By Khen Lim
For quest to bring a "modern" interpretation of Jesus has been going on for some time now but everytime someone or some media network attempts to give Christ a fresh coat of paint, something horrible happens. Christians feel looted of the Christ they cherish. Historians gloat that they "discover" something new in Jesus that thwarts the way we view and love Him.
Dale C Allison Jr's 2009 book called "The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus" is one of many books that attempt to tackle the many exploits of reconciling the Christ we know with the Jesus that the modern historian wants us to believe in. Does it work?
Image Source: amazon.com
Introduction
For a rookie theology scholar, the title is intimidating
enough.
At a little less than 120 pages encased in five chapters, “The
Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus” is deceptive because the text is
densely packed in single line spacing without breaks. Furthermore the chosen
writing style is imposing, often convoluted and trying.
Very often I found
myself repeating sentences I have just read just to try to gain a clear understanding
of what the author is trying to drive at. Any reader of this book require solid
concentration just to get through a single page let alone the entire book. Without
a doubt, this book cannot be skimmed but even so, it is thought provoking. However
without any biblical background, it is nigh unapproachable.
Allison’s complaints of “pew Christians” being unschooled in
the historical versus theological Christ debates is palpable and understandable
but the writing style he engages in this book doesn’t exactly make them any
more engaging or accessible to the common laity. I hardly see it as an
opportunity to encourage understanding and discourse with any simple
church-going Christian.
The upshot of Allison’s position in the end is that it really
doesn’t actually say much at all. I
noted nothing spectacularly definitive. It is well written. It is approachable
without obscuring facts. It is actually quite an excellent introduction to
historical scholarship because it offers quite a good glimpse at the
historical-theological battleground.
But I find a lack of clear thrust in the
book that is, other than the beguiling concept that, in this field of study,
nothing in fact can really be properly laid out. Allison tells us there are no
absolutes here since we are restrained in terms of a paucity of sources and driven
by our desires to really want to ‘know’ who Jesus historically is, as a person.
All this is not to say that Allison’s efforts are not
appreciated. We see someone very willing to indulge in this seemingly
never-ending debate and then come to the admission that we do not and very
likely will never ‘know’ anything amounting to much in the end.
And when you
get to the end of the book, you have this aftertaste in your mouth, an
impression of emptiness. You are left with the vacuous feeling of being unfulfilled.
The ending dangles like an unreachable fruit up in the tree – it’s just a
little out of reach of the common folk. Allison doesn’t really push you decidedly
to one (historical) or the other (theological). He doesn’t endorse a
significant position of strength in this matter and that’s exactly how I felt
for myself.
Without a shadow of doubt, there is no historical figure in
time continuum who is as contentious as He is enthusiastically debated as Jesus
of Nazareth. More so, none compares to Jesus when it comes to the abundance of
interpretational biases as Allison’s work demonstrates.
To that end, “The
Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus” offers us an intriguing reading
experience, albeit in a rather heavy scholarly style, where the reader is able
to compare the myriad conflicts between religious accounts and actual world
history.
Getting all these ‘negatives’ out of the way early, we can now
have a look at the book in a little more detail.
Overview
Image Source: Dale C Allison Jr.
“The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus” is a
text-based discussion of the historical authenticity of a certain Jesus of
Nazareth. It is a documented understanding of how historians attempt to
approach His story minus the biases that numerous Christian researches
unknowingly append to their work and how they may or may not reconcile with the
theological framework that undergirds the Christian faith.
It is also an informal presentation where Allison attempts to
evaluate the complex and often troubling issues that pervades common scholarly
discussions about the identity of Jesus Christ. As he says right from the
foremost of his book:
Whatever one makes of
these pages, they are the stammerings (sic) neither of an apologist nor of a
sceptic but instead of an oft-confused
Protestant who has come to his conclusions, modest as they are, quite
gradually, and who may alter his
uncertain mind about much tomorrow. Of two things only do I feel assured.
The first is that, as unchanging things do not grow – rocks remain rocks – informed
changes of mind should be welcomed, not feared. The second is this: the unexamined Christ is not worth having.
(p.5)
(bold effect added by the reviewer)
A modest Allison admits to the gravity of the task very early
on in his book, using words and phrases (bolded above) to underscore the scale
of the challenge he had put forth for himself. No matter how overwhelmingly
difficult the task may be, he added that it is more fruitful to have gained
clearer insights about Christ than for one who does not bother.
As he intimates in the above introduction, it is also a tacit
impression that this is Allison’s personal quest. He describes it as a
“personal testimony to doubt seeking understanding” and in so doing, there
arises questions from the outset:
-
How does one really do
about questing for the historical view of Jesus when much discord exists even
among the experts?
