Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis

Tucker S. Ferda

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780567687685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Tucker S. Ferda examines the theory of the Galilean crisis: the notion that the historical Jesus himself had grappled with the failure of his mission to Israel. While this theory has been neglected since the 19th century, due to research moving to consider the response of the early church to the rejection of the gospel, Ferda now provides fresh insight on Jesus' own potential crisis of faith. Ferda begins by reconstructing the origin of the crisis theory, expanding upon histories of New Testament research and considering the contributions made before Hermann Samuel Reimarus. He shows how the crisis theory was shaped by earlier and so-called "pre-critical" gospel interpretation and examines how, despite the claims of modern scholarship, the logic of the crisis theory is still a part of current debate. Finally, Ferda argues that while the crisis theory is a failed hypothesis, its suggestions on early success and growing opposition in the ministry, as well as its claim that Jesus met and responded to disappointing cases of rejection, should be revisited. This book resurrects key historical aspects of the crisis theory for contemporary scholarship.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCING THE GALILEAN CRISIS

The only way finally to avoid interpretation in history is to avoid history …

–K. Ross Toole

In Barcelona on July 20, 21, and 22, 1263 CE, the Jewish convert to Catholicism, Pablo Christiani, debated with the Jewish philosopher Moses ben Nachman (better known as Nachmanides). In front of a sympathetic audience—the debate was organized by the church—Christiani aimed to show from not only the Torah but also the Talmud that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah.¹ Nachmanides disputed the argument with a number of counterclaims, one of which was this: if Jesus had been the Messiah, there would have been a mass Jewish following. As it was, however, Jesus was rejected by most of those who heard of him.

Nachmanides was not, of course, the first to highlight the rejection of Jesus as a theological problem for Christianity. We see already in the 50s of the first century the Apostle Paul wrestling with it in Romans 9–11 and elsewhere (e.g., 2 Cor. 3:15-18). The topic emerges in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, as well as in the second- and third-century Adversos literature.² Mass rejection is clearly the point of b. Sanh. 43a, which claims that for forty days prior to his execution there was an invitation for “anyone who can say anything in his favor … [to] come forth.” No one came.³

In light of this material and much else that could be mentioned, it is not surprising that historians have expressed interest in the topic of how early Christians responded to the rejection of the gospel.⁴ What is infrequently noted in recent criticism, however, is that such inquiry has not always been so focused on the post-Easter church. Indeed, it was once common to assume that Jesus himself had grappled with the failure of his mission to Israel. Jesus himself had recognized, and was forced to explain, the meaning of the sower’s wasted seed. This idea emerged most forcefully in the theory of a “Galilean crisis,” which had its heyday in the nineteenth-century quest for Jesus. This crisis theory, despite its prevalence in earlier scholarship and intriguing reception history, has never been the subject of a focused study.⁵

Aims

The present book aims to fill in that lacuna. It details developments in the reception history of the New Testament that led to the crisis theory, examines the legacy of its interpretation of the gospels and historical logic, and reassesses its value for contemporary research. This project, therefore, has both reception-historical and historical-critical concerns. It intends to contribute to the history of Jesus research and to the attempt to reconstruct Jesus as a figure in history. It is perhaps best, then, to frame this study as a critical “commentary” on the crisis theory. As modern critical commentaries have interest in linguistic and conceptual background, sympathetic description, and (for some at least) historical explanation, so too our study will engage the crisis theory from these three different angles. On the whole, the objective is to answer three broad questions about the crisis theory in modern research: 1) where does this idea come from? 2) what forms does it take? and 3) does it contribute anything to our knowledge of the historical Jesus?

Problems Stated

There are four reasons why this study is important for current research on the gospels and the historical Jesus. First, the crisis theory is typically treated briefly, if at all, in surveys of Jesus research. This is surprising but not inexplicable, since many New Testament scholars have regarded Albert Schweitzer’s discussion and criticism of nineteenth-century literature as definitive. Few critics after Schweitzer have thought that there is much left to be learned from these “Lives of Jesus.”⁶ Due in large part to the perceived success of Schweitzer’s project, then, it has been easy for critics ever since to relegate these works to a unique period of scholarship and to ignore them. Moreover, given the incredible amount of material available for the researcher, studies of prior Jesus research must be selective. Schweitzer himself lamented in his preface that it “would take almost a whole book to simply list” nineteenth-century research on Jesus, and he was not exaggerating.⁷ More recently, William Baird has written that “a comprehensive survey of all the scholars and all their writings would require several lifetimes with a few generations of purgatory thrown in.”⁸ In penning this statement, he was thinking only of the stretch from the pietists to the nineteenth century. The upshot is that sweeping surveys must leave out a good deal of material and the particular interests of the scholar must dictate what is included. These interests tend to function like holes in the bottom of a sieve: of all the material that is put in for sifting, only that which matches the shape and profile of the historian’s interest finds its way out. Schweitzer’s work has endured not least because he was able to offer rich and poignant discussions of prior literature, such that the reader comes away with a feel for these works as wholes. But even Schweitzer’s study is really driven by his focus on three issues: ethics and eschatology, John and the synoptics, the supernatural. His treatments betray that.

The point is that prior surveys of Jesus research have, of necessity, focused on particular questions, and there has never been a study that shares our interest: how did the crisis theory come to be and exert such influence on thinking and writing about Jesus?⁹ It should be emphasized here that our task is not simply descriptive—e.g., to summarize what people have said about a Galilean crisis. Rather, the goal is to explain the interpretive and historical logic of the crisis theory, as well as hermeneutical patterns in reception history that made its existence possible. In other words, we are interested in not just the “what” but the “why.” This investigation uncovers interesting and unstudied parallels among gospel readers in different contexts and time periods.

