Looking for the ‘risen’ Jesus? – Book Review

Geza Vermes, The Changing Faces of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 2000)

This contribution to the search for the ‘Jesus of history’ adopts a rigorous methodology. Each of the canonical sources is examined in turn, albeit in an unusual order. Vermes begins with the genuine Pauline epistles as the earliest written sources available. He identifies elements in them that derive directly from the Jesus tradition – notably the account of the resurrection. Vermes interprets the formula ‘I handed on to you as of first importance what I turn had received’ (1 Cor. 15:3) as an indication that Paul is here repeating a core part of the proto-gospel message. Interestingly, the slight difference of phraseology in 1 Cor. 11:23 leads Vermes to speculate that Paul may have introduced the words of institution, previously unknown to the tradition, and that ‘the editors of Matthew, Mark, and especially Luke, who follows Paul most closely, introduced it into their respective accounts in the Synoptic Gospels’ (p. 69).

From this initial account, it is clear that we are dealing with a careful, text-based, and analytical approach to the question. Further treatment of the other epistles and the Johannine corpus confirms this impression. Vermes concludes his survey of this material by typifying the Jesus presented in Paul and John as a mystical, deified quasi-abstraction. He does this in large part by assessing the occurrences of the various titles they use for Jesus. The main difference between Paul and John is that Paul, writing in the middle of the first century, has a strong eschatological expectation (although this lacks clear definition – see p. 91). Meanwhile, John, composed in the early second century, has more or less disposed of this eschatological urgency. As Vermes puts it (quoting Alfred Loisy), ‘The first Christians expected the return of Christ, but it was the church that arrived instead’ (p. 113).

The Acts of the Apostles, the Synoptic gospels, and Mark’s gospel in particular, present a much more ‘human’ Jesus, along the lines of a ‘wonder-working prophet’ such as Elijah (see, for example, p. 190). It is interesting to note which of the sayings of Jesus Vermes admits as authentic – usually because they seem to go against the subsequent teaching of the Church – and how he weaves the emerging picture of a Galilean holy man together with his extensive knowledge of the Qumran scrolls and Rabbinic sources from the first century BC to the second century AD. These invariably cast light on the sayings and actions of Jesus, and help to situate them in a wider religious and social context.

Vermes is nothing if not fair. He recognises similarities between Jesus and other prophetic figures, while allowing for major differences of emphasis and vision. The inclusiveness of Jesus vis-à-vis women and outcasts is a notable distinctive, for example. Even his treatment of the resurrection tactfully leaves open the possibility that the account preserved by Paul and the fragmentary hints in Mark (later much elaborated by Matthew, Luke, and John to strengthen their veracity) might indeed refer to something real. Vermes quotes Paul Winters: ‘Crucified, dead, and buried, [Jesus] yet rose in the hearts of the disciples who had loved him and felt he was near’. It seems to me that this does not quite explain the persistence of the resurrection message, and its attested presence in the earliest recorded sources. Ultimately, the resurrection remains a skandalon to be accounted for.

The absence of an index and extensive bibliography is a serious shortcoming in this book.

Wolf Hall – Book Review

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009)

The term ‘historical novel’ covers a broad range of writing. If it is not actually an oxymoron, it nevertheless contains a certain amount of tension between fidelity to the historical context on the one hand, and the demands of pure fiction on the other. This tension leaves open the possibility for varying degrees of truthfulness in both historiographical and fictional narratives (as previously discussed in this blog).

Mantel resolves this potential problem by opting for character, dialogue, and atmosphere, rather than plot. Character, because her story is told entirely from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell; dialogue, in a variety of registers from the familiar to the formal (and occasionally in smatterings of French, German, Spanish, Latin, and Italian – as befits the context); and from atmospheric intrigues at court to light-hearted situations at home. The tone of these scenes varies from the cynical to the comical, and from the heart-warming to the gut-wrenching.

