The Gospel According to Benedict: “In the beginning..”
Reviews of Benedict XVI’s book Jesus of Nazareth–his first personal work as pope–are starting to hit the street. I am sure many there will be many more posts here as the book makes the rounds, and I have a few thoughts myself, having given it the once over. Those future posts may be more extensive than the review I just filed for PEOPLE magazine. Yes, that’s right, PEOPLE. Eat your heart out, Luke Timothy Johnson. I got to make three points, 20 words each. And none of those words was “Britney” or “Spears.” I don’t want any guff when your copies arrive next week…
Among the more expansive commentaries, Michael Dubruiel, a.k.a. husband to Amy Welborn, declared that Benedict “is positioning himself to be the St. Thomas Aquinas of our age.” (As you can read here: http://michaeldubruiel.blogspot.com/2007/05/this-is-great-book.html). Lisa Miller of Newsweek (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18629187/site/newsweek/page/2/) is taking some criticism for being insufficiently expert in her exegesis.
The review that left me a bit gobsmacked, however, was from A.N. Wilson. In The Times of London last Sunday (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1798127.ece) Wilson declares Benedict’s acceptance of the validity of historical criticism “a startling break with Catholic tradition” and said his approving citation of some Protestant scholars would have been “unthinkable” even 30 years ago. “Most Roman Catholic priests, until the last 20 years, would not have read the books quoted in this work for a simple reason: the pope of the day had forbidden them to do so,” Wilson writes.
That strikes me as off base on many factual points, as well as supremely condescending toward Catholic scholarship (and priests) and an exaggeration of Benedict’s role and intent. It strikes me that the Pope is trying to steer the debate back to a via media between the poles of complete deconstructionism on the one hand and blind-eyed literalism on the other–arguably Protestant tendencies, if Wilson wants to get sectarian. In fact, Wilson notwithstanding, Benedict could be seen as tilting toward a more “traditional” and devotional style of biblical criticism than that practised by Catholic scholars (in my layman’s view) for much of the last half century, at least.
For a review of the reviews, including those from German and Brazilian exegetes, see http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/benedict_xvi_on.html
People magazine. Wow. Just wow. That is so mind-bendling cool.
“Mind-bendling”? Is that what Lindsey Lohan does?
I do hope my piece makes the cut. I am, of course, quite proud. “The Secret” can be boiled down to 20 words. Or less. But B16 on Jesus? There must be an award…
Pretty obviously A.N. Wilson knows nothing about the work of Cathoclic Biblical Scholars over the last forty plus years.
My first impression of Benedict’s book is that it is good as devotional reading but weak as scholarship.
One is tempted to paraphrase the saying of Karl Kraus about Freud. Benedict’s approach is the error it claims to uncover.
I am in the middle of Benedict’s book. Obviously, we can all agree that Jesus is much more than a wise man or prophet. Why Benedict spends so much time on this aspect is curious. Only non-believers need this part.
I second Joe Gannon with reference to A.N. Wilson who has no clue about what he is reviewing. Amazing.
Benedict will also take a lot of moderate conservatives by surprise. Practically every pastor has come to know that Jesus did not say all the things the evangelists place in his mouth.
Why Benedict is impugning the historical critical method is a mystery to me. And discount it he does. Maybe he feels it a threat to the faith.
The next Thomas Acquinas? Not even close.
Lost in all this is the reality that Benedict does say some beautiful things about Jesus and it does read more like a spiritual meditation than a work of scholarship. Joe Gannon said that first here. It is definitely not a scholarship piece.
It will take us awhile to put it all together.
Benedict does well to say that we “are free to disagree.” Hopefully the idolators of the papacy will take his lead.
“Benedict (can)… be seen as tilting toward a more ‘traditional’ and devotional style of biblical criticism than that practised by Catholic scholars …for much of the last half century”.
I agree. In the Foreword Benedict makes the telling comment: “There are dimensions of the word that the old doctrine of the fourfold sense of Scripture pinpointed with remarkable accuracy” (p. xx). I wish he had developed this point more fully, though his book as a whole exemplifies the older approach.
oops. I meant “mind-bendingly.” Somehow I doubt Ms. Lohan will be purchasing the Pope’s book any time soon, unless Prada offers it as a promotional discount with their shoes.
