Reconstructing the Kingdom
THE FUNCTION OF THE REPORTS
So the historical context indicates that the community found a crying need for an authentic document that everyone could agree contained the basic information, and which the various emissaries and preachers could comment on or embellish based on their own personal experience or things that they heard from the original witnesses.
And this, I take it, was the purpose of the first Report of the Good News, which is almost certainly Mark's, since the other two Synoptics use him and even take over some expressions which are peculiar to Mark's style.
In order to perform the function that was needed at the time, what would this Report have to do? It would have to make out a detailed and convincing case for the factuality of what the Christians believed about Jesus. So it would have to present factual evidence, first of all, that could be attested by eye-witnesses. Secondly, the factual evidence would have to reveal clearly (1) that Jesus claimed to be YHWH, and was understood to be making that claim, (2) that he was crucified precisely because of that claim, (3) that he predicted that this would happen, (4) that he claimed that this was predicted of him as the Prince referred to in the prophesies, (5) that this prediction actually was in the prophesies, (6) that he predicted that the ultimate proof of his claim would be to return to life on the third day after his death, and finally (7) that the prediction was verified by his actually being seen alive after his death.
If I am correct, then, Mark's Report was to serve as the first textbook of Christianity, laying out the facts of Jesus' life insofar as they related to his being God and dying for our sins and coming back to life. So it dealt with the "historical Jesus" in the sense that it related without prejudice, one might say, what actually happened, and could have been observed by anyone who was there. After all, every one of the students who actually saw the events was a skeptic about the "Christ of faith" until after the resurrection; and it was what they saw that converted them to believers--always assisted by divine grace, of course. But they thought they had evidence, factual, observable evidence, that they could share with other people, and it would do the same job for others that it did for them. You didn't have to have faith before the evidence became evidence; though there were plenty of people who saw some of the events and didn't accept the implications of them.
I stress this because a great deal is made of the presupposition of faith on the part of those who read the documents of the New Treaty. Ever since Augustine, with his fides quaerens intellectum, it is assumed that people become Christian by the divine gift of faith, for which no human evidence is either possible or necessary. Once you have faith, then you don't need any evidence; if you don't have faith, no evidence will give it to you.
There is a certain sense in which I might agree with this; but to me it is a negative one. We are so blinded by our this-worldly bias that we can't overcome it without some supernatural help in seeing the facts that are presented to us. Just the other day, in a course on critical thinking, I was teaching the distinction between consistency and inconsistency in what one says, and the criterion the textbook was using was that the passage was consistent if one could imagine that the events in question happened, and inconsistent if it was impossible to do so. One of the examples was, "Er had been dead for ten days when he stood up and began telling stories of remarkable visions." Several of the students said that the statement was inconsistent on the grounds that what was related was impossible, and so couldn't be imagined. I countered with the contention that it was fantastic, but there was no reason for saying that it was impossible, and I alleged, "We know of at least one case where a person was dead for three days and then returned to life"--at which point, they dismissed this as being a "religious truth" and not a fact, and so of no bearing on whether the statement was possible or not.
My point here is that all of us have a built-in bias in thinking that if something is very much outside, even contrary to, our invariable experience, this something is impossible (and therefore apparent evidence to the contrary is some kind of trick); and if anyone claims it happened, then the claim is false. And this attitude we have generally stands us in good stead; and there is no particular reason for abandoning it in religious matters--especially when there are contradictory religious claims, meaning that you definitely can't accept all the claims of all religions as factual. (Islam, for instance, claims that Jesus was not in fact really crucified.) Hence, there is the need for divine grace to overcome this bias if we are going to be able even to consider evidence dispassionately and objectively.
But that does not mean, it seems to me, that, once you have faith, you have no need of evidence. Again, how is one to distinguish Islam from Christianity in this case? Believers of each religion obviously have faith; but they can't both be right. It simply cannot be that Jesus was in fact crucified (for a Christian) and the crucifixion in fact never happened (for a Muslim). There are no "facts for" someone; a fact is a fact is a fact. Either Jesus was crucified or he wasn't; and so one or the other of the believers is simply wrong. Faith, then, allows evidence to be looked at without bias; it itself is not evidence. It is, as the discourse to the Hebrews says, "the underpinning of what is hoped for; it is the argument for facts that cannot be observed." But it isn't of itself the evidence for those facts.
