Christ

by Jack Miles

  For Catholicism, it was a simple matter to reject Strauss and Renan: They were merely branches on a tree of rationalist history whose roots Rome had long since condemned. For Protestantism, the matter was much more complex, since Protestantism as a reform movement within Christianity had been built in part upon the historical reliability of the Bible. The emerging dilemma was exquisitely posed early in the twentieth century by Albert Schweitzer in an erudite but forcefully argued and indeed epoch-making work translated into English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Synthesizing a century and more of critical research, Schweitzer found one conclusion inescapable: Jesus of Nazareth had erroneously believed that the end of his earthly life and the end of the world were to be a single apocalyptic event. So inextricable was this idea from the rest of Jesus’ preaching, Schweitzer thought, that no one could embrace the historical Jesus intellectually without accepting the mistake that, historically, Jesus had made. Poignantly, Schweitzer himself, who could not escape his own modernity, could not renounce Christianity either, though his commitment to it now became more mystical than intellectual. He resolved his dilemma not by any theological breakthrough but by a heroic act of Christian charity: his decision to become a medical doctor and move permanently to Africa—as if to say with the Paul of 1 Corinthians 13:13, “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

  Schweitzer believed that the historical Jesus not only could be but essentially had been recovered. When he wrote, “There is nothing more negative than the result of research into the life of Jesus,” he did not mean to express any doubt that the quest for the historical Jesus had succeeded but only unflinching realism regarding the religious relevance of its success. “The mistake,” he wrote,

  was to suppose that Jesus could come to mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves. That is not possible. First because such a Jesus never existed. Second because, although historical knowledge can no doubt introduce greater clarity into an existing spiritual life, it can never call life into existence. History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it.2

  During the century after Schweitzer, the response of intellectual Protestantism to the subversion of its trust in the historical reliability of the New Testament oscillated between two options. The first, beginning not long after World War I and fading toward the end of the century, was an attempt—much in the spirit of Schweitzer—to neutralize history rather than to use it. The second option, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and climaxing at the beginning of the twenty-first, has been an attempt to create a religiously usable history by redoubled effort.

  The first option is associated above all with the name of Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann’s strategy, a brilliant one, was to retreat from the Reformation motto sola scriptura (“by scripture alone”) to the more basic motto sola fide (“by faith alone”). How important, he and his followers asked, should biographical information about Jesus be to the Christian of today if, quite clearly, such information was of little importance to Saint Paul? It is indeed the case that Paul, who was a contemporary of Jesus and who could presumably have provided much information about him to his many converts, never sees fit to do so in the letters that constitute so large a portion of the New Testament. Paul knows that Jesus died and rose and that he is the Savior of the world. There Paul is content to let the matter rest. There Martin Luther, whose preoccupations were theological rather than historical, had been content to let the matter rest. And there Bultmann was prepared to let the matter rest as well. What mattered was not how accurate or detailed one’s historical knowledge of Jesus was. What mattered, rather, was whether, when Christ was preached, one could respond in faith. Thus, Paul became not just the archetypal believer but, by extrapolating from his attitude toward the facts of Jesus’ life, the archetypal historical noncombatant. And thus Bultmann, tacitly conceding that sixteenth-century Protestant theology may have used the New Testament uncritically in challenging the Roman church, retreated to the position that interposing the authority of the historian between the repentant sinner and the Savior was little better than reintroducing the human authority of the Roman Catholic church in the same mediating role. Turning twentieth-century history against nineteenth-century historicism, Bultmann deployed his formidable learning to demonstrate that the Gospels were so fully subordinated to the needs of early Christian preaching and instruction that they could have no historical reliability whatsoever—but so be it: What happened, Bultmann maintained, was vastly less important than that it happened.3

  The second option—in recent decades, the dominant option, though no single writer has assumed the importance of a Schweitzer or a Bultmann—was, first, to assert or imply a normative function for the New Testament not as a mere literary text but, rather, as the carrier of a “kernel of historical truthy”; and, second, in pursuit of that historical kernel, to apply to the critique of the received text the same purgative fervor that sixteenth-century Protestantism brought to its critique of the received church. It was by this route that, during the latter decades of the twentieth century, the exposure of historical falsehood within the New Testament acquired the unmistakable mood of a religious mission. Yes, much of the canonical text had to be rejected as church invention, but something, it was clearly hoped, would remain that could function for all Christians—perhaps, some dared hope, even for non-Christians—as canonical scripture had functioned when Protestantism was young. Thus, reviewing a popularization of this historical criticism of the New Testament for The New York Times, one enthusiast exulted that it “does a better job than the canonical Gospels of presenting the root mythology of an expansive idea whose time, evidently, is still coming” and “accomplishes something the church itself would like to achieve: to wipe the slate clean of a shameful catalog of crimes and start over again with the original intention.”4 A brief reform movement in the Roman Catholic church, culminating in the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), resembled the Protestant Reformation in several regards, one of which was a readiness to invoke the Bible against church tradition and church authority. In this mood, a good many Catholic recruits were enrolled for this second of the two essentially Protestant options just mentioned.