-
How does one reconcile
truth from fiction (or innate biases) when much of personal agenda clouds
clarity once they are thrown in to the mix of such reconstructs?
-
And as historians and
theologians begin to do battle, we also should ask how much history should we
expect to find in the Gospels or alternatively, how much history does Christian
theology need in order that they are vindicated?
-
Whatever the quest
uncovers or stumbles across, how will these outcomes impact the conventional
Christian beliefs? Will they drive stakes of doubt into the believer? Will it
contribute to contemporary theological reflection?
In Chapter One, Allison brings clarity to the contrasting
shifts in the scholarship of Jesus, noting that the results of one era can be
so greatly divergent from another that in the end, “newer results” eclipse the
earlier understanding even if it were only a quarter of a century later. He
sheds light into the continuous reshaping and reinventing of Jesus in the image
of those who scholarly attempt to remould Him, beginning with the great Albert
Schweitzer who pioneered the changing patterns in the nineteenth century.
In the meantime, pastors and Bible teachers invariably – and
comfortably – lean towards their own preferred imageries of Jesus. This is a
natural gravitation to one’s own comfort zone but in so doing, they heed less
of those who differ. In turn their personalised views of Jesus remain
unchallenged and over time, they become the indisputable status quo. Once we
get to this point, there are plenty of reasons to ask if such portrayals will
actually stand up to rigorous scrutiny that is, if they willingly open
themselves to such assessment.
To all of these, Allison contends that the portions of New
Testament that may not necessarily be supported by historical authenticity may
actually turn out to be theologically accurate depictions as to what it was
that Jesus said and did. He goes on to list three such instances. The first are
the narratives where Jesus fought battles with evil throughout His ministry,
the second relates to the passion narrative in the Gospel of Mark that
punctuates Jesus’ principle of love for the enemy and the non-resistance
submissiveness found in the Sermon of the Mount while the third centres on 1
Corinthians 13, which may not be as much a historical narrative as it is a
picture of Jesus’ self-sacrificial ministry.
Chapters Two and Three introduces us to Allison’s profound
difficulties in extracting theological values from historically studying Jesus.
He concedes that there are problems with the history project itself because of
a lack of direct evidence as well as the obvious subjective nature of reconstruction.
Here Allison writes:
So if we are to do
something with the historical Jesus, it
will have to be someone’s particular historical Jesus – Wright’s Jesus or
Crossan’s Jesus or Sander’s Jesus; it can no longer be the Jesus of the guild
or the Jesus of the scholars, because they, in their writings and at their
academic conferences, argue with each other over almost everything. (p.11)
(bold effect added by the reviewer)
Theologians, on the other hand, are more inclined to choose
from manifold and disparate but mutually contradictory images of Jesus – what
Allison contends to be a method of “attraction” rather than to extract from any
strain of historical evidence:
Theologian A adopts the
reconstruction of historian B because theologian A likes the Jesus of historian
B. And the fondness of A for B derives undoubtedly from theological congruency.
That is, A and B share similar
ideological inclinations. So whereas some theologians may earnestly wish to
appeal to the Jesus of history and may think they are in fact doing this, what
happens more often than not is that they are really utilising the Jesus of
their own theological predilections, because those are also the predilections
of the historian(s) they have chosen to follow. Like is attracted to like. (pp.21-22)
(bold effect added by the reviewer)
Chapter Two underscores more problems for Allison – problems
that concerns how knowledge of Jesus is reduced to a historical nature.
Personal identities are harder to distinguish from the perceptions of others
including those of theological or biblical authors. They cannot simply be
reduced to fit into the authors’ original shoeboxes, so to speak. Such issues
become even more complicated to deal with if we are to embrace, as Allison
does, the conditional validity of Jesus’ “firsthand experience” in the life of
discipleship, elevated spiritual experiences and/or acts of love and service:
(Schweitzer, above) understood
that there is, in addition to all our inferences about the history behind
texts, the firsthand experience of
heeding and following Jesus, of personally striving, as best we can, to enter
into His moral and religious vision. Without such effort, our knowledge of Him
is the less. As the Jesus of Matt 11:29 says, ‘Take My yoke upon you and learn
of Me.’ (p.48)
(bold effect added by the reviewer)
And then he follows through with this bit of realisation:
The truth to my mind,
however, is that, unless we are dogmatic, flat-earth materialists, we cannot be confident as to what actually
took place. Because I have myself ostensibly both seen and heard from a
deceased friend, and because members of my immediate family and some close
friends I trust have had similar experiences, my mind is open to possibilities more than mundane. (p.49)
(bold effect added by the reviewer)
As we can see, the historical problems get worse before they
can get better. Many biblical scholars are likely to have developed their own
general ideas of Jesus reasonably early in their careers and then stake their
respective impressions of accuracy and authenticity from the different Gospels
though they don’t always recognise or concede the premise that their acquired
truths are the workings of non-negotiables, which they established almost
unwittingly. And to that, Allison raises his hands and pleads guilty himself.
