Paul Rhodes Eddy and Greg Boyd, The
Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic
Jesus Tradition. Baker Academic, 2007.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
What
is the task of biblical criticism? It is to advance the understanding of
the Bible by applying new methods to the study of the text. One hopes to
learn more and new things abut the text. By contrast, what is the task
of Christian apologetics? It is essentially one of retrenchment. It
wants to turn the clock back on criticism and in effect to learn less
about the Bible, to undo all that critics consider progress. The
apologist makes minimal concessions to critical method, using it
opportunistically to try to vindicate the Bible as the kind of prop he
needs it to be for the sake of his faith. The apologist who pretends to
be a biblical critic is like the medical missionary headed for the wilds
of Africa or Amazonia: he is sacrificing his time and comfort for the
gospel’s sake when he would, given his druthers, be doing something
else. One senses on every page that the Christian apologist wishes that
the Higher Criticism of scripture had never been invented (by Satan) to
confuse matters. Just as the TV repairman would ideally rather be
sitting home watching TV than out fixing it, the apologist does what he
thinks he has to do (as a secret agent behind enemy lines), though he
would much rather be simply preaching the gospel. But then again, that
is what he is really doing anyway. And that much would be perfectly
clear even if every single critic-vs.-apologist debate (and even the
book under review here) did not end with a bald-faced evangelistic
invitation.
It is dangerous to
introduce a damning quote that the nasty reviewer may turn back upon the
quoters. Here is one such: “this methodology exhibits a tendency ‘to
press toward conclusions that seem to be established a priori,
either on theoretical grounds or because the data may prove
uncongenial.’” (Snyder on Hezser on Harris) (p. 242). This book takes,
in the traditional style of historical apologetics, a completely
deductive a priori approach, trying to nibble away at critical
methods and conclusions with quibbling and caviling objections that are
often beside the point. The authors appropriate the rhetoric of
post-colonial critics to make it look like only Dead White Males would
scruple to accept miracle claims. Like “Womanist” “theologians,” Eddy
and Boyd have claimed the laurel wreath of “victim” for fundamentalism
so as to dignify credulity as a method. It would be a Eurocentist,
ethno-biased slur to “people’s religion” the world over if we did not
broaden the analogy of present-day experience (with which to judge past
event claims) to include that of various Pentecostals, Third World
shamans, and New Agers. The viewpoint of such a “confederacy of dunces”
the authors dub a “democratized epistemology.” That is just the
sleight-of-hand that Intelligent Design Creationists employ to get their
quack science included in public school curricula. In fact, the approach
of Eddy and Boyd is reminiscent of Intelligent Design propaganda at a
number of revealing points, as we shall see.
Our apologists, though
certainly more widely read in many relevant fields than any predecessor
(certainly more than the pompous N.T. Wright), manage to have learned
nothing important from it. For one thing, and it is perhaps the main
thing, Eddy and Boyd simply cannot bring themselves to grasp the
difference between methodological and metaphysical naturalism. They
insist that the only reason critics refuse to acknowledge any miracle
stories as probably true is that said critics are a stuck-up elite with
an anachronistic commitment to a quaint creed of naturalism and/or
Deism. They brand me personally as a naturalist, though I have
repeatedly rejected this label (even in public debates with Greg Boyd).
I regard it as the height of arrogant foolishness for mere mortals to
pontificate on the nature and workings of a largely unknown universe.
Naturalism as a philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with my
historical methodology. Nor, I am convinced, does it affect, much less
vitiate, the work of critics like Bultmann—or even David Hume. Boyd and
Eddy manage to find various quotes from Bultmann, Robert W. Funk, and
others in which they confess (or seem to) a personal belief in
metaphysical naturalism, and here the apologists think to have found the
smoking gun. But such beliefs have nothing to do with methodological
naturalism (AKA methodological atheism AKA the surprise-free method).
Let’s give it one more try. Greg? Paul? Are you listening? Troeltsch’s
“principle of connection” does not say we know or believe that
all events happen according to unbroken, immanent
cause-and-effect. We weren’t there; we don’t know. That is why we have
to try to devise methods like this to tell us what most probably
happened. All we can do is to assume a cause-and effect nexus,
just like the TV weatherman. We use the only guide we have. And
experience tells us that whenever a scientist or historian has stopped
short, shrugging and saying, “Well, I can’t explain it! I guess
it must be a miracle!” he has later regretted it. Someone else was not
willing to give up, and, like a detective on a Cold Case Files
show on TV, he or she did manage to find the neglected clue. Willard
Scott does not pretend to know for a fact that a sovereign God will not
reach down and stop the lightning bolt from starting a forest fire
tomorrow. He does not know that the nostrils of El Shaddai or Jupiter
Pluvius will not stir up a Tsunami next week. He can do no more than
extrapolate from current, known trends what is probably going to
happen. Big news: we can trace only factors that we can trace, though
for all we know there may be others.
