Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R. Joseph Hoffmann, PhD (Plainfield, VT), teaches at Goddard College. He is the author or editor of many books on early Christianity including Julian’s Against the Galileans and Porphyry’s Against the Christians. He is the chair of the Council for the Scientific Examination of Religion and the cochair of the Jesus Project. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Oxford University, Wells College, and the American University of Beirut.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

SOURCES of the JESUS TRADITION

Prometheus Books

Contents

Preface: Of Rocks, Hard Places, and Jesus Fatigue R. Joseph Hoffmann............................................................9An Alternative Q and the Quest of the Earthly Jesus Dennis R. MacDonald.........................................................17Jesus and the Brothers: The Theology of the Imperfect Union R. Joseph Hoffmann..................................................45Popular Mythology in the Early Empire and the Multiplicity of Jesus Traditions Justin Meggitt...................................55Bayes's Theorem for Beginners: Formal Logic and Its Relevance to Historical Method Richard C. Carrier...........................81The Abhorrent Void: The Rapid Attribution of Fictive Sayings and Stories to a Mythic Jesus Robert M. Price......................109Jesus' Dispute in the Temple and the Origin of the Eucharist Bruce Chilton......................................................118The Authorized Version of His Birth and Death David Trobisch....................................................................131Prolegomenon to a Science of Christian Origins Frank R. Zindler.................................................................140"Every Plant Which My Heavenly Father Has Not Planted Shall Be Uprooted" Robert Eisenman with Noelle Magana.....................157On Not Finding the Historical Jesus R. Joseph Hoffmann..........................................................................171Assessing the Evidence: Philosophical and Legal Perspectives Ronald A. Lindsay..................................................185Paul as a Witness to the Historical Jesus Gerd Lüdemann....................................................................196Jesus' Apocalyptic Vision and the Psychodynamics of Delusion J. Harold Ellens...................................................213Epilogue: The Canonical-Historical Jesus R. Joseph Hoffmann.....................................................................257Notes............................................................................................................................267

Preface

R. Joseph Hoffmann

Crouching somewhere between esthetic sound byte and historical detail is Michelangelo's famous statement about sculpture. "The job of the sculptor," Vasari attributes to il Divino, "is to set free the forms that are within the stone." It's a lovely thought—poetic, in fact. If you accept the theory of Renaissance Platonism, as Michelangelo embodies it, you also have to believe that Moses and David were encased in stone, yearning to be released—as the soul yearns to be set free from the flesh in the theology of salvation.

You will, however, be left wondering why such a theory required human models with strong arms and firm thighs, and why the finished product bears no more resemblance to real or imagined historical figures than a drawing that any one of us could produce. We may lack Michelangelo's skill and his deft way with a rasp and chisel, but we can easily imagine more probable first millennium BCE heroes—in form, stature, skin tone, and body type—than the Italian beauties he released from their marble prisons. In fact, the more we know about the first millennium BCE, the more likely we are to be right. And alas, Michelangelo didn't know very much about history at all. And what's more, it made no difference to his art, his success, or to his reputation. That is why idealism and imagination are sometimes at odds with history, or put bluntly, why history acts as a control on our ability to imagine or idealize anything, often profoundly wrong things.

If we apply the same logic to the New Testament, we stumble over what I have once or twice called the Platonic Fallacy in Jesus research. Like it or not, the New Testament is still the primary artifact of the literature that permits us to understand the origins of Christianity. It's the stone, if not the only stone. If we possessed onlyGnostic and apocryphal sources as documentary curiosities and no movement that preserved them, we would be hard pressed to say anything other than that at some time in the first and second century a short-lived and highly incoherent religious movement fluoresced and faded (many did) in the night sky of Hellenistic antiquity. The Jesus we would know from these sources would be an odd co-mixture of insufferable infant à la the Infancy Gospel of Thomas; a hell-robber, like the liberator of the Gospel of Nicodemus; a mysterious cipher, like the unnamed hero of the Hymn of the Pearl; or an impenetrable guru, like the Jesus of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Despite the now-yellowed axiom we all learned as first-year divinity students (of a certain generation) and later in graduate school (the one where we are taught that "no picture of early Christianity is complete without availing ourselves of all the sources"), I will climb out on a limb to say that these sources are not so much integral to a coherent picture of early Christianity as they are pebbles in orbit around the gravitational center we call the canon. They are interesting—fascinating even—in showing us how uniformity of opinion and belief can wriggle out of a chaos of alternative visions, but they are not the stone that the most familiar form of Christianity was made from. That recognition is as important as it is increasingly irrelevant to modern New Testament discussion.

So, how do we approach the New Testament? What kind of rock is it? We know (to stay with the analogy) that it's "metamorphic"—made of bits and pieces formed under pressure—in the case of the New Testament, doctrinal and political pressure to define the difference between majority and minority views and impressions, once but now unfashionably called "orthodoxy" and "heresy."

Whatever the root causes of canon formation, canon we have. The Platonic Fallacy comes into play when New Testament scholarship labors under assumptions that emanated from the literary praxis of Renaissance humanists and then (in methodized form) fueled the theological faculties of Germany well into the twentieth century (before a staggering retreat from "higher criticism" by neo-orthodox, and then existentialist, postmodern, and correctness theologians). The sequence of Jesus-quests that began before Schweitzer (who thought he was writing a retrospective!) and the succession of theories they produced were honest in their understanding of the metamorphic nature of the canon and the textual complexity of the individual books that composed it. The legacy, at least a legacy of method, of the early quests was a healthy skepticism that sometimes spilled over into Hegelianism, as with F. C. Baur, or mischievous ingenuity, as with Bruno Bauer. But what Left and Right Hegelians and their successors—from Harnack to Bultmann to the most radical of their pupils—had in common was a strong disposition to approach the canon with a chisel, assuming that if the historical accretions, misrepresentations, and conscious embellishment could be stripped away, beneath it all lay the figure of a comprehensible Galilean prophet whose life and message could be used to understand the "essence" (the nineteenth-century buzzword) of Christianity.

Whether the program was...