More on Meier
I read with interest the discussion below on John Meier, since I had the pleasure of meeting him for the first time yesterday evening. Meier was the invited speaker at the Graduate Theological Union’s 19th Annual “Reading of the Sacred Texts” lecture. The event was held at the GTU library, which was fitting since Meier spent so much time there while writing the fourth volume of his series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.
Alliteratively subtitled “Law and Love,” the book focuses on Jesus’ attitude toward the Mosaic Law. Examining several issues, including Jesus’ teaching on divorce, oaths, the Sabbath, purity rules, and the love commandments, Meier’s conclusion is that the historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus. Far from seeking to abolish the Law, Jesus was deeply involved in Jewish debates over its interpretation and application.
One of the issues raised in the comment box discussion below was how Meier sees his project. In brief, Meier wants to know what can be known about Jesus through modern techniques of historical research. The aim is a portrait of Jesus that even non-Christians could theoretically accept. The scope is narrower than it appears, because there are many things about Jesus that, given the sources we have, simply cannot be known in this way. As Meier observed last night, “what we don’t know, we don’t know.” The resulting portrait of Jesus is, he readily concedes, a fragmentary and unstable reconstruction that cannot serve as the basis for a faith commitment. The “historical Jesus” is not the same as the “real Jesus.”
It is this methodological humility that separates Meier from many other contemporary writers on the historical Jesus. Unlike many members of the Jesus Seminar, who tend to fill in the gaps in our historical knowledge with highly speculative musings, Meier generally stops where the data stops. It also separates Meier from theologians who would like to use the historical Jesus as a control on the dogmatic claims of the broader tradition.
After Meier’s lecture, he took a question from a young theology student who was clearly a bit shaken by Meier’s assertion that Jesus may not have said some of the things attributed to him in the Gospels. The young man asked a somewhat complicated question which boiled down to whether we can then continue to preach the Gospel as true with integrity.
Meier responded that the Church’s belief that scripture is divinely inspired does not depend on their historical accuracy in all details. The Book of Genesis is just as divinely inspired as the Gospels, yet no one would claim that the creation accounts in Genesis are a historical record. The truths revealed by scripture are not primarily historical truths, but rather the truths that—as the Vatican II document Dei Verbum puts it—“God wanted put into sacred scripture for the sake of salvation.” Our four Gospels became canonical because the early Christian community recognized that, despite significant differences in style and detail, these writings echoed what they believed about Jesus. All in all, it was a good answer, albeit one likely to be more comforting to Catholics than Protestants.
As both Bob Imbelli and Joe Komonchak observed below, Meier has had his critics who question whether all this effort is producing something of value to the Church. While I don’t necessarily agree with every assertion he’s made over the course of his 3,000+ page journey (who could?), I generally count myself as a fan for a number of reasons.
First of all, as N.T. Wright has observed, the absence of high quality research on the historical Jesus does not mean there will be no research on the historical Jesus. It just means that it will be done badly and primarily by people with ideological axes to grind. While Meier is probably never going to get as much press as the people who make more exciting claims (“the body was stolen!”), his work acts as an important control on the more outlandish claims of some scholars.
Secondly, Meier’s review of the sources is extremely thorough, which is something of an understatement. Those of us who don’t have time to read the thousands of relevant documents in this area should be grateful that Meier has and that he presents the evidence as objectively as he can. If you want to draw different conclusions than Meier, at least you will have the relevant evidence at your disposal.
Finally, I think Meier has done us a particular service by treating the subject of the current volume. The Law/Gospel antithesis that is a legacy of the Reformation continues to be enormously influential in preaching and catechesis. There is a conservative Protestant version of this that seems to hold that the point of the Incarnation was to establish the doctrine of Justification by Faith. There is also, however, a liberal version that holds that Jesus was an opponent of institutional religion and its burdensome rules. Neither does justice to the complexity of the Jesus who emerges from the scriptures. While these issues have been thoroughly explored by a number of Protestant scholars, such as E.P. Sanders and N.T. Wright, I’m not aware of a similarly thorough treatment from a Catholic perspective other than Meier’s.