Likewise, with the
“principle of analogy.” There is no claim here (nor in poor,
much-maligned Hume) that nothing out of the ordinary happens or ever can
happen. (“What? You mean a politician told the truth last night?”) There
is no dogma, no certitude, that miracles do not and never can occur. We
don’t have a time machine; we don’t know what did or didn’t happen.
Again, that’s why we have to fashion these conceptual instruments, crude
though they may be, to try to surmise what probably happened,
which is all we can ever “know.” And analogy forbids us to deem
“probable” any event without reliable corroboration by analogy with
present-day experience. I am a good historian when I get home, plop down
in front of the TV, switch it on and see an image of a giant creature
smashing Tokyo, and I do not infer, “Oh! I must be watching CNN!”
Is it because I know darn well that monsters do not and cannot exist? I
know no such thing! Cryptozoology tells us we may yet discover lingering
dinosaurs hidden away here and there (though none is likely to be this
big). All I know is that I have seen the like of this big boy in
a number of Toho Studios flicks over the years, and that this is
probably Gojira or Baragon, and that I am probably watching
the Sci-Fi Channel, not CNN. Analogy impels me toward the matching
genre. Thus, if Buddhist devotional lore provides a close analogy to the
Matthean tale of Peter walking on the water, sinking as he becomes
distracted, but no experience of today, not even in the Indonesia
Revival of the 70s, shows me such things occurring—what am I to
conclude? Should I not, especially in view of the obvious homiletical
motif of both stories, conclude that Matthew’s story is probably
another legend? Why tar me with the brush of unbelieving naturalism?
(Please note by the way, that in The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man,
I never invoke the mere presence of miracles in the narrative as
a reason to reject a gospel story as historically improbable.)
Nothing in Hume or
Troeltsch or Bultmann, that I can see, bids us reject miracle claims
without weighing the evidence. It is just that, given the limitations
imposed upon us (until we invent the time machine, that is), we cannot
detect “probable miracles” even if they happened! Historical inquiry
cannot touch them, even if time travel would show them to have been
real! I believe this was the position of Karl Barth. Barth knew that
faith and historiography entailed very different epistemologies. Faith
claims to be able to do an end-run around the data and to obtain
certainty about an ostensible miracle via some other way. But what way
is that? It is, I think, nothing more than the will to believe.
Listen to the parting words of Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy: “Our
historiographical conclusions, of course, do not yet come close to the
surrendered, trusting relationship to the living Christ that lies at the
heart of the Christian faith. But no amount of strictly historical
reasoning or evidence can take one to that point. At best,
historical reasoning can point in a more or less probable direction. To
speak now as Christian theologians: the Holy Spirit, personal
commitment, and covenant trust must carry one the rest of the way” (p.
454). But they have been speaking as Christian theologians all along. In
all their determination to build into the historical-critical method a
“recognition” of miracles as probable, they have been trying to smuggle
in a decision to believe. They imagine themselves to have maintained a
strict separation between a supposedly “historical” acceptance of
miracles as probable events of the past, as distinct from religious
belief about those events. They aver that the historian, as
historian, should accept that Jesus rose from the dead. But, they say,
it would take a hat-switch to the theologian’s role to decide that this
miracle held salvific significance. But I would suggest that, by urging
that a “resurrection” be accepted as a “supernatural” (not just an
anomalous) event, Boyd and Eddy have already smuggled in soteriology,
much as in that scene in Animal House when the Food King cashier
catches hapless freshman Pinto trying to sneak past her with his sweater
and pants stuffed grotesquely with roasts, hams, and packages of ground
meat.
Why can they not see that
to come to a point of feeling stumped and then throwing up one’s hands
and exclaiming, “God did it!” has the exact same value as saying, “God
only knows!” In other words, it is to say we just don’t have the
explanation, not that we do, and that it is one that defies explanation
just as much as that puzzle we are invoking it to explain! To jump the
gun and say “God did it!” is to wave one’s theological wand to transform
agnosticism into fideism. In the last analysis, Boyd and Eddy are
biblicists whose “historical” judgments are simply a matter of the Holy
Ghost-inspired (they think) will to believe. They know that would never
pass for historical method, so they engage in what Freud call
projection. While the fault is their own, vitiating the probabilistic
method of historians via “the obedience of faith,” they project the
fault onto the genuine critic, urging that if he would only accept the
bare possibility of the miraculous, he could start being honest with the
text. But, beneath their shameful shell game, our authors are exalting
faith and calling it historical judgment.