Bill Mazzella and Joseph Gannon make comments that resonate with my reading. And it also focuses me on a question that nagged me throughout the book: Who is his audience? I found several lovely insights (I especially like his take on The Prodigal Son, of The Parable of the Two Brothers, as he calls it). But throughout Benedict seems to be arguing with a foe that does not exist, or won’t read this book. I felt he was creating straw men (this ain’t Tubingen 1968, or at least I’m not THAT lost, nor is the rest of the community I know) and false dichotomies (Jesus is either the Son of God or just a wise sage and a fraud) and using them as platforms for his usual arguments. So maybe he is writing for the choir, an in-house tract to cheer his fans and warn off any would-be Sobrinos? More meditation required. But here’s a writer’s heresy for you: Half the book would have been a better book.
I confess that “gobsmacked” sent me straight to Google. I have got to stay up on my British slang. If anyone else was wondering:
GOBSMACKED
[Q] From W S McCollom: “I was looking at a UK magazine and ran across gobsmack. What can you tell me about this term?”
[A] It’s a fairly recent British slang term: the first recorded use is only in the eighties, though verbal use must surely go back further. The usual form is gobsmacked, though gobstruck is also found. It’s a combination of gob, mouth, and smacked. It means “utterly astonished, astounded”. It’s much stronger than just being surprised; it’s used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face. It comes from northern dialect, most probably popularised through television programmes set in Liverpool, where it was common. It’s an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like “shut your gob!” to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to the Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.
First, a big gratias to Joseph O’Leary for his post.
Joseph Gannon and Bill Mazzella have indeed seemed o hit the nail on the head – a nice devotional book with a concern about a theological problem that’s maybe not such a bifgproblem.
What’s noteworthy to me is that there is the matter, after this, of the curial influence on the forthcoming synod on Scripture.
Taking the BXVI approach might set back Catholic Scriptural study to the early 20th century or get us back to the tensions prior to vatican II.
Benedict says (p. xii)
“If you read a number of these reconstructions [ viz. of the historical Jesus] one after another, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has been obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold.”
Albert Schweitzer made essentially the same point just over one hundred years ago. One might suppose that this was not unknown to Benedict.
It seem to me that Benedict has done pretty much what so many other writers on the subject have done. He has found in the texts a Jesus who satisfies his own preconceptions. He wants to imagine an historical Jesus who spoke the words and did the things that the Gospel according to John attributes to him. Hence the argument of the section on the Johannine Question. It is one thing to say that the discourses in John are true and beautiful and worth taking to heart, quite another to say that they are the very words of Jesus himself recalled by the son of Zebedee. One may doubt the latter and believe the former. It is interesting that Benedict does not include Raymond Brown’s study of the Johannine Community in his bibliography
I don’t see any evidence whatsoever that Benedict XVI wants to bring us back to the early 20th century or to the tensions that marked the question among Catholics before Vatican II. Some years ago, after he gave his famous talk on the subject in New York City, he was asked at the press conference the next day, whether Catholic biblical scholars were not wrong in neglecting the decrees of the Biblical Commission and the restrictions of Pius X’s Encyclical “Pascendi.” He replied that the normative guidance for Catholic biblical scholars was Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. He has cited more than once the decrees of the Biblical Commission as examples of mistaken magisterial teachings. He was the head of the CDF when its Biblical Commission issued its fine document on “The interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” a document unthinkable in the early 20th century. I think a better effort needs to be made to understand how he can hold his position and not think we need to return to the days of Pius X. Things are more complicated than this fear indicates.
All I’ve read is the Newsweek excerpt. My reaction was more favorable than that of many of you. I think that the book will help many people have a better ad deeper appreciation of Jesus than they now have. So what if the book doesn’t make academic news!
My daughter-in-law was received into the Church on Easter. She has a solid liberal arts education and went through the excellent RCIA program at the Jesuit St. Ignatius Church in Manhattan. If the rest of the book is like the excerpt, I’ll happily give her a copy. And if she finds it good, i hope that she’ll pass it on to her husband.
