Richard B. Hays’ critical analysis of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (“The Corrected Jesus,” May) was estimable in every way. I would add only a few brief comments.
Hays notes that the criterion of dissimilarity was used by the Jesus Seminar to sort out the authentic words of Jesus, and that this criterion serves to authenticate only those words that are discontinuous with antecedent Jewish tradition and subsequent Christian tradition. The criterion is implied in the very distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” The gratuitous assumption that the canonical gospels, despite their obvious confessional character, contain nothing that illumines the historical Jesus is established prior to the reconstruction of the so-called “Jesus of history.” What is gratuitously assumed, of course, deserves to be gratuitously rejected by critical audiences. Any distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” requires an examination of what is given and taken away a priori in the distinction itself.
Secondly, the scholars of the Jesus Seminar laud their methodology excessively. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has pointed out the dangers of method-dependent scholarship. Since the time of Descartes and through the Enlightenment, it has been maintained that method is the guarantor of truth. In Truth and Method Gadamer has argued, quite effectively I suggest, that no method is capable of screening the personal prejudices of any interpreter. It is evident from Hays’ decisive review that the methodology of the Jesus Seminar itself was apparently designed to promote a particular view of Jesus.
John Dominic Crossan is a cochairman of the Jesus Seminar and author of The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. Crossan defends the legitimacy of the Seminar’s conjectures and defends his own methodology, one that is close to the approach of the Jesus Seminar. The method, unfortunately, did not save Crossan from self-delusion. The Jesus he reconstructed, in my reading, is a mere conveyance used by Crossan to promote his social vision and political ideology. How peculiar, I thought after reading The Historical Jesus, that Crossan’s Jesus preached the utopian egalitarianism, the rejection of hierarchical structures, and the liberationist ideology so currently popular on university campuses. Finally, after all these centuries we possess, thanks to Professor Crossan, the actual ideology of the historical Jesus!
Leon McKenzie
Indianapolis, IN
In his review of The Five Gospels, Richard B. Hays is too hard on the scholars of the Jesus Seminar in one respect and too easy on them in another.
Hays criticizes the Seminar for its early dating of the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas. His paragraph on this is a study in rhetorical sleight of hand; it begins by calling this choice of date “extraordinar[y],” “controversial,” and “[un]traditional,” and ends by calling it “implausible”—as if that’s the same thing. By not explaining what’s implausible about it, Hays implies that this dating is wrong simply because it’s fairly new. Yet the hope of any continuing inquiry is that new and better views will, over time, replace old, inadequate ones. . . isn’t it?
In fact, an early date for Thomas has been advanced by New Testament scholars outside the Seminar, including some at those “major graduate institutions” Hays mentions. As I understand it, there are textual reasons for believing Thomas might be independent and very old, not the later Gnostic gloss it was traditionally thought to be. More than that, there are obvious reasons why Christian scholars might have sought to minimize Thomas’ importance.
First, if Thomas contains authentic early material, it confronts us with the possibility that the Church Fathers’ original choices of books for the canon-choices made, let’s recall, 150 years and more after Jesus’ life, and controversial in their time-might have been, as it were, mistaken. Second, Thomas and the hypothesized “Q” source together point to the disturbing possibility that there were early “Jesus movements” that didn’t consider Jesus divine, didn’t credit (or know) stories of his miracles, didn’t regard his passion and death as important, and didn’t believe he’d risen again. Thus would be undermined the traditional, much simpler story of apostolic succession—a story basic to the Church’s claim to authority—in which Jesus designated a few of his intimates to carry on his work, and they did. Instead, we would begin to get a picture of a confused situation in which Jesus was taken up in different ways by different groups of admirers right from the outset, and in which the many writings about him, writings on which our view of him depends, began life not as objective reports but as partisan polemics designed to advance the claims of one group over another. Christian scholars who downplay Thomas should be prepared to show that they have reasons for doing so other than the fact that this new picture of things upsets traditional ecclesiastical authority.
Of course, the “new” picture isn’t really so new. Paul’s letters were polemics directed against competing groups and views; the sharp divisions had evidently appeared almost at once. The very first generation after Jesus’ death may have been as contentious as Luther’s generation, or our own. But here is where the project of the Jesus Seminar is deficient. The Seminar is still questing for the historical Jesus, as though a definitive sorting of “authentic” materials will settle the confusion once and for all. As Hays demonstrates, this quest involves assumptions that tend to make the whole effort circular. And it is fundamentally ahistorical. It’s based not on a real interest in the different early views-in the ferment of ideas and movements out of which Christianity arose or in the alternative courses that Jesus-adherence might have taken. Rather, it carries on the nearly 2,000-year-old effort to suppress all that disagreement in favor of a One True View.