The phoniness of their
enterprise is evident from the way they have to misrepresent Hume and
Bultmann. Hume held the door open for precisely the “out” Boyd and Eddy
ask us to entertain: Hume already allows us to accept a miracle report
provided any naturalistic explanation would sound even more far-fetched
than a supernatural one. In appealing to the universal facts of human
experience, Hume is being neither deductive nor circular. He is merely
appealing to what everyone knows: the frequent reports of the
extraordinary we hear from UFO abductees, Loss Ness Monster fans, people
who see ghosts or claim psychic powers always seem to turn out to be
bunk upon examination. Ask Joe Nickell. Ask James Randi. Ask the
evangelical stage magician Andre Kole, who exposed Filipino “psychic
surgeons.” So someone reports to you that he has seen his uncle Mel
alive again after his cremation. Are you going to believe him? Even if
you believe Jesus rose from the dead, I think you will not be quick to
conclude that Uncle Mel did, too. What would you say are the chances
your friend is mistaken? Probably pretty high. If your friend introduced
you to the living Uncle Mel, I bet you would immediately doubt whether
it was really he who was cremated, if it was all some kind of joke.
Everybody would think you were pretty silly if you took to the streets
proclaiming that Uncle Mel had risen from the dead.
This notion of granting
that a miracle happened, or that the supernatural intervened, when we
can find no adequate naturalistic explanation—do you see where this is
headed? Pretty soon any miracles the Bible says happened will
fall into the same bag. Elijah called down fire from the sky to roast
hundreds of Samaritan soldiers? Well, no naturalistic explanation’s
going to be able to account for that, but we’re still entitled to
believe it anyway. Why? Because there’s compelling reason to say it
happened. And what is that reason? I suppose, Socrates, it is simply
that the Bible says it happened! What other reason can there be if the
normal pointers to historical probability are absent? We see in the long
run that Boyd and Eddy just want us to believe what the Bible says, and
when we don’t, they flog us with the wet noodle of “naturalistic
presuppositions.”
Here we see a twin to
Michael Behe’s fraudulent “irreducible complexity” argument against
evolution. He points to transitional features required as stations on
the way toward a creature evolving toward something with survival value.
But the transitional version does not yet possess the “envisioned”
survival value. Half an eye has no utility. The creature has to make it
the next step, and the next, until finally it reached greater eyesight
with its survival value. What gets it there? Evolution must have
proceeded according to the plan of a “Designer.” (Behe does not admit
being on chummy enough terms to call him by his name, God.) In the same
way, Eddy and Boyd will not, they say, presume to read Christian
theology into what they claim is a mere research result: yes, the
supernatural must have intervened to work this miracle, but that hardly
implies it is a marvelous work and a wonder wrought by Jehovah. Oh no:
that would be a further step, a step of faith.
Eddy and Boyd would no
doubt protest that they are not calling for belief in God, as if “the
supernatural” were not merely a transparent mask like Behe’s
“Intelligent Designer.” But it is clear they are. Here’s why. Recall
their endless lambasting of Bultmann and his ilk for refusing to accept
gospel events that are parallel to the experiences of Third World
peoples. This is very puzzling since Bultmann freely admits that Jesus
did what he and his contemporaries regarded as miracles, both of healing
and of exorcism. Whatever you may want to make of them, Bultmann said,
you have to admit they might have happened because such things, such
scenes, occur today. Isn’t this what Boyd and Eddy demand? You see, here
is the nub of the matter: it is apparently not good enough to admit that
anomalous events occurred. No, Bultmann’s unforgivable sin is that he
will not jump from this diving board and confess, as a historian,
that Jesus did miracles by the power of Jehovah God.
I call Behe’s “irreducible
complexity” argument fraudulent because it was refuted long before he
made it. George Gaylord Simpson addressed the same claim in his The
Meaning of Evolution (1949), supplying a page full of examples of
extant living creatures with every conceivable degree of light
sensitivity, together with an explanation of how each tiny increment of
light sensitivity has increased survival value. No mystery there. Nor is
there any case of New Testament miracle stories which cannot most
readily be explained, a la Occam’s Razor, naturalistically (as an
overblown retelling or an outright fiction). And this is most especially
true of the resurrection stories. (Boyd and Eddy certainly do nothing to
make a historical resurrection seem impossible to deny.) Now Barth may
have been right: maybe God did raise Jesus from the dead in
space-time-history, but the fact is irrecoverable by historical method.