Fr. Komonchak:
You say “I don’t see any evidence whatsoever that Benedict XVI wants to bring us back to the early 20th century or to the tensions that marked the question among Catholics before Vatican II.”
I quite agree.
Father Komonchak et al: I don’t think Benedict necessarily wants to take us back to the “bad old days” of Catholic scholarship on the bible. But I am struggling to get to the heart of some other tension that is at work here, and I think it may have to do with the nature and goal of biblical criticism, or more precisely the vaunted/derided search for the historical Jesus (are we on the Third or Fourth Quest now?)
And I think people may be talking past each other (or past the pope, and he past me), in the sense that many Christians (or non-believers perhaps) want to “humanize” Jesus in order to come closer to Him. So the search for the Jesus of history is a search for a portal, a toehold, for belief. Benedict would approach the question from the other direction, presupposing faith in Christ and the Scriptures and using historical critcism as a way to bolster that faith in the mystery of Christ’s divine and human nature. He seems to suspect, however, that anyone coming at Jesus from the human side of the equation has been reading Funk & Spong & the Jesus Seminar.
In any case, it is striking to me how often Benedict speaks of the absolute necessity of cultivating friendship with Jesus, and through Him with God. It oddly parallels the bumper sticker theology that says “My best friend is a Jewish carpenter.” Most seem to want “Buddy Christ” (Google the image–it’s great). Benedict however can find intense divine friendship on a more abstract plane.
Same goal, different approaches?
Addendum: In short, whatever the excesses of some exegetes, many people see the historical Jesus as making Christ more approachable. Benedict/Ratzinger sees it as downgrading the faith to make it more accomodating to our needs. He frequently hits that point in his writings. For him, the journey of faith must be hard. Many of us want it to be easy. Both can be right, both can be wrong. And at the same time.
Basta.
In response to the first of David Gibson’s two posts above, I think that Benedict has a more exalted ideal of friendship than the buddy Christ, based on Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophy (and possibly the classic German writers, maybe Schiller, but that’s another area where I’m over my head). Friendship is a very great virtue and a significant part of any serious moral philosophy or happy life that tends to be degraded in our culture — maybe Benedict has something to say to us here.
By the way, the bumpersticker I’m familiar with is “My boss is a Jewish carpenter,” which is initially a more clever but ultimately more smarmy and trivializing point.
And I wouldn’t be quite so hard on the “third or fourth” version of the quest for the historical Jesus. Spong and Funk and most of the Jesus seminar people are studiously unserious, but the fact is that the study of the social history of the Roman Empire, especially in the provinces and among the non-elite, non-Latin and Greek speaking populations, is one of the areas of Classical Scholarship that has been utterly transformed in the last century, both by new evidence and increasingly sophisticaed methodologies. The same is probably true (I’m not qualified to judge) for late Hellenistic/early Rabbinic Judaism.
When Dominus Jesus came out Metropolitan Damaskinos of Switzerland, who studied with Ratzinger in Germany before Vatican II , asked him if the professor was the same as the prefect for the CDF. Ratzinger respnded that he was the same person but the prefects job demanded one type of action while the professor can say what he believes. That the prefect has to relate to the whole church.
I understand that one has to work on keeping the whole church together. We need that. But I fail to see how writing Dominus Jesus helps it. It seems blatantly political to me.
Fergus Kerr in his recently published “Twentieth Century Theologians” relates this in the chapter on Ratzinger, along with some other significant facts about R.
To me there is something disingenuous about Ratzinger. Reading his “Milestones” is difficult because of his vacillations. He was going nowhere in Regensburg (where he taught) and the Vatican was perhaps happy to get a former periti and Tubingen professor in the hierarchy. Paul VI was trying to get kung to change for years.
This is perhaps an ambitious man who seems to be trying without showing any clear focus. Of course, those who agree with him will come to his defense.
But his political trajectory (especially that restorationist speech just before the conclave) shows someone who changed himself to fit the spotlight that was offered to him.
A reader of this blog has asked me for assurance that I believe in the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. I do.
Joseph Gannon wrote: ‘Benedict says (p. xii)
‘”If you read a number of these reconstructions [ viz. of the historical Jesus] one after another, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has been obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold.”
