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ОглавлениеIntroduction Hermeneutics of the Gospels
As the gospel writers each begin their account, for their present and for a future posterity they cannot possibly anticipate or imagine, they are burdened with an almost overwhelming responsibility of representing events in the life of Jesus (his acts and his words) and to make him present to their readers despite being separated both from the man himself and the sources available to them. With compelling motivations, and recognizing the fragility of their communities and the hostility of the social world around them, the writers of the gospels attempt to portray Jesus as someone who comes into the world to be an inauguration and to begin to actualize in being what has remained, until him, inconceivable. However, despite sensing Jesus’ dynamic ability to initiate such a possibility for the first time since creation, from out of himself in the fullness of his human presence, they always return him to a prior scriptural history. They need to give him an origin in a three-part tradition announcing him from the past and thereby making him legitimate, with the most authoritative credentials related to Abraham the patriarch, David the king, and the prophets as world-historical individuals. Each writer distinguishes himself from all oral traditions because their gospel is now permanent. They avoid the discrepancy of word-of-mouth versions by creating what they believe to be two related and complementary historical events, each with a source and chronology: the life of Jesus as previously handed down by oral testimonies and, perhaps, by one or more documents – the hypothetical Q, German for Quelle or “source,” and with Mark serving both Matthew and Luke as is commonly thought – and a prophet such as Isaiah, for example, who is interpreted to have announced Jesus’ future coming and will now be a fulfillment of a historical aspiration. Despite their individual reasons for setting down their version of events in the life of Jesus, the gospel writers are at every turn confronted with a difficult situation. The complications are extreme and without resolution.
After repeated readings of their sources, making selections and decisions, each of them begins under significant pressure. The permanence of the writing had to be intimidating, more so if certain alterations were made, changes they believed to be necessary. They individually decide on a starting-point, with a reading that will move, with some uncertainty – or rather, with both deliberation and hesitation – between the available document(s) on the life of Jesus, the testimonies of “eyewitnesses,” (Luke 1:2) and a continuous reference to utterances made in the past, with direct and precise quotations. For example, “when Mark ←9 | 10→is internal to the story and intrudes his own judgment upon what people felt,” Best tells us, “he does so in order to interpret the events he reports.”1 Dodd goes further. “All four gospels alike have the character of fact plus interpretation.”2 The reader of the gospels, alone and independently, can no longer simply accept the interpretations without being attentive during the times other textual references are relied upon for support, most especially when Jesus identifies himself from out of a prophecy, as in Luke 4:16 when reading the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue. “It is especially crucial to state that the story of Jesus itself has led the author to the Old Testament looking for an explanation, rather than the story being generated out of Old Testament quotations.”3 The “explanation” may, in principle, be imposed, the narrative relation little more than tenuous. Removed from their world, the reader returns again and again to its composition in order to hear Jesus uniquely and independently of all associations announcing his coming to be. Freyne adds: “the gospel writers as transmitters of the kerygma include reference to the past as part of their overall intention, and so provide us with data about Jesus that needs to be critically evaluated, to be sure, by good hermeneutical practice.”4 Without imputing a conscious scheme to any specific writer, one may even “suspect that these texts may be hiding the real Jesus from us.”5 Jesus certainly does seem opaque at times, his language vague, evasive, almost intentionally obscure. A recent translator tells us: “to be honest, I have come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance.”6 If so, the reader has the additional task of reflecting on the relationship between the possible concealments (though the reasons extend beyond translation) and Jesus’ revelations. We have yet to consider how Jesus’ language may be so unique, so creative, in part invented to serve his incomparable meanings, that it had to be necessarily elusive ←10 | 11→to his first-time hearers and modern readers. He became intelligible over time; multiple hearings were necessary, as were innumerable discussions by all those who persevered after his death and collectively remembered, began to assemble a doctrine, and ultimately wrote about their experiences. How, and for what reasons, the gospels are composed therefore becomes an essential problem, one inseparable from the initial act of reading and understanding any writing available to them; it will not be solved by sensationalist claims and proposals about “unlocking secrets,” making world-altering “discoveries” or exposing conspiratorial “cover ups.”7
With the gospels’ obvious reliance on scripture to manage Jesus’ meanings, each of the writers necessarily becomes “a sort of creative editor,”8 an observation repeated whenever we recognize “the editorial hand of the evangelist.”9 The gospels are “heavily edited versions of Jesus’ life and thought.”10 Dibelius describes them as “principally collectors, vehicles of traditions, editors.”11 One notices “Marks’ editorial tampering,”12 especially important considering he is by virtual consensus the first to write a gospel. His account contains “editorial additions.”13 Finally, Hengel rhetorically asks if Mark is “a collector or creative ←11 | 12→theologian?”14 The modern reader (neither ideal nor implied, but real, and aware of the challenges) is met with an immediate and persistent self-demand; no wonder the scholars of the Jesus Seminar15 went to such lengths to attempt to determine the authentic sayings of Jesus – while knowing, one presumes, they were making equally baffling editorial decisions as the gospel writers themselves. Any forthcoming decisions on how to deal with if not solve the dilemma can only begin with an initial proposal. My reading of the gospels will depend on this one motivation. Everything follows from one commitment: if (as I believe – and as John metaphysically confirms) Jesus is an unprecedented human being who conceives of himself as the pre-creation logos capable of a second act of human creation and who generated himself uniquely and alone in his relationship with his conception of God and the spirit, then he must be so-defined from out of his life and his words and from a singular self-consciousness open and given, as revelations, to the reader.