And if you look at what Paul was doing in his letters, he was obviously presenting what he considered evidence why people should bother believing that Jesus died and came back to life--some of which, to be sure, was the miraculous events that accompanied the preaching. But what that told an unbeliever was that God must be behind what was being said, because God would not produce miraculous events "on call" to someone who was claiming a falsehood. The miracles were not faith; they were intended to produce faith in people, by giving the people evidence that what was being said was true.
Hence, the Reports were intended to present evidence to someone who did not have faith; and therefore, they had to be couched in such terms, especially since the events they related were in themselves fantastic, that the hearer would find his skeptical bias undermined by them, and would be inclined to believe that the text was (1) not relating mythological stories, but actual facts, (2) the author was not lying; and (3) he knew what he was talking about, either from his own sense knowledge or from contact with people who saw the events.
One note about the "historical Jesus." I said above that what the Reports were talking about is the historical Jesus, in the sense of the one you would have seen if you had been there; he did the things they say he did and said the things they claim he said. But the Reports were never intended to be "histories of Jesus" or biographies; they had no interest, as current historians or even ancient biographers would, in events of Jesus' life that were not relevant to the case they were making.
So, for example, events would be selected and arranged with a view to how they affected the progress of the argument, not with any care for chronology. It seems very likely that there was only one time when Jesus drove the buyers and sellers from the Temple, and John puts this at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, while the others place it just before the end. John also has Jesus go to Jerusalem on several occasions, and the Synoptics have him in Galilee all the time, and give the impression that Jesus made a single and climactic journey to Jerusalem. In this sense, the Reports are not about the "historical Jesus," and some attempt may be made to reconstruct which event occurred when.
So neither the time nor the location of various events can necessarily be relied on if one is interested in tracing Jesus' steps from the beginning to the end. For instance, Luke puts the Christian Manifesto on a plain, and Matthew has it as the sermon on the mountain. Such topographical details give force to the argument rather than affect its factuality.
But I would contend that it simply makes no sense, in the context in which the Reports were written, for them to be making up stories or be recounting legends. The whole point of Christianity as Paul and the other letter-writers insist, is vitiated if the fantastic events did not actually happen; and if some of them are neat little embellishments and others are actual occurrences, and you can't tell one from the other except by "form criticism," then they might as well all be fairy tales. No case is made for faith.
The second thing that should be stressed, however, is what I said earlier when speaking of the speeches in Acts. One must not look for verbatim transcriptions of Jesus' sayings. In the first place, it is very unlikely that any of his first students were scribes, taking down what he said in shorthand; they were students, trying to learn what he was all about--and doubtless eager for cabinet posts in the new government they saw on the horizon. Hence, they would pay attention to what he was saying, in the sense of getting the meaning or the basic thrust of what he said, even when they didn't understand it; but they would not be concerned with the actual words.
This, in turn, does not mean that the authors were putting words into Jesus' mouth. I think Luke is instructive in this. The speeches of the early emissaries in Acts are much more flowing and eloquent than, say, his recounting of Jesus' "sermon on the plain." It is of no special significance to recount what Peter or Paul actually said on a given occasion, except to indicate that a speech on a given topic was made at that time; but with the sayings of Jesus, so strange, often, and enigmatic, it would be important what he actually said. Combining this with what is just above, what this amounts to is that the sayings of Jesus would have to be fairly close to Jesus' actual words.
Combining this with the remarks about time and place above, then those sayings of Jesus would be arranged in such a way as to bolster the case that was being made, and so one could expect collections of things said at various times and on various occasions into places where they would logically fit, without any attempt to be faithful to the actual chronology or location of their pronouncement by Jesus.
With all of that as a preamble, I think that Mark was actually commissioned to write the first Report, because he was known to Peter (we have at the end of his first letter, which is certainly authentic, "Your sister in Babylon, who is also chosen, sends you greetings, as does my son Mark.") and was also well known to Paul (who ends his last letter, as we saw above by asking to have Timothy bring Mark with him, because "he's a great help to me."). My guess is that Peter saw the need of an authoritative document, and chose Mark rather than Sylvanus, for some reason, to be the author.