Allison’s Chapter Three piles on the doubt further, suggesting
that whatever the conditions are in determining the likely historicity of the
works and words of Christ, none will deliver the results that they so promise
at the outset. Rather we should consider the very nature of the Synoptic
Gospels and work on what they stress. When we do that, Allison contends that we
can see how the human memory broadly works that inevitably shape the way we
accrue and then express our knowledge. In the process of committing details to
memory, history is then shaped by some of the details we get wrong
unsuspectingly and also, by some of the broad truths that are shaped with
different sources. It is the latter that offers us a more compelling ‘big
picture’ of what might really have transpired. In other words, it’s looking for
the forest rather than the individual trees that might matter more.
Chapter Three closes with Allison fairly convinced that Jesus
would have insisted from His disciples the acceptance of self-sacrifice, the
conduct of exorcisms, the support of His cousin, John the Baptist, the
embracing of God as the ever-loving Father and that He spoke in parables as
part of the mystery of the kingdom of heaven. He would also have convicted in
His disciples the ominous inescapable reality of coming into confrontation –
and conflict – with the Pharisees.
In the last three Chapters, Allison talks more about his
method towards the historical Jesus where he was also able to extract some smattering
of theological insights. From the aspect of content, he is visibly partial to
the traditions of Schweitzer but not before he considered what the others had
thought of, of Jesus’ apocalyptic tendencies and in that, he quickly reviewed –
other than Schweitzer – Questers like (Johannes) Weiss, (Rudolf) Bultmann, (Joachim)
Jeremias, (Oscar) Cullmann, (Werner) Kümmel, (C.H.) Dodd, (John D) Crossan and
(Tom) Wright before he came to this conclusion:
Not one of these eloquent
appeals suffices to overthrow the common verdict: whether we like it or not, the historical Jesus was the apocalyptic
Jesus. Having elsewhere shared my several reasons for taking this view of
the matter, for deciding that the shared hypothesis of Weiss and Schweitzer is
not just tenable but compelling, I need not repeat myself here. What I do wish
to underscore before continuing is that positing an apocalyptic Jesus coheres
with the critical method introduced earlier in this volume… (pp.91-92)
(bold effect added by the reviewer)
In terms of the methods he bases on, perhaps his is consistent
with Ernst Troeltsch in light of his choice of broad wholesale outline
impressions by the sources in deference to particular sinews that may be
regarded ‘most authentic.’ Allison talks much about the deep frustrations he
has in reconciling what we know of what Jesus had said with or without the
historical context. While he is convinced about many of the things that Jesus
had expressed, he raised questions as to what He might or might not have meant,
what He alluded to or even the actual context He had in mind:
To our everlasting
frustration, we cannot respond with conviction to any of these important
questions and dozens like them. Without knowing the real-life setting as
opposed to the current literary context, the originating meaning is up for
grabs. We can, to be sure, often profitably argue about what Matthew, Mark,
Luke or John wanted us to think, but Jesus is a much more difficult matter. So
here the outcome of the quest is negative. Among its lessons is our inability
to know much that Christians have always wanted to know. This in turn entails a
large dose of theological humility.
We can still outline the general themes of Jesus’ speech. But that we can,
beyond that, fill in the details with robust confidence seems doubtful, however
much we wish it were otherwise. (p.103)
(bold effect added by reviewer)
And finally he accepts that the quest may not achieve what it
had set out to. Despite the opinion of contemporary interpreters like Anglican
Bishop Tom Wright, Allison wants us to understand that the theological image of
Jesus does not make any sense in lending weight to any historical persuasions.
Rather instead, it should encourage the interpreter to adopt some degree of
“theological humility.”
More so, Allison brings to light what he calls, the
“eschatological pattern” (p.117) where Jesus is perceived as the living
incarnation in His preaching and in His own person. It is, after all, Jesus who
“announces and makes real the eschatological presence of the God of Israel”
(p.117). Through the Gospels, Jesus brings forth revelation of the defeated
Satan, the routing of the demons, the miracles, long-anticipated kingdom of
God, the elation and gratitude of the poor and the constant amazement
throughout.