A hermeneutics of the gospels begins from one premise, one attitude in relation to reading: “to proclaim the Spirit of scripture anew,” as Oeming writes, and “something that transcends any method.”16 Instead of being relational, the narrative accounts will be read so as to first of all make Jesus independent of any prophetic announcements and to interpret his life, words, and his self-consciousness, from out of himself alone and as a revelation who will unveil and disclose what has remained, until him, imperceptible and un-thought. The dynamic of the gospel narratives regenerate themselves in the relationship (direct, without mediation) with a reader who assumes, at the same time, the responsibility of interpretation and the effort to recognize a disjunction between the spirited words of Jesus and the narrative of events. Jesus embodies the apokalypsis – not to precipitate eschatological events and any “last things” or an end, but rather to reveal what has been recognized by many and often repeated as a “new creation.” To anticipate the future from out of the past resulted in once again establishing, without knowing it, a limit to being. Jesus could not be anticipated; he was inconceivable prior to his coming into the world. In self-conception, Jesus preceded creation and gives himself over to another genesis, a moment understood from the ←12 | 13→stunning proclamation “Before Abraham was, I am,” (John 8:58) one of the rare sayings reflecting his unparalleled language and consciousness.
As Paul was the first to understand and commit to writing, Jesus is, then and now, “the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began” (Rom. 16:25). The Pauline community will remain most faithful to this one remarkable insight by the apostle and continue to regard Jesus as “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed” (Col. 1:26). All prior generations could not perceive the mystery, had no access to witness the concealments of the social world; to then relate Jesus to a carefully constructed genealogy, whether in Matthew or Luke, gives him a descent entirely inappropriate to him, with historical individuals who could not precede him as his progenitors. Jesus cannot be an heir; he inherits nothing from the past (surely not any monarchical pretensions) except a limit soon to be definitively breached. Jesus nullifies all apocalyptic expectations, any last things or end, since he is the revelation of what has remained concealed from prior to the beginning of being and now makes it possible for humanity to recollect it from his words. Achtemeier writes: “Jesus, through his language, gives us a new being.”17 The challenge of a hermeneutics depends on making the revelations of Jesus’ words effectual, capable of disclosing precisely how this “new being” will come about both in an individual and, equally important, in a world in time to come, with the demands of the here and now never more crucial and consequential. Hermeneutics will require the inter-related attitude of suspicion, reflection, and recollection, a three-part reading leading to the meaning of Jesus’ words and the events of his life between history and faith, in relation to both, but determined by neither.
The gospels have been defined by Bultmann as “an original creation of Christianity.”18 Ellis believes “the gospels constitute their own literary genre,”19 as does Collins who calls them “a unique Christian literary form.”20 Auerbach has stated that the writings of the New Testament as a whole “would not fit into ←13 | 14→any of the known genres.”21 Kümmel adds: “viewed as a literary form, the gospels are a new creation.”22 Hermeneutics is here less interested in the “form” of the gospels or, for that matter, the various disputed and uncertain sources, than what their meanings disclose and what the consequences of what an “original creation” and a “new creation” mean, today, for us. The fundamental problem remains ontological. Jesus re-animates being, gives it once more the breath of the spirit to begin to regenerate itself. But as writing, the gospels are under the considerable strain of fully, adequately representing Jesus; as interpretations, they expose their intent for the necessity of their present that, for us, can no longer be binding. A three-part hermeneutics intent on interpreting the meaning of Jesus is indifferent to the intention of the author, the work’s Sitz im Leben, or the immediate reader and listener of early Christian communities.23 Some believe “one’s first question should be about the meaning and intentions of those who recorded the words that now appear in the gospels.”24 The immediacy of the gospel writers and their situation, however urgent for them, has receded into a distant and, perhaps, no longer recoverable past. The author’s motivations, his history, or the first readers of the gospel, cannot determine our present. The one and only certainty remains the text and the reader, in a necessary relationship to see and hear the one individual who, by virtue of his self-consciousness, and with that singular and many times repeated self-designation, “the son of man,” became and continues to be a revelation. His presence, then and now, was not intended to be a merely individual accomplishment, for himself alone. Jesus shows himself to others and thereby introduces a possibility in the world of a fundamental transformation of the human, in one individual, in everyone to come in a second act of creation. Jesus inaugurates, from out of himself, and from the two extreme moments of the figures of the virgin birth and the resurrection, a new possibility of being.
Jesus’ revelation are a disclosure, for thought more than vision looking for signs and epiphanies, and for a future entrusted with making his unveiling possible, actual, and true. In one of his most remarkable sayings and first announced, ←14 | 15→as we saw earlier, at the end of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Jesus tells his listeners, “I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35). What he reveals by speaking are hidden meanings that, when fully understood, will contribute to the beginning of perpetual task: to draw, into the world, what has been described – with historical language inappropriate to the future – a kingdom (Gr. basileia) a word in itself bound by history and still reflecting an imaginable alternative to our world. The human imagination has not yet been able to conceive a completely other form of being, one that cannot be reduced to what has already taken place. Kingdoms are antiquarian and irrelevant, royal individuals more so. The revelations of Jesus disclose previously concealed realities that are incomparable to all previous historical forms.
For the first time, and independent from any past or singular tradition, Jesus understood himself in a way difficult for his disciples and followers to fully share; he speaks, at times plainly, at times in parables, at times enigmatically, with meanings that are often obscure. Revelations are not simply given, and certainly not for plain sight, to simply stare at passively and in stunned wonder to any “signs.” They demand reciprocity, acuity of perception, an abiding interiority. As a teacher, he seems unwilling or unable to better explain his meanings; his words often leave his listeners bewildered, utterly at a loss, and, strangely, not infrequently in fear. Luther’s belief in claritas scripturae does not leave us any more confident; on the contrary, and in one of the many instances of a human Jesus (disappointed and frustrated) he can only ask: “why do you not understand what I say” (John 8:43)? The reader, today, also hears the question; it has been perpetually asked as a reminder of the difficulties involved, in reading, in hearing, and in making Jesus present.
