. His followers who saw the risen Jesus realized that he
was even more than they had understood during his public ministry.
The resurrection, therefore, makes it very difficult to explain away
as romanticized creation the more explicit christology attested after
the resurrection.
I always thought of the resurrection as one of those things that, while there are plenty of supposed witnesses, it's something there really isn't much proof for, and that scholarship could choose to ignore--even if I wished they couldn't. What I'm seeing as I begin to read is that scholars have to take the resurrection seriously. As a minimum, they have to deal with the fact that early Christians believed it happened. As a maximum, they have to explain why the tomb was empty, and they have to do that by guessing. The historical sources (if they say anything) seem to universally agree that it was empty, but nobody can produce the body to prove how it was emptied. Brown doesn't go into this, but there are entire popular books on it (that I'm not inclined to read) that have collected the historical evidence. I still think it's not provable, and even if we proved Christ was risen, that wouldn't prove everything else we believe, but I was surprised to see how central central the resurrection is to all biblical scholarship, not just the religious.
The tension between Servant and King
All the Gospels present a Jesus who was
clearly Messiah, Son of Man, and Son of God (and sometimes
specifically Lord) during his public ministry. Gospel readers
immediately know this because they are made party to a revelation
connected to the baptism of Jesus where God speaks from heaven and
calls him “My beloved Son” (Mark 1:11; Matt 3:17; Luke 3:22178).
In the two-step resurrection chrÃstology discussed at the end of the
preceding chapter, the ministry of Jesus from the baptism to the
cross Could without difficulty be presented as one of lowliness (Phil
2:7 speaks of Jesus in “the form of a servant”) since exaltation
came only with resurrection. In ministry christology, however, where
exalted status and lowly service coexist, there is inevitable
tension.
Let us consider one way in which that
tension was handled by the evangelists. A resurrection christology
passage, such as Acts 13: 33, can apply Ps 2:7 to Jesus without
qualification: “You are my son; today I have begotten you.” The
Synoptic baptismal designation, “My beloved son; with you I am
well pleased,” has modified Ps 2:7 by combining
it with words (italicized) from the description of the Servant in Isa
42:1. By this combination the evangelists indicate that to understand
Jesus as the messianic king during his public ministry one must
recognize that he was simultaneously both the
Messiah/Son and the Servant who did not
cry out (Isa 42:2) and was pierced for our offenses, bearing the
guilt of all (Isa 53). Since it is not clear that in preChristian
Judaism the ideas of the Messiah and the Suffering Servant had been joined,
Jews who did not accept Christian claims might well point out that a
Messiah whose life terminated in suffering was a drastic Change of
the concept of the expected anointed Davidic king. Christians would
reply that Jesus threw light on the whole of the Scriptures and
showed how once separate passages should be combined.
Beyond this common approach, in
describing the ministry of Jesus individual NT writings treat
differently the tension between the exalted Messiah/Son image and the
lowly Servant; and this difference contributes greatly to the
distinctiveness of each of the four Gospels.
Mark preserves the greatest amount of
lowliness by describing a precrucifixion ministry in which no human
being recognizes or acknowledges Jesus’ divine Sonship. Thus the
christological identity of Jesus is a “secret” known to the
readers (who are told at the baptism) and to the demons (who have
supernatural knowledge; Mark 1:24; 3:1 l; 5:7) but not to those who
encounter him or even to those who follow him as he preaches and
heals. Mark 8:27-33 shows how little even Peter, the most prominent
disciple, has understood Jesus. He has come to recognize that Jesus
is the Messiah, but his understanding of messiahship would not allow
Jesus to suffer. He is like the blind man of 8:22-26: Jesus has laid
hands on the man, and he has come to partial sight (people look like
trees); but it will take further action by Jesus before he sees
clearly. If Mark’s readers or hearers wonder why Jesus does not
reveal his christological identity clearly to his disciples, the
scene of the transfiguration in Mark 9:2-8 supplies an answer. There
Jesus is transfigured before them and the glory that has been hidden
throughout the ministry shines forth brightly.
The Gospels are easy to read. Thank goodness, or I never would have read them the few times I have. Apparently I missed a few things in my reading, though.
Jesus gives Judas permission to go off
to betray him (13:27-30). When he says “I am,” the party
of Roman soldiers and Jewishpolice that have come to arrest him
fall backwards to the ground(18:6). The disciples of the Johannine
Jesus do not flee as he is arrested; he arranges for them to be let
go so that it may be seen that he has not lost any of them (18:8-9).
This Jesus does not die alone and abandoned; not only is the Father
always with him (16:32), but at the foot of the cross stand his
mother and the beloved disciple (19:25-27)-symbols of a believing
community that he has gathered.
Therefore, knowing that he has
accomplished all that the Father has given him to do and has completed the
Scripture, he can decide “It is finished” and give over his spirit
(19228-30). Obviously, as last words, this is a far cry from the “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” of Mark and Matt.
These examples suffice to show that
despite the four evangelists’ agreement that during his ministry
Jesus was already Messiah and Son of God, the way in which they
balance that with a picture of him as rejected and misunderstood varies so
that very different Gospel pictures of Jesus emerge. For those who
accept the later church confession of Jesus as true God and true
man, the different picture in each Gospel, while supporting overall
that confession, gives its peculiar insight into one or the other
side of that mystery: Mark, for instance, more insight into Jesus as
true man; John, more insight
into Jesus as true God. No one Gospel
would enable us to see the whole picture, and only when the four
are kept in tension among themselves has the Church come to
appreciate who Jesus is.
I always thought the evangelists described the same events. I still accept it as a matter of trust that they did, and that they each came fairly close to things that really happened, but even if I accept that, they were telling stories with agendas, and I can learn more if I can see their agendas.
Conclusions
Once again, I have both found new thoughts to enrich my understanding, and plenty of room to remain the kind of believer I am. Scholarship places limits on what I can responsibly accept as true. I need to adjust to those limits. I can work on that. Still, an understanding of Christ arrived at without the evidences of the Book of Mormon and modern scripture fails to address the divine Jesus I know. I look forward to when a Mormon Raymond Brown tackles the New Testament and helps me see Jesus with new eyes. If you know of one, tell him or her to get writing, please.
Making One