Over the course of the evening, Meier repeatedly asserted that the fifth volume of the series will be his last (“if a Pentateuch was good enough for Moses, it’s good enough for me,” he said at one point to general laughter). However, since he plans to treat three enormously complex issues—Jesus’ parables, the titles of Jesus, and his death—I simply cannot imagine he will fit all of it into one volume. Whatever the result, I will certainly look forward to reading it.
Interesting and when I get some time I will read his book probably starting with the first volume. I read an excerpt of the fourth volume here: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/excerpts/meier_marginalv4.pdf
From Meier’s methodological approach to history, to what extent would he allow that the interpretation that his followers gave to observance of the law as recounted in Acts (and even the authority given to Paul) surrounding circumcision and dietary regulation, provide evidence for the historical Jesus’ understanding of the purpose and function of the law?
Splendid, Peter. Thank you! The basis of an article I hope.
Doesn’t this lead to the conclusion that God Incarnate spent his earthly ministry giving opinions on Jewish law that were ignored by Jews and became irrelevant within the first few generations of Christianity?
David:
I think the entire book would have to be read before arriving at that kind of conclusion. But I am somehwhat curious as to how he will handle the historical reasons for the crucifixion. Paula Fredriksen addressed that question. I have not read Raymond Brown’s Death of the Messiah. But it seems to me that the end of Jesus’s earthly life clearly gives clues as to his reception by religious and political authorities.
Debates around the law were nothing new in first century Palestine and as Meier mentions part of the normal to and from of Jewish debates. But one incontrovertible fact is that Jesus’ position on these was threatening to the Jewish authorities and they colluded in his death – no amount of presenting these debates as saguine, detached analytical dialogues can alter that reality.
I share David’s concerns. Look, if Jesus was “far from seeking to abolish the Law,” then we have to draw the conclusions from that. Such as, Jesus set his imprimatur on debt slavery; beating a slave to within an inch of his life (“because he is his money”); stoning adulterers and other sexual offenders (and please don’t bring up the “woman taken in adultery” story, because that’s apparently a much later addition); stoning intractable children; putting suspected adultresses through a very weird detection ritual (described in Numbers 5) — in short, the sort of stuff Christian Reconstructionists would love to impose on all of us.
I suspect that we don’t think about all this because Christians usually think of “the Law” as “the Ten Commandments.”
George D: I disagree with your conclusion that it is an “incontrovertible fact” that Jesus’ position on the law was threatening to Jewish authorities and that they colluded in his death. His position on the law seems quite orthodox, and the threat to authorities by groups such as the Essenes and the Zealots was much more pressing. Jesus sounds a lot like a Pharisee, and they were not getting killed by Jewish authorities. As Fredriksen and others point out, the far more likely source of danger for Jesus was his apocalypticism. We have ample record of apocalyptic preachers getting killed for their positions, and in some cases all of their followers getting killed.
Peter: You write,”no one would claim that the creation accounts in Genesis are a historical record.” Alas, well over half of my students, and maybe a third of my colleagues would disagree with you.
Excellent post.
I think we need to bear in mind that Fr.Meier’s work is an attempt – to look deeply at the record and see what we can come to – now – . Whatever the difficulties, he has moved the conversation alon gand raised some questions that we we’ll continue to keep working on until all is revealed.
Peter: I have been thinking all morning about your quote from Dei Verbum. I wonder if one way to differentiate between historical-critical scholars of scripture is, on the one hand, a group that despite their historical-critical studies of scripture still thinks that God’s hand is somehow behind the content of scripture and the inclusion of certain scriptures in the canon, and, on the other hand, another group who thinks that the authors of scripture and the makers of the canon were guided by far more fallible hands. Your claim that “the early Christian community recognized that, despite significant differences in style and detail, these writings echoed what they believed about Jesus,” is compatible with the understanding of both groups.
FYI, Donald Senior, CP, reviewed the fourth volume of Meier’s A Marginal Jew for Commonweal last year. If you’re a subscriber, you can read it here.
DavidN and Eugene, and re DavidN’s #12 comment on the other Meier thread (which deserves further discussion, imho): Does it matter to you that Meier concludes Matthew 5:18 (the every jot and tittle passage) to be not historical? (I could be wrong, have barely cracked the binding, but I’m pretty sure that’s his claim.) Just curious.