Even as a twelve-year-old, people “did not understand what he said to them” (Luke 2:50). He left his listeners astonished by the newness of his ideas even as they struggled with its meanings. “The Gospels record the difficulty his disciples – those simply fishermen, innocent of hermeneutics – have as they try to decipher”25 Jesus’ message. The gospel writers, however, are much less “innocent of hermeneutics.” They are continuously making decisions of inclusion and omission; they have motivations, and if they are neither interested in argument nor persuasion, there is sufficient commentary and drama to attempt to influence the reader and listener of their time. The reader, today, experiences the difficulty of deciphering the innumerable layers – of speech and writing, Jesus’ sayings and ←15 | 16→narrative constantly inter-related and with no certainly about its origin except when attributed to the scriptural. The gospel writers are even in more of a predicament: all they have are oral testimonies and written accounts, one or perhaps more sources, requiring them to make decisions – of inclusion, of redaction, each with life situations no longer relevant for the present. Hermeneutics has another purpose: instead of accepting the gospel writers and their interpretation of the sources and how their intentions attempt to influence the reader, it is necessary above all to offer other alternatives, other meanings. If, as Kermode believes, the “hermeneutic potential” of the gospels is “inexhaustible,”26 then there continues to be a “need to rediscover the meaning of the words and figures employed in the New Testament, a task entrusted to the exegete first of all.”27 The present interpreter will bring hermeneutics to bear on the gospels so as to attempt to recollect both the collective memories of Jesus and how he necessarily exceeds them in his life and words – beginning with the profound meaning, one certainly not reducible to a biological fact, to the gynecological condition of a body, of the virgin birth.
Reading the gospels writers involves being attentive to their interpretations. With the exception of “the son of man,” his singular and repeated self-designation, all titles given to him (whether Messiah or Christ, Lord or son of God) are derived from conceptions that may fail to recognize Jesus the unprecedented human being. The gospel writers cannot understand Jesus without depending on parallels. They need support; foundations are necessary, and this is the reason they continuously relate him back to a traditional history. He is heralded, previously “spoken of by the prophet,” (Matt. 3:3) and confirmed since “it is written in the book” (Luke 3:4) and, more provocatively, “the time is fulfilled,” (Mark 1:15) and “this was to fulfill the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah,” (John 12:38) as if he was the sign of God once again, and after a significant absence, intervening in the world to alter its history once and for all. For the writers of the gospels, Jesus can only be legitimate when he becomes the fulfillment of tradition; he is authoritative not due to himself (to his individuality and what he reveals by speaking, in sayings that astonish everyone for their newness) but through an association to scripture and to the utterances of prophets. Borg and Crossan make us aware that
←16 | 17→
it is sometimes difficult to discern whether “prophecy historicized”
is being used to comment about something that actually happened
or whether it is being used to generate a narrative or a detail within
a narrative. But such discernment is not our present concern. The point,
rather, is the use of the passages from the Jewish Bible in the telling
of the story of Jesus and what such use suggests about the interpretive
framework of the narrator.28
Girard goes further and is one of the few to stress how the gospels are attempting to “gain acceptance” for Jesus by relating him to scripture.
The evangelists make many innovations with respect to theology.
We could attribute to them the desire to make their innovations
respectable by sheltering them as much as possible behind the
prestige of the Bible. In order to gain acceptance for the extraordinary,
endless exaltation of Jesus they place their writing under the protective
shelter of texts that denoted authority.29
Girard’s argument deserves emphasis: when the four writers of the gospels decide to relate Jesus to the history of Judaism in order to make him legitimate as a Messiah, for example, or Davidic, they have inadvertently limited Jesus to a prophetic pre-understanding; such a “protective shelter,” unfortunately, is also a covering and a limitation. He may have been given authority by virtue of his relation to Jewish tradition, but the past (all of past human history) is precisely what Jesus’ advent and enduring presence has confronted as inadequate and no longer binding. Girard makes explicit the need for a reflective hermeneutics. One obligation will be to interpret the “pre-judgments” of the gospel writers and argue that such a relation provided only one understanding of his life, giving him a context that, ultimately, may be have been misleading; it certainly cannot be complete and in their determination made both omissions and impositions. “The earliest Christians made most significant use of the OT in their theologizing. They developed major aspects of their beliefs and expectations from OT texts.”30 But in so doing Jesus has been given titles he never chose or identified with – none more alien to him than “King.”
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Pre-judgments, according to Gadamer, may well be “conditions of understanding,”31 but in the case of the gospel writers, their interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life, as it relates to the past, may limit what he has revealed that can in no way be anticipated. The past prior to him did not reveal Jesus; and only the future, our own, can realize him. It is the task of reflection, as Habermas tells us, to recognize these initial conditions of understanding. “It is the peculiar achievement of hermeneutic understanding that – in relation to the successful appropriation of traditions – the prejudices that are attached to the initial situation of the interpreter are also rendered transparent in their emergence from tradition, and thus absorbed into reflection.”32 Ricoeur makes the same argument.33 To absorb into reflection, a hermeneutic interpretation of the gospels will recognize Jesus as a deliberate confrontation with the limits of tradition and its continuity; only by encountering tradition and its representatives does it then eventually become possible to see how the “concealments” have become permanent and unrecognized. “This hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved.”34 Revelation and tradition are incommensurable. Revelation shatters all history so as to recollect what has remained, as Paul tells us, the mystery now to be understood.
The patriarchal, prophetic, and monarchical associations are imposed on Jesus by the gospel writers since they cannot understand him from out of himself, uniquely, in the fullness of his presence (his parousia) that can in no way be anticipated by already existing expectations, most especially in some world-ending eschatology initiated from out of a metaphysical source. To elude Jesus’ history, and therefore to refuse to understand him within the limits of his time and place, allows the reader to interpret the consciousness Jesus has of himself. Hermeneutics will involve what Vattimo calls “a reflection on what remains to be recollected and undertaken of the mysterious event that took place two ←18 | 19→thousand years ago,”35 with “recollection” being a necessary re-examination of all the experiences and memories preserved about Jesus the man and how they have been handed down to us, as writing, in the four gospels. Finally, recollection cannot be limited by the memories of everyone who provided a testimony of Jesus and the writings of the gospels; “what remains to be recollected” becomes an interpretive task undertaken again and again between the text and the reader and without relying on anything but the decisive encounter in language – with the inter-relation of Jesus’ sayings and the description of events.
