by Jack Miles
If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you.… But if he refuses to listen to these, report it to the community; and if he refuses to listen to the community, treat him like a gentile or a tax collector.
This is the sort of thing that, nowadays, tends to be collected in a thin book with wide margins and large print and published as The Management Principles of Jesus of Nazareth.
Many other Gospel sayings, however, fall outside the borders of perennial Jewish or Judeo-Hellenistic wisdom, for they relate not to the human condition in general but uniquely to Jesus’ own condition. And of these a great many refer, as does “No one is taking [my life] from me. / I lay it down of my own accord,” to the exceptional circumstances of Jesus’ death. That saying refers, in other words, uniquely to God Incarnate and uniquely to his crucifixion.
Sayings of this second type occur in all four Gospels but with particular frequency in John. When they occur, they interpret the plot in the way that stage directions interpret—that is, deliberately narrow and specify—the meaning of a dramatic action. A reading of the Gospel built around God Incarnate as its protagonist and around the Crucifixion as its central action inevitably highlights sayings of this second type.
As for the rest of Jesus’ teachings, those that in some way illumine the central action receive more attention here than teachings or sayings that might have been spoken by anyone on any appropriate occasion. The latter, much attended to in recent commentary, may or may not be the surest path back to the Jesus of history. What is beyond argument is that the Jesus Christ of literature lives on principally in the Gospel plot and in the words, historical or not, that most directly enhance it.
APPENDIX I
1. Aramaic and its descendant Syriac remained in use from Palestine eastward until the Muslim conquests of the early seventh century C.E. Aramaic would be the language of the Gemara, the larger, latter portion of the Talmud, whose two editions were completed in Palestine and in Persian (Sassanian) Mesopotamia just before that conquest. One cannot speak of “world Jewry” without including this large and immensely influential eastern Jewry. It is still probable, however, that, worldwide, more Jews spoke Greek than spoke either Hebrew or Aramaic at the time when Hellenistic Jewry was at its peak and the Septuagint was produced.
2. For a full discussion of this phenomenon, see Mogens Müller, The First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuagint (Sheffield, England,: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), and Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2000).
The literature of Hellenistic Jewry, it should be noted, included much more than just the Septuagint. Its most important thinker was the prolific and philosophically sophisticated Philo of Alexandria, an exact contemporary of Jesus; but it contained examples in various other genres. See, as an example of recent attention to this literature and the culture that produced it, John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora, From Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE–117 CE) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
3. See “The Mission to the Jews: Why It Probably Succeeded” in Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). Recent archaeological evidence cited by Stark suggests that a clear and final separation of the two religiously and ethnically related communities—Hellenistic Judaism and Greek-speaking, ethnically Jewish Christianity—was not complete until the fourth century in Palestine and even later in other locations. That starting around 100 C.E. an explosion of Christian writing in Greek, most of it the work of Christian Jews, coincided with a sudden decline in Greek literary production by Judaist Jews certainly suggests an explanation for that otherwise unexplained decline. See Shaye J. Cohen, “Judaism,” in G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, editors, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
4. In Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 3), Michael Rose writes:
Discussions of copyright not infrequently regard intellectual property as an “ancient and eternal idea” or “a natural need of the human mind.” But copyright—the practice of securing marketable rights in texts that are treated as commodities—is a specifically modern institution, the creature of the printing press, the individualization of authorship in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and the development of the advanced marketplace society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
5. Aquila, a second-century convert from paganism to Christianity and then from Christianity to Judaism, set out to retranslate the Jewish scriptures from Hebrew and Aramaic into a Greek that would follow the original word for word. The results, essentially unreadable by anyone who does not understand Hebrew (and have the Hebrew text at hand), were a conscious challenge to the legitimacy of the far more readable Septuagint. Aquila’s translation, which deliberately sought to seem foreign, bespeaks a new and culturally fateful subordination of translation to original, a new awareness that a translation is only a translation. Rabbinic Judaism effectively fostered the same awareness by instituting the bar mitzvah requirement that every male member of the community, on coming of age, demonstrate an ability to read the scripture aloud in the original language. The very difficulty of this requirement in the diaspora, where no one spoke Hebrew in daily intercourse, guaranteed that it would impart a vivid sense that the original was not to be confused with any translation of it.
A comparable but far more restricted translation-awareness began to develop within Christianity only two centuries later when Jerome, a Christian monk translating the Bible into Latin, moved to Palestine, apprenticed himself to rabbis, mastered Hebrew, and made the culturally significant decision to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek. Jerome’s deference to the original language, not to minimize its importance, remained restricted, within Christianity, to a narrow class of scholar-monks like himself. At the popular level, the older attitude of diaspora Jewry toward the scripture in translation lived on as the standard Christian attitude. It would remain standard until the Reformation, and, to a considerable extent, it remains so down to the present.
