Watch this homepage for my appraisal of John Dominic Crossan’s
brilliant (though flawed) study of the life of Jesus (hopefully
October/November 1995).

Shalom! Rowland Croucher

BOOK REVIEW: JESUS, by Leon Morris (Acorn Press, 1994, pb, 112 pp.)

Leon Morris is probably the most prolific Australian religious
writer ever (about 50 books, followed by F.W. Boreham with 46).

His latest, Jesus, would be my first choice as a resource for a New
Christians’ Class, or Christianity Explained group. (Modesty should
prevent my suggesting my own book GROW! as runner-up!). Young-to-older
adults who are fairly knew to the Christian faith seem to be Dr. Morris’
target-audience.

Jesus is still hot copy for both religious and secular
newsmagazines. Who was/is he? Did he exist? (a question Morris takes for
granted). What of Barbara Thiering’s theories? (which don’t rate a
mention in Morris’ book either).

This little book is gently written (Leon Morris is a gentle man). It
is tentative in many places (due to his scholarly hesitancy about coming
down hard on one side or the other of difficult issues – like the order
of events in the various Gospels’ passion narratives). The book doesn’t
really examine most of the major technical/critical issues: there are
no footnotes, and few references to contemporary scholarship.

The book has chapters on Jesus’ birth, baptism and temptations, his
teaching and signs and wonders, and parables. A whole chapter is given
to ‘Jesus, the Bread of Life’, as well as to ‘Jesus Meeting People’. One
of the best is devoted to Jesus’ enemies, and there’s another about
Jesus’ disciples. The Passion narratives take up the final three
chapters, followed by an epilogue about Jesus’ claims to be ‘God with
us’, to forgive sins, and his promise to return to this earth.

Although the book targets new Christians or ‘enquirers’ I believe
more serious/mature students of the Christian faith and life would find
it as fascinating as I did. You must read it ‘between the lines’. There
are choice little throwaway comments everywhere, and if you know a
little of recent critical biblical scholarship, they are tantalizing.

Morris simply studies the Gospels at face value. There isn’t an
indication (a la Raymond Brown, for instance) that these documents
represent apostolic or sub-apostolic preaching, and are products of ‘the
churches the apostles left behind’.

My major reservations are about its editing. Leon Morris is getting
on in years and there are at least 20 archaisms, sexisms, and
theologisms that should have been rewritten for a modern secular
baby-boomer audience. Some examples: ‘The parable is a form of teaching
that is not greatly used in these days’ (p.35: only a Westerner would
make that comment); some archaisms: ‘flesh can give rise only to flesh’,
‘for him did God the Father seal’ (pp. 44,55); ‘he who eats my flesh…
I will raise him up at the last day’, ‘whoever does not carry his
cross’, ‘what comes out of a man makes him unclean’ (pp. 57, 75, 78: why
not use the non-sexist NRSV translation?); and there are a couple of
references to Jesus’ ‘atoning death’ with no explanation of what that
means.

Rowland Croucher, Director, John Mark Ministries.

Book Review/Essay: THE TRUTH ABOUT JESUS, Paul Barnett (Sydney:
Aquila Press, 1994).

Paul Barnett, a high-profile (Sydney) Anglican Bishop, has written
several books about Jesus and the historicity of the New Testament
documents (‘Is the New Testament History?’ 1986, ‘Bethlehem to Patmos’
1989, ‘The Two Faces of Jesus’, 1990, etc.)

He writes from an ‘enlightened evangelical’ (my phrase) stance.

In ‘The Truth About Jesus’ he tries (successfully in my view) to
present evidence for the NT writers’ historical reliability when they
write about Jesus’ existence, deity, and resurrection. In his opinion,
it’s not merely ‘good’ evidence, it’s ‘outstanding’ – ‘evidence from
which a clear and conscientious verdict about Jesus can be reached’
(p.161)

The unique thing about this book is that an evangelical scholar is
not creating a _direct_ apologetic about who Jesus was/is: he’s simply
asking us to examine the New Testament as ‘authentically historical
literature’. However there’s plenty of ‘indirection’ – evangelicals
can’t help but preach!