Of much greater interest historically would be a better account of the early ferment. This would require recovering the source documents those original disagreements produced-a textual reconstruction project that obviously cannot rely on canonical materials alone (any more than a serious history of the arguments of Luther’s day can rely only on texts by Lutherans).There are scholars at work on this project, but like scholars in so many fields they keep neglecting to share their work with laypeople. The problem with the Jesus Seminar is that while it is a praiseworthy effort to speak to non-scholars, it’s sharing the wrong work. Since Jesus left no writings, we may never have anything but different views of him. What we can do is at least try to hear those views, and to understand how they interacted at a moment in history foundational to the world we live in today.
Jeff Smith
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA
Richard B. Hays’ review of the published findings of the “Jesus Seminar” is an excellent demolition of the monumental pretensions of a few ambitious and disingenuous biblical scholars. He quite clearly shows that behind the pretense of seeking scientific knowledge these scholars are in fact doing no more than the embarrassing cut-and-paste of Mr. Jefferson, our Voltairean third President, a man whose virtues liberal historians have long exaggerated while contemporary Christians understood his vices only too well. But Mr. Hays might have gone further to show that even a genuinely scientific knowledge of Jesus would be futile. A friend of mine (the distinguished medievalist Jeffrey Burton Russell) told me some thirty years ago that it would eventually be clear that the only statement Jesus certainly made was in fact one not found in any of the Gospels, canonical or not; namely, “Let us go to Capernaum.” He must at some point in wandering about Galilee indeed have made such a remark. Science, after all, only tells us what doesn’t matter. It tells us, for example, that 1+1+1=3. But Christians know that what really matters is that 1+1+1=1.
Norman Ravitch
Riverside, CA
Richard B. Hays replies :
I am happy to respond to these letters in order to clarify certain points that I was not able to treat sufficiently in my review of The Five Gospels.
Mr. Smith’s challenge concerning the dating of the Gospel of Thomas touches a crucial issue indeed. My judgment that the early dating of Thomas is implausible is not merely a “rhetorical sleight of hand.” The review as originally written contained several footnotes on this point that did not appear in the published version. My basic reasons for reaffirming the traditional view of Thomas as a second-century document are as follows: (1) Thomas strips away most of the specifically Jewish features of the Jesus tradition, turning Jesus into a Gnostic mystagogue; surely this is a mark of secondary—and therefore later—reinterpretation of the tradition. (2) In particular, the sayings about “the kingdom of God” (in Thomas, “the kingdom of the Father”) have been removed from their native context in Jewish apocalyptic thought and converted into teachings about secret heavenly knowledge necessary for believers to reenter their heavenly home. (3) Christopher Tuckett has demonstrated that Thomas frequently shows literary dependence on the canonical gospels, including dependence upon elements that are distinctive redactional features introduced by the synoptic evangelists (“Thomas and the Synoptics,” Novum Testamentum 30 [1988] 132- 57). These factors taken together constitute a compelling argument for the relatively late date of Thomas. The scholars who defend the independence of Thomas can do so only by the artificial expedient of hypothesizing an “early version of Thomas” underlying the extant text. Since there is no evidence for the existence of such a document, the hypothesis is tenuous in the extreme. For more extensive discussion of these issues, see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minnneapolis: Fortress, 1992), pp. 435-43.
As for the possibility of early Jesus movements that did not regard the passion and death of Jesus as important and did not believe he had risen again, this is a conjecture based on the fact that Thomas lacks a passion-resurrection narrative and that the hypothetical Q is alleged also to have lacked such a narrative component (though speculating about what was absent from a nonexistent, critically reconstructed “document” is iffy business, at best). The existence of a collection of Jesus’ sayings, however, does not necessarily mean that those who collected such sayings were ignorant of or hostile to a narrative kerygma. Indeed, the speaker in the Gospel of Thomas is designated as “the living Jesus,” which surely implies some notion of resurrection, even if not an orthodox one.
Critical skepticism about the early dating of Thomas is not necessarily based on the desire to uphold “traditional ecclesiastical authority.” (One might note that the canonical gospels of Mark and John are both notably reticent or even skeptical about ecclesiastical authority and “apostolic succession.”) Thomas was omitted from the canon not because it posed a threat to ecclesiastical authority but because it was rightly not regarded as a primary witness to the tradition of Jesus’ teaching. Indeed, there was never any serious debate in the ancient church about the possible inclusion of the Gospel of Thomas in the canon-unlike, say, the Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle of Barnabas.