6. The rearrangement that Christianity was to impose upon the canon of scripture that it had inherited from Judaism may be seen at a glance by comparing the two canons as they have come down to our time:
OLD TESTAMENT TANAKH
(Jewish scriptures in Greek as reordered by Christianity) (Jewish scriptures in Hebrew)
Genesis Genesis
Exodus Exodus
Leviticus Leviticus
Numbers Numbers
Deuteronomy Deuteronomy
Joshua Joshua
Judges Judges
Ruth
Samuel Samuel
Kings Kings
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Ezekiel
Twelve Minor Prophets
Chronicles Psalms
Ezra Proverbs
Nehemiah Job
Tobit*
Judith*
Esther Song of Songs
Maccabees* Ruth
Job Lamentations
Psalms Ecclesiastes
Proverbs Esther
Ecclesiastes Daniel
Song of Songs Ezra
Wisdom* Nehemiah
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach)* Chronicles
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Lamentations
Baruch*
Ezekiel
Daniel
Twelve Minor Prophets
Within the group of about a dozen books, some quite short, that runs from Chronicles to Ecclesiasticus in the Christian canon and from Psalms to Chronicles in the Jewish canon, both the contents and the order were quite fluid in the Jewish canon during the years when the New Testa
ment was being written and indeed for some time thereafter. In Latin-speaking Western Christendom, both the contents and the order of the canon were effectively fixed in the early fifth century when Jerome completed his semiofficial new translation from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into Latin. Early in the following century, the monk Cassiodorus introduced the one-volume format in southern Italy, and a standard was set that would be maintained in the West for a millennium. The standard changed in the sixteenth century when Protestantism decanonized those books (asterisked above) of the traditional Christian Old Testament for which no Hebrew original was in hand at the time, while Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism retained the older canon and made it official. (When translating, Protestantism also expanded the Book of Jeremiah and condensed the Books of Daniel and Esther so as to have its translations conform to the Hebrew text against the traditional Greek.) When determining the order of the works it accepted as canonical, however, the Reformation did not follow the Hebrew text but instead retained the traditional Christian order, for the same apologetic reason that had dictated its adoption in the first place.
In our own day, although the traditional Christian canon has been largely replaced by the Protestant in Protestant-majority countries, the older canon remains the majority canon of world Christianity, a statistical fact that has not been without consequence. Thus, some recent critical translations of the Christian Bible into English even under other than Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox auspices have gone halfway back to the traditional canon by including an appendix of “apocryphal” or “deuterocanonical” works—namely, the books and book-portions of the traditional canon that Protestantism had grown accustomed to dropping. (The King James Version, interestingly enough, originally included such an appendix, but over time it became standard Protestant practice for printed editions of that version to dispense with the appendix.)
A few widely used contemporary translations, notably the Jerusalem Bible, have gone so far as to restore the deleted books and the deleted sections of retained books to their traditional position, and other even more searching innovations continue to occur. Thus, La Bible, Traduction oecuménique, édition intégrale, a brilliant French translation (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1995), has placed Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets in the position they occupy in the Jewish canon while including but segregating the apocryphal/deuterocanonical texts. So long as the Bible remains in active use, further such adjustments of the canon, or canons, are not just possible but likely. Their significance must not be exaggerated, but neither should it be ignored.
7. As that singular definite thing, the Bible is a Christian invention, and the expression the Bible—including both the article and the capital letter—may be said to refer, properly, to the two-testament Christian Bible. Judaism retains to this day a far stronger working awareness of the inner plurality of scripture than Christianity does, beginning with the fact that it sees an almost metaphysical difference between Torah (the first five books of the Tanakh) and the rest of the canon. Some Jews, sensitive to the somewhat un-Jewish implications of using the Bible to refer to their scriptures, avoid the expression, but others use it freely. In this, as in all linguistic (and, for that matter, religious) matters, usage controls.
The development of the Bible into the definite, singular thing it became in Christendom may owe something to a technological breakthrough as well. The codex—the book as we know it, consisting of cut pages bound on one side—may conceivably have been a Christian invention. This cannot be known, but it is suggested by the fact that virtually all the earliest surviving codices contain Christian texts. What is clear, however, is that Christianity led the way in replacing the scroll with the codex and in developing the technology that produced ever larger and more capacious codices.
The technical advantages of the codex over the scroll are, essentially, economy and convenience. Because one writes on only the inner side of a scroll but on both sides of the pages of a codex, the codex is more efficient in its use of writing space. Because one may enter a codex in the middle but must enter a scroll at the beginning and unroll to the middle, the codex is more convenient. Once codices large enough to contain many scrolls had developed, the codex would seem almost inevitably to have had a unitizing effect on the once physically separate works it contained, not to speak of a literally binding effect on the order in which they would appear. In this way, Christianity’s unitization of the scriptures it inherited from Judaism may well have been fostered by technology. At the same time, it must be stressed that the technology need not necessarily have had this effect. Judaism, which now routinely uses the codex except during its liturgy, retains nonetheless a strong sense of the inner plurality of scripture. By the same token, some sense of the unity of scripture had to precede Christianity’s adoption of the codex for Bible copying, or large codices of Christian scripture would not exist at all.