Fine, whatever. But don’t dress up the will to believe as some fancy
epistemology, much less the “open historical-critical method.” Nor is
this gambit anything new: Gerhard Maier (The End of the
Historical-Critical Method? 1977) called the same shall game the
“historical-biblical method.”
Boyd and Eddy pull another
fast one when they attack and deride the post-modern doctrine of
“incommensurability” in order, as they imagine, to pull it out from
under Van A. Harvey, who had the goods on them and their approach forty
years ago (The Historian and the Believer, 1967). Harvey says
that the historian cannot simply jump out of his historical skin to
allow himself to embrace the beliefs possible to the ancients and their
very different raft of assumptions. Here and elsewhere, Boyd and Eddy
speak of biblical critics as an insular group of snobs who abdicate all
responsibility for their beliefs, merely acquiescing to the suppositions
of the momentary Zeitgeist. No one can give Van Harvey a fair
reading and come out thinking he means this. His book, in fact, is
filled with reasons he and his critical colleagues in the modern
age have abandoned ancient credulity in favor of fine-tuned historical
method. But if Harvey can be caricatured as a poster boy for passive
subjectivity (“we can’t help being the mouthpieces of our age”), then
Boyd and Eddy have exempted themselves from having to take his actual
arguments seriously.
But then our apologists
pivot to wrap themselves in the post-colonial outrage against the Dead
White Males of Western academia. How dare the higher critics exclude the
beliefs and experiences of the Third World and the miracle-mongering
ancients? We must instead construct an Affirmative Action epistemology
that will include their beliefs, too. What hypocrisy all this is! For
Boyd and Eddy will go on to argue in a later chapter that the ancients
were not particularly credulous, were indeed just as skeptical of
claimed miracles as moderns are! They need to argue this way long enough
to promote the idea that the early Christians must have had good reasons
to believe in the resurrection, etc., rather than just believing any old
rumor someone told them. It is a way of pretending that the ancients
were critical historians and would never have believed in Jesus’
miracles if they weren’t forced to by the Humean caveat that miracle
belief is preferable to far-fetched naturalistic rationalizations. So
what were they? Critical moderns before their time (so we can accept
their “analyses” of miracles we ourselves cannot witness)? Or were they
easy believers in demons and spirits and wonders (which would forbid our
being skeptical about them since we must embrace “democratized
epistemology”)?
Another egregious case of
Janus apologetics, facing both ways at once, is Boyd’s and Eddy’s
argument that the resurrection of Jesus cannot have been borrowed from
polytheistic mythemes. Their first step is to circumscribe a magic zone
from about 165 BCE to 70 CE when there was no Jewish inclination, but
rather the reverse, to accept Hellenistic influence. They figure that
the Hasmonean victory over the Seleucid Hellenizers put an end once and
for all to the temptation to Hellenize. Hellenization began to rear its
ugly head again only after the Roman victory over Jews. This strikes me
as a gratuitous assumption. Indeed, the fact that there is during their
magic period much evidence of Jewish anti-Hellenistic Zealotry surely
means the “danger” of influence continued. You don’t strengthen the
fortifications when there is no enemy at the door. And no evidence of
Hellenization? What about the astrology of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Ah, er,
it’s not what it looks like! The presence of horoscopes at Qumran
doesn’t mean the sectarians actually used or believed in them, say the
apologists. Perish the thought! It was probably because they needed them
to write scholarly refutations of them! And second- to third-century
synagogues with mosaics of Hercules, Dionysus and the Zodiac? Purely
decorative, that’s all. Come on! Obviously, you don’t decorate your
house of worship with images of gods you find abhorrent! And this
was just at the time Yavneh Judaism was getting stronger and stronger!
Judaism just was not a solid monolith even at this time, much less in
Jesus’ time.
Our authors find it
necessary to misrepresent Margaret Barker, too. She argues very
powerfully (in The Older Testament and The Great Angel: A
Study of Israel’s Second God) that popular Judaism had not embraced
the monotheism of the Exilic prophets yet, even in spite of priestly
indoctrination and interdiction. She ventures that Jesus as the
resurrected Son of God was a direct survival of Israelite polytheism.
Boyd and Eddy cannot seem to get through their learned heads that Barker
is not talking about a Jewish embrace of pagan mythemes. Her point is
that mythemes the rabbis later reinterpreted (explained away) as pagan
were always indigenously Israelite, shared with Canaanite neighbors, not
borrowed from them. Thus there is no need to posit some repulsive
borrowing from hated paganism to account for easy Jewish familiarity
with dying and rising gods. Ezekiel knew the daughters of Jerusalem were
engaged in ritual mourning of the slain god Tammuz even in the days of
the Exile. Baal and Osiris were well known in Israel, too.
