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More About Jesus Would I Know
By Keith F. Nickle

The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. John Dominic Crossan. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Pp. xxxiv, 507, seven appendices, bibliography, two indices. $30.00.

A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 1: "The Roots of the Problem and the Person." John p. Meier. (The Anchor Bible Reference Library). New York: Doubleday, 1991. Pp. x, 484, three indices. $25.00.

"Tell me the stories of Jesus
I love to hear;
Things I would ask Him to tell me
If He were here;
Scenes by the wayside,
Tales of the sea,
Stories of Jesus,
Tell them to me."

It happened at a state-wide denominational youth conference the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school. Six or seven of us were sitting under a tree in a "Quest Group." We had just come from the evening's Bible lecture, which had explored the story of Jesus' struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now the group was supposed to discuss the meaning of the story for our faith.

On such occasions spiritual reflection usually came in a poor second to our fascination with boy-girl interests, so the Bible discussion was desultory and unelectric. Until, that is, someone asked, "If the disciples were asleep, how do we know what Jesus said in his prayers, or if he said anything at all?" We were stunned and shocked." Maybe Jesus told them, later," one offered." Maybe one of the disciples was just faking it and heard everything," came from another. The best that I could offer was the observation that Jesus must have said it since it was printed in red in my Bible.

Lurking behind our confused consternation was more than adolescent uncertainty as to how we were to distinguish those data in the biblical record that the canons of modern historiography would permit us to label "historical fact" with reasonable probability. The gut-wrenching issue for us, only murkily gleaming as we thrashed about in

Vice President and Dean of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Keith F. Nickle is the author of The Collection: A Study in Paul's Strategy (1966) and The Synoptic Gospels: Conflict and Consensus (1980).

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such deep methodological waters, was nothing less than the dependability and veracity of the truth claims of the Bible.

If the Bible reported that Jesus said something that, in some form, was supposed to have been auditorially experienced by someone else, only as far as anyone could prove he did not even say that, or if the Bible related that Jesus had done something to someone else or, at least, which someone else had observed, but the most reasonable evaluation of the evidence indicated that he had never done that, whom could we believe?

I

The problem is, of course, not new. Early on, the Christian community took pains to promote the veracity of its gospel preaching and the probity of the stories about Jesus, which it told to clarify and reinforce the truth claims of what it preached. Early Christians claimed to hand on Jesus traditions with rabbinic-like fidelity. Appeals were made to the origin in apostolic testimony, or at least in apostolic tradition, of certain versions of the Jesus stories. A discriminating consensus emerged that accepted a selected list of early Christian literature as uniquely authoritative and normative for the life, thought, and worship of the church, in distinction from other Christian literature, which, although edifying perhaps, was considered inferior and even defective and consequently denied authoritative status. Such efforts reflected a concern to deflect any skepticism that might divert attention from the truth claims of the gospel.

The issue was even more sharply posed as a consequence of the Enlightenment, which midwifed the emergence of modern historiography. Questions were defined to address factual assertions in historical documents, testing them for the accuracy of allegedly historical data. Post-Enlightenment scholars defined criteria to gauge the probability of the accuracy of such assertions.

The enterprise prospered with relative tranquility until the method was applied to the documents of the Bible, then chaos erupted. Some misused the methodology to attack and undermine the teaching authority of the Church. Some condemned the methodology in a misguided attempt to defend the Church from such attacks. There were those who claimed that the Gospels contained dependable data about the historical Jesus and a comprehensive portrait could be produced once the pivotal interpretive "key" was discovered. That "key" served as the organizing center around which one ordered the data and assessed the relative importance of the multiple insights and emphases concerning Jesus that those ancient documents provided. Some insisted that such attempts told us more about the scholar defining the interpretive "key" than they told us about the historical Jesus. Some held that the Jesus of history was unrecoverable, but then it did not really matter since Christian faith had always been rooted in the apostolic testimony, which was quite sufficient.

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The last forty years have seen a renewal of interest in the "quest for the historical Jesus" as scholars have increasingly insisted that (1) it did matter, and (2) the tools of modern historiography, carefully applied, could provide significant information about the Jesus of history. Two works that are the latest contributions to this renewed quest were published last year. Both volumes testify to the possibility, the necessity, and the profitability of such an inquiry, and each, in its own way, contributes to the enterprise considerably.

