Can we rely on the Gospels’ accounts when they describe Jesus’ life and teaching? Here are three ‘posts’ I’ve sent to religious – and alt.atheism – newsgroups during 1995 on this question… 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 </body