A hermeneutics of the gospel narratives will simultaneously be concerned with the act of interpretation and understanding as well as, perhaps more importantly, as Ricoeur tells us, “with apprehending a possibility of being.” We will make a demand on ourselves in the act of reading and thereby attempt to fulfill the obligations of a hermeneutics that will “uncover” not only meanings, “but to unfold the possibility of being indicated by the text.”36 Jesus’ revelations are ontological; they are an uncovering and illumination of a mode of being previously concealed. Jesus’ presence in the gospels, however, cannot simply be one possibility of being amongst others. A hermeneutics of the gospels will turn to the narrative and there assume the obligation of disclosing a possibility of being now, from out of the presence of Jesus the individual, so as to render him (as always, from the very beginning) as effectual, dynamic. “Christ’s word brings out the meaning not only of our personal existence but also the meaning of all human existence. Thenceforth there is not the correcting in detail of our view of the world but of re-orienting all being.”37 Hermeneutics will only succeed when it has also adopted the very attitude evident, again and again, by Jesus himself when confronting the traditions of the past; and that is one of the symptoms of the gospel writers as they attempt to represent Jesus. Too often, they are unable to resist – in part because they have no other alternative they can see – relying on the very past Jesus has extricated himself from; and that means becoming independent of three simultaneous and inter-related traditions of Judaism: the ←19 | 20→patriarchal, the prophetic, and the monarchical. Jesus will necessarily place himself between the entire history of the Jewish people, thereby creating what Moltmann has called a “discontinuity,”38 the possibility of another history so momentous nothing in the past could have prepared it. The introduction to the primacy of hermeneutics – first, as the recognition of the “pre-judgments” of the gospels, the task of reflection and recollection and, finally and most importantly, disclosing a possibility of being such that understanding leads to an ontological transformation – must now contend with the quest for the historical Jesus and the limits of historicism or what Nietzsche has called “the idolatry of the factual.”39 The “dehistoricizing tendency”40 of hermeneutics is here fully accepted.
Historians turn to Jesus and attempt to understand him within the context of 1st century Palestine and Judaism. Jesus is surrounded by a world, born and raised there; he becomes a historical figure, like everyone else. Horsley believes that the gospels can only be understood “against the historical background of its origin and reference,”41 a task neglecting how our interpretation, now, cannot be determined by a long-lost origin and reference. More specifically, and in a now well-known affirmation made by many, Jesus “must be understood as a Jewish figure teaching and acting within Judaism, or we will misunderstand what he was about.”42 Jesus was a “first-century AD Galilean Jew, a man firmly situated in time and space.”43 “Jesus was a man of his time.”44 Collins writes: “Jesus was fully conditioned by the culture and thought-world of his time.”45 “Jesus belongs ←20 | 21→firmly in the world of first-century Judaism”46 Aslan, even more absolute and ignoring many aspects of the gospels and how he ministered to Jews and Greeks, Romans and Samaritans, and many others still, believes that “Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His was a Jewish mission, one concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews. Israel was all that mattered to Jesus.”47 The apparent certainty of historians could not be further from my fundamental conviction. Those predisposed to the apparent comfort of history and the facts known about it, however, must necessarily exclude the possibility of Jesus being capable of extricating himself from his time and place and to conceive such a radical transformation of the human, of the world, it could only be done so from the creation emanating from his life. There are simply too many incomparable ideas expressed by Jesus and preserved in the gospels to be constrained by what Bultmann has called “the hegemony of historicism.”48
Among the most insistent as to Jesus’ identity and, consequently, the formation and development of the Christian church, no one perhaps has been more adamant than Vermes.
Returning to the upheaval caused by the migration of Christianity from
a Jewish milieu to pagan Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome –
there can be little doubt that if in one sense some continuity persisted, in
another, the uprooting was so thorough that as a source for the historical
understanding of Jesus of Nazareth, the reliability of the Gentile church,
together with all its literature, composed especially for it, can be ruled out.
In many respects, the Hebrew Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Qumran writings,
and the enormous body of rabbinic literature, are better equipped to illuminate
the original significance of words and deeds recorded in the gospels.49
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Bold, to be sure; without taking into consideration all his references, rabbinic literature (begun after Jesus’ death) is unlikely to adequately interpret the figure of Jesus. The variations of our sources, Hebrew and Greek, make any one tradition insufficient. Scholarship is polarized. “Palestinian Judaism in Jesus’ day was so Hellenized at all levels of society that it is no longer adequate to look at the Jesus tradition in the light of mainly Jewish sources. Rather, one must rely primarily on Greek sources to make sense of the Jesus material.”50 That Jesus scholarship is so divided on the question of culture indicates not so much a problem as the need, from the outset, to indicate one’s presuppositions and perspective. The Jewish and Hellenistic emphasis turns to the available sources as possible guides to interpretation; and though not without merit or relevance, once again the sources (used by the gospel writers) can in no way determine how Jesus conceived himself. Aune provides one momentary but still unsatisfying alternative. “The Christianity of the New Testament is a creative combination of Jewish and Hellenistic traditions transformed into a tertium quid, ‘a third something’): that is, a reality related to two known things but transcending both.”51 The difficulty of situating Jesus culturally become noticeable – at the beginning and ending of his study – in Barnett’s incompatible claims. “The history of the New Testament was a sacred history, fulfilling and ending all that had gone before in the sacred history of the Old Testament. As such, a New Testament history could not be conceived as a mere succession of haphazard events. God lay behind this history as the undergirded the history of the Old Testament.” Despite his initial position, with God intervening and “fulfilling and ending” his vision of history, Barnett adds: “key elements in Jesus’ teachings … cannot be accounted adequately by appeal to the religious culture of Judaism and Hellenism.”52 It has been accepted as a matter of course, as indisputable, that Jesus was influenced by already existing ideas; that he confronted prevailing norms was certainly an aspect of his life and teaching. His dialogues with members of the Jerusalem temple leadership – scribes, priests, elders, Pharisees – were relentless and marked, at times, by ←22 | 23→hostility and anger. Jesus made enemies; some despised him and long-hoped for his death. What remains to be interpreted are the ideas he expressed and how they were uttered for the first time and were without any antecedents. An anti-historicist hermeneutics – motivated, first of all, by suspicion, reflection, and recollection – must now turn to the gospels as narrative.