In saying this, I am, of course, completely rejecting the idea that the Report was written by some members of "Mark's community" years after Mark had continued preaching there. We know that Mark was wandering all over the world; Acts has him presumably in Jerusalem at first, because his mother lived there, as we learn from the twelfth chapter; then he is with Paul and (his cousin) Barnabas in Judea, Seleucia, Cyprus, and Pamphylia, when Mark went back to Jerusalem; and then (in Chapter 15) Mark accompanied Barnabas to Cyprus, and Paul went to Syria with Sylvanus. In spite, however, of the rift that arose between them at this point ("Paul demurred at constantly having at his side a person who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had refused to continue with them in their work."), evidently they got back together, or the note at the end of the second letter to Timothy doesn't make sense.(1)
And somewhere or other he managed to be connected with Peter. Further, from what we can see from Acts as well as Paul's letters, many different people kept visiting a given community.
Furthermore, as I said, there was an urgent need at this point in Christianity, with the original witnesses being killed off, for a written document that everyone would recognize was well-attested, presumably by someone who was known over a large area to be trustworthy and well-connected: someone of the stature of Paul or Sylvanus or Mark or possibly Barnabas or Luke--or, of course, one of the original twelve Emissaries. But it had to be someone who could write well, and someone who was a clear, logical thinker (which, from the letters, we can say would exclude both Peter and Paul).
In any event, we have Mark's Report, which makes its case for Jesus' divinity by the miraculous events, as well as by devils shouting things like, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?" and by his statement when the students saw him walking toward him on the lake, "Be brave. I am." (Tharseite, ego eimi), which is "It is I," of course, but also happens to be the Greek of YHWH. His reply to the chief priest at the trial also answers the question, "Are you the Prince? The son of the Blessed One?" in this way: "I am. And you will see the Son of Man seated on his throne by the Father and coming in the clouds of heaven." So there is no doubt that Jesus, as Mark portrays him, made the claim of being God, and proved it by the miracles and the Resurrection.
Nevertheless, there were difficulties with the Report, however convincing it might be in its structure and selection of incidents. It presupposed somewhat too much knowledge of Jewish life and religion for it to be completely intelligible to those who had no contact with the Chosen People; even expressions like "Amen I tell you" wouldn't make sense to a Roman. Further, it is written in, I am sorry to say, very bad Greek, sometimes even ungrammatical Greek. Mark was a brilliant compiler and organizer of his data; but Greek was obviously a second language for him, and his text is full of errors that perhaps could pass when one is speaking, but look terrible when written down.
And we must remember that the Greeks were very style-conscious, and this text, which was supposed to be the definitive textbook of Christianity, was offered increasingly to Gentiles more than Jews. Doubtless the original readers would cringe when they heard it; it would become evident in very short order that a drastic revision was needed.
And there were also, of course, events being told about Jesus that were not in Mark, not to mention legendary stories of the sort that the "Jesus of history" people assume the Gospels were, and it would have been a good idea to weed out the narratives which were authentic from those that weren't.
And who better to perform both these tasks than Luke, who spent so much time among the Gentiles with Paul? And this is how his Report begins,
"Although, my noble Theophilus, there have been many attempts to give a description of the events that have taken place among us--apparently based on what we have been told from the original eye-witnesses who dedicated themselves to the service of what they were affirming--I still thought it would be useful to research the whole matter from the beginning, and write you the results of a careful study, so that you would know what would be safe to consider factual in what you have been told."
So Luke embarked on a rewriting of Mark's Report, with the intention of making it more available to Gentiles, as well as adding to it the results of his research into what stories about Jesus were factually based, presumably with the idea that if there were things circulating that were not in this document, they could be presumed to be mere legends.