We must remember, finally, that a large codex was a costly object in antiquity, and a very large codex—one large enough to contain both the Old Testament and the New—even more costly. A very large parchment codex would also have been both extremely costly—requiring, quite literally, the slaughter of hundreds of animals, an extraordinary expense in an era when livestock were a major form of wealth—and extremely cumbersome to house. The fact that so many ancient codices contain only the Gospels or only the Gospels and Psalms may thus bespeak considerations of economy and convenience more than any larger conceptual considerations. It is for this reason that, though the first one-volume codex containing both Old and New Testaments was produced in Italy as early as the sixth century, such codices did not come into relatively common use until the ninth.
APPENDIX II
1. I would distinguish commentary that aims to supplement the historical information in a work of historical art, the usual case in New Testament criticism, from criticism that aims to illumine the artfulness of a work of historical art by creating a rival work from the same information. John Updike has illumined the artfulness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by drawing on Shakespeare’s twelfth- and fifteenth-century sources to write his novel Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). Another novelist, Reynolds Price, has done something comparable for the Gospels by writing his own apocryphal gospel, The Honest Account of a Memorable Life (Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1994). These works of art are simultaneously works of criticism, but neither intends to be a work of history.
Shakespeare scholarship, of course, attends a great deal to the historical Shakespeare and to Elizabethan England as the cultural matrix of his work; but Shakespeare scholarship is distinguished, on the one hand, from the history of Elizabethan England and, on the other, from Shakespeare criticism, whose concerns are character, diction, and other more or less extra-historical aesthetic issues. The contrast with New Testament studies in this regard is clear. On the one hand, New Testament scholarship is less and less distinguishable from the history of the founding era of Christianity. On the other, New Testament criticism as distinct from either New Testament scholarship or early church history—a New Testament criticism concerned with character, diction, and some set of extra-historical aesthetic issues—has, until recently, scarcely existed at all. New Testament scholars have tended to think of New Testament criticism, what little of it was written, as a species of popular theology if not simply as impressionistic or “fanciful” scholarship. By referring to New Testament scholars in this appendix as “historical critics” of the New Testament, I seek quite deliberately to reverse this tactic—seeing scholarship as peculiar criticism rather than criticism as peculiar scholarship.
2. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, first complete edition, edited by John Bowden, translated by W. Montgomery, J. R. Coates, Susan Cupitt, and John Bowden from the German (London: SCM Press, 2000, p. 479; originally published as Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1913]). Schweitzer’s reading of historical research down to h
is own day as a religiously irrelevant intellectual triumph depends, in effect, on his transformation of its findings into a psychohistorical reconstruction of the consciousness of Jesus. This reconstruction has its fullest development in his slightly earlier The Mystery of the Kingdom of God: The Secret of Jesus’ Messiahship and Passion. Hans Frei in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative rightly sees the specter of suicide haunting Schweitzer’s vision of Jesus. Schweitzer’s Jesus, a self-conscious agent of God’s apocalyptic, final intervention in human history—an intervention that never came about—might be described as suicidally confident in the power of his own martyrdom. For an era no longer open to self-martyrdom as a religiously meaningful action, Schweitzer believed that the historical Jesus, thus finally and correctly understood, would be religiously irrelevant except, as noted, through a mystical willingness to live in, as it were, suicidal disregard of social norms—to live, that is, as if this world were about to pass away. Historical research could neither create nor destroy that kind of Christianity.
3. “Das entscheidende ist schlechthin das Dass” (“What is decisive is simply the ‘that’ ”). This revealing remark, made near the end of Bultmann’s career, came in a lecture for the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences in 1960. I cite it as quoted in an essay by the Dutch scholar Marinus de Jonge, “Theological Considerations in the Search for the Historical Jesus,” in Jesus, the Servant-Messiah (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 23. I see this stance as much in the spirit of the Schweitzer who, having declared historical Jesus research religiously irrelevant, cited 2 Corinthians 5:16, where Paul seems to allude to, and in the same breath dismiss as religiously irrelevant, the possibility that he had known his Nazarene contemporary personally:
Our experience is like Paul’s. Just as we come nearer to the historical Jesus than anyone has ever come and our hands reach out to draw him into our own time, we are forced to give up the effort and admit our failure in that paradoxical dictum If we knew Christ according to the flesh, yet starting now we know him no longer. Moreover, we must come to terms with the fact that historical knowledge of the personality and life of Jesus will not be a help but perhaps even an offense to religion. (Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung [Tübingen: Mohr, 1906], p. 399; my translation)