Jesus is present as logos.
Among the most vocal and also most impressive responders to the claims made by scholars within the tradition of the quest for the historical Jesus has been Luke Timothy Johnson. In one of a series of exchanges, “Learning the Human Jesus: Historical Criticism and Literary Criticism,”53 he argues for a reading of the Gospels as narratives and through a careful and literary engagement with its “full literary integrity.” In this way, “the Gospels are read literarily rather than historically.” The strength of Johnson’s argument lies in less considering an event in Jesus’ life or one of his sayings than what any one narrative description contributes to “the character of Jesus within the narrative.” Johnson has made it clear: the character of Jesus can be known. There are many moments when Jesus makes his human self known in his moods. Johnson has been consistent in this regard: “there is one aspect of Jesus’ humanity on which the New Testament witnesses remarkable unanimity, and that is Jesus’ character.”54
The reader respects the narratives as the medium of meaning regarding
Jesus and engages the Gospel narratives in the way that literary critics
engage other such narratives, with specific attention to the literary elements
of plot, character and theme… such a disciplined reading engages the human
Jesus as a literary character in the narratives written about him within fifty
to seventy years after his death. (168)
To add to Johnson’s argument for being able to access Jesus’ character – and all four gospels are in no way incompatible on his character – a further analysis will be attempted here: it is not only his character that can be assessed, but also his self-conception and what it means for anyone who begins to understand the purpose of his teaching. A hermeneutics of the gospels does not concern itself either with a method or with a theory; it presupposes, from the beginning, that ←23 | 24→understanding is an ontological condition, and one with a particularly dynamic ability when it is animated by the spirit – and the reader may choose to understand the word (for themselves) any way they like, as theological, existential, or both. To interpret and understand Jesus should, in principle and with sufficient commitment, lead not to the recognition of the gospels themselves as a “new creation,” but to the gospels as making possible a new creation, for an individual, for the whole world, from out of the revelations of Jesus. It is therefore necessary, prior to turning to his life and words, to establish how a hermeneutics, to be effective, will have to be revelatory and allow the reader to experience the possibility of becoming “regenerated,” ontologically changed.
Distinct from the insistence on the discipline of history and on restraining Jesus to a particular context, others have made quite different proposals; far from understanding him from his historical or cultural contexts, there have been unique calls to regard him as someone who is, according to von Balthasar, “the absolutely singular.” His presence “does not result from a combination or synthesis of Jewish and Hellenistic expectations. It is incapable of being expected.”55 In order to prepare for the hermeneutic responsibility of representing Jesus independently of history – he emerges in the world precisely to breach the limits of the historical, beginning with his virgin birth – some preliminary arguments are necessary. To understand Jesus historically (he was, reductively, a product of his place and time) fails to recognize him as an individual who conceived himself. Jesus raised himself, from childhood; he did not come into being by emulating others. Rather than confining him to the particularity of time and place, Jesus will be interpreted from the perspective of an individual who created himself in part by confronting the limits of his world, thereby offering humanity – then, and now – the possibility of creating nothing less than a new world from out of the limits of the old. History can neither define nor contain Jesus. From the moment of his virgin birth to the event of the resurrection, in all the remembered instances of his life, with others and by himself, Jesus defies history.
Smith tells us that “the most frequent use of the terminology of the ‘unique’ within religious studies is in relation to Christianity.”56 Mack adds: “the fundamental persuasion is that Christianity appeared unexpectedly in human history, ←24 | 25→that it was (is) at core a brand new vision of human existence, and that, since this is so, only a startling moment could account for its emergence at the beginning.”57 More particularly for what follows, “the startling moment” must necessarily begin with the life of Jesus. If he accomplished anything at all, it was his example of being capable of offering a vision of the world, that is, human beings and the limits of history that could transcend tradition and thereby inaugurate a break in time that could not be eschatologically initiated by a principle outside itself. From out of himself Jesus creates the unforeseen, indeed, a revelation and an apokalypsis that cannot be reducible to an event (or a series of catastrophes) leading to a transitional end precisely because the occurrence happened first and foremost in individuals, those listening to him, certainly, and those – like Paul and Timothy – who ventured into the world and did nothing more than talk to people in small gatherings, in synagogues and homes, in markets and in open places.
Schleiermacher has a reminder from his 1819 Lectures on hermeneutics: the assumption that the gospel writers are products of their ages, and their language(s) – as the “historical school” he addresses believes – does not take into consideration how Jesus cannot be constrained by the same imposition. “The only danger in their reasoning is their tendency to overlook the power of Christianity to create new concepts and forms of expression; they tend to explain everything in light of available concepts and forms. To correct the historical style of interpretation one has to resist this one-sidedness.”58 More importantly, rather than thinking of Christianity, as a tradition, creating new concepts or new forms of expression, it is rather Jesus himself who first revealed them; and what the gospel writers then attempt to do in their account is to portray the full, the infinite, consequences of his revelations for a humanity now given the opportunity to actualize the world he makes possible. The reader’s hermeneutics has the task of reading the gospel accounts as strained; the gospel writers are attempting to reveal the infinite meaning of Jesus with ideas, sometime related to tradition, inadequate to their individual. If, as Schleiermacher tells us, the gospels created “new concepts” (if Jesus himself revealed the new ideas to be intended as transformative) once again his words must be heard as effectual.
