The third installment of Peter Enns' series on the 'aha' moment comes from Daniel Kirk, associate professor of NT at Fuller Theological Seminary. For Kirk, this moment came when he tried to construct a harmony of the events of the last week of Jesus' life as related in the four gospels.
It's a common mistake made by some non-theists to assert that the gospel narratives are hopelessly in conflict when they narrate the last week of Jesus' life. However, as Kirk notes:
...there are interesting differences.
One example: does Jesus go into the temple to cast out the moneychangers as the climactic moment of his “triumphal entry” (Matthew)? Or does he wait until the next day (Mark)?
Another: Does the fig tree whither immediately upon being cursed (Matthew)? Or does the withering happen overnight (Mark)? For that matter, does Jesus curse it before going to the temple for the clearing incident (Mark)? Or after (Matthew)?
Details, details, right?
But then there are potentially more troubling questions: did Jesus have his last meal with the disciples on Passover (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? Or was Jesus killed on the day when the Passover Lamb was slaughtered, such that the religious leaders were scrupulous to keep themselves pure for the feast that would take place that night (John)? [1]
Of course, at the big picture level, they tell much the same story: Jesus shared a last meal with his disciples, was betrayed, crucified and raised from the dead. The non-theist who blithely asserts that the narratives are hopelessly contradictory and therefore worthless is guilty of imposing modern standards of historiography inappropriately on texts written nearly 2000 years ago. However, this is also the same mistake made by the fundamentalist who, when they assert that every word of the Gospels was dictated by God directly into the minds of the four evangelists, assume that they have four written texts which can be examined likewise by modern historiographical standards. That the gospels may have begun their life as oral texts in a society where getting the broad picture was more important than harmonising minor details is something that fundamentalists completely forget, and when they construct doctrines of inerrancy which ignore these possibilities, they are merely creating problems. Kirk is particularly helpful on this point:
Though I had not been raised in a fundamentalist church, I was attending one during my first two years of college. Somehow the idea of “inerrancy” had lodged itself in my mind. And here I was, reading the Bible, and discovering that the Bible we actually have doesn’t seem to line up with the Bible I was told to believe in.
As I prepared to go to Westminster Theological Seminary a couple years later, I got introduced to the idea of “hermeneutics.” Guided by the biblical studies department, a way forward began to open up, in which I might be able to affirm inerrancy with respect to the Bible we actually have: maybe we need to think about reading and interpreting differently, bringing a different set of expectations to the text with us.
This, frankly, carried me very far through my studies.
At Westminster (at the time) I was given ways of affirming inerrancy by attributing historical inconcinnities to authorial purposes that lay beyond the bounds of historical accuracy. Historical problems were due to differing expectations of the ancients, or they were due to the fact that the Bible’s history is “preached” history rather than “objective” fact.
Moises Silva, formerly a New Testament professor at Westminster, even wrote an article in which he stated the possibility that pseudepigraphy might be part of an inerrant New Testament.
Learning all of this at Westminster, and spending my first 4.5 years at Duke while I was at the same time pursuing ordination in an inerrantist denomination, I actually found that the view of the Bible I had been given had a lot of staying power. [2]
One of the differing expectations of the ancients is rooted in the fact that the ancient world was primarily an oral culture, with a completely different standard of historiography. John Walton and DB Sandy cite Kenneth Bailey on the transmission of oral texts in Middle Eastern society:
For parables and stories, on the other hand, the reciter is allowed flexibility in recounting specific details. The main lines of the story are fixed and cannot be changed, but if he chooses to invert the order of some scenes or tell the story in his own style or with a few added details, that is acceptable within the community’s value structures. “The storyteller had a certain freedom to tell the story in his own way as long as the central thrust of the story was not changed. . . . The storyteller could change, say, 15 percent of the story—any 15 percent.” But over time the essence of the story remained the same. In other words, it would be unlikely that the authenticity of a story would ever be challenged. No one was permitted to change a key element. It would be completely inexcusable for a reciter to alter a fixed portion of the account. But neither would the authenticity of a story ever be challenged if reciters embellished non-fixed portions of a story to suit their purposes. The primary point is that reciters were granted a measure of flexibility; variance in incidental details was acceptable to the community.