John Meier, at the beginning of volume four of “A Marginal Jew,” differentiates between the labors of the historian and the theologian, specifically between the quest for the historical Jesus and Christology; though he admits: “obviously the two endeavors are related” (p. 5).
It seems to me that the nodal points, where the disciplines relate, are the discussion of Jesus’ self-understanding and aims — hence my reference to the identity and intentions of Jesus in the post that Peter cited.
Now whether Meier’s truly prodigious labors will conclude with a pentateuch or extend into a hexateuch, these issues will, I think. come to the fore. Already, at the end of volume four, he provides a preview of things to come. He writes of Jesus’ “understanding of himself as the Elijah-like prophet of the end-time” (p. 656). And, on the volume’s last page of text, says: “in Jesus’ view of things, the halakic life he demands of his disciples is one that already is made possible by and responds to the power of God’s rule, present in the [sic] Jesus’ preaching and actions.”
I for one will be intensely interested in the outcome of his study. At the same time, I agree with the “very astute theologian,” whom Meier cites (p. 17), in recognizing both the “importance and limitations” of the historical-critical method.
It seems to me that a theologian who wishes to avoid difficult questions might very well appeal to the “limits of the historical method” as a way suggesting that the questions are not really as difficult as some less astute theologians and commentators make them out to be.
If “the historical Jesus” isn’t “the real Jesus”, then what/who is? Is the real Jesus a construct of the theologian’s minds? Is the real Jesus an objective, knowing/loving/choosing self, and if so where/how does he exist now? (I take it the historical Jesus doesn’t qualify.)
If he isn’t an individual, historical, objective, self, an entity distinguishable from other entities, then how, the old ladies in the pew ask, can he/it be my savior? Or is Jesus simply the Second Person of the Trinity? If so, that sounds quite heretical, though I guess it would be a new take on the problem.
The question of the historical Jesus is what can we really know about the historic person, nit whether there was the man(God/man to believers) Jesus.
The question, now that study has shown clearly that the NT isn’t a blow by blow of Jesus”s life , is how much do we really know and I think Fr. Meier says what we know doesn’t compel faith.
Thanks to Mollie for recalling Fr. Senior’s review. What Senior says makes much sense to me, an uninformed reader. If it is also what Meier says, then again I find the work to be instructive, again instructive to one who doesn’t know much of the whole set of issues. So again, thanks Mollie.
Re #13: I think Meier’s distinction keys in on the role of faith (and why folks, esp some Protestants of the evangelical flavor) mistakenly think Christianity disappears once inerrancy/literalism is foresaken. I understand Meier’s distinction between “real” and “historic” to be an epistemic one–the “real” is the sandals-in-the-sand person, the “historic” is inevitably/necessarily an abstraction, the product of scholarship/research, theory and method. I think Nunz above is correct to suggest Meier would argue what can be known isn’t that which compels faith.
It seems to me that the whole area of the historical Jesus is fraught with problems for those who are not already very committed believers. Benedict talks (as others) about a “personal friendship” with Jesus, but it is necessarily a friendship with someone whose real deeds and words are not necessarily described in the only records we have of him. One of the stories everyone knows and cherishes about Jesus (I think it is fair to say) is the one about the woman taken in adultery (“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”), yet as Eugene McCarraher points out above, it is not in the earliest manuscripts, nor the incident of Jesus saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Virtually no modern Catholic biblical scholar would claim that Jesus said everything attributed to him in quotation marks or did everything described in the Gospels.
I tell the following story so often that I am plagiarizing one of my old messages, but it describes a key moment in my awareness of these issues. Over 30 years ago, when I was reading Saint Mark by D. E. Nineham, a volume in the Pelican New Testament Commentaries, and got to Mark 2:23-24:
When I read the first line of the commentary, it made me laugh out loud. It said, “It is idle to ask what the Pharisees were doing in the middle of a cornfield on a sabbath day.” The question — and so many others like it — had never occurred to me! This was my first encounter with modern Biblical criticism and exegesis. The commentary continued:
For the committed Catholic believer, it doesn’t matter whether this incident (or the above sayings) actually happened, because God inspired the authors and editors (and who knows how many others—e.g., the ones who passed it along as oral tradition) to include in the Gospels what God wanted in the Gospels for our salvation. But for “o me of little faith,” I want to know the facts first and then have faith (or not) in the Bible.