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In addition to the historical Jesus, whether Jewish, Hellenistic, or some outcome of both, there have been a few who have presented him as independent of the cultural influences that would have determined the lives and thoughts of everyday people. “With Jesus,” Dunn writes, though still restrained by an obvious oscillation between tradition and the new, “we see the freshness of an original mind, a new spirit, taking up old categories and concepts, remoulding them, creating them afresh, using them in a wholly new way.”59 Hengel is more decisive. “Jesus stood outside any discernible teaching tradition of Judaism.”60 For his unprecedented individuality to be revealed from out of the four gospels, then, certain moments of his life will have to be understood as unique. Hamerton-Kelly draws attention to others as they listen to Jesus and the “astonishment of the onlookers and hearers who ask about the source of all this teaching, indicating that it is altogether new and unparalleled in their experience.”61 It cannot be emphasized enough how those listening to Jesus’ teaching realize it has no “parallels,” as Hamerton-Kelly emphasizes, and therefore cannot be compared to any prior teaching. Jesus can neither be anticipated by the past nor understood (as he understands himself) by appealing to a prior historical utterance; when Jesus repeats prophetic words verbatim from memory, it is more likely a gospel interpolation than authentic, as will be the words accumulated together as the Olivet discourse and the apparent but by no means self-evident eschatology of Mark 13.
For some, the quest for the historical Jesus, and in particular defining him according to a specific place and time (Jewish, Hellenistic, a combination of the two, or a Christian interpretation) fails to consider him not simply as unique, but as self-generating. Bultmann writes: “First there occur in history events which are new and decisive … Nothing is comparable with it.”62 To affirm the life of Jesus is incomparable also means he is unprecedented; no prior history ←26 | 27→(prophetic or otherwise) can lay claim to his appearance, his enduring presence. He cannot be anticipated since Jesus conceives of himself as being anterior to history, and certainly to the Jewish history initiated by the patriarch Abraham – a problem, parenthetically, the gospel writers most concerned with genealogy (Matthew and Luke) cannot realize; they cannot see the discrepancy between their narrative of the virgin birth and the extensive (and contrived) genealogy of Jesus and his descent. Jesus cannot be a descendant, or an heir; he is a “first-born.”
Recalling but three fundamental categories, Breech provocatively writes that “there is absolutely no basis for assuming that Jesus shared the cosmological, mythological, or religious ideas of his contemporaries.”63 Among one of the very few to make his assertion unequivocal, Breech has the merit of regarding Jesus without any necessary relationship to his “contemporaries” or to any of their beliefs and ideas; in other words, if Jesus’ ideas are independent of his contemporaries, they are also, more importantly, independent of any ideas from the past and from an inherited tradition – whether patriarchal, prophetic, or monarchical. When Breech further argues that “we cannot approach Jesus as a ‘historical personage’, assuming that his world-attitudes are totally circumscribed by the language and assumptions of a first-century Galilean,” here he makes a bold and appealing claim – one radically anti-historicist; if Jesus cannot be limited by history, he must certainly not be aligned (as Sanders does in Jesus and Judaism64) to an eschatological anticipation, whether narrowly understood as a nationalist aspiration and confined to the Jewish people or a much more comprehensive phenomenon. Stauffert argues that “Jesus is much less a child of his time and of his people than has hitherto been widely thought.” Indeed, stressing his uniqueness allows him to further add that Jesus is “without parallel – in history, not only the history of Palestine.”65 It is within such a tradition that a hermeneutics of the gospels will attempt to follow and contribute, now, to a renewed consideration of how Jesus shows himself to be without parallel and without precedent, characterized by an “unmistakable otherness.”66 Jesus may have been perceived as a prophet, yet he “surpassed all his predecessors inasmuch as what his ministry was ushering in was greater than all that had happened hitherto. ←27 | 28→He could not therefore be appropriately described as simply this or that figure of the past redivivus or as their successor, nor did he fully match up to any one of the current expectations of contemporary Judaism.”67 Jesus cannot emerge from out of tradition since he conceives himself as not only prior to any foundational patriarch much less monarchical, but as prior to the word bringing creation into being. “The novelty represented by Jesus can no longer be described by recalling anything similar in history.”68
Here is the fundamental argument to follow, and to stress Breech’s remarkable assertion as all others who provide us with an assessment of a unique human being. Jesus cannot be understood according to history. He is in his self-conception, not historical. He conceives of himself as unprecedented precisely because he is anterior to being, affirms himself as prior to all creation and therefore not determined by historical actuality – whether scriptural, or temporal. The following hermeneutic interpretation of the gospels of Jesus will attempt to radically disassociate him from any milieu; to define Jesus ethnically or philosophically (as Jewish, as a Hellenist) fails to consider him from a transcendence completely immanent – and when he utters such statements (or rather, is reported to have said such and such) the oral reports and the written documents are a testimony to the struggle of representing him. He cannot be represented; one can only approximate, from the limits of our consciousness, his self-understanding.
Despite their dependence on a three-part tradition, the gospel writers nevertheless have intimations of Jesus’ being. He discloses truths about human existence for the first time and make it possible to recognize how limitations are not inherent ontologically but have been established in the world of history. Schillebeeckx believes finitude and secularity are fundamentally related. The revelations of the gospels of Jesus make possible the recognition of the finitude of the human world; not its end or finality, but its limits. Only the experience of revelation can begin the inter-related processes of altering the finite. “Revelation takes place in a long process of events, experiences, and interpretation.”69 Bultmann writes that revelation is “the experience in which one is raptured from the things of everyday ←28 | 29→life and one’s own limitations.”70 The limitations are not personal, reducible to an individual; they have been imposed from what humanity has “missed,” as the sin at the heart of being, a radical incompleteness sometimes denied though never fully concealed. Jesus’ revelations are a direct confrontation with what has been missed, neglected, and forsaken from humanity and now restores, for the first time, the demand to recover all that is still possible to actualize.