II

Captivated by the methodology so profitably followed by such scholars as Joachim Jeremias and Norman Perrin, John p. Meier in A Marginal Jew not only follows that path with conscientious thoroughness but extends it remarkably. The volume falls into two parts: "Roots of the Problem," describing the methodology Meier intends to pursue, and "Roots of the Person," sketching as much as the methodology yields of a biographical framework for the life and ministry of Jesus.

In Part I the author screens the fund of ancient literature to identify those documents that offer information about Jesus, and he defines the criteria by which he proposes to evaluate this information. Meier is ruthlessly spartan in assessing what deserves to serve as resource material for his investigation. The principal source is the literature produced by earliest Christianity, accumulated in the New Testament. Center stage are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Pauline literature and the documents comprising the rest of the New Testament are granted space in the wings for whatever meager material they contain that may mask possible allusions to Jesus sayings and traditions.

The only noncanonical author Meier is willing to include with enthusiasm as a secondary witness is Josephus for the scant testimony he provides about Jesus in two passages of Jewish Wars. Neither Tacitus nor any other author, second century or later, Jewish or pagan, is regarded worth sifting by Meier. Even less enthusiastic is he about the Jesus traditions related in the apocryphal "gospels" and other early Christian literature that did not make it into the New Testament. He summarily dismisses the recently emerged fascination of some in the scholarly community with the possibility that the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi corpus may stem from an extremely early stage in the development of Christianity, perhaps concurrent with the formation of "Q" and prior to the composition of any of the canonical Gospels.

The data about the person and work of Jesus reported by the primary sources cannot be accepted as accurate historical reminiscence without further ado. Each assertion must be tested by criteria that conform to the stringent standards of modern historiography. Even then, he cautions us, no single criterion by itself really establishes

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the historical authenticity of any reported datum. Rather, it is the cumulative force of the results achieved by applying several criteria to the tradition which gives a more reliable estimate of the degree of probability to the claim to authenticity of any assertion.

As with his literary sources Meier also divides the evaluative criteria he proposes to employ into primary and secondary categories. Primary criteria include:

(1) Embarrassment-supports any stories about Jesus which describe acts or sayings which would have been difficult for early Christians to assimilate into their understandings of Jesus or to explain to others. Example: Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist.

(2) Discontinuity-singles out actions and teachings of Jesus that contain emphases not at home either in the religious piety of first-century Judaism or in the characteristic emphases and perspectives of the early church. No single example suffices to illustrate this test since, in Meier's view, the criterion works best in evaluating repeated themes and motifs. (Meier is less enthusiastic about the effectiveness of this criterion than were his predecessors. He rightly warns that the borders of its usefulness are set by the limits to our knowledge of the true shape of first century Jewish religious piety and our fragmentary information about the nature of earliest Christianity. He further points out that it excludes from our consideration any concurrence that may have occurred-and there surely were many-between the acts and words of Jesus and either the characteristic emphases of first century Judaism or the central faith affirmations of the early Christians.)

(3) Multiple attestation-indicates a higher probability of historical reminiscence for those traditions in which the same, or similar, words and acts of Jesus are included in more than one independent literary source or in more than one literary genre. The testimony of the criterion is even more persuasive if the tradition is attested both in different literary sources and in different literary forms. Example: Jesus' teaching about the kingdom of God (heaven), which occurs in Mark, "Q," "M," "L," John, and Paul and in parable, beatitude, prayer, aphorism, and miracle story.

(4) Coherence-builds upon the results of the application of the first three criteria. This criterion assigns a greater likelihood for accurate reminiscence to those sayings or actions of Jesus that are compatible with the material that one or more of the first three criteria have identified as probably reflecting accurate historical information. These traditions partake of that probability already established for the prior material because they conform to, cohere to, those traditions. Again, specific examples fail because the criterion is more useful in identifying recurring themes and motifs than in deciding the issue for an individual narrative story.