  What complicated historical criticism of the New Testament undertaken in this archetypally Protestant spirit was that the proportion of stained to clear glass was not what historical critics would have wished. A window that might at least have been partially clear was found, when examined pane by pane, to contain scarcely a single one unstained by art and religious ideology. Moreover, whenever one scholar labeled a pane clear, another scholar was likely to take a closer look and find it stained. By the turn of the century, almost all the panes were so labeled, and the end point of a learned adventure begun courageously in the spirit of sola scriptura had come to seem very nearly sola ecclesia (“by the church alone”). The church, which was to have been reformed using scripture as a norm, turned out to have created scripture for its own purposes.5

  The secular alternatives: church history and literary appreciation

  To the fully secular historian, of course, the New Testament would be of little interest unless a church of historic importance had grown up around the beliefs to which it gives expression. Indeed, genuinely secular New Testament scholars (and there certainly are some) understand themselves as, in effect, historians of the very early church. The Gospels of Matthew and John end with scenes in which Jesus commissions his disciples to spread his message around the world. The Gospel of Luke is half of a two-volume work, with the second volume devoted entirely to the foundation of the church. The Letters of Paul are all addressed to recently founded churches. New Testament scholars may easily enough rest the case for their research on the importance—large, even if not infinitely so—of the Christian church as a historical phenomenon.

  As t
hey do this, however, their study of the New Testament text under-goes—in principle, if not always in practice—a paradoxical change. This is so because passages in the text that, though not historical in themselves, have fostered the growth of the church acquire in the end greater historical importance than duller or more cryptic passages that may hint at what actually happened or what the historical Jesus was actually like. Thus, the line “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone” (John 8:7) is quite probably an invention of the early church, but that line captured the imagination of the world. It is, accordingly, quite properly described as a historic line. The New Testament contains a great many such brilliant adulterations of the historical record. Were it otherwise, no one would now remember cryptic but probably authentic lines like “Let the dead bury their dead” (Matt. 8:22).

  Historical truth within the New Testament text has survived, in other words, only because it has been carried within imaginative invention that enjoyed historic success in the world at large. But to value the inventions over the preserved memories is an inversion of learned priorities that, for a great many historical critics, is almost literally inconceivable. It is to abandon the heroic program of creating what might be called Jesusianity and capitulating to the disappointing but irreversible fact that it is Christianity that became a world religion—capitulating to the fact that had Jesus not been so effectively transformed into Christ and then into God Incarnate, in a process that begins on the earliest pages of the New Testament itself, no one today would be interested in engaging in any historical quest for him.

  The religious relevance of history is not self-evident or self-establishing. A further, constructive step must be taken to establish that relevance, and this step is itself confessionally religious rather than neutrally historical. The action by which religious importance is assigned to history cannot be presented as a discovery but only proposed as a commitment. Thus, when Robert W. Funk, a founder of the “Jesus Seminar,” writes in the prologue to his Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium, “I confess I am more interested in what Jesus of Nazareth thinks about God’s domain than in what Peter the fisherman and Paul the tentmaker thought about Jesus,”6 one perfectly legitimate reply is: “I confess that I am not.” Near the end of the book, when Funk reveals his twenty-one theses for the reform of the faith, explicitly evoking the memory of Martin Luther, he expands on his confession:

  5. We can no longer rest our faith on the faith of Peter or the faith of Paul. I do not want my faith to be a secondhand faith. I am therefore fundamentally dissatisfied with versions of the faith that trace their origins only so far as the first believers; true faith, fundamental faith, must be related in some way directly to Jesus of Nazareth.7

  But what if another man thinks that a faith that confesses its origins in Peter and Paul as well as in Jesus is superior to one that would admit no source but Jesus? What reply can be made to such a man? Jesus, in one of his best-attested teachings (reported both in the Synoptic Gospels and by Paul at 1 Corinthians 7:10–15), opposed divorce under all circumstances; Paul allowed it in some circumstances. Funk prefers Jesus; someone else might prefer Paul. Many in the nineteenth century preferred, on religious grounds, the consciously cosmopolitan Paul to the more ethnocentric Jesus. No historical argument or concatenation of historical facts can settle a dispute that is, in the end, a matter of religious opinion and religious commitment. The very success of historical criticism in showing how pervasive was the influence of “Peter and Paul,” taking them as stand-ins for the entire process by which memory was transformed into literature, has made this religious question—a perfectly legitimate question, of course—increasingly unavoidable.