In his discussion of what constitutes a “Christian philosophy” (his quotes) Jean-Luc Marion relates hermeneutics to the uniqueness of revelation. “Christ exercises a hermeneutic on the world and its wisdom. But he accomplishes it only because of an entirely different characteristic: its radical newness, its unsurpassable innovation… His revelation introduced realities and phenomena into the world that never had been seen or known before him.”71 A hermeneutics of the gospels, then, has one primary responsibility and motivation: if both Catholic and Protestant thinkers recognize revelation to be the beginning of the ability to overcome finite limitations, then all interpretation will be motivated by this fundamental necessity. Jesus becomes the confrontation between revelation, from out of himself, and finitude as the limit of being.
Since “the word is the only possible means of revelation,”72 it is now time to turn to the gospels and interpret how Jesus reveals the possibility, for the first time, of at least recognizing the burdens of our human limitations and find the re-source, in his life, to overcome them. Jesus’ authority is precisely the resources he has in himself to give to others. “Far from reflecting pre-existing social relations, the cross and the resurrection give birth to new horizons.”73 The cross and the resurrection may be the culmination of Jesus’ life as he ruptures old horizons; its beginning extends back to two relations – Jesus as the word and how it leads to the virgin birth. One final note, on Bultmann’s demythology:
We must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the
mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning
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which is concealed under the cover of mythology. If that is so,
let us abandon the mythological conceptions precisely because
we want to retain their deeper meaning. This method of interpretation
of the New Testament which tries to recover deeper meaning behind
the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing – an unsatisfactory
word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements
but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.74
If Bultmann’s project of hermeneutic de-mythologizing continues to be relevant and essential in the interpretation of the gospels, one of the tasks is the attempt to “uncover” a deeper meaning – one, for example, where any hint at “the kingdom of God” is treated with the same necessary hesitation as the thought of an ineffable divine, forcing the human imagination to extend beyond mere alternatives to history and to conceive an entirely other order of being. The gospels should consistently defy our assumptions and presuppositions; so when we invoke “the kingdom of God,” such an event and subsequent situation can in no way be compared to any human expectation – for example, of an altered political world. Such an anticipation reveals our human aspirations; and though they may be understandable, and perhaps even necessary in a world of the most atrocious violence and caused by our own excesses and fragility, to close off ourselves at the limit of our imagination negates whatever may still be possible for Jesus to reveal in the world and to transform it absolutely at the ontological level. What remains to be disclosed, and from the very place (and time) when Jesus conceives of himself – “before Abraham was, I am” – he represents the dynamic possibility of a time prior to history that has been fatally missed, hence the idea of sin as hamartia, not a flaw or a moral transgression reducible to a thought or an act, but a condition of being that has restrained itself within an imposed finitude, a determination Jesus now exposes not as some irreducible condition of the human (much less a biological or anthropological) but as the very creation from out of limited historical actuality. Jesus “overcomes” the world as he bequeaths, to us and all future generations, the work to accomplish, one that has to return, again and again, to think and reflect on the meanings of the gospels – and, for now, with four simultaneous beginnings: as the pre-creation logos, in the regeneration of baptism, and the two narratives of the virgin birth where Matthew will relate Jesus’ emergence in the world with a trauma to persist from Bethlehem to the crucifixion.
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1 Best, Ernest. Mark the Gospel as Story. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983, 115.
2 Dodd, Charles Harold. The Founder of Christianity. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1970, 26.
3 Witherington III, Ben. Matthew. Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 2016, 52.
4 Freyne, Sean. Galilee, Jesus, and the Gospels: Literary Approaches and Historical Investigations. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1988, 24.
5 Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006, 2.
6 Hart, David Bentley. “Introduction” to The New Testament: A Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017, xiv.
7 There has been a curious element in the literature on Jesus that ranges from the sensational to the conspiratorial. A few recent titles are: Michael Baigent. The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-up in History. San Francisco: Harper, 2006. Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino. The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery that Will Change History Forever. London: Harper Element, 2007. Robert H. Eisenmann. James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Penguin, 1998. Barbara Thiering, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992.
8 Fredriksen, Paula. From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, 3.
9 Perrin, Norm. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom: Symbol and Metaphor in New Testament Interpretation. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980, 132.
10 Charlesworth, James Hamilton. The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2008, 63.
11 Dibelius, Martin. From Tradition to Gospel. Tr. Bertram Lee Woolf. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935, 3.
12 Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973, 45.
13 Rhoads, David and Michie, Donald. Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of the Gospel. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982, 2.
14 Hengel, Martin. Studies in the Gospel of Mark. Tr. John Bowden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985, 32.
15 Funk, Robert W, Hoover, Roy W. and the Jesus Seminar. The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Sayings of Jesus. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
16 Oeming, Manfred. Hermeneutics: An Introduction. Tr. Joachim F. Vette. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 74,
17 Achtemeier, Paul John. “How Adequate is the New Hermeneutic?,” 101–119 in Theology Today, Vol. 23, No. 1, April 1, 1966, 111. For an early discussion, see The New Hermeneutic edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb Jr. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964.
18 Bultmann, Rudolf. “The Gospels (Form)” in Twentieth Century Theology in the Making, Vol. 1: Themes of Biblical Theology. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. London: Collins, 1969.
19 Ellis, Edward Earle. The Making of the New Testament Documents. Leiden: Brill, 2002, 5.
20 Collins, Adela Yarbro. The Beginning of the Gospel: Prologue of Mark in Context. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992, 2.
21 Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, 45.
22 Kümmel, Werner Georg. Introduction to the New Testament. London: SCM, 1975, 37.
23 These three aspects of the work are outlined by Paul Ricoeur in “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” 95–110 in New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1974).
24 Tuckett, Carl. “The Present Son of Man,” 58–81 Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 14 (1982), 58.
25 McCracken, David. The Scandal of the Gospels. Jesus, Story, and Offense. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 83.
26 Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979, 40.