Boyd and Eddy indulge in
overkill when it comes to the dying and rising gods, summarizing
Jonathan Z. Smith’s failed case for dismantling this ideal type with not
even a footnote referring to, much less rebutting, my detailed
refutation of Smith in Deconstructing Jesus. They follow Bruce
Metzger, Edwin Yamauchi and other apologists in arguing, absurdly, that
the Mystery Religions borrowed the dying and rising god mytheme from
Christianity—even though early Christian apologists like Tertullian,
Firmicus Maternus, and Justin Martyr admit the pagan versions were
earlier (the devil fabricated the gospel events long before they
happened with Jesus)!
So there was no need to go
to paganism for the resurrection doctrine/myth. It was home-grown in
earlier Israelite polytheism. One need not throw up one’s hands in mock
bafflement that the Christian resurrection faith could not have come
from paganism so it must have been ignited by a real resurrection! This
is like saying space aliens must have built the pyramids. It’s a
ridiculous argument, but the apologists see how ridiculous it is
only once they have to refute someone else’s use of it against them!
What about the worship of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher
Rebbe, believed by most of his followers during his lifetime to be the
Messiah, though he never said so? He died, and immediately his fans
predicted his soon return in glory and began hailing him as God
incarnate! Now where did they get such a notion, which non-Lubavitcher
Jews, needless to say, do not exactly welcome? If it sprang
spontaneously from messianic adoration, and overnight after the Rebbe’s
death, there would seem to be no miracle required to explain how Jewish
disciples soon ascribed incarnate divinity to Jesus, right? Oh no! The
cases are not similar at all, Boyd and Eddy tell us. The Lubavitchers
must have—borrowed it from Christianity! Yeah, that’s real
likely. Hasidic Jews borrowing myths from the religion they hated most!
If Jesus’ disciples wouldn’t have stooped to borrowing theology from
pagans, there is even less likelihood Hasidic Jews would have cribbed
from Christianity.
We are treated to another
fine display of nimble apologetical pirouetting when Boyd and Eddy
discuss the question of ancient Palestinian Jewish literacy. They make a
good enough case for widespread literacy. I never doubted it. Why are
they interested? Because this fact enables them to speculate (or to
borrow the old speculation of Edgar J. Goodspeed) that the gospels are
not dependent exclusively upon oral transmission. Matthew might have
taken notes (p. 252). One must infer that Boyd and Eddy would feel
uncomfortable with merely word-of-mouth connections between Jesus and
the gospels. No, written sources would be a more secure link, so by all
means let’s posit them. (Myself, I cannot help thinking of the scene in
Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ when Jesus picks
up such a sheaf of notes Matthew has been making, and he rebukes him for
writing lies about him! Just as George Washington’s friend and
biographer admitted fabricating stories and sayings that he felt would
communicate “the real Washington” better than any known facts.)
But then it’s a hundred
eighty degrees around to exploit recent theories of oral transmission of
epics, poems, and sagas. Though we just heard how literate first-century
CE Jewish culture was, now we learn that it was instead a largely oral
culture, like the various African tribes, Balkan shepherd communities,
and Pacific islanders on whom the whole cottage industry of orality
studies, stemming from Albert Lord (The Singer of Tales) and
Millman Parry, base their theories. The point of trying to subsume the
gospels under this rubric is to maximize the reliability of the
underlying oral tradition. Apologists like to make a great deal of the
fact that local history and lore may be transmitted faithfully for
generations within such a closed framework, under the watchful
supervision of both lore-masters who sing or chant the traditions and
their audiences who are like children with a bed time story, refusing to
countenance any significant variations. So far this sounds like a
folkloristic vindication of the Vincent Taylor/F.F. Bruce dictum that
gospel reliability is guaranteed by the “retentive mind of the
oriental.” Except that closer examination disappoints. The crown jewel
of the “controlled local oral tradition” approach, the work of Kenneth
Bailey (Poet and Peasant, etc.), has been thoroughly debunked by
Theodore J. Weeden. Boyd and Eddy admit this, but it doesn’t matter to
them, since they say it was a crummy example anyway. They’re just
throwing Bailey to the wolves and asking you to accept his conclusions
anyway.