But all that is only one half of the same coin. Like the coin,
Jesus portrays two sides of the story. A joyful Jesus is juxtaposed by
tragedies and sorrows for He is familiar with grief. Again, the Gospels shed
plenty of light on this side of the eschatological Jesus. But, as Allison says,
it is only when we come to understand the Jesus of “celebration and
crucifixion” (p.119) that we know we know the truth about Him beyond whatever
history can dig up:
If Jesus had pretended to
know only the blessings of the future age, we should turn our backs on Him, for
we would know His faith to be a hopeless flight from the pain and dread of
living. And if He had harped only on death’s doom and the tribulation of the
latter days, we would have to judge His hope too small, the distance between
Him and God too great. But it was otherwise. By announcing not only tribulation present and coming but also
salvation present and coming and then by living into both, Jesus commends
Himself to us. (p.119)
(bold effect added by reviewer)
The prominence of the eschatological Jesus
Image Source: en.wikipedia.org
Allison’s deference to Schweitzer in his book “The Historical Christ and
the Theological Jesus” is not without reason. Albert Schweitzer (above), a very
accomplished doctor in his own right, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a
theologian is well known for his work called ‘The Quest of the Historical
Jesus’ written in 1906. Without a doubt, Schweitzer’s monumental work here was
an important and historical turning point in the study of Jesus.
Allison’s work here is one
of many responses to Schweitzer’s own but in the main, the latter’s support for
the apocalyptic Jesus is particularly very well-known and the author of “The
Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus,” clearly one of the modern leading
lights of Bible scholarship in the past few decades, not only rubberstamps this
especially in the latter parts of his book but he has also expanded on
Schweitzer’s position. His conclusion is exemplary of his position:
For (Jesus), death and life are not like summer and
winter, the one always coming after the other, in an eternal return, without
victor. He may believe in the devil, but He believes far more in God. Jesus’
dualism is relative, not absolute. There can be no tie, for evil is bound to lose. The divine love and goodness must
triumph over all else. So the opposites are not complementary but antagonistic,
not equal but sequential: in the end,
the good undoes the bad. And in this, as in so much else, Jesus’ life
instantiates His teaching. For the resurrection does not balance crucifixion
and the grave. It defeats them. (p.119)
(bold effect added by
reviewer)
Schweitzer actually argued that Jesus’ prophetically
apocalyptic nature is well supported by the three Synoptic Gospels. Matthew,
Mark and Luke are all convicted in the impending, final judgement of God where
wrongs will be put right, the rights will be upheld and humanity as we know it
will be judged where the sheep is separated from the goats.
Despite the prevailing subjective evidence that hides
conveniently behind masks of great objectivity, Allison upholds Schweitzer’s
eschatological view of Jesus, going to the extent of believing that this image
(of Jesus) is historically, the most reliable as well. He also expressed
surprise at how little consideration his students’ work paid to the historicity
aspect when they extract the meanings and purposes behind the Gospel readings.
Yet despite this, there laid proof (from his students) that it is possible to
still serve Christians theologically.
The eschatological emphasis is such that Jesus Himself is
convinced of His very own role. As Allison puts it in his own words:
…my inference is that,
whatever titles he may or may not have used, Jesus probably believed Himself to
be not just an eschatological prophet but the
personal locus of the end-time scenario, the central figure of the last
judgement, someone akin to Melchizedek in 11QMelchizedek, or the Elect One
in the Parables of 1 Enoch. (pp.65-66)
(bold effect added by reviewer)
Allison convinces us that it is not possible to discount the
tales of miracle in the Synoptic Gospels or to consign them to a heap of
fanciful apocrypha especially when we can see for ourselves how compelling
Jesus’ works are and how credible they appear in the encounters of those
others, which then leads us to understand that the eschatology defined by
Jesus’ warnings of the coming judgement are not only real but are indefinitely
here to stay no matter how ‘controversial’ today’s modern churches find them.
It wouldn’t have gone down well with those who bury themselves in endless
prosperity messages or overpowering notions of universalism. None of them will
be ready to accept that indeed not only Jesus addressed these issues
pervasively and assertively but in fact, much of any religion would as well.
Summary
The most obvious impression that the book makes is Allison’s
honesty. It is everywhere. His writing style comes off with remarkable integrity
and sincerity. He writes not to deliberately prove or not prove a historical
Jesus but more importantly, he simply sought out to answer a simpler question
and that is, “Is there really any use to theology even if we can assert a
historical Jesus?” In other words, would it change the way we view Him? Would
we change our mind in terms of what we know of Him?
My thoughts after reading the book is, in all frankness, a lot
of writing but precious little progress made in the end. We have not moved
forward. The stalemate that is the impression I gather is you can’t move
without disagreement from one camp or the other.