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(5) Rejection and execution-works against the backdrop of the violent fate which Jesus suffered, and assigns a greater probability for accurate information to stories concerning Jesus' activities or teaching that explain or clarify how it was that he came to such a brutal end as crucifixion.

Meier also lists five secondary criteria: (a) traces of Aramaic, (b) evidence of Palestinian environment, (c) vividness of narration, (d) synoptic tendencies, (e) historical presumption. He betrays his less-than-moderate enthusiasm for their usefulness when he parenthetically dubs them "dubious" criteria.

Meier turns to his primary source documents in Part 11, "Roots of the Person," to assemble a skeletal biographical profile (the sources hardly allow more) for the life and ministry of Jesus. He mines the nativity narratives to elucidate Jesus' name, ancestry, birth, maternity, and paternity.

Next he employs the information provided by historical and sociological studies of first century Palestine to fill in aspects of what we may reasonably assume concerning the development and maturation of Jesus during the "silent years" prior to the inauguration of his public ministry. That encourages him to make carefully argued guesses about the language(s) that Jesus spoke (mainly Aramaic, some Hebrew, limited Greek, probably no Latin), his education (literate in Hebrew), his occupation (a "lower middle-class" wood-working artisan), his family (he had real brothers and sisters), his marital status (probably an unmarried celibate), and his status in the religious establishment (layman)." Jesus of Nazareth was insufferably ordinary."

In the final segment of Part 11 (and of volume 1), Meier does what can be done, within the limits his methodology imposes, to extract a chronological framework for the career of Jesus. The task is tedious and the results are quantitatively minimal, but important. Jesus' birth in Nazareth(!) took place around 7 or 6 B.C.E., and his public ministry began early in 28 C.E. The dating of his execution is hazier. Meier guesses that it occurred in 30 C.E., which would allow for a two-year-plus interval for his public ministry.

I found the book to be generally quite readable, though there were some sections that dragged. The developing argument is festooned with superscript numbers directing piqued curiosity or outraged protest to copious notes at the end of each chapter, which disclose the author's wide-ranging conversations with the community of scholarship and encourage us to check his references.

There will be those who are put off by the way Meier explores in exhaustive detail some aspects of the Jesus tradition that seem to have particular interest for Roman Catholic tradition (his own) and that go beyond the demands of his primary source material and his analytical methodology. I am thinking in particular of such sections as those on the virgin birth of Jesus, the vexing question of whether he had siblings,

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his marital status, and so on. I, for one, am grateful that Meier took the space and made the effort to do so, even though it lengthened the volume and presents those sections in sharp contrast to the parsimonious rigor with which he crafted his line of argument in other less volatile sections. Such considerations continue to play a role in the current conversations exploring the relationship of Roman Catholic Christianity to its Protestant counterparts. Even more to the point, those questions are not of interest exclusively to Roman Catholics but, being part of the broader Christian tradition, are of more than passing import to all Christians.

I also appreciated Meier's willingness, in a brief parenthetic digression toward the end of Part I, to step back from the analytical task at hand in order to assess with candor the limited impact such an investigation, necessary as it is, has on our understanding of the object of faith. The endeavor to excavate as much historical information as possible about the person and work of Jesus is no substitute for, or corrective to, "knowing" Jesus and the God whom Jesus discloses to believing faith. Accurate data about Jesus (historical "truth") is not identical with faith-knowledge (theological "truth")." The Jesus of history is not and cannot be the object of Christian faith."

It was not only misdirected nineteenth-century scholarship that produced multiple contradictory portraits of Jesus dependant on whatever interpretive perspective was elevated to "key" status. Contradictory portraits of Jesus emerged as well out of the oral and written traditions of early Christianity. Respect for the integrity of each of those ancient witnesses compels us to resist the urge to merge their diverse portraits of Jesus into one grand composite. No modern "historical" reconstruction of Jesus' life and teachings, just as no single first-century portrait of Jesus, is to be accorded normative force for Christian belief." For the believer, the object of Christian faith is a living person, Jesus Christ, who fully entered into a true human existence on earth in the first century A.D., but who now lives, risen and glorified, forever in (God's) presence."

