Week 4 - Chapter 4 - The Four Gospels and the One Jesus

de Silva is starting to get into the “meat” of the debate about the composition of the New Testament, including a discussion of the search for the “historical Jesus” which may be recovered from the layers of the New Testament, extra-canonical sources, and even non-Christian sources. In particular, de Silva discusses the Augustinian Hypothesis (Matthew was written first, Mark abridge Matthew, and Luke used both Matthew and Mark), the Griesbach Hypothesis (which also gives Matthew priority, but says that Luke drew from Matthew and Mark used both in writing his gospel), and the Two-source (or Four-source) Hypothesis (Mark was written first, and both Matthew and Luke used Mark and Q as sources, perhaps with Matthew using special material (“M”) and Luke using other special material (“L”), given classic form by B. H. Streeter. De Silva pays scant attention to the “Holy Spirit Theory,” the theory of independent Divine inspiration for each of the Gospels.
De Silva discusses the various techniques, disciplines, theories, which have grown up in various academic communities, including “form criticism,” in which the sayings and stories about Jesus are studied to see which appear to be very early and thus authentic, “source criticism,” which considers what material was used by the Evangelists to compose their Gospels, and “redaction criticism,” which studies the ways each Evangelist edited the material available to him and incorporated it into his own Gospel, serving his particular ends.
Reading all the academic debate about the “historical Jesus” reminds me of the Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant, an Indian fable. Here is a portion of the Wikipedia entry -
“The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe.”
Yes, I do believe there’s a constructive purpose to be served by the search to uncover the “real” Jesus, but that too often scholars and writers tend to adamantly defend their own positions while refusing to accept the possibility of merit in the views which appear to contradict their own. De Silva quotes John Dominic Crossan, with approbation: “It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history; to do autobiography and call it biography.” (Crossan, The Historical Jesus, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991, pg. xxviii, in de Silva pg. 182)
The reason to analyse the Gospels (and other material) to try to know Jesus is at least in part because of what de Silva says Augustine posited: that the Holy Spirit stands behind every word of the Evangelists, even if some parts of the Gospels seem contradictory. (pg. 177) That is, the Gospels reflect a higher, spiritual truth and are a challenge to believers to find the core of that truth. Historical Jesus studies can be seen as the results of the effort to uncover what Jesus actually said and did in First Century A.D. Galilee and Judea.
That is commendable surely, even if the effort is fraught with peril. Consider the above quote from Crossan. I am enjoying reading Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998, which reflects many of the issues that de Silva discusses, from Crossan’s own perspective. Crossan was born and raised in Ireland and spent years as a Roman Catholic priest before leaving the priesthood in order to be able to marry and have more academic freedom. For some years he was the leader of the Jesus Seminar, which is referenced extensively in this chapter of de Silva. Crossan is imbued with a passionate interest in worldwide peasantry, and although he himself was not a peasant, he grew up with the tales of the oppression of Irish peasants down through the 19th. century. For example, in The Birth of Christianity he cites the example of a couple thousand of Irish peasants, naked and starving, dumped on the shores of New Brunswick by Lord Palmerston. Perhaps not too surprisingly, Crossan utilizes inter-disciplinary methods, including anthropology, archeology and history, as well as the traditional Gospel critical methods, and comes to the conclusion in his Jesus: a Revolutionary Biography, San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1995, that Jesus in reality was an illiterate Jewish peasant leading a social revolution.
My point here is that people become too fixated on their own theories. This may be a danger in attempting to place Jesus too much in the context of his era. That minimizes the possibility of Jesus being a messenger of the Divine, perhaps sent, in part at least, to correct excesses or errors in beliefs and practices of the traditional Jewish Temple priesthood, the Pharisees and other sects of traditional Judaism. There is a danger, in my view, not to recognize the possibility that Jesus may have been able to transcend his time and place, bringing the Good News for all time and all places.