Mr. Smith is right to say that the gospels “began life not as objective reports” and that their purpose is partly polemical. I would prefer to make this point by saying that the gospels are witness documents that advocate particular interpretations of the figure of Jesus against other possible interpretations. As Smith rightly notes, this is hardly a new view; Paul railed against rival Christian missionaries who preached “another Jesus” (2 Corinthians 11:4). Certainly one may applaud Smith’s call for a more thorough historical account of the diversity and ferment within early Christianity, though I do not know exactly what newly recovered “source documents” he has in mind.
I do not entirely share the skepticism of Mr. Ravitch and Mr. McKenzie concerning the possibility of historical knowledge about Jesus or about the value of the distinction between the “Christ of faith” and the “Jesus of history.” The diversity of the surviving accounts poses a question that may legitimately be investigated by historical methods, even though the results of such an inquiry will remain always subject to the same qualifications as any other critical reconstruction of the past. From a theological point of view, however—and here I concur with Ravitch and McKenzie—the Church’s confession rests on the canonical portraits, not upon the historian’s reconstruction. The plurality of those canonical portraits, however, insures continuing controversy and flexibility in the Church’s construal of the figure of Jesus.
Fighting Faith
Paul J. Griffiths, in “Why We Need Interreligious Polemics” (June/July), wants to put a stop to the trivialization of religious commitments, a trivialization he claims takes place not only in the interreligious dialogue movement but in university departments of religion and, more generally, in the American population at large.
His major concern, however, is with what passes as interreligious dialogue. He offers numerous and sweeping generalizations characterizing a monolithic interreligious dialogue movement that reaches from Geneva to Rome to Chicago. This movement is said to be guilty of: (1) promoting a “kind of well-meaning but finally destructive inanity”; (2) imposing an imperialistic discursive practice; (3) expropriating and plundering religious peoples’ beliefs and practices; (4) pronouncing utterances “as useful to a serious Christian or a serious Buddhist as a pacifier is to anyone over the age of four”; (5) providing asylum for Western Christians working out their postcolonial guilt; (6) comprising a community of those with a profound misunderstanding of what religious commitment entails; (7) disallowing, “both rhetorically and actually, the thematization of the metaphysical understandings that in fact inform the practices of all participants in it.” It is unfortunate that so little evidence is put forward to support these assertions. Such an omission gives polemics, that which he hopes to restore, a bad name.
More importantly, even if one were to accept Griffiths’ analysis, the solution he proposes only seems to contribute further to the problem he wishes to solve. That is, to reform interreligious dialogue, we are not called to search more deeply into the depths of our respective religious traditions, but rather to adopt something like Hegel’s dialectical method, i.e., hold firmly to the belief that thought progresses by means of the struggle between a thesis and an antithesis. Once you accept this premise, then intellectual authenticity is to be attributed only to those who are intellectually militant; indeed, Griffiths wants military imagery to govern the way in which interreligious dialogue is conceived. He laments the fact that interreligious dialogue practitioners do not model themselves after secular intellectual warriors such as Catharine MacKinnon and Ronald Dworkin. But to give such counsel to those who engage in interreligious dialogue is to invite them to be a particular kind of Euro-American intellectual first, and only secondarily religious. Does this not trivialize and marginalize religion? I fail to see how such an argument could be made by one who claims to want to rescue religion from its trivializers.
Another weakness in Griffiths’ account derives from his seeing interreligious dialogue too narrowly as primarily a Christian activity. This is the only way one can make sense of his claim that the WCC Subunit on Dialogue represents interreligious dialogue in its “purest form.” While it is true that interreligious dialogue emerged largely in the Christian world, it is now practiced by other religious traditions as well. Perhaps Griffiths should have entitled his essay, “Why We Christians Need to Employ Interreligious Polemics in Our Encounters with Non-Christians.”
Finally, it is strikingly inconsistent that Griffiths, who certainly must know the profound sensitivity of numerous interreligious relationships in specific contexts, e.g., Sikhs and Hindus, Jews and Muslims, Indigenous Peoples and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, Hindus and Buddhists, Orthodox and Catholics, Protestants and Catholics, etc., ends his militant manifesto with an irenic caveat made specifically about dialogue between Christians and Jews, which he calls extremely delicate. Is Griffiths himself suddenly suffering from a kind of postcolonial guilt? His point is well taken, and can be applied more broadly to any number of interreligious situations, but to conclude his muscular argument with a call for Christians to be sensitive and restrained in their dialogue with Jews is, given the premises he has previously insisted upon, quite inconsistent.