It seems to me to make an enormous difference whether Jesus concerned himself with the Jews and things Jewish, because that would mean, if we could (say) go back in a time machine and be a follower, a great deal of what he said would simply be irrelevant to Christianity, and having been ignored by the Jews, irrelevant to Judaism. And Benedict tells us we are not to concern ourselves with the Jews, because God will take care of them. So the mission of Jesus to the Jews failed, and it is no longer a concern to anyone. Or so it seems to me. If Jesus had been a prolific writer on the questions of Judaism in first-century Palestine, how much of what he wrote would have anything at all to do with Catholicism?
I think Meier, as a serious scholar of the historical Jesus, is to be admired for taking on what in one sense is a fool’s errand– i.e., no matter in what chronological era Jesus were to have lived, we would still want to know more about him as a person because of his role as the most influential individual of all time. What did his voice sound like? What was his favorite food? Believers whose faith sustains them would nevertheless relish more details about him, and, conversely, for some unbelievers no amount of detail would ever be enough. Meier and other scholars should continue their search, but wouldn’t a deity whose greatest gift to us is free will intentionally choose to remain a historical enigma?
It seems to me to make an enormous difference whether Jesus concerned himself with the Jews and things Jewish . . .
I didn’t say that well. Of course, we know he did. But if his focus was the controversies of first-century Judaism, and if it was an approach to first-century Judaism that was the subject of his ministry and was the legacy he wished to leave to his followers, then it seems to me that something went almost completely awry in the movement that he began. Maybe the “one true church” is Jews for Jesus.
Bpb N. –
I realize that there is no question but that there was a man named Jesus. What I don’t understand is why the huge distinction between the historical Jesus and the “real” one. It’s as if theologians don’t think that the historical one is in some way the real one.
Or maybe I don’t inderstand what you mean by “the historical Jesus”? What is the referent if that phrase? Is the referent the man who actually lived way back then and who was crucified, or does that phrase refer to constructs of theologians which hopefully describe something else, something intended by God other than the person of Jesus? Or maybe I don’t understand what “the real Jesus” means.
As I understand what you all are saying about Meier, he is trying, using the best available evidence, to arrive at a construct which describes the (hopefully) observed events in the life of the actual man called Jesus. The construct would have to be only about what was observable and very probably observed, because otherwise the agnostic would not agree to it. (At least I assume this is so.) In any case, the construct would be about probable facts, including what Jesus probably was observed to have said.
But as with all history, the resultant construct would be at best only an expression of what probably happened. As such, faith in it would be a matter only of belief. But that’s now new.
Oops — “that’s now new” should be “that’s NOT new”.
because of his role as the most influential individual of all time . . .
William,
The question, it seems to me, is if “the historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus,” and if “[f]ar from seeking to abolish the Law, Jesus was deeply involved in Jewish debates over its interpretation and application,” in what sense can he, personally, be considered the most influential individual of all time? Perhaps the movement that was established in his name is the most influential movement of all time, but how important was the ministry of Jesus if it was about Mosaic Law, which almost no Christians follow?
David–
Whether the historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus (or not) can never be determined with any certainty. It’s an interesting issue, but there will certainly be debate about the issue among scholars for many years to come. Non-scholars, such as me, may also be interested in the issue, but I doubt that any consensus, one way or the another and assuming one could be reached, would matter to most people or change their perceptions of Jesus, whether good or bad. The influence of Jesus may have spread through a movement (as did that of Mohammed through Islam), but even among some secularists Jesus is admired as an influential ethical teacher about whom they would want to know more historically.
A question to any or all of you who have been studying this matter. Would it make any sense to suggest that Meier’s work focuses on what parts of the Gospel accounts of the words attributed to Jesus can be shown by critical research to have probably actually uttered by him? If this is the case, then, from a perspective of faith, might one say that the Christian message conveyed by the Scriptures is the message that became clear to the man Jesus only when He was glorified , only when He has been raised from the dead. If this distinction makes any sense, could one not say that the only texts that could have been considered for inclusion in the canon are those written, as were all the NT books, after the Resurrection?