  As this question comes to the fore, interestingly, a more thoroughgoing secularization and academic normalization of New Testament studies may also come within reach. Erstwhile New Testament scholars whose interests are genuinely and secularly historical may begin—some have already begun—to define their field, as historians do, by a period rather than by a text, while those who continue to define their field by the text may begin to locate their chosen text, for interpretative purposes, in the Western literary canon rather than in the first and second centuries C.E. The truly secular historians may broaden their inquiry into very early church history to include relatively neglected topics like the history of Syriac and Egyptian Christianity (Syria and Egypt being, after Palestine, the regions first Christianized) and the surprisingly early emergence and influence of monasticism. As for the truly secular New Testament critics, they may begin to deal with their chosen text as a work of art rather than mining it as a historical source. Either change brings with it a new set of secondary colleagues and analytic categories, and neither prejudices the continued study of scripture as sacred—that is, as relevant pastorally and theologically to the life of the church.

  So long as history, literature, and religion remain ingredients in a single stew, the metahistory of how ancient writers combined scraps of actual history and remembered speech with literary inventions from various sources may continue to function as a surrogate sacred history for scholars who find that process more meaningful, religiously, than its product. Indeed, the fact that this metahistory, this history of composition, must itself be largely imagined, the evidence for it being so fragmentary, only makes the enterprise more deeply engaging for some of the historical critics committed to it. One begins to hear, however, a certain creaking at the seams.

  The churches of today, which have in no small measure financed the latter stages of this research and have expected somehow to be its beneficiary, have begun to find themselves not so much offended by as oddly indifferent to its findings. The compositional story of “the making of the New Testament” is, after all, a dreadfully bookish story. Even if you accept it, it is not a story to set minds and hearts on fire. The stripped-down, historically defensible, original sayings of Jesus, even if you believe that they are not, rather, the accretion to Jesus of general Hellenistic or Judeo-Hellenistic wisdom, are anticlimactic in their plainness. The reconstructed early-church backdrop of polemic and counterpolemic, by any measure the most plausible part of the reconstruction, is nonetheless unedifying and rather dreary. The historical criticism of the New Testament has, in sum, all the kick of nonalcoholic beer, and some who were once intoxicated by it have awakened with a sobriety hangover.

  Some years ago, as it began to dawn on a few Protestant critics that the reconstruction of the events supposedly behind the text or, worse, the reconstruction of the falsification of those events was in this way being substituted for the text itself as a source of religious authority, a reaction called “canon criticism” sprang up. According to this school of thought, whatever is in the canon must count for the church whether or not it counts for the historian. An older designation that some had come to apply to those passages that held the proverbial kernel of historical truth within the husk of ecclesiastical invention was “the canon within the canon.” Canon criticism sought to deny the validity of any such intracanonical distinction; for if the canon were to be whittled down, then, among many other consequences, the great commentaries of the founding fathers of Protestantism—those of Jean Calvin, above all—could no longer be used. Canon criticism arose from a deep and correct intuition that, first, the game of seeking historical fact behind the text of the New Testament was ultimately a game without an outcome, much less a winner, and that, second, staying within the text rather than going beyond it via historical research could somehow be the first rule of a new game. In practice, however, those who led this movement engaged, most of the time, in the same laborious winnowing of the historical from the unhistorical, the same painstaking speculation about authorship and original audience and so forth, that had always exercised historical criticism. Canon criticism never quite offered a new game. It simply played the historical game more gently, stopping short of drawing the practical conclusions from historical research that the more radical among the historical critics were pre
pared, not to say eager, to draw.

  Meanwhile, all along, an alternative had lain open that was neither religious history (historical Jesus as norm for reformation) nor secular history (Christian church as historical phenomenon). As one participant in the canon-criticism debate put it:

  A really non-historical, literary study of the Bible on the basis of its shapes, styles, and motifs could be very interesting. It would be much more original than canon criticism, which is really still completely tied up in the inherited problems of theology. Instead of endlessly seeking to correct the older [historical] biblical scholarship, it could simply accept the latter as valid and go on its way in its own direction, taking or leaving as much of traditional scholarship as it needed.8

  This third option—lying still in the indefinite future as late as 1982, when James Barr spoke these words—was neither the Jesus of history nor the Christ of faith but the Jesus Christ of literature. This was the option of looking at, rather than seeing through, the rose window.

  The notion of reading the Bible as literature in serene indifference to all that religious commentary has made of it is, at one level, an idea as old as the Enlightenment.9 Barr’s suggestion differs from that combatively secular notion because it emerged in and is deeply colored by an academic context that continues to care intensely about the received tradition of religious commentary, a tradition of which, for fully two hundred years, the larger portion has consisted of historical commentary. Yet a far more searching and programmatic suggestion along these lines was virtually ignored by Bible scholarship nearly a decade earlier when the late Hans W. Frei published The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics.10 Frei grasped, as no other contemporary writer on the Bible then seemed able to do, the novelty—even the oddity—of the notion of historical correspondence as a validating criterion for scriptural authority. He understood where this notion had come from and dreamed, clearly, of an aesthetic response that would recover the literary power that historicism had so eroded. That literary power lay in the delight of internal rather than external correspondences, in gestures from one part of the text to another rather than in confirmations of the text from extratextual evidence.