Thomas G. Walsh
International Religious Foundation
Louisville, KY
Paul Griffiths is to be commended for his call to return commitment to its rightful place in interreligious dialogue. But he drops the ball in his discussion of indefeasibility. Griffiths’ assertion that “a properly constituted interreligious polemic should deploy as methods of argument and proof only tools that are recognized as authoritative and demonstrative by both sides” is both contrary to the testimony of Scripture and philosophically naive.
First, to believe, for example, that it is possible that God does not exist implies that God’s revelation of himself is not as clear as Scripture indicates. To be sure, to maintain this possibility is the position of epistemological respectability since Enlightenment-era philosophers subordinated revelation to reason, but is it in keeping with Scripture? Either God has revealed himself so clearly that all are responsible for this knowledge (even those who do not know the theistic proofs), as Paul seems to be saying in Romans 1, or he has not. The same can be said of moral knowledge spoken of in Romans 2. To hold, then, that God might not exist—or, to say it another way, that the unbeliever might be correct in denying God’s existence—is to declare that Scripture is false.
Also with respect to the biblical witness, to expect that the non- Christian participant in the discussion can reasonably work through the issues involved with a high degree of objectivity is to ignore scriptural assertions about the fallen condition of humankind. Are unbelievers’ minds darkened as Paul said? Are they in rebellion against God, repressing the truth in unrighteousness? If the Bible is true, to hope for objective neutrality on the part of unbelievers is naive.
Griffiths’ position is also philosophically deficient. Everyone has metaphysical beliefs or commitments that permit or do not permit certain ideas. To begin without basic Christian presuppositions (those things that can be known by general revelation) is to begin with other-than- Christian ones. No one is worldview-free even in his or her evaluation of any other worldview. To join the unbeliever on some kind of neutral ground is impossible; for the Christian to do so is to join the unbeliever on his turf, from which it is difficult to escape.
Richard M. Wade
Norfolk, VA
I was impressed with the piece “Why We Need Interreligious Polemics” by Paul J. Griffiths. It struck me as commonsensical since we no longer confront other religions with the fears we once held. This was not the case some thirty-five years ago with Paul Blanshard and his attack on the Catholic Church concerning separation of church and state.
In many respects Blanshard was right—even if there were unwarranted attacks on U.S. Catholicism. Remember, this was before Vatican II, and Blanshard did make valid points about various theories then prevalent in Catholic theological circles about separation of church and state as well as about religious freedom. This confrontation was good for America, good for the Catholic Church in the U.S., and, ultimately, good for the whole Catholic Church. The confrontation made the Church clarify its doctrine on religious freedom, conscience, and separation of church and state.
A much more serious question confronts the question of separation of church and state and religious freedom vis-a-vis Islam. In Catholicism, there was always a theoretical separation even if historically there were failures. In Islam, there has never been even a theoretical separation, and this is a huge problem (or should be) for Americans as they confront Islam. But no one is willing to face this question honestly and forthrightly. . . .
Unfortunately, it does not help to say that we must ferret out the Islamic fundamentalists from the overwhelming number of law-abiding Islamic Americans. Of course, this is true. But the problem still remains even as we do this: Is Islam as traditionally conceived compatible with liberal democracy, which is a product of Western Judeo- Christianity? That is the heart of the question which must be asked; not about controlling immigration and spotting the Islamic fundamentalists. . . .
Religious cultures can change through complex social, demographic, and technological pressures. In the meanwhile, all we have is dialogue to help the process and the evolution. . . . Catholicism evolved. Can Islam?
Peter J. Riga
Houston, TX
I want to congratulate Professor Paul Griffiths for a fine article before he gets savaged as a gang member who has somehow managed to crash the great ecumenical tea party. Instead of vigorous engagement with religious ideas, the author is likely to meet high, low, and broad dudgeon, and not just from members of his own communion.
In fact, Mr. Griffiths’ essay puts me in mind of four of his countrymen. That stylish essayist and polemicist Christopher Derrick has referred for some twenty years to the incompatibility of genuine unity and ecumenicity, goals that can be pursued in tandem only when truth claims are abandoned or trivialized. The “unencompassability” of religion, its inability to be subsumed in other categories, was well known to Chesterton, who pointed out that paganism was the biggest thing in the world, Christianity is bigger, and everything else is comparatively small. No surprise then that Christopher Dawson should have called religion the key to history. Lastly, one can read the article as an extended gloss upon Ronald Knox’s quip that the comparative study of religions is a good way to become comparatively religious: that is, to pretend to float outside or above metaphysical commitment, a disinterested browser through the belief-boutique with no awkward questions to be asked about the merchandise.