Given the nature of her subject, Henry VIII and his ‘great matter’, the plot is involved and always changing. Yet due to its relative familiarity and recent treatment on the stage, screen, and page (not least in the HBO television series ‘The Tudors’), it holds few surprises. The more familiar the reader is with the English Reformation, the more characters, quotations, and allusions he or she will recognise. Mantel’s hints and Cromwell’s premonitions grow clearer and more blatant as the tale progresses. The book ends, deftly but predictibly, with a chapter entitled ‘To Wolf Hall’.

So it is character that carries this novel, and Mantel has chosen an interesting and unusual one. Her account of Cromwell is analysed very capably in Colin Burrow’s article, ‘How to Twist a Knife’ (London Review of Books, Vol. 31 No. 8 (30 April 2009), pp. 3-5). Burrow suggests that Wolf Hall is ‘less a historical novel than an alternative history novel. It constructs a story about the inner life of Cromwell which runs in parallel to scenes and pictures that we thought we knew’.

And so it does. Cromwell comes across as a well-rounded character with desires, ambitions, memories, and a conscience. He is capable of political ruthlessness, but also of compassion. Mantel offers imaginative insights into the inner workings of the mind of a powerful man, whether of the sixteenth or of the twenty-first century. The only criticism I would raise is that Cromwell’s cynicism – especially about religious questions – occasionally seems closer to the twenty-first than to the sixteenth century. The greatest pitfall in both history and historical fiction is anachronism.

Scarcity or plenty? – Book Review

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007; first publ. 1983)

Like Marcel Hénaff’s Le Prix de la Vérité (see forthcoming review), Hyde’s book is a reworking of the concept of gift, as analysed by Mauss (‘Essai sur le don’, 1923-24), Lévi-Strauss (Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, 1949), and others.

In this case, Hyde focuses on the arts, making characteristically bold claims for the scope of his work. To give him his dues, The Gift is a a wide-ranging treatment of the topic. Beginning from the classic starting point in social anthropology, Hyde goes on to offer a detailed analysis of usury in the Christian West, including some good points with regard to Calvin and Luther. The latter, for example affirms ‘a scarcity of grace and gift’. Scarcity becomes a dirty word when Hyde contrasts it with plenty in this section. Furthermore, he identifies that in a gift-based system any surplus is passed forward to the recipient, while in usury the surplus is retained by the creditor.

There are also fascinating chapters on Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, and insights into the workings of political and business economics in 1970s and 80s Capitalism.

Certain themes recur throughout Hyde’s study. The most prominent of these is the grouping of money, Logos, and commerce over and against gift, Eros, and imagination. It is easy to see which grouping Hyde finds most attractive, and only in the final chapter does he begin to ask how the two groups can interact. It is here that more thinking is required, to see how the arts – and society at large – can reincorporate the idea of plenty into our scarcity-driven thinking.

Federal Liberty – the seed of an idea?

‘The Swiss Reformed Protestants in the sixteenth century, following the Bible, defined liberty as federal (from the Latin foedus, meaning covenant) liberty (i.e., the liberty to live according to the terms of God’ s covenant with humanity entered into), rather than individual liberty as natural liberty.’

This quotation from Daniel J. Elazar’s article, ‘Communal Democracy and Liberal Democracy: An outside Friend’s Look at the Swiss Political Tradition’ in Publius, Vol. 23, No. 2, Communal and Individual Liberty in Swiss Federalism (Spring, 1993), pp. 3-18 (p. 13) links the theological concept of ‘covenant’ with the political concept of ‘liberty’ in a potentially fruitful way.

We tend to think of liberty exclusively in terms of the individual, and have learned to dismiss communal ideals as idealistic. But ideals are not necessarily unrealistic, and a communal form of liberty may well prove far more workable and sustaining than our bankrupt individualism, which in the light of the banking crisis and the disintegration of society, is clearly an unworkable idealism.

How to write and interpret history – Book review

Mark Day, The Philosophy of History: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2008)

If this book has done nothing else, it has at least introduced me to the work of Paul Ricoeur.

But it has done more than this, by showing how questions of epistemology and hermeneutics have been discussed in the field of historiography.

This in turn is suggestive of ways in which hermeneutics and epistemology need to be considered within the field of theology. Indeed there are direct parallels or even areas of overlap within what Day writes.

