How the Bible Actually Works

by Peter Enns

  Jesus interprets the ancient Law for a new day, which we’ve also seen already: Deuteronomy interprets the slave law of Exodus more justly; Ezekiel marginalizes the older notion that one’s actions have intergenerational consequences; the Passover morphs from a family meal at home to a national feast in Jerusalem. All of which is to say that Jesus debates the meaning of biblical laws not to dismiss them, but to see beyond them to the deeper will of God not captured by the script.

  Seeing Jesus as the Sage of Sages should perhaps not come as a complete surprise, especially when we glimpse back at how John begins his Gospel. He speaks of the Word, who was in the beginning, was with God, and indeed was God. And through the Word came everything that exists, and in the Word is life and light (John 1:1–4). This divine Word then became flesh and lived among us (1:14).

  “Word” is a concept borrowed from the world of Greek philosophy. The Greek term is logos, and grasping its exact meaning can be tricky. It often means something like logic, reason, or divine thought or plan.* In some Jewish circles influenced by Greek thought, “Word” was the divine “force” of creation as well as a divine mediator bridging the gap between God and humans.

  It gets a bit abstract, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve never been particularly clear on what John is getting at here, but he is at the very least saying something of considerable importance about Jesus: as the Word with God at creation, Jesus is described in a way that unmistakably echoes the description of wisdom we already saw in Proverbs 8 (especially verses 22, 30) and wisdom’s role in creation. And note too that John’s In the beginning was the Word is meant to get readers to think of the opening words of the book of Genesis, In the beginning.

  For John “Word” combined the Hebrew notion of wisdom as a basic property of the cosmos and the Greek concept of logos current at the time and that Jews were already familiar with. But John’s twist—a rather remarkable one at that—is that this divine logos becomes flesh rather than a fleshless divine intermediary between God and mere mortals.

  And all of that brings me to this: the incarnation—the “enfleshing” of God that we celebrate each Christmas, and which is such a core mystery of the Christian faith—is a rather striking reimagining of God and wisdom. By claiming that this logos became flesh, John is taking a familiar idea of his culture and infusing it with new meaning—and for the time, a rather absurd meaning at that.

  And it still is. If we toss about the idea of “God in the flesh” as if it were just that thing we believe, we are not tuned in to the shock and even offense that John’s opening lines would have generated. Christianity is a weird religion, folks.

  And just like the biblical notion of wisdom, this “Word become flesh” is not far off in the distance, but intimate with humans—accessible. Indeed, the whole purpose of the Word becoming flesh was to make humans children of God (John 1:12), or, as we read later in John’s Gospel, to allow humans to experience the same mystical connection with the Father as the Son does (17:20–26).

  The apostle Paul puts his own fine point on Jesus and wisdom: He [God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God (1 Cor. 1:30). Christ does not become wisdom for us by delivering a set of clearer ground rules for the game of life, but by peeling back the curtain to reveal the thicker existence of life with God: God’s mystery . . . is Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3).

  Jesus, who is wisdom incarnate, gives us access to the Creator to reveal hidden things and invites us to seek out our sacred responsibility to perceive God’s unscripted presence here and now.

  Think About It: Four Gospels

  This isn’t quantum physics. There are four Gospels. But this is going somewhere.

  The New Testament begins with four versions of the life of Jesus, and, as anyone can tell by reading them side by side, they don’t exactly match up. They don’t record the same events, and even when they do, the accounts sometimes differ rather significantly. That fact has been a cause of concern for some of the faithful, especially in modern times, when this disharmony has been used as evidence of their historical unreliability. After all, if the Gospels can’t even agree on basic information at this key moment in the story, what good are they to tell us about the life of Jesus?!

  Too often the response to this modern reaction has been to acknowledge that there are some differences, but they are minor and they don’t really amount to much, blah, blah, blah. But a defensive, protective mindset misses a golden opportunity to see wisdom in action yet again.

  Rather than defending the Gospels against their (self-evident) diversity, we should be asking ourselves why they are different at all. Why are there four versions of Jesus’s life out there?

  I can think of a few reasons why these differences exist. No one was taking notes as Jesus was talking, and so the stories got jumbled by the time they went from oral to written form. And we humans have faulty memories and “remember” events differently.

  But I think the main reason they differ so much is this. Each Gospel writer took it upon himself to shape—not simply report—the story of Jesus the way he saw fit, to present Jesus not as an academic exercise in historical accuracy, but as a way of encouraging and strengthening the community for which he was writing.

  To put it another way, each Gospel is its own unique retelling of the life of Jesus centered on the needs of each writer’s community of faith. We’re in wisdom territory here again, folks.

  The Gospel writers weren’t thinking, “Gee whillikers, I hope my story wins the accuracy contest and winds up making it into the Bible.” They were more like pastors leading and encouraging everyday people to make sense of their lives as they walk the path of faith and trust in God. Each in its own way, the Gospels are answering the question, “How do you connect with the Savior here and now?”

  Each Gospel is tailored for an audience, which means the Gospel writers were not simply focused on the life of Jesus, but—as wisdom demands—reading the situation.

