The Beginning of Historical Research on Jesus in the Modern

[stephan happy huller]

https://www.academia.edu/5597474/The_Be ... 2013_77-88

[Blood]

"Pietro Pomponazzi, in his Apologia (1518) and in his De Incantationibus (1517), presents a naturalistic interpretation of the birth of religions.He argues that every time situations of crisis arise, a cosmic influence is the natural cause that gives birth to prophets or founders of religions. These influences he ascribes to figures (called divini or perfecti homines) who are able to receive and transmit the natural influence of the cosmic celestial bodies. Pomponazzi does not deny the superiority of Jesus in relation to other prophets or his divinity. He creates, however, a conceptual classification in which Jesus is included. Christianity is seen as a natural phenomenon, and the reason for its birth is understood within a general explanation that can be applied to all religions. In this sense Pomponazzi anticipates a historical-religious understanding of Jesus and Christianity."

[Blood]

"In 1593, the Chizzuch Emunah by Isaac ben Abraham of Troki (1533–1594) marked the emergence of a Jewish vision of Jesus. This means that at the end of the sixteenth century the recovery of the Jewishness of Jesus had already begun, determining a different vision of his figure and of Christian origins. Isaac sees Jesus as a Jew who did not wish to abolish Mosaic law, did not violate the Sabbath or the Jewish laws regarding food, and did not establish a new law to replace the Jewish law. According to Isaac, the christological interpretations of the Jewish Bible found in the New Testament are considered unsustainable from an exegetical point of view, while the Hebrew Bible did not permit, if read correctly, the christological interpretations subsequently given to it by the church. Isaac did not seek to condemn Jesus from the Jewish viewpoint; rather, he set out to reappropriate Jesus’ Jewish identity."

[Blood]

Nothing began with Reimarus.

[DCHindley]

https://www.academia.edu/5597474/The_Be ... 2013_77-88

What's it all "mean" Stephan? You really have to stop posting links without commenting in what is said in them.

Unfortunately, I read the whole thing and still don't understand what Pesce is getting at. Didn't David Laird Dungan already cover this stuff in A History of the Synoptic Problem? At least I understood where he was coming from (that modern Historical-Critical scholarship is a tragic and unnecessary, but understandable, development in biblical interpretation)!

DCH

[Peter Kirby]

I guess the point is that to trace the question of the historical Jesus from Reimarus (a common history-of-scholarship tradition) may be in error.

[DCHindley]

I guess the point is that to trace the question of the historical Jesus from Reimarus (a common history-of-scholarship tradition) may be in error.

I don't think Schweitzer ever intended to trace the roots of historical Jesus research before that conducted by German scholarship, especially in their "lives of Jesus."

WHEN, AT SOME FUTURE DAY, OUR PERIOD OF CIVILISATION SHALL LIE, closed and completed, before the eyes of later generations, German theology will stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life of our time. For nowhere save in the German temperament can there be found in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and factors — of philosophic thought, critical acumen, historical insight, and religious feeling — without which no deep theology is possible. [p 1]

Mauro, for some reason, misspells Schweitzer's name in the footnote that cites his book Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung ("From Reimarus to Wrede: Quest of the Historical Jesus studies," Tübingen: Mohr, 1906). The English translation by W Montgomery is The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1910.

For three hundred years, long before Reimarus’s seventh [Wolfenbüttel] fragment, the discussion about the historical figure of Jesus together with the search for Christian origins was at the center of the interest of many European intellectuals and scholars. [pg 79]

I don't think anyone ever doubted the quest's debt to three hundred years of humanistic inquiry, development of scientific method and its implications, philology, or even Jewish contributions. But, except for the German reformers like Luther, they weren't German, and wrote in Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, and even - God forbid - English.

Schweitzer, for his part, admits in Geschichte Der Paulinischen Forschung [1912, English translation Paul and His Interpreters, same year] that "The English and American literature of the subject [of Paul and his interpreters] has not been included in this study, since the works in question were not in all cases accessible to me, and an insufficient acquaintance with the language raised a barrier." I suppose that this was also the case with The Quest.

Every Evangelical Blog in the universe has noted the publication of Mauro's article, perhaps because they hate that liberal Schweitzer so much that anything that questions his authority is to be praised. The problem, though, is that Mauro does not really invalidate anything Schweitzer said, only the strawman concept that he laid some sort of interpretive framework holy to modern historical critics. Evangelicals are always making up things to attribute to Schweitzer, even sometimes that he had somehow destroyed liberal historical critical inquiry by pointing out the failures of its proponents. Ohhh pleeeaaassse. That was certainly not Schweitzer's intent. What he did was to demonstrate that individual scholar's interpretation of the past must by necessity take place in the present. No wonder why there is not a single comment about the validity of the article in any of the blogs I have seen it posted on.

But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus. No vital force comes into the figure unless a man breathes into it all the hate or all the love of which he is capable. The stronger the love, or the stronger the hate, the more life-like is the figure which is produced. For hate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hate: that of Reimarus, the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, and that of David Friedrich Strauss. It was not so much hate of the Person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it was so easy to surround Him, and with which He had in fact been surrounded. They were eager to picture Him as truly and purely human, to strip from Him the robes of splendour with which He had been apparelled, and clothe Him once more with the coarse garments in which He had walked in Galilee. [pg 4]

Oh GOD! That means that Schweitzer was actually a post-modernist!

DCH

[Blood]

My favorite apologetic is that when Schweitzer discovered the apocalyptic Jesus, we finally had the "real" Jesus of history. Close the door and turn out the lights. 'Cause nobody wanted or expected to find the apocalyptic Jesus. That must mean he's the real deal.

[Peter Kirby]

Thanks for giving the article some much-needed context, David.

[DCHindley]

Mr Hindley, you evil man!

David Laird Dungan figured it all out long before Mauro. A History of the Synoptic Problem (1999)

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
PART ONE. The First to the Fifth Century: Cotiflict and Consolidation
1. Responses to Multiple, Differing Gospels in Early
Christianity 11
2. Luke’s Preface 13
3. Papias of Hierapolis Reports the Apostle Johns Criticism of Peters
Gospel (Mark) 18
4. Justin Martyr Uses a Gospel Harmony; Tatian’s Diatessaron 28
5. Marcion Carries Out an “Ethnic Cleansing” of Christianity 44
6. Celsus Attacks Christianity in True Doctrine 59
7. Origen Confronts All Four Aspects of the Synoptic Problem
for the First Time 65
8. Porphyry—“the Deadliest Foe”—Has Read the
Gospels, Carefully 89
9. Eusebius of Caesarea’s Four-Part Response to Porphyry 98
10. Augustine Refutes the Manichaean Critique of the Gospels;
the Second Form of the Synoptic Problem 112
PART TWO. The Creation of the Modern Historical-Critical Method
11. The Rise of the Modern Period and Its Consequences,
1500-1950 145
12. Main Features of the Modern Historical-Critical Approach to
Biblical Interpretation 171

xii
A History of the Synoptic Problem
13. Signs of Things to Come: The Protestant Reformers on the
Differences among the Gospels 177
14. The Text Reemerges as a Problem: Erasmus and the Return
to the Greek New Testament 185
15. The Overthrow of Erasmus’ “Standard Text” and the Descent
into Textual Chaos 191
16. Baruch Spinoza and the Political Agenda of Modern
Historical-Critical Interpretation 198
17. John Locke and the Economic Agenda of Modern
Historical-Critical Interpretation 261
18. The Gospel Canon Is Rejected; John Toland and the
Gospel of Barnabas 287
19. The Establishment of a “New Standard Text” of the Gospels 291
20. Emergence of a Third Form of the Synoptic Problem and
Its Preferred Solution 302
PART THREE. Current Trends in the Post-Modern Period
21. The Synoptic Problem Today 345
22. Current Trends in Understanding How the Gospels
Were Created 368
23. Conclusion 392
Notes 395
Index 513

[392]

CHAPTER 23

Conclusion

The dawn of the twenty-first century, and with it the third millennium of the Christian calendar, is an appropriate time for retrospective soul-searching and stocktaking. At the end of this history of the main attempts, from the first century to the twenty-first, to explain the creation of the Gospels, a few general conclusions are in order.

Perhaps most important, the profound changes which took place during the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment can hardly be overestimated. Protestant Christianity, modified by Enlightenment ideals and concepts, represents a great sea change over against all earlier forms of traditional Christianity—and the changes were by no means all for the better. If Martin Luther and the Reformers succeeded in breaking through the crust of centuries of misguided and corrupt ecclesiastical dogma and practice to discover a purer, more spiritual form of the Christian faith, at the same time they unleashed an unrestrained individualism and arid scholasticism every bit as destructive as the evils they opposed.

If the Enlightenment rightly perceived and fiercely attacked certain aggravated abuses of entrenched power—religious, political, and economic—in the name of religious tolerance, political freedom, and scientific objectivity, the arrogance and rigid materialism typical of many Enlightenment thinkers either exacerbated or at least did nothing to prevent some of the bloodiest and most destructive wars the world has ever seen. And we now stand on the brink of an environmental crisis whose [393] specific details and awful dimensions are only just beginning to be grasped, caused by certain scientific assumptions that have blinded us to what we have been doing to our planet.

It would seem that this history of the repeated attempts to provide an adequate explanation of the differences among the Gospels, while still preserving their credibility as authoritative witnesses to Jesus Christ, must end on a note of considerable irony. It seems as if the farther we go, the greater the confusion, error, and disintegration. But such a conclusion overlooks the manifold evidence of strong movements for reform, reintegration, and renewal.

As we saw in Part One, the presence of competing, very dissimilar accounts of the Lord Jesus at first led to attempts to suppress rival Gospels by a number of Church leaders. After the canonization process got well under way (by the mid-second century), the orthodox faction found itself ineluctably in possession of four rather diverse documents. This resulted in more and more elaborate attempts at justification, culminating among the orthodox in the magisterial work by Augustine On the Harmony of the Evangelists.

Part Two described the eclipse of the great Augustinian medieval synthesis and its replacement by the Enlightenment historical-critical method, within a broad cultural revolution leading to the establishment in western Europe of market capitalism, secular political democracy, and religious toleration and freedom of the individual. Within this cultural revolution, every aspect of traditional Christian worship and theology was replaced. In biblical studies, each of the four main aspects of the Synoptic Problem—canon, text, composition, and interpretation—were likewise replaced.
While these great changes seemed advantageous at the time—at least to some—today they need a searching critique. This critique is indeed going on, right now, with great fervor and industry in Christian seminaries, universities, and schools all over the planet. Everywhere the inquiring eye looks, it sees an astonishingly complex vista of scholarly activity, at unprecedented levels of sophistication.

An example of these concerted efforts at renewal is the one-volume commentary on the Bible, entitled International Bible Commentary: A Catholic and Ecumenical Resource for the Twenty-first Century. Editions will appear by the year 2000 in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Dutch, and Polish. Intended primarily for pastors all over the world, it was created by an ecumenical, international team of scholars, with contributors from every continent and more than 150 countries. This commentary pioneers a number of new approaches to biblical interpretation. As such, it addresses many of the issues raised in this book.

[394] The Synoptic Problem: Part of the Church’s Conversation with God

The Synoptic Problem has been—from the beginning—one of the most sensitive and complex areas in biblical study. It has been the foremost goal of this history to present, in some respects for the first time, a complete (if not comprehensive) history of the debate on this issue from its inception, not just from the eighteenth century. Moreover, this history has examined the Synoptic Problem within a rigorous and consistent methodological perspective, so as to clarify the subtle nuances of its different forms.

This history has documented the heretofore unknown fact that there are not one but three clearly defined, strikingly different forms of the Synoptic Problem. The latter two forms still are active today among the Augustinian/Lockean fundamentalists with their Gospel harmonies (Second Form) and the Spinozist historical critics with their synopses (Third Form). Given their sharply differing assumptions about the Gospel canon and the appropriate method for interpreting the Bible, they clash head- on wherever they meet. Perhaps the account given here of the primary assumptions more or less unwittingly taken for granted by each group will help to remove some of the animosity and confusion in future encounters.

It is striking to observe that, from the first century until now, one and the same basic question has animated all participants in this great discussion in all of its forms, namely: “Where may I find reliable testimony to the Lord Jesus?” Even the Jesus Seminar, which is not noted for its adherence to any traditional norms or institutions, can publish a book, The Five Gospels, with the subtitle The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. Whether it be Justin Martyr or Origen, Celsus or Porphyry, Eusebius or Augustine, Martin Luther or John Calvin, Erasmus or John Toland, Baruch Spinoza or John Locke, Johann Jakob Griesbach or Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, Burnett Hillmann Streeter or Basil Christopher Butler, Frans Neirynck or William Farmer, James Robinson or Robert Funk—they have all sat down at the same table and looked at the same mysterious Gospels and asked the same fundamental question. Clearly, it is the answer that divides us.

At one level, the Synoptic Problem is not really a “problem” at all. That is, it is not like a scientific riddle that can be given this or that solution, which then must be reexamined by later investigators. At its deepest level, the Synoptic Problem is not a scientific “problem” but part of the Church’s never-ending conversation with the God of Jesus Christ. At its deepest level, the quest for the correct solution to the Synoptic Problem, like the Church’s quest for the correct canon of the Gospels, and the correct text of the Gospels, and the correct way to interpret the Gospels, is a vital aspect of the Church’s perennial quest for the Word of Life.

Ahh-mennn! How are you ah!

Weirdly enough, Mauro doesn't so much as acknowledge that Dungan covered much of the same ground 14 years ago!

Respectfrully,

Your Evangelical Catholic twin,

Skippy