27 Léon-Dufour, Xavier. Life and Death in the New Testament: The Teachings of Paul and Jesus. Tr. Terrence Prendergast. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986, xxvi.
28 Borg, Marcus Joel and Crossan, John Dominic. The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem. New York: HarperOne, 2006, 157.
29 Girard, René. The Scapegoat. Tr. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986, 102.
30 Perrin, Norman. Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, 23.
31 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Tr. edited by Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1986.
32 Habermas, Jürgen. “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” Tr. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy, 213–244 in The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, 230, my emphasis.
33 Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Tr. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
34 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1962, 44. The quote is from the section “the task of destroying the history of ontology.”
35 Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. Tr. Luca D’Isanto. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 112.
36 Ricoeur, Paul. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, action, and interpretation. Ed. and Tr. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 56. See especially “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 33–62.
37 Latourelle, René. Finding Jesus Through the Gospels: History and Hermeneutics. Tr. Aloysius Owen. New York: Alba House, Society of St. Paul, 1978, x. He adds that Jesus “deciphers the human condition in all dimensions and accomplishes it beyond all that was foreseen,” xi, my emphasis.
38 Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
39 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” 59–123 in Untimely Meditations. Tr. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
40 Osborne, Grant T. The Hermeneutic Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2006.
41 Horsley, Richard. The Liberation of Christmas: The Infancy Narratives in Social Context. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1989, 18–19.
42 Borg, Marcus Joel. “Seeing Jesus: Sources, Lenses, Method,” 3–14 in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. New York: HarperCollins, 1999, 8.
43 Vermes, Geza. Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1981, 16.
44 Lindars, Barnabas. Jesus Son of Man: A Fresh Examination of the Son of Man Sayings in the Gospels in the Light of Recent Research. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983, 1.
45 Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Origin of the Designation of Jesus as “Son of Man”,” 391–407 in The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (Oct., 1987), 407.
46 Wright, Nicholas Thomas. Who was Jesus? Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992, 39.
47 Aslan, Resa. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. New York: Random House, 2014, 121. The overwhelming evidence in Acts, Paul’s letters, and the gospels make this belief impossible to defend. Innumerable passages testify to his universal teaching. Three, out of countless others, will here suffice. After the birth of Jesus, it is announced that he brings “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people” (Luke 2:10). After his death and in, literally, his last will and testament, he appears to his disciples and tells them to “teach all nations” (Matt. 28:19) and to take his message “unto the uttermost parts of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
48 Bultmann, Rudolf. “The Problem of Hermeneutics” in Rudolf Bultmann: Interpreting Faith for the Modern Era. Ed. Roger A. Johnson. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991, 146.
49 Vermes, Geza. Jesus and the World of Judaism. London: SCM Press, 1983, 26, my emphasis. In making such a claim, Vermes has created an unbridgeable chasm between a Christianity with its origin firmly (and exclusively) in Jewish culture, and a later development which, he claims, has somehow been a deviance from if not an outright betrayal of that origin.
50 Witherington III, Ben. Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994, 118.
51 Aune, David E. The New Testament in Its Literary Environment. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986, 12.
52 Barnett, Paul. Jesus and the Rise of Early Christianity: A History of New Testament Times. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 1999, 10 and 155.
53 Johnson, Timothy Luke. “Learning the Human Jesus: Historical Criticism and Literary Criticism,” 153–178 in The Historical Jesus: Five Views. James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy. (eds.). Downers Grove, Illinois. IVP Academic, 2009. All page numbers are from this text.
54 Johnson, Timothy Luke. “The Humanity of Jesus: What’s at Stake in the Quest for the Historical Jesus,” 48–74 in The Jesus Controversy: Perspectives in Conflict. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999, 70.
55 Balthasar, Hans Urs von. “Jesus, the Absolutely Singular,” in The Von Balthasar Reader. Ed. Medark Kehl and Werner Löser. Edinburg: T&T Clark, 1982, 124, my emphasis.
56 Smith, Jonathan Zittell. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, 38.
57 Mack, Burton. A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988, 4.
58 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” 85–100 in The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. Ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, 89.
59 Dunn, James D. G. Jesus and the Spirit: A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament. London: SCM Press Ltd., 1975, 40.
60 Hengel, Martin. The Charismatic Leader and His Followers. Tr. James Greig. New York: Crossroad, 1981, 49. He adds: “he remains in the last resort incommensurable,” 69.
61 Hamerton-Kelly, R. G. Pre-Existence, Wisdom, and the Son of Man: A Study of the Idea of Pre-Existence in the New Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, 50, my emphasis.
62 Bultmann, Rudolf. History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity. The Gifford Lectures of 1955. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1957, 60.
63 Breech, James. The Silence of Jesus: The Authentic Voice of the Historical Man. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983, 218. He adds: “Jesus might be more complex and original than commonly supposed.”
64 Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.
65 Stauffer, Ethelbert. Jesus and his Story. London: SCM Press, 1960, 11, 125.
66 Bornkamm, Günther. Jesus of Nazareth. Tr. Irene and Fraser McLuskey, with James M. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1960, 56.
67 Wedderburn, Alexander J. M. Jesus and the Historians. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010, 294.
68 Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015, 151.
69 Schillebeeckx, Edward. Interim Report on the Books of Jesus and Christ. New York: Crossroad, 1981, 12.
70 Bultmann, Rudolf. What is Theology? Ed. Eberhard Jüngel and Klaus W. Müller. Tr. Roy A. Harrisville. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997, 88.
71 Marion, Jean-Luc. The Visible and the Revealed. Tr. by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, 71.
72 Achtemeier, Paul John. An Introduction to the New Hermeneutic. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969, 96. He adds: “The new hermeneutic must provide the existential questions that will allow the text to function as what it is, i.e., as a linguistic response to, and illumination of, existence,” 98.
73 Thiselton, Anthony C. New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992, 7.
74 Bultmann, Rudolf. Jesus Christ and Mythology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958, 18.