This example from Middle Eastern culture leads Bailey to propose that the villagers’ method is likely to have been similar to the process of transmitting Jesus’ teachings. He refers to the model as informal controlled oral tradition. This is in contrast to other theories of tradition criticism such as proposed by Bultmann or Gerhardsson. Bailey concludes, “We have observed a classical methodology for the preservation, control and transmission of tradition that provides, on the one hand, assurance of authenticity and, on the other, freedom within limits for various forms of that tradition.” [3]
It goes without saying that the fundamentalist's naive use of modern historiography when reading the Bible is simply going to create problems which simply did not exist in the first century world. (The same would also apply to the naive non-theist who makes the same mistake). Walton and Sandy continue:
It’s especially important to recognize that a modern view of historiography must not be the standard by which we judge ancient practices of writing history. Again quoting Bock, “To have accurate summaries of Jesus’ teaching is just as historical as to have his actual words; they are just two different perspectives to give us the same thing. All that is required is that the summaries be trustworthy.”
The evidence then suggests that the gospel message preserved the essential essence of things Jesus and the disciples said and did. If there are variations in the written Gospels, it’s likely there were similar variations in the oral texts. It’s safe to conclude that a precision of wording was not expected either in the oral transmission or in the written records. “There is more to history than precise chronological sequence or always relating the exact same detail or reporting something in the same words.” [4]
The essential essence of the last week of Christ's life has most certainly been preserved, and that essence, neatly reflected in the Apostle's Creed, is the basis on which the Christian faith is founded:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead;
He ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
Memory is of course an integral component of any oral society, and as NT scholar Anthony Le Donne notes in his study of memory and the historical Jesus:
The more significant a memory is, the more interpreted it will become. The great figures, moments, movements, and shifts of history will ever be shaped and reshaped by new interpretative contexts. History makes new impact with every telling. With every telling history is impacted. [5]
In a primarily oral culture, something as momentous as the life, death - and resurrection - of Jesus would most certainly have been a significant event subject to interpretation and revision. Helen Bond, in her work on the historical Jesus quite rightly states that while "the event itself is not open to historical investigation", it is possible to examine the impact the events surrounding the death of Jesus had on the first generation of his followers:
The Christian claim was indeed a bold one, but it would have taken something of enormous magnitude to explain the sudden and unprecedented outpouring of devotion to Jesus among early Christians very soon after his death. It was the Resurrection that made Jesus different from any other first-century messianic leader and ensured that his movement continued, while those of others (including John the Baptist) did not. Christian preaching was now focussed not simply on the Kingdom of God but on Jesus himself: that God had raised him from the dead, that believers needed to make a personal commitment to him, and that he would come again in glory. [6]
The fundamentalist view of the inspiration and authority of the Bible is predicated on an untenable mechanism of inspiration - direct dictation of the very words into the mind - which collapses when one examines the multiple disparities between parallel accounts. It also destroys the authority of the Bible by forcing it to be something that it is not. Recognising the cultural background of the world of the NT, in particular its status as a primarily oral culture in which the essence, rather than the exact words of the message is important. Kirk's story is a happy one that shows how the choice is not simply fundamentalism or nothing:
Formerly, my communities helped me hang onto something (inerrancy) that I had been willing to let go of for years. Now, my community of godly colleagues affirms for me what folks from my past would claim to be impossible: those who reject inerrancy handle the scriptures with reverent humility, and live fruit-bearing Christian lives, demonstrating that here is a place where not only the word of God but the very Word of God is living and active. [7]
References
1. Kirk P, “AHA” moments: biblical scholars tell their stories (3): Daniel Kirk Peter Enns: Rethinking Biblical Christianity June 30 2014
2. ibid
3. Walton JH., Sandy DB., The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary
Culture and Biblical Authority (2013: InterVarsity Press) p 145-146
4. ibid, p 148-1495. Le Donne A Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It? (2011: Eerdmans) p 37
6. Bond, H The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed (T&T Clark International, 2012) p 174
7. Kirk, op cit