The need for this project is also demonstrated by the fact that, when critics do make mention of the crisis theory in whatever form, descriptions of its genesis and background are rife with misunderstanding. All of this will be discussed in much more detail later, but a few important examples suffice to illustrate the point. In Schweitzer’s survey, the genesis of the idea was said to be the work of Karl Hase (1829).¹⁰ Schweitzer’s emphasis on Hase is not entirely misleading, but it fails to grasp that Hase’s reconstruction of two “periods” in Jesus’ career was a conscious response to prior research, and that he relied on interpretive conventions to do so. (Schweitzer’s claim builds on his unfounded assumption that the modern critical study of Jesus in the late eighteenth century has no parallel in earlier times.) More recently, John Meier briefly described, and ultimately rejected, the theory of “a joyous beginning and a disastrous end” to Jesus’ Galilean ministry. He contended that “the germ of this idea” could be found “already” in Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863).¹¹ This also, I will argue, fails to grasp how Renan’s developmental biography of Jesus relied on preexisting interpretive tradition, and was more a flowering than the germ of this idea. Finally, and more recently still, there is Barry Smith’s monograph Jesus’ Twofold Teaching about the Kingdom of God (2009).¹² This volume conveys little awareness that its hypothesis that Jesus’ ministry passed through two different “contexts” of reception (which Smith terms the “non-rejection context” and “rejection context,” respectively) is hardly a novel one.¹³ It may in fact have helped Smith’s case to show that he is not the only reader of the gospels to think that certain tensions in Jesus’ teaching are best resolved by positing a change in historical situation.

The problem with these inaccuracies is not that the history of scholarship simply lacks a piece of the larger puzzle. Rather, these inaccuracies show that there are some basic assumptions about that larger puzzle—particularly the relationship of nineteenth-century scholarship as a whole to earlier and later research—that need to be reframed. The crisis theory is not a footnote to the history of the quest for the historical Jesus, but is a historical hypothesis that was widespread and involved all aspects of the gospel tradition. We fail to grasp something fundamental about the quest for Jesus if we lack an accurate understanding of the background and logic of the crisis theory. It is one of the major tasks of this book to demonstrate that the crisis theory developed as a historical “solution” to preexisting “problems” of interpretation in the gospels. The story of the recognition of those problems, and even some important stabs at solutions to them, are necessary to understand how and why the crisis theory appeared as it did.

Third, because our aim is not merely to describe what people said about a Galilean crisis but to better understand why they did so, our inquiry into the history of scholarship informs contemporary discussions of Jesus and the gospels. Critics by and large no longer write Lives of Jesus, and very few recent monographs feature what could be called a Galilean crisis. So scholarship has, at least on a surface level, decided against the plausibility of the crisis idea. But the interpretive issues that prompted the crisis theory are still very much with us, even if they are not always recognized as such. Not only that, the basic historical solution offered by the crisis theory—that we posit a change in historical context to resolve certain theological tensions in the gospel tradition—parallels contemporary discussions in several remarkable ways. Thus, I will suggest that, while we must acknowledge differences between recent work and the much-criticized Lives of Jesus, it is also informative to identify clear interpretive parallels between the new and the old. Hopefully, our discussion will enable us to see continuity where histories of research have tended to stress discontinuity.

Fourthly, investigation of the crisis theory is informative for contemporary research not only because of the interpretive questions it raises, but because some of the historical answers offered to those questions deserve a fresh hearing. I will contend that the idea of a Galilean crisis suffers from numerous problems as a historical hypothesis on a macro level, and this study is not a wholesale endorsement of it. However, I will argue that particular features of the crisis theory offer valuable insights into perplexing traditions in the gospels, particularly concerning the suggestion that the Jesus tradition is marked by disappointment and a struggle to respond to rejection. In this respect, I second the insight of Eckhard Rau that this earlier literature, its weaknesses notwithstanding, offers “issues and insights which, though often forgotten or abandoned, could be helpful.”¹⁴

Approach

In one of his last published articles, Per Bilde wrote the following:

The traditional Christian (not Jewish or Muslim) interpretations of Jesus from the New Testament through Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment were religious, dogmatic and a-historical, and therefore are of no interest to modern research.¹⁵

From the perspective of reception history, Bilde’s comments are deeply misguided. There are three related problems here, and identifying them can serve to introduce the approach of this study to the task at hand. First, earlier interpretations ought to be of interest simply because they are not always so foreign to modern research. As Chapter 2 of this project will detail, numerous readers of the gospels before the advent of “modern historical criticism” anticipated the interpretive conclusions of contemporary critics.¹⁶ There has been a recent surge of interest in documenting such phenomena, the logic of which Dale Allison clearly explicates:

If … we can cast aside the strange notion that New Testament scholarship must, like the hard sciences, ever progress onward and upward, then there is no reason to doubt that some of the older books about Jesus might get us as close or closer to the truth than some of the more recent ones. The passing of time does not always and everywhere carry us closer to the truth.¹⁷

Moreover, even when pre-critical exegesis differs from modern work in terms of the treatment of specific texts and themes in the gospels, at times one can identify in those earlier readings a grappling with interpretive issues that resembles modern exegetical discussion.¹⁸ For instance, as I will show in Chapter 2, John Chrysostom thought that Jes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introducing the Galilean Crisis
• Chapter 2. Interpretive Precursors and Habits of Reading
• Chapter 3. The Galilean Crisis in the Nineteenth-Century Quest
• Chapter 4. The Afterlife of the Crisis Theory
• Chapter 5. Consistency and Change
• Chapter 6. Development: Early Success and Growing Opposition
• Chapter 7. The Rejection of Jesus
• Chapter 8. Final Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index of Biblical Writings
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Imprint