Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

historical Jesus

Origen and the Historical Jesus

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I was reading the ACCS commentary on Joshua when I came across this gem from Origen.

In this manner, therefore, Jesus [Joshua] with his chiefs and princes comes to those who are attacked for his name by opposing powers, and not only does he furnish assistance in war, but also he extends the length of the day and, prolonging the extent of light, dispels the approaching night.
Therefore, if we are able, we want to disclose how our Lord Jesus prolonged the light and made a longer day, both for the salvation of humans and for the destruction of opposing powers.
Immediately after the Savior appeared, it was already the end of the world. Even he himself said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.” But he restrained and checked the day of consummation and forbade it to come. For God the Father, seeing that the salvation of the nations can be established only through him, says to him, “Ask from me, and I shall give you the nations for your inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession.”11
Therefore, until the promise of the Father is fulfilled and the churches spring forth in the various nations and “the whole fullness of the nations” enter so that then “all Israel may be saved,” the day is lengthened and the setting is deferred and the sun never sinks down but always rises as long as “the sun of righteousness”13 pours the light of truth into the hearts of believers. But when the measure of believers is complete and the already weaker and depraved age of the final generation arrives, when “the love of many persons will grow cold by increasing iniquity” and very few persons remain in whom faith is found, then “the days will be shortened.”15
In the same way, therefore, the Lord knows to extend the day when it is time for salvation and to shorten the day when it is time for tribulation and destruction. We, however, while we have the day and the extent of light is lengthened for us, “let us walk becomingly as in the day” and let us perform the works of light. HOMILIES ON JOSHUA 11.2–3. John R. Franke, ed., Old Testament IV: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1–2 Samuel, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 59.

Origen does not so much as concern himself with the meaning of Joshua 10:12. He instead springboards off of the longer day of Joshua into the extended day of salvation in the New Testament. But he notices something about Jesus in the gospels that has confused many scholars. He notices that Jesus was a prophet of a near judgment. But Origen also notices that Jesus, in his claim to be uniquely related to God, is also the very reason for God’s delay of his final act of judgment.

A Strange Comment

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I’ve been reading the Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels Malina and Pilch. On page 360, in an entry on fasting, they note concerning Jesus, “…he was not what modern authors call an apocalyptic preacher.” Essentially, the authors base this claim on the following evidence:

  1. Gospel traditions indicate that Jesus did not fast during his ministry.
  2. Said traditions are clearly accurate because later members of the Jesus movement did fast. Thus they recorded Jesus’ abstinence from fasting despite their own practice.
  3. Apocalyptic preachers had a tendency to fast in protest of the evil in the world.
  4. Jesus, having not been much of a faster, did not protest the evil in the world.

    Therefore, Jesus was not an apocalyptic preacher.

This argument is interesting to me because one of the surest pieces of data available about Jesus (purely from the historian’s perspective…tabling for a moment the possibility that Scripture is inspired by God) is that he preached the immediate presence of and immanent cataclysmic arrival of God’s kingdom. Now, historians, theologians, and such disagree about precisely what the content of Jesus’ preaching meant at those points. But nevertheless, there it is.

Anyhow, I just thought that was a weird notion. Earlier in the book the authors essentially argued that Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom was not “eschatology” but rather “nextology.” They claim this on this basis: Israelite peasants did not think about the far future, but only about what was just about to happen. Aside from being a neologism that is so stupid that I cringed when I read it, the application of the term is also stupid. Here’s why, the authors claim that thinking that Jesus had a world-changing judgment from God in mind is a 19th century idea, rather than an ancient Jewish one. But Luke’s gospel, which is connected to Acts, pretty clearly connects a future judgment of the living and the dead with the teachings of Jesus or at least with the teachings of his disciples.

Oh well, weird stuff like that frustrates me. I think that Bible commentaries are an important genre. I also paradoxically think that there are too many of them. So many, in fact, that people write them and put weird comments like that in them that make one wonder how good the rest of the book is. And this book, in particular, has a great deal of illuminating sections. Sadly, it seems that the need for novelty overrides the need for good historical judgment. Kind of like how science journalists always make claims that have almost no relationship to the studies they read.

On Writing About the Gospels

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Mike Bird has noted over his blog that

Start with the Gospels as they are, engage them on the level that we have them, get into their story, figure out what they are doing, admire the artistry and theological sophistication, and then afterwards begin looking at things like genre and sources.  Along similar lines, Chris Keith has recently argued that the historical task is not to cast aside the interpretive layer of the Gospels so that one can thereby scrounge through their underlying traditions in the hope of finding a pure and unadulterated image of Jesus in some textual relic. Rather, as Chris Keith says, “the first step in the critical reconstruction of the past that gave rise to the Gospels should be toward the interpretations of the Gospels in an effort to understand and explain them, not away  from them, as was the case for form criticism and its outgrowth …” (Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, 39-40). Hmm. They got me thinking!

Maybe its my inquisitive nature, but I’m committed to explaining how the Gospels came into being as a prerequisite to accounting for what they are doing and why they were written. Though in many ways, such questions must be approached simultaneously, since one cannot study the sources of the Gospels unless one first knows the Gospels themselves.

I, like Dr. Bird, have a tendency to want to explain everything. So, when I teach about the gospels, I want to explain source theories, genre theories, composition theories, etc. But, this does not do justice to the documents as we have received them. The need to explain all that fun stuff can have two functions:

  1. It is super fun for a professor and a small majority of students who can piece that data together into a coherent whole.
  2. It distracts us from the meaning of the documents (and for Christians, from Jesus himself). 

It is not that these theories are not important, they clearly are. It is just that scholarship has atomized the gospels in so many ways so that we can isolate little proton sized morsels of Jesus data and fuse them into a new, synthetic element of Jesus studies material. The problem with this approach is that we miss the gospels for the traditions (or the forest for the trees). I would submit that to understand the ‘Jesus traditions’ (for those who are not Biblical studies majors, the Jesus traditions are the oral traditions about Jesus that eventually ended up in our New Testaments), we must understand the document which contain them. James Dunn, for instance, has argued that “The only Jesus available to us…is Jesus as he was seen and heard by those who first formulated the traditions we have… (Dunn, New Perspective on Jesus, 31).” Dunn’s argument could go one step further though. The only Jesus traditions we have are those which are not only contained in the gospels, but which are interpreted by the gospels. To know the Jesus traditions, one must know the gospels, thus to do historical Jesus work is to do exegesis of the gospels.