Who’s it for? Thoughtful enquirers attracted by theories a la Spong,
Thiering et al popularized in the media.

The style is a little wooden, pedestrian. (This is a book about
‘facts’ so it’s not meant to be funny, and here I’d suggest Paul try to
emulate the writing style of the greatest conservative exponent of the
historicity of the NT documents, FF Bruce, who is far more readable).
Generally Paul’s writing is not sexist (but there’s an exception at the
foot of page 163). The scholars Paul recommends in his bibliographies
are not all ‘conservative evangelical’, nevertheless they hold fairly
similar views in this area. (How you can discuss NT ecclesiologies
without citing Raymond Brown beats me). I’d also have liked a critique
of Crossan’s methodology… perhaps next time.

There are some interesting insights. For example: ‘It would not be
possible to reconstruct even one story found in Mark from the Letters of
Peter, to re-tell any story in Matthew from the Letter of James, to
piece together any story in Luke from a letter of Paul or to recreate
any story in John from the Letters of John. The Gospels were not
manufactured out of the mission Letters’ (p.82).

And another: ‘One scholar (WD Davies) has estimated that Paul uses
or alludes to Jesus’ teaching more than one thousand times in the course
of his thirteen Letters’ (p.49). (Fortunately, in my view at least, Paul
Barnett doesn’t muddy the waters with complicated discussions about
authorship of the NT documents).

The main ideas:

[1] Jesus really existed: the Gospel narratives are reliable
‘history’.

[2] Jesus accepted recognition as Messiah, but radically redefined
that concept.

[3] ‘Had the Gospel writers sought to “invent” a Jesus acceptable to
the church and the world at the time of writing, they would hardly have
written about a man of dubious parentage, a lowly tradesman from
unheard-of Nazareth in obscure Galilee who finished his life disgraced
on a Roman cross for treason against the Emperor. The improbability of
the details supports their veracity’ (p.84).

[4] ‘Is he the Son of God? Did he rise from the dead? If the answer
to either question is No, then Christians should abandon their faith and
immediately discontinue any attempt to persuade others to accept it’
(p.106).

[5] ‘Those who look for Bible passages where Jesus says, in as many
words, “I am God”, will look in vain. Jesus is, indeed, “God” but in the
Bible’s own terms, not ours’ (p.110).

[6] ‘It is quite clear that something left its mark in history in
early April AD 33… The New Testament knows the difference between
seeing the risen Lord and a vision of the Lord’ (p.145).

Buy it and read it before you form an opinion about Jesus.

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher

THE INVISIBLE PINK UNICORN IS A HOAX !

I’ve been visiting the .atheism and religious newsgroups most days
for eight months, and in discussions about God’s existence the IPU
regularly makes his/her/its appearance. (I hope I’m politically correct
– ie. ‘inclusive’ – gender-wise here: I don’t want to be disrespectful
of another’s deity…) The IPU was created (I gather it was not
_self-_created) before I came here, so I don’t know the nuances of
scholarly debate about its history/hermeneutics etc.

The IPU, I gather, is somewhat harmless (it’s a unicorn, not a
rhinoceros, as perhaps it was in ancient lore), fairly cute, certainly
colorful, and most decidedly invisible – and therefore, ipso facto,
non-existent. Occasionally someone asks the brave question, ‘What if the
IPU wanted to reveal him-/her-/itself: how do you think that sort of
incarnation might occur?’ But I’ve never seen a satisfactory answer…

Now, back to an alternative deity: Yahweh/God/the Lord. What
followers of the IPU (and some Christian fundamentalists) have done, is
set up a caricature of the God of Jesus, demolished it, and gone away
feeling quite self-satisfied. And not even tried to answer the basic
question: if the Hebrew Yahweh wanted to be humbly incarnated, how would
Yahweh have chosen to do that – better than in the person of Jesus of
Nazareth? (Yes, I don’t buy Aquinas’ classical ‘proofs’ for the
existence of God either).