Once again, we have an explicit attempt to set down what the facts are and to distinguish them from "meaningful legends"; Luke is presumably checking with eye-witnesses to be sure that the events he narrates were actually observed. It follows from this, of course, that what Luke relates about the pregnancy of Mary and the birth of Jesus actually happened. But I should inject this cautionary remark about the quotations from the characters here. Luke, as I mentioned earlier, was acting like a historian of his time, and "novelizing" history. Hence, the poems put in the mouths of Mary and Zechariah were intended to express the significance of the events, and would not be interpreted by anyone at the time to be stenographic reports of spontaneous effusions of eloquence. But this sort of thing cannot apply to the quotations from Jesus (except trivial remarks), because what Jesus said was part of what needs to be kept authentic, on the supposition we are going on. So we can trust Luke to give us, if not the actual words of Jesus, at least a reliable paraphrase of what he said, rather than an "interpretation" of the significance of the event disguised as a quotation.
Hence, I am not, by any means, against historical or "form criticism" of the Reports. But we must remember this about them: The authors were certainly influenced by the literary forms they were familiar with; but they had a unique purpose which governed their writing and made it different from other writings of the time which had the same general literary form. Thus, the fact that they were trying to get across what actually occurred, and to present the evidence that Jesus was YHWH in the true flesh of a human being, is bound to make their use of the literary form (biography, history, letter) different from what others did with these genres.
Perhaps I may illustrate my point from something not Biblical. Plato's dialogues look like plays, and obviously take a great deal of their literary form from the plays of the time. But they are not plays, and in significant respects depart from the requirements of drama, and even verisimilitude. For instance, Plato sometimes has Socrates talking to people he couldn't actually have spoken to, because they were dead before Socrates was born. We accept this sort of thing because we recognize that Plato was using this form as a painless way, if you will, for people to be able to absorb his philosophical points; and we interpret the dialogues first in the light of their philosophical purpose, and secondarily we take the literary form into account when we recognize that everything that is said by characters other than Socrates is not necessarily something you want to hold Plato to.
Similarly here. The literary form can account for various secondary aspects of the Reports; but it cannot be used to account for primary aspects, allowing us to explain away apparently fantastic events on the grounds that they were the same legendary puffery you find in other biographies and histories of the time. Why? Because if this is the case, then, as I have been stressing, the purpose of the Reports is vitiated, since the whole reason for any interest in Jesus is that he was not simply a crook or a Socrates, but was God and proved it by doing fantastic things.
Both Mark and Luke, then, set forth the events and the sayings of Jesus, arranged in such a way as to make a powerful case that Jesus is God and died for our sins. But neither of them give many of the nuances of what Jesus said, nor do they show how well Jesus' life fits in with what you would expect from the Old Treaty documents.
And this is one major function the function of Matthew's Report.
That is, my theory about Matthew's Report is that the similarity between it and Luke and Mark is that Matthew knew these texts, not that both Matthew and Luke, for instance, had access to an urtext called "Q." I think Matthew, who was one of the original Emissaries, saw that some of the statements recorded, though they were what Jesus said, gave the wrong impression unless they were qualified by what he said at other times. He also realized that a number of the events of Jesus' life that were simply put down as happening were either predicted or foreshadowed by the documents of the Old Treaty. Based on this, he (or the one or ones who persuaded him to write the Report) decided that a more interpretive version of the Good News should be undertaken.
Thus, for example, when Luke has Jesus say, "It is a blessing to be poor, because then you have God for your King," Matthew's version handles the objection, "But what about the poor who curse God because of their poverty?" He adds the qualification, "It is a good thing to be poor to pneumati (in spirit), because these people are ruled from heaven." If this is introducing an answer to the objection above, then what it means is, "It is a blessing poor and not discontented, because . . . "
Similarly, Matthew talks about the "kingship of heaven" rather than the "kingship of God," because basileia can also mean the "kingdom" in our sense of the territory or the population ruled, not just who is the ruler, and if one puts it in the sky, then he doubtless thought it was clearer which of the two meanings was intended.
Once again, the insertion of the qualification "except for sexual misconduct" in Luke's and Mark's unqualified statements about divorce handle the casuistical objection, "So divorcing your wife makes her an adulteress. Well, suppose she's already an adulteress. Then presumably you can get a divorce." If this is what the qualification is a response to, then what the statement says is "Anyone who divorces his wife makes an adulteress of her--unless of course she already is an adulteress--and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery." On this reading, a loophole is closed, not opened.
I suppose one of the reasons for the theory that Matthew and Luke both used the same document is the difference in treatment of the common material; and commentators who say that one author used the other tend to hold that Luke used Matthew. But it seems to me that the treatment Matthew gives to Mark's text (whether this text is also in Luke or not) is very similar to the kind of thing you see between Matthew and Luke: shortening, leaving out of background details, but putting in interpolations of Theological import. Comparing Matthew and Luke and Matthew and Mark, makes it, to me by far the most defensible position that Matthew had both the text of Luke and the text of Mark as sources, and adapted the material to suit his own purpose.
But be that as it may, it seems clear that the function of the differences between the earlier Synoptics and Matthew is that Matthew introduces more nuances into Jesus' statements, presumably because they are closer to what the original intent of the statement was.
Current theory is that Matthew's Report was written to a Jewish community, as Luke's was written to Gentiles. But I don't think this is the case; I think it was written, like the others, to all the communities (the "universal church").(2)
It has a Jewish cast to it, first of all because Matthew was a Jew and thought like a Jew; but more importantly, because he was giving a picture of what Jesus was saying that was more accurate than a simple transcription of his words at a given time, by qualifying the particular statement with what he said at other times or with explanations that he gave to his students afterward; and this would necessarily have a Jewish flavor to it. Matthew was also trying to show the Biblical significance of the events of the life of Jesus, which necessarily would involve references to the documents of the Old Treaty. This would make his Report sound Jewish for two reasons: first because the references, of course, were Jewish; but secondly, because he referred back as a Jew would do looking for a midrash for some event that he knew occurred in Jesus' life.
A propos of this, we tend to think that a quotation from a famous person is more accurate the more closely it resembles the actual words the person uttered. But when you think about it, it is very often the case that what a person says can convey a meaning that is different from what the person intended to convey; and this can be discovered by questioning the person or by listening to other things he says. What we would do in this case is quote the exact words and then add qualifying footnotes; but that is our convention for these things. It is not necessarily less accurate to put in the person's mouth the qualified statement you know he really was trying to get across.
As to the events Matthew links to things in the Old Treaty, the temptation is great to say that he (or the "tradition" the author was writing down) invented these events, such as the appearance of the sages at the birth of Jesus and so on, because there were events in the Old Treaty which needed fulfillment in Jesus. After all, there is the psalm about the kings of the East coming to give homage to the Prince, and so on.
Significantly, though, this psalm is not the one Matthew refers to, nor are the people who are reported to appear kings, but only "wise men." And think of what the prophesy was that is fulfilled here: the one about Bethlehem being insignificant, but being the source of the one who would rule Israel. This would be fulfilled by Jesus' being of the lineage of David, because then he came "out of" Bethlehem (David's home town); he didn't have to be physically born there to fulfill it. So why invent such a thing to place Jesus as being born in Bethlehem? In this connection, it is significant that Luke reports that Jesus was born in Bethlehem without giving a hint that the event had anything prophetic connected with it; from his narrative, it is portrayed as an accident due to the census. Matthew, however, stresses the Theological implications in this accident--which is, to me, a good reason for saying that Matthew knew what Luke wrote, and isn't just reporting a "different tradition." If he didn't put down some of the events that Luke did, it is just as tenable that the omission was due to his knowledge that they were already documented as that he was operating from a "different tradition." Similarly, the omission of the wise men and the flight to Egypt from Luke does not imply that Luke did not know of these events; it could just as easily be due to the fact that they didn't bolster the particular case that Luke was making (and would have involved explanations of why Joseph settled in Bethlehem for a while and then decided to go back to Nazareth).(3)
As to the flight into Egypt and the return, as well as the slaughter of the innocents, this is not something that you would necessarily want to create to fulfil the prophesy "I have called my son out of Egypt." Granted, when applied to Jesus, the words have a literal significance that they don't have in their primary application to the people Israel and the exodus; but the documents of the Old Treaty are full of metaphorical uses of terms like this which are not literally fulfilled in Jesus' life (where, for instance, are the dogs at the crucifixion, which would seem to be predicted by the psalm that refers to the dividing of the clothes and the piercing of the hands and feet?), and why make up a whole trip just to fulfill this one and stick in an even more far-fetched fulfillment dealing with Rachel in the slaughter of the children?
