Textual Preliminaries
CAN WE TRUST THE TEXTS?
A good deal of befuddlement has fallen upon Scripture studies in the last hundred years or so, from a source which, I think, is fundamentally alien to the whole Christian enterprise, even though there are plenty of devout Christians who try to turn it on its head and use it to bolster Christian belief. But the attempt, even when successful, has generated a good deal of confusion, because it more or less tacitly accepts the premise which undermines the authenticity of the texts as evidence of actual events; and if the texts aren't reports of actual events, then the whole thing is a waste of time.
That is, if Jesus didn't say what the evangelists claim he said, and if he didn't do the fantastic things they report him as doing, and if, particularly, he did not get up and walk out of the grave in such a way that people would recognize that this was a corpse which came back to life as he predicted, then Christianity and the claim of God to be a God of love is false. It is that simple, in the last analysis. Those who say that they would believe even if the bones of Jesus were actually discovered in some grave don't realize the implications of what they are saying.
Why is this? Because the God that can be argued to from reason is the "philosophical God" I spoke of in the preceding chapter, and this, as I was at pains to say, gives us no guarantee that the events of the world--or of the life after death--will work out to be what we would like. In fact, the evidence from the events of the world leads rather to the opposite conclusion, and counsels, if anything, that we should be resigned to a world that is, from our point of view, absurd and often horrible.
Jesus allegedly offered us hope that this was not the case, because, allegedly, he claimed to be God, and therefore the anthropomorphic view of God was not only legitimate but literally true. But according to the Scriptures, he backed up this claim by rising from the grave. If that did not actually happen, then his claims are false, and all he is is the wise guru, telling us nothing more than the Buddha did; it is his Christian followers who blew up his enigmatic statements out of all proportion and created "meaningful" legends about him which add nothing to our understanding of the way the world is.
What I am saying is that we must understand that what is distinctive about Christianity is not the values Jesus stood for--because you can find the same sorts of things in Confucius or the Buddha, or even in Stoicism and the ancient Roman religions--but in Jesus' claim to be the One God and the facts about his life; and it is small wonder that those who are followers of Jesus because they like what he said in the Sermon on the Mount are also those who think that fundamentalists and Catholics are being stupidly arrogant when they claim that their brand of Christianity is the truth and that others should be converted to it.
And modern Biblical scholarship reinforces this view, because it speaks of what the "Matthean community" wrote (Matthew's Gospel) in response to problems facing the community at the time of writing, based on what "it" remembered about what Jesus had said, and so on. So, for example, we have the notion that the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard was written to teach a lesson to the Jews who resented the fact that the Gentiles were receiving all the gifts of the Kingdom at the last moment, as it were, while the Jews were given no special consideration for having been at the Lord's work for generations.
My problem with this is not that the parable can't be interpreted in this way, nor that some in the early community might actually have done so. My problem is that it tends, in a subtle way, to undermine the authenticity of the Reports themselves. It gives the impression that the Reports were responses to the needs of the community at the time of writing rather than compilations of what Jesus actually said and did: attempts to get down the facts before they got distorted precisely by those needs of the community. That is, I have no problem with the authors' picking and choosing from what they knew actually happened those events and sayings that were relevant to the case they were making for Jesus' divinity and useful for people to know. My difficulty is that modern Biblical scholarship leaves the impression that a good deal of what the authors wrote was what Peter denied in his second letter: "'meaningful' legend."
The results of my own research show me that Matthew (almost certainly, in my view, Matthew the tax-collector) wrote his Report to the whole Christian community (the whole Church), with a special eye toward the community in future generations; and he wrote it precisely to correct misleading impressions the community might have received from reading Luke's and Mark's Reports. He was not responding to the "needs of the community at the time," but had the whole future of Christianity in view. He was writing for us as much as--or more than--for those he preached orally to.
There's a difference, in other words, between the Reports as the answer to the questions, "What did Jesus really say? What did he do?" and as the answer to "What did all of this mean? What relevance does it have?" I have no quarrel with the answer to the second questions as being contained in the Reports; but if the focus of the Reports is not to answer the first questions, or if you can't distinguish from them when each is being answered, the Reports collapse as evidence of what actually happened.
That is, if you can't distinguish whether Jesus actually walked on water or whether the report of his doing so was a graphic way of presenting the commanding force of his personality, then you can't distinguish whether the Resurrection actually happened or whether the report of its happening was a graphic way of illustrating how this commanding personality lived beyond the grave and carried out his work through those most closely influenced by him. In the latter case, it is the message of Jesus that is important, and the supposed miraculous events of his life are merely a way of saying how important that message is.
But in that case, the message as we understand it is a lie, because it implies that Jesus is revealing that God is love and can do so because he is God, not because he's got some theory about God; and he has said that our sins are removed, when he has in fact no power to remove them. The whole of Jesus' message is a waste of time if the events that surround the message are just imaginative ploys to make us pay attention to it.
(I might also point out that St. Paul is a bare-faced liar to the people of Corinth, who held something very close to what modern theologians hold; that dead bodies don't come back to life. Paul said that if that were true, then Jesus didn't actually come back to life, and so the whole thing is a waste of time and we still have our sins-and he and the other Emissaries are perjurers, because they had sworn before God that they saw Jesus after the Resurrection.)
I realize that there will be many people who say that I am being naive and unsophisticated. My answer is that I think I am being more sophisticated than the sophisticates. "Meaningfulness" of the texts is not at issue here; the question is whether they have any evidentiary value.
And, in spite of the fact that I am not a Scripture scholar, I know from my own work on Aristotle and my wife's work on Plato that a lot of the "very well accepted" theories about what these authors are saying are simply bunk. They are ingenious interpretations that find a "depth of meaning" in what the authors say that is sometimes in direct contradiction with what on the face of it the authors are saying; and when texts can't fit into the Procrustean bed they have created, the commentators either allege corruption of the text or accuse the authors of contradicting themselves.
My own attitude toward a text is that, if it bears a prima facie sense, then (absent evidence to the contrary) this is the sense that the author intended. If that sense is what one would expect based on the context in which the work was written, then that confirms that the obvious sense of the text is the correct one. If the author alleges evidence to support the prima facie sense of what he is saying, then presumably that is the sense he intends.
The fact that another meaning of the text can be teased out of it if one takes a certain point of view, even if that meaning fits all of the facts, supposes that the author had a reader in mind so ingenious that he would totally ignore the obvious sense the text seemed to mean, and would spot what was "really intended," which only the most clever of readers would ever hit upon. Any author who writes for that kind of audience has to have a screw loose, given the millions of ways one can be misunderstood. That I would be so clever as to be able to predict just which of the far-fetched tertiary or quartary meanings of what I am saying will be caught by the "proper" reader and then actually make that the real meaning I was trying to get across is an indication that I shouldn't be allowed within a mile of any writing instrument.
In the last analysis, of course, deconstruction (because that and its kin are what I'm talking about) deconstructs itself, because presumably the authors of treatises on deconstruction don't intend their own treatises to be deconstructed; because if they do, then what they are saying is that the treatise means nothing, but is simply a ploy to get them recognized as being brilliant, when in fact they have nothing to say. But if they intend their treatise to be taken seriously, then it for some reason has "a" meaning, the obvious one, and it is also for some reason supposed to be immune from deconstruction. But if it is supposed to be taken at face value, then why shouldn't any other work?
Next