Though he doesn’t say any such thing, my suggestion comes from my reading of Wilfred Harrington’s short “Jesus Our Brother.”
I realize that I know so little that I should keep my mouth shut about this matter. don’t hesitate to tell me so.
One of the stories everyone knows and cherishes about Jesus (I think it is fair to say) is the one about the woman taken in adultery (”Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”), yet as Eugene McCarraher points out above, it is not in the earliest manuscripts, nor the incident of Jesus saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Virtually no modern Catholic biblical scholar would claim that Jesus said everything attributed to him in quotation marks or did everything described in the Gospels.
It seems to me that the criteria that the Church used to determine what should and should not belong in the official canons can legitimately be used to reliably say that while these sayings may not been said verbatim by Jesus, they are, at the very least, consistent with the trajectory of his overall life and mission as understood by those closest to him and passed on through a generation or two. In the case of the crucifixion, knowing Jesus, that is certainly the attitude he would have had and it would not be unusual or out of character for him to speak like that. Ditto for the woman caught in adultery.
Whereas in the case of the Gnostic gospels, they often present Jesus speaking as a Greek philosopher which is clearly a clue that someone is putting words in the mouth of Jesus and trying to pass it off as authentic. It is obvious that the Gnostics were trying to appropriate Jesus’ voice to give their philosophy some added weight.
the fist paragraph is a quote from david – no sure why the formatting did not work
The question Ann raises is the one that Ben F. Meyer raised about John Meier’s distinction between “the real Jesus” and “the historical Jesus.” Meyer thought this analogous to Kant’s distinction between the noumenon, unknowable to us, and the phenomena, which we can know but whose distance from the noumenon, of course, we can’t know. So there is the unknowable “real” Jesus, the one who walked the dusty roads of Palestine, and there is the Jesus of historians, an historical construction, but whose relation to the “real Jesus” we can’t know.
Meyer proposes instead that we think of the real Jesus as the Jesus who becomes known to the degree that we can make intelligent and grounded judgments about him. Thus, to make use of the quotes Bob Imbelli supplies above: Meier writes of Jesus’ “understanding of himself as the Elijah-like prophet of the end-time” (p. 656). And, on the volume’s last page of text, says: “in Jesus’ view of things, the halakic life he demands of his disciples is one that already is made possible by and responds to the power of God’s rule, present in the [sic] Jesus’ preaching and actions.” Now to the degree that these judgments are well grounded, do they not give us access to the real Jesus, to his self-understanding, to his view of things, to the demands he makes on disciples, etc.?
Or does Meier have in mind an already back there then real Jesus (to borrow Bernard Lonergan’s description of the view of reality of empiricists and naive realists: “the already out there now real,” sitting out there and waiting to be known by some means other than by intelligent grasp and reasonable judgement?
AnnO: “…a construct of probability” (your last two paragraphs)–yes, I think this is what Meier means by the historical Jesus. He and other scholars have devised various criteria by which to evaluate evidence for authenticity (multiple attestation, coherence, embarrassment, e.g.). The part of what you write that I suspect some of them would quibble with is your use of “observed,” since there is virtually no contemporaneous evidence for the historical Jesus, certainly no eye-witness testimony, and arguably nothing reliable until about year 70.
George,
Would it make a difference if the account of the Last Supper in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus did not institute the Eucharist, were the most historically faithful account, and the accounts in the synoptics were the result of a very early tradition of Jewish-Christians sharing a meal that resulted in oral traditions developing that Jesus himself actually started the tradition? Remember that the evangelists themselves were not interested in historical accuracy. So if those interested in deciding what was in an out of the canon were judging the gospels by what was historically accurate, or at list historically plausible, they were using different criteria than the evangelists themselves.
I have learned a great deal from reading each volume as it has appeared, and agree that Meier fully deserves the attention and plaudits he has received. His discussions can help to strengthen faith because they help restore the incarnational “both-and” tension. The disciples and companions realized that Jesus was an extraordinary person they knew and loved. The people of that time compared him to the great prophets. And yet it took from them a leap of faith to profess his divinity. For centuries we have studied and professed the divinity who came down from heaven and took flesh. In our profession we act correctly, but that does not mean that we can know more about a Son or Word that we have abstracted from his life among us. Our leap of faith would be, not that God is revealed in Jesus, but that he is fully revealed, that he is what God’s “power and might” and “right hand” mean.