What I am getting at is that these midrashes make sense if you start with the events in Jesus' life as actually having happened, and you look for earlier things which prefigured them; but they don't make a great deal of sense the other way round. Hence, I take it that the more reasonable theory is that Matthew knew of these things, which either Luke did not, or did not use because they did not suit his purpose, and saw a significance in them which induced him to include them in his statement of the case for Jesus' divinity.
In any case, I think that Matthew's Report was intended to flesh out the Theological import of the events in Jesus' life and his sayings, and that, probably for that reason, it was placed first in the collection of the documents of the New Treaty.
What then of John? It seems to me that his Report was written some time later, as most commentators hold, when the significance of Jesus had been debated and most of the original Emissaries had died off. A new generation of believers was holding that Jesus was "filled with the Holy Spirit," but was not really God Himself, or on the other hand, was God showing himself as a kind of phantom human being. John wanted to make it perfectly clear, based on eye-witness observation, that Jesus was a tangible, flesh-and-blood human being; but that he was in fact God, knew that he was God, and proved that he was God. The synoptic Reports, in other words, left open some loopholes which John wanted to be sure got closed before the last of the original Emissaries died and there was no one to counter the subtle (but often well-intentioned) sophistries of those who wanted to make Jesus and his significance something rationally acceptable.
Notes
1. This, by the way, is one reason for thinking that that letter was actually written by Paul, because if it were written late "as from" Paul, then the dissention between Paul and Mark would have been well known from Acts, and there would be absolutely no reason for a pseudonymous author to undercut his case by gratuitously inserting such a remark.
2. My view, in other words, is at variance with most scholars. It seems that the prevailing opinion at the moment is that Matthew's Report was written to handle the shock of the Jewish Christians at the destruction of the Temple--from which it follows, of course, that it was written long enough after the event for the community to be shocked enough to need a whole Report of the Good News to assure them that Jesus predicted this.
I detect some of the inherent skepticism of the "historicist" approach to Biblical scholarship behind this. There is a twofold assumption, whether conscious or unconscious here, I think: first, that, since Jesus' prophesy as reported came true, then the document which tells of his making the prediction had to have been written after the event (because how could the "historical Jesus" have known what would happen?). I have been trying to say that this kind of manufacturing of statements and events of Jesus' life vitiates the whole point of the New Treaty documents, and is inconsistent with the documents themselves. Second, it is taken for granted nowadays that the document was responding to some set of social or psychological problems of a given segment of the believers; in this case, the Jewish people the "author of Matthew" had contact with. But then why not write a letter explaining the situation, as Paul did to the Thessalonians, rather than disguise the whole thing as a report about what Jesus said and did? Were the early authors really that devious? Look at the letters of Paul if you think so.
Besides, what would all the fuss be about among the Christians, especially the Jewish ones, if the Temple was destroyed? They certainly believed by this time that Jesus had superseded the Old Treaty laws and ceremonies, and they had no particular brotherly affection for the Jews, who had been harassing them even to death from the beginning; and so without any elaborate explanations, they would be expected to feel how appropriate it was that (a) the Jews would be punished, and (b) the Temple, the symbol of the continuation of the Old Treaty between YHWH and the human race, would be torn down.
No, Matthew's Report was responding to a "need of the community"; but it was the need of the whole community of believers to see to it that the statements of Jesus didn't get taken in a sense he didn't intend and that he be seen in the context of the prophesies and prefigurings about him in ancient Israel.
3. People hold nowadays that this sort of reconciliation of the two narratives is hopelessly naive, though it went on for centuries before the present age of "form criticism." I don't see that it's any more naive than to assume that because Matthew inserts "the king was angry and sent troops and destroyed these murderers and burned their city" into the story of the guests invited to the wedding, he was alluding to the destruction of Jerusalem. Naivete takes many forms.
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