While we know that there is some consensus as to Jesus’
historicity, Allison contends that they are at best irrelevant or even boring
but still he can balance that by acknowledging the difficulties in attempting
to construct a reasonable theology based on an ever-changing paradigm of
diverse opinions. In this book, we Christians read it to see if we can
understand how historical scholars reinvent Jesus and then determine if what
they have done can relate to the Christian theology that we know Him by.
In so doing, many Christians may read and find disagreement in
some of the things that Allison suggests but that is to be expected in a topic
such as this. There is no clear way for a discourse that is agreeable to all
and Allison is wise not to start from this premise. You can find this as a
pervasive timbre through the book – his insights and his cautiousness in not
making claims and then find himself painted into a defenceless corner.
In no part of the book have I read of any of his assertions
that are unwarranted. Confused, maybe, but certainly not unwarranted. In my own
self-effacing manner, I could say that I do not know sufficiently to legitimise
a critique of his work other than to say the following: in my final persuasion:
-
The attempts to reconcile
the historicity to the theology of Christ is admirable but not necessary for my
personal faith. I am not rocked one way or the other but that might just be me.
-
I do not necessarily agree
with Allison’s assertion that by digging deep into its historicity, one’s faith
should not be challenged. I feel that for some, it can have undermining
effects. We have seen often enough how some historical discoveries can certainly
unseat a few Christians in its wake. Archeaological finds relating to the
Gospel of Judas is one of many examples, let alone the unearthing of the
ossuary of James, allegedly, in this case, the brother of Jesus as well. As it
turned out it was a fake but along the way, there were many who were unsettled
by it.
As we can see, what his book is not able to do is to appease
either the conventional conservatives or the progressive liberals but perhaps,
that might, after all, be the motive behind it all. Allison’s interpretation of
the historical Jesus or of the God that inspired Scripture inclusive of the
Gospels and how it blends in his own way with theology would leave both camps
dry and wanting. On the one end, the conservatives will not find his book
gravitating decidedly towards a historical genre because it doesn’t. Allison
leaves enough holes to warrant that. On the other end, progressive liberals
cannot read this book and then exculpate themselves from his pervasive
theological bent simply because it is deigned to be impractical, unrealistic or
irrelevant for our contemporary Christianity.
Very often, I come away being uncertain if Allison has proven
that standing in the middle of the opinion spectrum is the right thing to do be
it historically or theologically. Yet even if the dense writing style is hard
to plough through for someone unfamiliar with biblical scholarly writings,
there is no doubt that Allison leaves behind enough to make a lasting point.
He does fill us with common sense with his style of argument.
He does wisely use historical lessons to underline with profound insights how
the debate can wither despite all the outward promises. His self-effacing
candour instantly disarms any preconceived notion that he might aggressively
approach one point in deference to another. But he has also positioned with
equivocal attention given to the criticisms of the many scholars of his day and
in the past so much so that he leaves us to appreciate a work well researched
and fair in so many ways.
Yet time and again, I come away wondering where we’re all at
with this discourse. I doubt we are any closer to harmonising the attempted
relationship between the theological truths of Christ and the historicity of
that man called Jesus of Nazareth. I believe we’re as far away at the beginning
as it were at the end of reading the book. Theology is theology. Historical
facts keep changing dynamically as we find out new things over time. It appears
as if historians are attempting to bend the theological integrity of Christ to
fit the emerging historical image of Jesus but the problem is, this historical
image is never static but a moving goalpost. In that sense, I agree with
Allison – this quest is often futile, in the end.
That is why in examining the historical reconstructs, we often
find ourselves caught in the convoluted struggle to want to stretch Jesus as
far as we can go to fit someone’s idea of who He is. And before we know it, we realise
we need to draw a line somewhere. Allison does not believe there are any quests
(including his) that can ever set out to accomplish what historians want to in
the first place and I can only nod in agreement.
Perhaps in the end, we can once again peer at the title of his
book and then understand that Christians cannot stay ignorant of the historical
perspectives of the Gospels without blocking their faith from new insights (or
even challenges). This may end up confusing some Christians but as historians
continue to come up with befuddling perspectives of who Jesus is, we can’t stay
ignorant and not know what to make of such discoveries. At the same time, we
simply cannot allow historians to run away from the genuinely deep theological
nature that undergirds the life and teachings of the one Jesus of Nazareth.
And so the search will continue, as we suspect it will. And if
Allison does not believe he has all the answers, one wonders if there will come
a time when we will all accept Jesus for who He truly is.
NOTE: All quotations in the book review come from the “The Historical Christ and
the Theological Jesus” itself. No third-party sources were used in the writing
of this review.
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