Meier's study is not ground-breaking. He does what other scholars have been doing in a more fragmentary way for some time, but Meier does it with great clarity and thoroughness. The major drawback is that the end of the book comes too soon. It is, after all, the first volume of a projected two volume work. So, he leaves us poised to move on to the logical and crucial next stage of the investigation, that of applying the methodology which he has defined to the teaching and preaching traditions of Jesus. Having discovered, as best the methodology allows us, who Jesus really was, we are eager to push on to consider what Jesus likely said. If he completes the project with the same success achieved so far, the result will be an eminently useful resource for study and research, precise and comprehensive enough for the guild of biblical scholars, yet accessible to the literate nonspecialist.

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III

John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus aspires to address the task of recovering a description of the Jesus of history from a different direction. The jacket blurb trumpets it as the first comprehensive determination of the true Jesus-who he was, what he did, what he said. That rhetoric may be a tad more triumphalistic than the language Crossan himself might have chosen, yet I suspect that it reports what the author intends.

Crossan indicts biblical scholars for pursuing the quest for the historical Jesus with tunnel vision. They have sought to discover data about Jesus from the stories early Christians told about him but have examined those stories in quarantine, isolated from a thorough understanding of the first-century context out of which they emerged and in conversation with which-sometimes cajoling, sometimes concurring, sometimes correcting, sometimes contradicting-they were shaped.

Crossan proposes to consult and benefit from the insights of what he terms the "macro-cosmic level (of) cross-cultural and cross-temporal social anthropology," the "meso-cosmic level (of) Hellenistic or Greco-Roman history," and the "micro-cosmic level (of) the literature of specific sayings and doings, stories and anecdotes, confessions and interpretations concerning Jesus." All three levels "must cooperate fully and equally for an effective synthesis." They presumably correspond to the three major divisions of the study: Brokered Empire; Embattled Brokerage; and Brokerless Kingdom. The first two levels putatively set the broad parameters (of worldly brokering) in contrast to the information about the anti-brokering ministry of Jesus at the third level.

Crossan is stringently selective about what he regards as the primal "literature concerning Jesus." He prescinds from giving primary weight to the Jesus traditions in their canonical forms as found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The frequently divergent nature of those four testimonies compels such caution.

He distributes all early Christian literature that contains information about the life and work of Jesus into four chronologically defined strata. Stratum 1 (30-60 C.E.) includes four of Paul's letters, a proto-Gospel of Thomas, the Egerton Gospel, "Q," the (no longer extant) Gospel of the Hebrews, the Cross Gospel (incorporated in the Gospel of Peter), certain primitive sections of material embedded in documents assigned to later strata, and several other manuscript fragments. Stories about Jesus in their canonical form make it into the second (60-80 C.E.), third (80-120 C.E.), and fourth (120-150 C.E.) strata.

Crossan then dismantles the documents contained in his inventory of early Christian literature, extracts the stories about Jesus, and sorts them into bins defined with chronological intervals corresponding to

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these strata. He also tabulates the number of independent literary versions in which each tradition appeared. If a particular tradition appears only in one document, that detracts significantly from its usefulness, even if he has deposited it in the earliest bin. Given the space limitations of this book, Crossan limited himself to an examination of the stories in the earliest bin.

He rightly alerts us that there are three major layers in the Jesus traditions that reflect three different approaches by early Christians to the Jesus stories. The first layer was the basic reporting of the essential data about sayings, actions, events, and occurrences. This earliest layer of the tradition was modified to adapt such material to different situations and needs that subsequently emerged in the early church, which constitutes the second, "developed" layer. A third layer resulted from the creative activity of early Christians as they crafted original sayings, anecdotes, and larger narrative accumulations to speak to new needs. Under the conviction that the risen and living Lord had led them to these new insights and solutions, they attributed their original stories to Jesus and incorporated them without footnote into the Christian community's fund of Jesus traditions.

If this summary of the procedure by which Crossan developed his study seems turbid, he spells out the methodology in the prologue. Though complicated, it must be mastered. Otherwise, Crossan's analyses of particular Jesus traditions is obscure, and some of the appendices are cryptic and unusable.