  John’s Gospel, for example, is the maverick of the four. Most of what Jesus says and does here isn’t found in the other three. There is no one simple answer for why this is so, but we can see that John was clearly crafting his story for his community.

  John pits Jesus against “the Jews” rather than specifically the religious elite (scribes, lawyers), as the other three Gospels do. That has come across—understandably—as anti-Semitic and historically has been used to justify vilifying Jews (throughout much of German history at least as far back as Martin Luther and in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ). But charging John with anti-Semitism doesn’t cut it. The term is freighted in our day with a lot of history that isn’t relevant for John’s time. Many scholars have surmised that John’s language actually gives us a window into the struggles of his community.

  When John was written (probably somewhere in the 90s CE), there was no “Christianity” per se. Christianity as a distinct faith didn’t really hit the ground until a bit later in the second century, when it emerged as a largely Gentile faith. But John was written when Jewish–Gentile division was just beginning, and Jewish believers especially might have been ostracized, thrown out of synagogues, and otherwise given a hard time. John’s so-called anti-Jewish rhetoric was a commentary on his day.

  In other words, John’s phrasing was an act of wisdom: he was translating the Jesus story for his situation. It should therefore not be taken to be a timeless template for Jewish–Christian relations, but neither is it to be tossed aside as simply bigoted.

  Supporting today John’s rhetoric is not a sign of faithfulness to scripture, but a failure to accept the sacred responsibility of making the ancient text our own for our time. By aligning ourselves with John’s rhetoric we would, ironically, not be following what John is actually doing—which is bringing the Jesus story to bear on the circumstances of his community’s here and now. When we reproduce John’s rhetoric today, after centuries of Jewish persecu
tion and suffering, too often in the name of Christ, we are not reading our moment—and therefore not exercising wisdom.

  One more example from the many in John’s Gospel concerns the cleansing of the Temple. The other three Gospels place it at the beginning of Passion Week, Jesus’s first act after he enters Jerusalem the week of his crucifixion. John, however, places the Temple cleansing at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, in chapter 2. I say “places,” because John is certainly deliberately relocating this scene from the end to the beginning.

  Historically speaking, Jesus didn’t cleanse the Temple this early. Had he actually done so, his movement never would have gotten off the ground and John’s Gospel wouldn’t have gotten past chapter 3. Cleansing the Temple would have led to Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion, as it does in the other Gospels. It would have been like a protest movement to reform American politics that began with the torching of the Capitol. The movement would have come to an abrupt halt.

  But John’s relocation of this episode isn’t a “mistake.” That’s the vital point here. It is an intentional move on his part to paint his portrait of Jesus.

  John is quite keen on establishing Jesus’s divine authority right away, by both the signs Jesus performs (like turning water to wine, also in chapter 2) and the speeches Jesus gives. John’s Jesus is certainly the most divine portrait of Jesus in the four Gospels. It is in John’s Gospel that Jesus makes regular claims to his unique and intimate connection with God, much more so than in the other three, even appropriating the divine name “I AM” for himself.*

  Similarly, John doesn’t bother with a birth story (only Matthew and Luke do). John wants to establish Jesus’s divine authority from the very beginning—he is the Word who was with God at creation and is God. John’s birth story isn’t so much missing as replaced with a story of Jesus’s divine origin.

  Likewise in chapter 1, Jesus appears at the Jordan River where John the Baptist (not the author of the Gospel!) is living up to his name—baptizing his fellow Jews to cleanse them of sin. Though Jesus is milling about in the story, he does not actually get baptized in John’s Gospel, even though his baptism is quite prominent in the other Gospels. Jesus does some baptizing himself (which is not mentioned by the other three Gospels), but he himself is not baptized.

  The reason John mutes Jesus’s baptism is perhaps easy to see: John’s divinely exalted and authoritative Jesus should not need to be forgiven of sins. The other Gospels handle this problem differently. They present the baptism as something like Jesus’s royal coronation, in which he received public approval from God for his ministry. (Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include God’s heavenly voice approving of Jesus, perhaps echoing Psalm 2:7, but John does not.)

  That’s enough of John. The other Gospels also have their own flavor.

  Matthew’s Gospel, for example, has by far the most citations of the Old Testament of any of the Gospels. He also seems to be intent on presenting Jesus as a new and improved Moses. In the Sermon on the Mount (chaps. 5–7), like Moses, Jesus is on a mountain delivering laws to the people below. In fact, as we saw earlier, Jesus places his authority above Moses’s—his speech is punctuated by You have heard that it was said [in the Law] . . . but I say to you . . . In Luke, Jesus delivers a similar speech, but on a level place rather than on a mountain (6:17). Luke’s portrait of Jesus is different than Matthew’s.

  Matthew’s audience is largely Jewish—meaning Jewish followers of Jesus who would want to see that Jesus was deeply connected to Jewish tradition rather than overthrowing it (as some Gentile believers might have thought). Hence, Matthew’s birth story of Jesus (which has virtually no overlap at all with Luke’s, by the way) includes the scene of King Herod’s massacre of infants (as an attempt to get at Jesus) and Jesus’s flight to safety in Egypt.