In short, decaf and deconstruction are welcome at the tea party; truth and, one suspects, Mr. Griffiths must be shown the door. The inadequacies of interreligious dialogue in the country where it is most popular prove what most have long recognized: Americans brew notoriously weak tea.
P. M. Aliazzi
Hunting Valley, OH
Together with Whom?
The declaration on “Evangelicals & Catholics Together” (May) states that “we thank God for the discovery of one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.” But to be a brother or sister in Christ requires that each individual be first “in Christ.” Those in union with Christ are brothers and sisters by virtue of their union with Jesus. But implicit in the Evangelicals and Catholics declaration of brotherhood is the message that there are two ways of being incorporated into union with Christ, i.e., two methods of salvation. As a Bible-believing Christian, I am certainly not about to recognize as brothers and sisters people who tell me that to be saved one must be baptized, believe in Jesus, and perform good works (Catholics and Mormons).
Next I suppose I will hear about “Evangelicals & Catholics & Mormons Together” and that God has three ways of being saved. I certainly don’t trust anyone who subscribes to this kind of pseudo-brotherhood.
Charles Gillespie
Phoenix, AZ
Thank you for the encouraging, thoughtful, and comprehensive declaration “Evangelicals & Catholics Together.” It helps to bring out with more clarity and greater charity the nature of the orthodox realignment of North American churches.
While appreciating the American context of this statement, there is a tendency to over-identify the Christian faith with the American experiment in democracy. No doubt, it is crucial to bring out the Christian principles and assumptions in the founding constitutional documents of America and to secure the place of the Christian religion in the public discourse of the nation. But classical modernity gave birth to constitutional government in a variety of forms, all of which are more-or-less explicitly Christian in their origins. The American republic is, undoubtedly, one of those forms, but certainly not the only one. And it may be asked how adequately Trinitarian it is in its constitutional structures.
Along the same lines, the statement marks too great an identification between the principles of Christian freedom and a free market economy. This overlooks the strong and necessary criticism of contemporary capitalism in Veritatis Splendor, for example, as well as the historic fact that Christianity embraces a variety of economic forms and cannot be constrained to any one in particular. This does not preclude the relative evaluation of different economic systems, but does one really want to claim that capitalism is more inherently Christian than, say, mercantilism before and the socialist economics now of many western democracies? The danger in the equation is to release economics to the activity of the will without regard to the structures of creation and the principles of political and religious life. . . .
(The Rev.) David Curry
Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia
Canada
I commend all those who participated in and contributed to the drafting of the historic statement “Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” For the first time since I first came to the United States in 1989, I found a real effort to prevent the spread of conflict between Evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Being a Catholic native from Latin America, it was extremely difficult while pursuing my bachelors degree at an American Protestant college to interact with certain students and, at times, unpleasant to visit churches from other denominations. The verbal attacks on the Catholic Church during preaching by some of the non-Catholic churches I visited were insulting. This was an experience that I had never witnessed in my home country of Peru, even though the conflicts and divisions between the churches also exist in Latin America as well as in the rest of the world. . . .
Ricardo E. Romero
Washington, D.C.
The Abortion Debate (Cont.)
What insufferable PC gobbledygook from Professors Wilson and Arkes, and what posturing pedants they are (“Abortion Facts and Feelings II: An Exchange,” May). It is especially sad that Professor Arkes believes “that life begins at conception, that there is no ground of principle on which the embryo or fetus could be regarded as anything less than human at any stage of its existence,” and yet, given such pronouncement, he would not necessarily have the law try to protect the embryo at every moment or seek “absolute prohibition” on abortion. May I ask under what circumstances he would necessarily have the law absolutely prohibit abortion?
How true it is that it is given to the simple of heart to accept on faith the profundities of life. The moral issue of abortion is a very simple and clear-cut one: life is a gift from the Creator of all, and as such is sacred. But even allowing for the fact that all people are not accepting of the existence of God, based purely on human principles and basic rights we cannot arbitrarily destroy human life because, in so doing, we destroy ourselves and our society. . . .
Mary J. Feerick
San Francisco, CA
The Arkes/Wilson dialogue published in First Things has elevated the abortion debate from impassioned rhetoric to impassioned thinking; and, as Mr. Arkes intimates in his closing paragraph, if thought can be made to prevail, his and Mr. Wilson’s common cause will some day prevail. Mr. Wilson proposes that we address the issue by appealing to moral sentiments; Mr. Arkes counters with an argument that emphasizes moral principles. In the process they have clarified those issues-which is a step in the right direction. A great many Americans who have doubts about aborti