Based on these studies,
they insist that oral balladeers were like Johanon ben-Zakkai’s disciple
who was like unto a plastered cistern that loseth not a drop. But then
it turns out that these performers care little for specific wording,
focusing only on the general gist. Uh-oh. Then it turns out that the
order of pericopes varies almost at random with the whim of the
balladeer. We are starting to get very close to form criticism here,
though Boyd and Eddy, who hate form-criticism (for understandable
reasons) do not seem to see it. We must not, they urge, impose
twenty-first century standards of accuracy onto ancient oral texts. Yes:
exactly the point of the form critics, no? The only difference is
another parallel to Intelligent Design Creationist arguments: Boyd and
Eddy will allow only differences in wording within a recognizable story
or saying. They will not countenance changes big enough to make one
saying into a new one with a different point, to retell one story so
much that it becomes another (say, stilling the storm becoming walking
on the water in order to still the storm). This is exactly like the
Creationist willingness to admit the occurrence of “micro-evolution”
within “kinds” of animals so long as one does not posit
“macro-evolution” from one “kind” to another. Boyd’s and Eddy’s fear of
“macro-evolution” in the Jesus tradition is the dread of having to admit
that a saying or story no longer truly represents what Jesus actually
did or said. As they urge critics to do, perhaps Eddy and Boyd ought to
be a bit more critical of the agendas underlying their scholarly
methods.
They sneer at the
form-critical axiom that particular forms in which the sayings or
stories meet us in any way reflect the Sitz-im-Leben of their
use. They fear, rightly, that to admit this would be half-way to
admitting the materials have been designed to serve their purpose and
are thus tendentious fictions. But then they do not mind at all
following Joanna Dewey and Christopher Bryan in taking certain formal
features as implying the public performance of the Gospel of Mark (p.
358) for evangelistic purposes. Isn’t that inference from formal
features to Sitz-im-Leben? Maybe it’s not so perverse an approach
after all.
Form critic Dennis E.
Nineham long ago pointed out how the gospel pericopes, short and sweet
and streamlined as they are, just do not read like eye-witness
testimony. For that we would expect the kind of “table talk” we get in,
say the Acts of John: “Once I said to Jesus…, and he said to me…” Our
gospel pericopes sound like they have been rubbed smooth by the currents
of constant repetition. Boyd and Eddy are happy to point to ethnographic
studies that show even actual eyewitness recollections may, the first
time out, be put into traditional forms for transmission, verbal time
capsules, and that in this manner vivid details and distinctive features
may be sacrificed from the very beginning. Similarly, they aver, the
dynamics of oral tradition dictate that what is actually stated,
preserved in explicit wording, presupposes an informational background
outsiders are unlikely to know, with the result that even good,
on-the-spot recollections may not sound like it. Well, that helps a lot!
Boyd and Eddy obviously imagine they have given themselves permission to
read the clipped and stereotyped mini-narratives of the gospels as
eyewitness testimony despite appearances. But all they have actually
shown is that, even if there should chance to be real eyewitness
testimony in the Jesus tradition, we can no longer recognize it as
such! Formal considerations will have obliterated any evidence of
eye-witness origin.
Another case of
transforming agnosticism into fideism concerns the Mythic Hero Archetype
to which the life of Jesus in the gospels conforms in its entirety, with
no incidental, “secular,” or genuine biographical detail left over. Boyd
and Eddy point out the obvious: that sometimes known historical figures
actually live up to the Archetype. Of course: that is why Joseph
Campbell and others have made so much of it. The problem is that, the
more completely someone’s life story conforms to the mythic-literary
form, the less likely it becomes that their story is genuinely
historical. At such a point they risk becoming lost behind the stained
glass curtain, unless they have left a trail of historical “bread
crumbs.” Augustus Caesar did; Jesus did not. It is especially ironic
that Boyd’s favorite example of a real-live archetypal hero is the Scot
William Wallace, whose exploits came to the screen in the film
Braveheart. Boyd likes to make Wallace a real-life Jesus, implying
that the gospel Jesus could have been just as real. It does not occur to
Boyd that we have no better information about Wallace than about Jesus!
All we have is the ballad
"The Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace, Knight
of Elderslie,” written around
1470
by someone called Blind Harry. He based it on oral tradition describing
events 170 years earlier. Yikes.
Boyd and Eddy are relieved
at last not to have to trouble themselves with the destructive
intricacies of redaction criticism. Again, they defend the right of oral
singers and tradition-transmitters to vary details in the telling as
they prefer, and they do not see that this is no different from
redaction criticism. They suggest that some of the differences of which
Conzelmann and Marxsen and Bornkamm made so much are not changes made by
writers at their desks, but rather the slavish recording of whole oral
performances in which the oral tridents had made ad hoc
variations. Uh, what’s the difference? Why could you not trace a
redactional agenda in an oral performance?