  This scene is probably less a piece of history than an intentional echo of the story of Moses: at his birth Moses escapes Pharaoh’s edict to massacre male infants, and Moses later also fled from Pharaoh to save his own life. And both Moses and Jesus return home after being given the divine all-clear sign, and the wording is too similar to be accidental:

  Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead. (Matt. 2:20)

  Go back to Egypt; for all those who were seeking your life are dead. (Exod. 4:19)

  Only in Matthew does Jesus take a Moses-like trip.

  Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include the lesson about new wine and old wineskins mentioned earlier, but they differ. Mark simply says that the new wine will burst the old wineskins (2:22). You’re left with the impression that there isn’t much use for old wine or old wineskins at all. Matthew adds a twist at the end. By putting new wine in new wineskins, both the new wine and the old wineskins are preserved (9:17). This way of putting it would make sense for a Jewish readership that might have been startled at Mark’s more blunt words.

  Luke goes in a very different and somewhat unexpected direction. After repeating the idea that new wine needs to go into new wineskins, Luke adds: And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, “The old is good” (5:36–39). This sounds backwards. Luke seems to be prioritizing Jewish tradition over Jesus—yes, the new wine belongs in new wineskins, but the old wine is better.

  Luke’s twist also has a purpose, though to be honest, I’m not really sure what that is. Since this lesson comes in the middle of a section in which Jesus is challenged by religious leaders (about fasting and keeping the sabbath), this twist may be a dig against them. Though the religious leaders claim to be the traditionalists and Jesus the dangerous innovator, Jesus is delivering a punchy retort that he is more aligned with the old ways than they are. They are the blundering innovators who actually cloud God’s ways. I could be wrong, of course, but that makes most sense to me at the moment.

  I’d rather stop now than go on for five hundred more pages talking about how the Gospel stories differ. My point here is simply this: each Gospel is a deliberate shaping of the life of Jesus to address the needs of the community.

  According to the reigning theory, Mark was written first and was used as the basis for Matthew and Luke—and they adjusted Mark’s Gospel as they saw fit, either by changing Mark to suit themselves or including scenes that Mark doesn’t. We might call that dishonest, bad writing, plagiarism, or the like, but let’s not impose our own rules onto ancient writers. The Gospel writers, rather, were adapting and shaping the relatively recent history of Jesus of Nazareth, even freely editing the work of others, in order to present Jesus meaningfully to their communities of faith.

  But beyond the four Gospels, the New Testament as a whole is one big act of wisdom—its writers reimagine God in light of the present moment, in light of their faith in Jesus as God’s Messiah. Their work ties Jesus to the past, but also takes the faith of old far beyond the pages of their sacred text, in more surprising—even startling—ways than we’ve seen thus far.

  Chapter 11

  Reimagining God the Jesus Way

  Just Hear Me Out

  Well, we’re moving right along here at a pretty good clip; let’s recap for a moment.

  God is not a helicopter parent, and the Bible isn’t set up to tell us what to do. God is a wise parent and the Bible is an ancient, often ambiguous, and undeniably diverse text, and as such invites us to accept our sacred responsibility of discerning the moment and of perceiving how God is present here and now. That is the life of wisdom, God’s Plan A, which the Bible, by its very nature, points us toward.

  We see already throughout the Bible how its various writers, living at different times and places and under different circumstances, found themselves needing to think of God differently—to reimagine God when older perceptions (which made sense earlier) could no longer account for their experience. And probably the biggest factors that affected the ancient Israelites were the crisis of exile and centuries of foreign rule that followed, especially Greek culture. How could they stay conn
ected to the God of old when they were in such a different time and place and the God of old seemed so out of touch?

  With Jesus, Israel’s tradition was adjusted to account for this unexpected Messiah. We’ve looked at some of these adjustments already, but now we are going to zero in on other kinds of adjustments that were more sweeping and controversial—where central Jewish ideas and beliefs rooted in the Bible itself were reimagined.

  Where new wine really needed new wineskins.

  Which brings me (obviously) to the New York Yankees.

  I don’t mean to annoy anyone, but the New York Yankees are the most successful sports franchise in the solar system (look it up). As of summer 2018, they’ve played in more than one-third of all World Series ever played (40 out of 113) and they won the World Series 27 times. No other sports franchise comes close, though it’s cute when they try.

  I only bring this up to say that they were successful not by stubbornly sticking to tradition but by adjusting to changes in the game over the last century. The game has changed in so many ways it’s hard to count, and I won’t even try, for fear that those of you who aren’t interested in baseball might shut down—if you’re, say, a Communist or from Denmark and don’t care for baseball, just substitute some worthless activity, like tennis or gardening. Just trust me. It’s changed. If you entered a time machine and brought back players from the 1920s and 1930s, like Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig, and put them in today’s starting lineup, they would be like lost children.

  You can never rest on past tradition. Success requires adapting tradition to survive. That’s the wise thing to do.

  I’d like to thank the Yankees for helping me sum up a central point of the book, but this brings me to a question that maybe some of you have already been asking: “At what point do we cross the line from adapting a tradition, so it can survive, to compromising the tradition beyond recognition?”