If the writing is aimed at students of history, the ideas are nevertheless of much wider application.

In particular, I am interested in Day’s analysis of historiography as narrative, which links with Christian Salmon’s Storytelling and with the BBC series ‘The Tudors’, as well as tying up nicely with Ricoeur (and Rowan Williams?) with regard to theology.

The ‘historical’ Jesus? – Book Review

Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus, An Intimate Biography: The Jewish Life and Teachings that Inspired Christianity (New York: Image/Doubleday, 2000)

At the core of Chilton’s study is a true observation. The Jewishness of Jesus has tended to be overlooked, or even deliberately obscured, throughout history.

From such a start, one might expect a critical historiographical survey, or a rigorous reexamination of the evidence.

Sadly this is not what Chilton gives us.

Instead, Rabbi Jesus is an ‘intimate’ biography, which seems to mean a consciously one-sided and impassioned account of Chilton’s own reconstruction of the life of Jesus.

Chilton’s account draws on historical research and archaeological excavations, some of which is no doubt accurate. However, it is treated in a haphazard and unscholarly fashion. Chilton favours the existence of a Galilean Bethlehem about which I had never heard, for example, and helpfully contextualises Herod and Pontius Pilate within the Mediterranean power politics of the time. But Chilton also relies on very old traditions, such as the early death of Joseph, and on apocryphal sources whose authenticity has been questioned since the early centuries of the common era.

There is therefore a lack of care in Chilton’s handling of sources. The same can be said of his translations from the Greek of the New Testament. Aiming for freshness, Chilton certainly conveys the strangeness of the text, without necessarily helping us to understand it better (the true aim of translation). Thus he renders the familiar phrase ‘the Son of Man’ as ‘one like a person’, on the basis that Jesus seems to have taken it from Daniel 7:13, where it refers to a creature that looks like a human being. Leaving aside the problematic nature of the word ‘person’ itself, as well as the fact that the phrase ‘son of man’ occurs throughout Ezekiel and also in Daniel 8:17 (where it seems to be a circumlocution meaning ‘you the addressee, as a representative member of human society’), Chilton’s translation seems to suggest that Jesus was not really a human being, but only seemed to be one. Yet this is more or less the opposite of what Chilton means to say, given his view that Jesus was a human being who discovered himself as a son of God, just as all of us can.

On the basis of Daniel 7, Chilton develops the idea that Jesus’ teaching revolved around meditating on what he calls ‘the chariot’ (or God’s throne), although Jesus himself never used these terms.

On the plus side, Chilton emphasises the radical nature of Jesus’ shared meals and shows how much of his teaching revolves around a radical new understanding of purity (which he terms ‘Galilean’ because it bypasses the temple system policed by the Pharisees and Sadducees). Chilton therefore notes the ways in which Jesus himself supersedes the temple, following the author to the Hebrews but with a different spin.

Another plus is that, whatever its scholarly failings, Chilton’s account treats Jesus as a historically contingent human being, responding to political, economic, and cultural events. His reconstructed changes in the location and focus of Jesus’ teaching (Galilee, idealism, Jerusalem, militant radicalism, etc.) are intriguing but textually hard to prove.

I felt there was enough good in this book to make me wish it were better. Prediction: you may react strongly to the ‘intimate’ biography of Jesus!

Unsung European hero? – Book Review

Martin H. Jung, Philipp Melanchthon und seine Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010)

Philipp Melanchthon is not well known, even in Germany. Jung acknowledges this entertainingly in his opening chapter, disarming a possible argument about the irrelevance of his subject head-on with a number of straightforward arguments. Melanchthon’s life is among the best-documented of the sixteenth century, for one thing. A noted Humanist scholar, Melanchthon was responsible for shaping the German Church as well as the modern university. Far from being a specifically German figure, Melanchthon can justifiably be called ‘Europe’s teacher’; Jung includes England in the long list of countries within Melanchthon’s sphere of influence, but neglects to mention that subsequent developments have made Lutheranism an important force in North America too. What is more, Melanchthon clearly anticipated many ecumenical advances that have only come about in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, making him up-to-date and widely relevant. This book is timed to coincide with the 450th anniversary of Melanchthon’s death in 2010.