Meier also concluded in volume 2 that Jesus was esoecially noted for his prophetic acts, in particular, the exorcisms. Each volume is a treasure in itself.
F.Y.I- The Eucharist:
http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/john/john17.htm
History is a form of memory, so the historical Jesus is the remembered Jesus. The real Jesus is what we want to remember, but our memories are shaped by our thinking in a way that “others” are not. By examining various histories of Jesus, the quest for the historical Jesus aims to get at the Jesus who was encountered, but even when we use the memories of many people, we still have only memories rather than Jesus. In essence, we have another history, based on memories still, farther removed from the real Jesus though it may be more accurate than other accounts.
None of this is new. St Luke begins his gospel by saying he is going to use various sources to create “an ordered account” of the life of Jesus. Now exegetes use a variety of sources to create their own ordered accounts, with “order” meaning factual, that any historian could agree on, that makes sense to a modern person, etc. But the narrative achieved is still memory, not the real Jesus.
F.Y.I- The Eucharist:
Nancy,
Many claim to find the Eucharist in Chapter 6 of the Gospel of John, but if it is to be found in Chapter 17, as far as I can tell, you are the only one who has figured out how. Would you care to give us an explanation?
Bob, JAK, and Mary –
Thhanks for the help.
If Meier’s real Christ is like Kant’s noumenon (completely unknowable), then I have the same problem with him that I do with Kant. If He/the noumenon is unknowable then how come they keep trying to describe Him/it? Obviously, they really do believe that they have some evidence that there is actually something known out there.
The logical problem is, I think, a problem of a referent when there is *only very little* known about something we have some reason to think is objective, but we do not have much grounds to describe it in any detail. But we try anyway. Our resultant construct is based on scraps of information, and the construct ends up being as much fiction as fact. But with Scriptural constructs we can’t (unless we’re crazy) love our Scriptural fictions as if they were facts. We can’t believe that it is our fiction is really going to save us or that it loves us. Such Biblical hermeneutics becomes a kind of high class exercise in literary criticism.
For me the question should be: is so little known of the real Jesus that we cannot know what His main claims were? This does not assume that *nothing* is known of him. “Jesus” does have a real and partially described referent.
N. T. Wright (the only theologian I’ve read concerning this question) seems to be saying that although we do not have direct evidence of what Jesus said (he didn’t write anything), we do have witnesses-of-His-sayings-and-doings, and the witnesses are of the most extraordinary sort: Plus we know from a non-disciple that He was in fact crucified. Some followers of those witnesses also wrote second-hand accounts of Jesus’ sayings and actions. The question for Wright becomes not ‘why believe these are jesus’ exact words?’ but ‘why believe that these witnesses and their immediate followers are telling the truth about Jesus *as they understand it*?’ In other words, the epistemic problem is shifted from the problem of knowing Jesus to the problem of knowing His early followers.
Wright puts great store in the fact that the conversions of so many of those witnesses were so very extraordinary that it is unlikely they were lying — there is convincing evidence to think thqt many did leave wife, child, father, mother to go to the ends of the Earth to preach the Good News to utter strangers! The martyrs died horrible deaths because of their beliefs. NOrmal people don’t act like that unless they are convinced they are right. So one becomes inclined to believe or at least think it probable that the early Christians told the truth as they saw it.
Even so, given prior belief in the truth of Scripture, I can see a lot of value in theologizing such as Meier’s. It seems to be analogous to reading a highly censored letter during wartime. While there are blacked out passages in such a letter, if you know the writer and certain facts well enough you can, indeed, sometimes would have to, project certain meanings onto blacked out sections. It would be sort of like filling in a jig-saw puzzle. Some projections just fit the contexts. (What does “fit” mean? Sigh.) Will have to read some Meier.
Mary –
You say that there are no eye=witness accounts. Do you mean that *all* of the New Testament is second hand? (See what I know?)
“Jesus’ understanding of Himself as the Elijah-like prophet of the end of time.” ?
Ann,
Jesus died about A.D. 30. The first writings we have from Paul are from around 50. Mark was written in about 70, with Matthew and Luke coming next and John was written sometime in the range of 90 to 100. I don’t think any scholars in the same league with John P. Meier believes any of the New Testament authors were eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus.