But Boyd and Eddy skip past
that. Their main point is that oral tradents could and would not have
expected their audience to notice tiny differences in details. Lacking
the opportunity of the modern TV viewer who can pause and rewind even a
live TV show to catch what was said a moment ago, the listener of a live
oral performance in the ancient world simply would not have been able to
keep up with and catalogue the sorts of changes redaction critics think
they discern comparing Mark to Luke and Matthew, etc. So far, this is a
point well taken. But it seems to prove too much: it implies that such
oral performance variations could never have survived into written
transcripts, since who could have remembered them? I don’t think this
has occurred to Boyd and Eddy. Their point is rather that all the
tendential patterns of redaction Conzelmann and company think they have
found must be sheer illusion, completely accidental. Slips of the
balladeer’s tongue. I find it difficult to credit that anyone familiar
with the work of the redaction critics can believe that. But I find it
quite easy to believe that apologists who do not want to know
what the redaction critics have to tell them would take the easy way
out, embracing a pious know-nothingism. This is a prime example of what
I mean when I charge that evangelical apologists want to know less about
the Bible, not more, to turn back the clock on criticism, to re-enter
the Sunday School Toyland of fundamentalism. “It was long ago and it was
far away, and it was so much better than it is today.”
So if we do not dismiss the
findings of the redaction critics as so much hallucination, we begin to
realize that the “orality studies” approach is inappropriate. We begin
to realize that Boyd and Eddy are just shopping for a paradigm congenial
to apologetics. Here oral tradition has become anal tradition.
Heilsgeschichte has turned into Bullgeschichte. If the
gospels are in practice so readily understood and profitably studied as
written works, amenable to the methods of reading and analyzing such
works, then I think it is safe to forget about the politically correct
“noble savage” paradigm of African tribal lore-masters and Eskimo
chanters. The gospels seem to be true literary works, so let’s treat
them that way. That is what Burton L. Mack and Vernon K. Robinson are
doing when they point out the similarity of the gospel pronouncement
stories to the Hellenistic chreia so common in Greco-Roman classrooms,
where students demonstrated they understood the gist of a Socrates or a
Diogenes by fabricating a pronouncement story appropriate to each man’s
reputation. I’m afraid that’s bad news for apologists, for it provides a
natural paradigm accounting for the gospel materials independent of any
access at all to supposed eyewitnesses.
Does that rule out any
possible oral-traditional basis to the written gospels? I don’t mean to
discount that, just to point out that the possible parallels Boyd and
Eddy insist on are not the only ones, or even the best ones available.
They seem so sure that oral cultures would not allow for a mass
fabrication of traditional units that would serve only to legitimize
this practice or that belief of some faction of the community. But it
was field studies of the Trobriand Islanders that led Bronislaw
Malinowski to formulate his categories of myths, including
legitimization myths. Closer to home, there is the well-known mass
production of spurious tendential hadith falsely ascribed to the
Prophet Muhammad. The early guardians of hadith felt it was their job to
shepherd the growing tradition into the directions they thought best by
making up opinions and deeds of the Prophet. We do not know if
early Christian tradents engaged in such activities, but neither do we
know that they behaved like Serbian shepherds or African lore-masters!
Given the choice, the Islamic paradigm would seem a lot more likely, if
only because it is closer to home historically and religiously. At any
rate, the wholesale hadith-forging industry is at least as attractive an
option for understanding the developing Jesus tradition. It is based on
a well-known oral-traditional matrix and matches perfectly the model
adopted by Bultmann and the form critics. If oral tradition “really”
worked as Boyd and Eddy say it must, we cannot explain the phenomena of
the hadith.
Or of the Nag Hammadi
gospels! They simply would not exist, or else we must accept them as
historical, too. They, too, claim to stem from eye-witnesses. They, too,
offer us many sayings ascribed to Jesus. If we admit they are
historically spurious, we admit that it was nothing for early Christians
to ascribe their own best thoughts and revelations to their Lord. How
typically contrived and double-tongued for our apologists to begin by
quoting the old “not I but the Lord” text as the rule for all early
Christians (even though they know it may not even intend quotes from a
historical Jesus) as attesting the universal early Christian tendency to
segregate Christian intuitions from dominical sayings—and then to
isolate the prophecies of the Risen Christ through John on Patmos as
some aberration unrepresentative of early Christians generally! For if
the latter were even possibly typical of early Christian practice, then
Bultmann would be justified in chalking up some Jesus-attributed sayings
to Christian prophecy. And then Pandora’s Box is open.
Boyd and Eddy gleefully
point out what so many other retrenchers before them have: if the needs
of the church dictated what Jesus would be made retroactively to say,
why do we not find so many of the “hot” issues of early Christianity
discussed by Jesus? Why, for instance, was he not made to mouth
someone’s opinion on the issue of Gentile conversion and circumcision?