The task Crossan has set for himself is to study those Jesus traditions that are multiply attested at the earliest stratum. He does so in conversation with the sociocultural trajectories of the first-century Mediterranean world from which those stories about Jesus emerged and to which they were designed to communicate. The goal is a synthesized integration of the anthropological and the historical perspectives as they illumine and are illumined by the early Christian texts about Jesus.

Is this approach a new methodological initiative? It is, but only to a certain extent. There are echoes in his argument that suggest appreciative concurrence with what others have sought to do in their search for the historical Jesus.

Certainly Crossan's insistence on the cardinal importance of having several literarily independent versions of any Jesus tradition at hand illustrates his employment of the criterion of multiple attestation. The canons of discrimination, by which he assigns one Jesus story in Stratum I to the layer of data reporting and another to the layers of development or creation in, say, Strata II or III, are less clear, but they sound like a combination of the criteria of dissimilarity and of embarrassment.

For example, when considering the tradition that relates the story of John baptizing Jesus, Crossan counts three independent witnesses and nine separate texts. That is certainly multiple attestation. He also

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notes a very large amount of "theological damage control," because "the tradition is clearly uneasy" with the implications in the story that Jesus was subordinate to John. That sounds like evidence falling under the criterion of embarrassment.

Or take the section where he discusses "The Feast." Having acknowledged as extremely early the tradition that lies behind the three extant versions of this story (Thomas 64; Luke 14:15-24; Matthew 22:1-14) [=criterion of multiple attestation], he clusters seven other groups of sayings complexes around it [=criterion of coherence], observing that the basic story promotes a "random and open commensality" which "negates the very social function of the table" [sounds like the criterion of dissimilarity]. I did wonder why Crossan did not give more notice to the religious dimension of table fellowship (he does allude to it) and the restrictions associated with it in first-century Jewish piety. Crossan salutes this example as a fine demonstration of the reciprocal cooperation and integrated synthesis for which he is striving: the macrolevel of society, the mesolevel of table, and the microlevel of food.

It does appear that Crossan uses much the same methodology as Meier, but he does not call our attention to it as clearly. What is distinctive and stimulating about his approach is that he integrates the perspectives of sociocultural analysis. I am still unclear, however, as to precisely how he intends to broker that integration, which may simply be my admission that I am a slow study.

I find him even less forthcoming about how that broader perspective impacts the decisions he makes about the relative probability of historical accuracy for assertions in, say, his Stratum I list of Jesus traditions. It simply is not apparent how the extensive information which he provides in the section "Slave and Patron" or in "Magician and Prophet" shapes or even shades his discussion of "Magic and Meal" in the "brokerless kingdom" Jesus announces. We may hope that Crossan will extend his analytical evaluation of the early Christian traditions about Jesus into those clusters of traditions that he has assigned to the second, third, and fourth chronological strata. And we will hope that he will be more detailed and patient in charting for us how his methodology drives him to the conclusions he reaches and steers him away from alternate options.

There is another consideration that raises some (hopefully temporary) reservations about this second study. Crossan makes some radical decisions with regard to what documents to include and what to exclude in his first chronological stratum. That is a decision which is prior to and affects which ones of the multiply attested Jesus stories make it into Stratum I. Until a greater scholarly consensus supports him in these documentary evaluations and decisions, the extent of acknowledgment of the portrait of "the true Jesus," which the publishers claim his study discovers, will be sparse and tentative.

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IV

Similar to the nineteenth-century "life-of-Jesus" investigations, the recent revival of the search for the historical Jesus has produced multiple portraits. At the beginning of his book, Crossan referred to an article by Daniel J. Harrington that listed seven recently published studies on Jesus. Each of the seven comes out differently because of "the differences relating to the different Jewish backgrounds against which they have chosen to locate their image of the historical Jesus." With these two latest studies, scholars are no longer searching the same documents and ordering the same material according to those differing emphases that each scholar's preferred interpretive bias dictates. Now the methodologies direct the attentions of each analyst to a divergent selection and a disparate evaluation of source material.

What Meier offers is persuasive but not new and not yet completed. What Crossan offers is partly new but not yet persuasive. Perhaps the consequence of these two studies is that neither of them will supplant the seven studies recently offered as definitive descriptions of the historical Jesus. Perhaps instead of seven, we now simply have nine.