‘Albert Schweitzer made essentially the same point just over one hundred years ago. One might suppose that this was not unknown to Benedict.’
— But note that Schweitzer acclaimed Johannes Weiss as providing solid ground amid the welter of Life of Jesus portraits. Schweitzer seems to have excepted Weiss and himself from his general condemnation, which Benedict like most enemies of the quest-of-the-historical-Jesus ritually repeat. And in fact the image of Jesus as an eschatological prophet has held its ground very well in the century since then.
‘It is one thing to say that the discourses in John are true and beautiful and worth taking to heart, quite another to say that they are the very words of Jesus himself recalled by the son of Zebedee.’
It is not a coincidence that the book is issues exactly one hundred years after the May 1907 declaration from the Vatican denying that the Johannine discourses are theological compositions rather than the true and proper words of the Lord. That is why some talk of Benedict taking us back to the dismal anti-modernist period — of course, only to a certain extent; but even Vatican II in its stress on the historicity of the Gospels is read by conservatives as entailing the historicity of the fourth Gospel. It was in the name of Vatican II that Fr Francis Moloney was scolded by Fr Paul Mankowski SJ of the Biblicum for his “heterodox” denial of the historicity of the Cana miracle.
The quest for the historical Benedict is now in full tilt. Our modern-day exegetes have exposed him for the ogre he is. Imagine how surprised Benedict must be to find his fiendishly clever plans revealed. As the perspicacious comment above points out, “It is not a coincidence that the book is issued exactly one hundred years after the May 1907 declaration from the Vatican denying that the Johannine discourses are theological compositions rather than the true and proper words of the Lord.”
Unfortunately, publication plans for May 2107 will now have to be hastily revised. In the interim scolding will also have to be curtailed.
To Gene O’Grady: Thanks for the correction on my bumper sticker error. You are right. Though my mistake may actually speak in my favor. I am racking my brain to recall who first wrote about the “Jesus is my best friend” movement–not Bellah in the 60s, but someone similar. Now, as you may have seen, there is a movement popular among single young women (esp evangelicals) to see Jesus as “my boyfriend,” complete with date nights and such. Really.
As for the Jesus Seminar et al, I’m afraid I can’t roll my eyes high enough. What is frustrating, I think, is to see the historical Jesus exegetes all lumped together–Bob Funk with Raymond Brown and so on.
In any case, before this thread gets too nasty or tangled, a point of interest raised by these discussions is how this book (and there will be a second volume) will figure in B16′s legacy. He takes pains to say this is not a magisterial act and all that. Yet his “private” career as a theologian while head of the CDF cemented his legacy there as much as anything else. Will his effort to keep his non-papal scholarship going have the same fate? In other words, will the galloping infallibilism and papalism in the church today erase any distinctions–today or perhaps moreso in the future–between his “official” pronouncements and a book such as “Jesus of Nazareth”?
How could one possibly know that this is or isn’t a coincidence? And hasn’t the book been out for several weeks now in Europe? Did someone jump the gun over there?
The Masons told me it was true…
On the “Jesus as friend” imagery, it must go back awhile since it is referred to in the (inoffensive to me at least) parody Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum that was released in 1969. But I wonder if such an image hasn’t been there in most popular piety over the years, perhaps more Catholic than Protestant.
I hope my circumlocution (studiously unserious) didn’t make anyone think I have much use for the Jesus serminar people.
On A N Wilson — while I have avoided his books on specifically religious topics as likely to be more autobiographical than illuminating, I have read some of his stuff on 19th and 20th century cultural history and found that he was generally fair and sometimes perceptive on Catholicism. It’s rather a surprise that he made the kind of error he seems to have made, although he often prefers to shock than inform.
The specific points about Johannine authorship and the discourses being accurate accounts of Jesus’s own arguments with the Pharisees are made very strongly in two documents — the 1907 declaration and the 2107 papal book. In the 100 years in between I cannot recall any Vatican document stressing these two particular points. That is why I think it is not a coincidence.
As Cardinal Martini points out, the support that the Pope claims to find in current exegesis for his repristination of these old claims is highly dubious.