But he was: that must be the point of Mark 7:14-19, where we find
a rationalist repudiation of the idea that nonkosher food renders one
unclean. That must be the point of Thomas 53: “His disciples say to him,
‘Is circumcision worthwhile or not?’ He says to them, ‘If it were, men
would be born that way automatically. But the true circumcision in
spirit has become completely worthwhile.’” Would not Jesus be made to
address the issue at stake in the Cornelius story of Acts 10-11,
missionaries eating Gentile food? But he does address it in Luke
10:7, where the seventy, in contrast to the twelve (in other words,
future missionaries to the Gentiles), are told to “eat and drink what
they set before you.” The Gentile Mission as a whole? What do you think
the Great Commissions, not to mention the distance-healings of the
children of Gentiles, are all about? Table fellowship with Gentiles, as
in Antioch? That’s the point of Jesus being shown eating with “sinners.”
Eating meat offered previously to idols? Someone must have realized that
Jesus could not plausibly be pictured addressing this in Jewish
Palestine, so they left this one in the form of a post-Easter prophecy
(Revelation 2:20), a concern for verisimilitude not often observed. The
role of women in the community? That is the point of Luke 10:38-42,
where, depending on how one understands it, the issue is either women
serving the Eucharist (Martha) or women embracing the stipended,
celibate life as “widows” and “virgins” (Mary). Speaking in tongues?
Matthew 6:7 (“When you pray, do not say ‘batta” as the heathen
do.”) is against it; the late Mark 16:17 (“they will speak with new
tongues.”) is for it.
By contrast, Boyd and Eddy
utterly fail to meet the challenge of G.A. Wells: if Paul had our fund
of Jesus sayings available in oral tradition, why does he not settle
issues at once with a dominical saying, e.g., on payment of taxes to
Caesar, on celibacy, on fasting? And when Boyd and Eddy follow James D.G.
Dunn and others in the bluff that all the parallels between epistolary
maxims and gospel sayings are unattributed allusions to the gospels by
the epistle writers, it is just pathetic. If the point is to win
obedience to the teaching of Jesus, who in his right mind would not pull
rank by explicitly proof-texting Jesus?
Boyd and Eddy continue
their march into yesteryear with an appeal to take with renewed
seriousness Papias’ authorial ascriptions of the gospels of Matthew and
Mark. He was in a good position to get the facts from the eyewitness
apostles, was he not? Well, then, I ask, must we also accept what Papias
says about Matthean priority? About Judas Iscariot swelling up bigger
than an oxcart and pissing live worms? The sole surviving example of
Papias’ collection of Jesus traditions supposedly derived from “the
Elders” sounds like a garbled quote from the Syriac Apocalypse of
Baruch.
I suppose the clearest,
most outrageous example of Boyd and Eddy advocating old-time
fundamentalism and calling it criticism is their defense of
harmonization, indeed, their attempt to elevate it to an axiom of
criticism! They proudly point to a pair of reports about the hanging of
two men; according to one report, they were strung up from trees, but
according to another, they depended from a bridge. A contradiction, no?
What do you know? News photos demonstrated that both were true! For some
unknown reason, the bodies were displayed first in one circumstance,
then the other! Strange but true. And so it would it turn out, if we had
the photos, in every case of gospel contradictions. Oh, would it? It
seems to me that Eddy and Boyd are trying to persuade us to make the
exception into the rule. Do they really think every secular,
non-biblical “apparent contradiction” can be resolved in such a way? If
not, what’s the point of invoking this example? We are henceforth to
baptize the improbable into the probable. But as F.C. Baur said long
ago, the true critic admits that anything is possible but asks “What is
probable?”
Finally, let me venture to
agree with Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy on one major methodological point.
Though they quote me out of context on the question, my approach is to
assume the burden of proof in challenging the historical accuracy of any
and every bit of gospel material I analyze. I believe it is best and
only natural not to dismiss any of the gospel sayings or stories unless
there seems to be some problem, e.g., an anachronism, a contradiction.
And never do I count against a story that it involves ostensible
supernaturalism. I do not want to beg the question. See my gospel
analyses Deconstructing Jesus and The Incredible Shrinking Son
of Man, and you will see my approach. What Boyd and Eddy do not like
is the results I have come to in this manner. Naturally they would
prefer to be able to rule them out of court a priori by accusing
me of sweeping away all the material on the basis of a naturalistic
bias, which in fact I do not hold.
One may render the
following verdict on the case the authors have made on rehabilitating
the historical reliability of the Synoptic Gospels: nice try.