Jung retells the standard Protestant version of the Reformation story, but with a number of twists. The first of these is to break up the narrative into short, quasi-thematic sections, which he introduces with a snappy segue to enhance the pace and drama of the story (think Da Vinci Code in the hands of a competent popular historian). The purpose is not to provide another sweeping account of the period, although Jung does take the time to debunk the worst of the Luther legends (revealing Melanchthon’s role in the creation of the story in which Luther nails his 95 Theses to the Church door, for example). It is just as well that Jung does not attempt such a retelling, which has in any case been recently undertaken so successfully in the form of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s scholarly history Reformation: Europe’s House Divided. Jung, on the other hand, is a popularising and occasionally pedantic historian. He uses traditional historiography and terminology uncritically, misses opportunities to analyse his data or to quote specific examples from Melanchthon’s writing, and he does not indicate his sources with any clarity. His real achievement in this book is to make Melanchthon visible – and legible – in the history of the Reformation.

It emerges that Melanchthon’s role has been downplayed, even in some of the best-known episodes of the Reformation. We learn of his vast correspondence with friends and associates, as well as with such opposed figures as Erasmus and Calvin. His academic abilities are emphasised too, as Jung reveals that Melanchthon’s Wittenberg lectures were consistently better attended than Luther’s. Melanchthon played such a significant role in Luther’s famous translation of the Bible that Jung proposes re-baptising it the ‘Luther-Melanchthon Bible’, but Melanchthon’s grandeur was such that his abilities as a linguist were recognised on all sides of the confessional divide. Even his dogmatics – subtly different and more nuanced than Luther’s – and his theological method have exercised a long-lasting and unrecognised influence.

Never a monk or a priest, Melanchthon was simply and straightforwardly an academic. Yet it is as a mediator that Melanchthon really comes into his own. Much more ready to compromise than most of his contemporaries, Melanchthon appears as a cultivated and patient peace-maker. Indeed, Melanchthon helped to engineer what still counts as the longest period of peace in German history (1552-1618).

In his position on secondary issues (‘adiaphora’), Melanchthon took a stand against fundamentalism. Perhaps this openness of mind explains why he was so sought-out as a correspondent and conversation partner, and why his drafts of statements negotiated at Augsburg and Worms have been retained and successfully used in recent ecumenical discussions.

In keeping with contemporary biographical practice, Jung uncovers little-known aspects of Melanchthon’s private life: his unsuccessful marriage, for instance, or his depression, suicidal tendencies, and sense of impotency in the face of stronger personalities (such as Luther’s). The importance of dreams and portents for Melanchthon’s political and theological decision-making is also surprising.

Finally, Jung brings Melanchthon up to date with chapters on his treatment of Jews and Muslims. Only a discussion of his sexual ethics and attitude towards women are missing. In fact, Melanchthon was surprisingly experimental in his willingness to rethink his views on marriage, in one case advising (secret) bigamy and in another, divorce. The former advice he later came to regret, while the latter, inspired by the unhappy marriage of his daughter and perhaps also by his own. (Melanchthon felt ‘under the thumb’ both at home and at work, where he lived in Luther’s shadow and very much submitted to his influence. These sad marital and professional situations were never resolved.)

Melanchthon’s avant-garde views with regard to marriage and ecumenical relations do not prepare us for his more naive treatment of Jews and Muslims (although Jung hastens to point out how personable he was with individual Jews, and generous in what he wrote about Islam). Also in his reluctance to accept the Copernican revolution, Melanchthon shows himself to be a true child of his times.

Twin Narratives – for discussion/reflection

“History and fiction each concretize their respective intentionalities only by borrowing from the intentionality of the other [...] This concretization is obtained only insofar as, on the one hand, history in some way makes use of fiction to refigure time and, on the other hand, fiction makes use of history for the same ends.” (Paul Ricoeur, 1988, III, p.181; quoted by Aurelio Ramos Caballero in his unpublished MPhil thesis, 2009)