So we come to the Lord/liar/lunatic argument of C.S.Lewis,
popularized in the U.S. by Josh McDowell (but pinched from the ancient
Church Fathers). Actually it’s not a trilemma, but a quadrilemma: the
fourth possibility is that the fairly prosaic writers of the New
Testament records were mistaken/ imaginative / assuming legends were
history, etc. and were unanimously prepared to die for that lie/error.
(I’d need a _lot_ of ‘faith’ to believe that one).

The two basic questions seem to me to be: Did Jesus exist? Does he
possess some credibility when he makes claims to divinity? After 40
years of skepticism-to-faith, my response is yes, and yes.

First, let’s take a little journey into what is called ‘The Quest
for the Historical Jesus’, where scholars debate the historicity of
Jesus. There have been three modern ‘Quests’. Briefly: Schweitzer (yes,
the African doctor) dates the first quest from Reimarus (1694-1768)
whose ‘Apology or Defence of the Rational Worshippers of God’ was
withheld from publication because of its dangerous ideas. Two images
emerge: Jesus-as-somewhat-liberal (Harnack) and
Jesus-as-a-kind-of-Nietzschian-‘superman’ (Schweitzer). The second quest
also threw up various images:
Jesus-through-whom-we-encounter-a-transcendent-God (Barth, Brunner); a
demythologized Jesus who can become ‘Christ of faith’ (Bultmann). The
third quest is either radical (eg. the Jesus Seminar’s
Jesus-below-layers-of-tradition), or conservative (the Jesus of the
Gospels and the Pauline writings are complementary) or liberationist
(Jesus as radical prophet who identifies with the poor) or Jewish (Jesus
as dangerous prophet/wonder-worker who, according to Deuteronomy 13, had
to be purged) or Moltmann’s Jesus-as-suffering-God. Take your pick!

Behind all this is a remarkable man, who so impressed his friends
(and his enemies) that everyone had an opinion about him. About eighty
times in the Gospels he is recorded as saying/doing things that only God
(as his contemporaries understood God) would dare say/do – forgiving
sins, promising tickets to ‘eternal life’, raising the dead, casting out
demons (whatever that means), and generally telling people he is the key
to their eternal well-being. He claims to have a unique relationship to
God. And so on.

Now, the _rational_ question is: what do you make of all this? You
can – indeed _should_ – compare Jesus to other ‘prophets’ (Mohammed, the
Buddha, Father Divine, Koresh – take your pick, there are plenty of
them).

And at the end of the day, you have to ask: ‘Did Jesus seem to be
what he claimed to be?’ My answer to that is ‘yes’: I would need _more_
faith to believe otherwise. Am I saying Jesus was God? Yes. That no one
else – before or since – was God in the same sense? Yes. That Jesus’
character matches that amazing claim? Yes. That he is is a real sense
alive today? Yes.

Now, hang in here: this is _not_ preaching. The toughest question of
all is: How can I know this Jesus? And how can I _know_ I know him? This
is where I believe a _suprarational_ (not ‘irrational’ or
‘non-rational’) approach is needed: not dissimilar to my having faith in
anyone. I have been married for 35 years. How do I know my wife loves me
and vice-versa? Because there are observable, historical evidences for
it. Ditto for Jesus? Yes: some generations removed. So I have to trust
the NT records as being reliable? Yes: provided you understand they are
‘theological history’. But isn’t that a circular argument? Yes, in a
sense (most syllogisms begin with presuppositions assuming beliefs-
supported-by-a-kind-of-faith).

There’s a host of further explorations implicit in all that, but for
the sake of brevity let me conclude:

So what is Jesus asking of me? The fundamentalists respond: ‘Receive
him as your personal Lord and Savior’ – a nice Western, modern,
individualistic caricature of the demands of Jesus. Better: _commit_
yourself to what you know of Jesus with what you know of yourself. That
is, follow him (become a modern ‘disciple’), and move from ‘orthodoxy’
to ‘orthopraxis’ – doing in your world what he did in his. Read Mark,
then John, then back to Matthew and on through the NT, with an open
mind, praying (skeptically if you like): ‘OK Jesus, if you are who you
say you are, convince me!’ And you just might find a better deity than
an invisible pink unicorn!

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher