Bauckham vs. Crossley at "Unbelievable"

Over at the radio show Unbelieveable hosted by the gorgeous Justin Brierley, James Crossley and Richard Bauckham have a good chin wag about eyewitnesses and the Jesus tradition (note, I call Justin "gorgeous" because my wife thinks he is, I still bat for the right team). Listen to it here.

Christian Prophets and the Jesus Tradition

Rudolf Bultmann (History of the Synoptic Tradition, 127-28): “The Church drew no distinction between such utterances by Christian prophets and the sayings of Jesus in the tradition, for the reason that even the dominical sayings in the tradition were not the pronouncements of a past authority, but the sayings of the risen Lord, who is always a contemporary for the Church.” (See more recently, M. Eugene Boring, The Continuing Voice of Jesus: Christian Prophecy and the Gospel Tradition [Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox, 1991]; Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998], 7-10). Thus it is possible that a Christian prophet speaking on behalf of Jesus in the first person may have said something that was now attributable to Jesus, but later projected into Jesus' pre-Easter ministry and given a historical setting. (Incidentally, I am amazed as to why all modern Pentecostal prophets always prophesy in Kings James English! I once visited a Pentecostal church in Townsville where a guy kept speaking on behalf of Jesus with the words, "Yea, I say unto thee" which prefaced every sentence, and after 10 minutes it was rather monotonous).

The best example of this actually comes from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ during the journey to Golgotha. Do you remember the part where Jesus says to his mother, "Behold, I make all things new"? Well that saying is not found in the Gospels, but it is found Rev. 21.5 as part of the vision narrated by John the Seer. This is the exact kind of phenomenon that Bultmann and others envisaged of how a prophetic utterance was assimilated into the Gospel tradition.

While this phenomenon is possible, I'm quite sceptical whether it actually occured the way that Bultmann and Boring describe. I too a brief dig at this view in an article in WTJ some time ago. My main arguments are that: (1) Luke is always careful to name the prophet to which a prophetic word originated from; (2) in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul clearly distinguishes between "words" of the Lord and his own inspired utterances; (3) there was a healthy degree of scepticism about prophecy in the early church as well (e.g 1 Thess 5.21).

My good buddy Michael Barber has two posts on this issue (part 1 and part 2) which I recommend for those who want more info.

In Defence of Gerhardsson

In Memory and Manuscript, Birger Gerhardsson argued for the use of memorization akin to rabbinic methods of learning in the transmission of the Jesus tradition. Gerhardsson argued that memorization was an important feature of education in the ancient world and was exceptionally important in Jewish education according rabbinic sources.

Gerhardsson's thesis came under severe criticism including the constant criticism that he was guilty of projecting post-135 AD views on tradition back in to the pre-70 AD period, esp. in the criticisms of Morton Smith and Jacob Neusner. And yet Gerhardsson never claimed that the rabbinic methods in toto could be traced back to before 70 AD, he always distguished materials about education from the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods, and regarded Rabbi Akiba as a definite marker in a period of transition concerning rabbinic education. His point was that Akiba did not invent memorization and some rabbinic education techniques go back to an earlier period. This is confirmed by the language of "delivering" and "receiving" traditions as stated in the New Testament itself (e.g. Mk. 7.13, 1 Cor. 11.2, 23; 15.2-3). What is interesting is that Jacob Neusner wrote the foreword to the 1998 edition of Gerhardsson's book and basically apologized for his initial review of Gerhardsson which was too reliant on Smith's dismissive essay and did not take into account Gerhardsson's nuancing of his position. On top of that Martin Hengel, Gerd Theissen, and Richard Bauckham have all found in Gerhardsson's theory a genuine analogy with the transmission of the Jesus tradition. Rainer Riesner and Samuel Byrskog have also developed and furthered Gerhardsson's thesis in subsequent publications demonstrating the robustness of his approach. That is not to say that no legitimate criticisms remain valid (e.g. how does memorization account for the diverse details in the tradition and Jesus was more of an eschatological prophet than a rabbi), but critics have been unkindly dismissive of Gerhardsson's view of the traditon.

For those who want to read more see my WTJ article.