Paul met Peter, but if Peter told Paul anything about the life of Jesus, either Paul never wrote about it, or it didn’t survive. Paul never mentions Jesus as a healer, an exorcist, or a teller of parables. Paul never mentions St. John the Baptist or Mary the mother of Jesus or anything miraculous about the birth of Jesus. There are arguments about how much Paul really knew about the life of Jesus, but he certainly says little if anything to tell us about the earthly Jesus.
Mark is presumed to have compiled oral tradition and possibly relied on some documents, but this was 40 years after the death of Jesus. Matthew and Luke are believed to have relied on Mark and a hypothetical document containing sayings of Jesus (called Q).
So everything we have about the life of Jesus is not direct at all, which is why it is taking John P. Meier decades of work and five or six volumes to piece together a picture of the historical Jesus.
David N. –
Thanks. I knew a lot of it was second hand, but I guess I just assumed that some was first hand. i can’t believe that there weren’t written communications between the early Christian centers and that none of it is in the NT.
As for Paul, I’ve always thought of him as the philosopher-mystic, not mainly a historian. At least that’s what his interests seem to me to center on – the stuff that educated Gentiles would be especially interested in.) Though he disparages philosophy, he was often very much the philosopher. Plus he was particularly interested in practical issues such as how to love your unlovable neighbor.
Question: Paul studied with the Rabbis, didn’t he? Were any of them the same ones Jesus argued with?
@Ann–I just now saw your comment at #35, didn’t intentionally ignore your query, which DavidN addressed far more succinctly than I could have, so my delay in checking this thread worked out well for everyone. Over the years I’ve been slowly (very, at times) working my way through Meier’s project and have just started vol 4–I think it’s well worth the candle, even for those of us who aren’t scholars but just love to read and think, who aren’t trained in ANE scholarship, biblical studies, ancient languages, etc., but maybe in another life would’ve been. Another recently published book related to issues Meier’s addresses is Thom Stark’s “The Human Faces of God” (2010). I’ve found it well-written, accessible, and quite intriguing. Cheers.
Mary –
Thanks for the recommendation. I don’t think I’ll try the Meir — I doubt i’d live to finish it :-) Still haven’t finished the N.T. Wright, which, by the way, you might enjoy. Another 4 volume work ;-(
By the way — you refer to different posts by numbers, e.g., #35. Where do those numbers appear? I waste time going back to find earlier posts, and having their numbers would be helpful.
Ann, I’m not sure. The comments show up numbered on the screen of my blackberry (which is how I typically access the CW site).
A book that helped me put the life and times of lf Jesus in perspective is “Life in Year One” by Scott Korb who is Jewish. It’s written with the non-scholar in mind and reads easily and quickly.
It’s not about Jesus, but, rather what the world was like in 1st century Palestine. It covers such general topics as the political situation, money, home life, food, baths, health, the attitude of Romans toward Palestinians, religion, war and death.
David Nickol said,
“Maybe the “one true church” is Jews for Jesus.”
I’ve also thought that. And that was before I read Meier. Meier merely confirmed my understanding, separately arrived at. What is extremely painful to me is what has been lost in the Jewish veneration of The Word. Go to a synagogue service, let alone a Bar- or Bat-Mitzvah, and your heart will ache for the reverent celebration of scripture, with the exposition of that Word which follows, that should truly characterize a Catholic liturgy: half Liturgy of the Word, half Liturgy of the Eucharist. One is “hearing” in the way that the Jewish people were enjoined to hear. One is pausing and drinking in, giving thanks for that, and rejoicing. It perfectly parallels what happens at the altar and in the congregation during our own liturgy of the Eucharist.
I also think that unless one really receives scripture as both literary expression and kerygma, you will not understand what the evangelists were attempting to convey. A dry historical document it is not. They recorded the message as they received it spiritually, and they used much deliberate artistry to shape that message.
Overall, I really appreciate Meier’s understanding of Jesus’ Jewishness, but he’s not the only scholar who has insightful things to say about that Jewishness. I agree that the attempt to reconstruct an historical Jesus is not only not possible, it is not ‘the point.’