Reading the New Testament

John Court

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134850112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

Reading the New Testament is the lead volume to the successful New Testament Readings Series. It analyzes the many ways in which the New Testament can be read and interpreted.
Rather than prescribing one 'correct' way of reading, this study offers an overview of and introduction to the most influential theories of recent scholarship, discussing the background against which such theories are developed. It shows the advantages of combining methods of reading, thus stimulating an interaction between various approaches, illustrated by the individual volumes in the series.
This is an important addition to New Testament literature, offering the student of religion a comprehensive overview of the methods and approaches used by scholars in the field.

Chapter 1

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Historical reading

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What it had been was history. What it was to be was not history at all.

Alan Bennett, Writing Home

A treasured painting in the National Gallery’s collection is a panel with an unusual depiction of the entombment of Christ. Although The Entombment was purchased as being the work of Michelangelo, the attribution has been disputed periodically and the work assigned to a lesser Florentine artist, a contemporary called Baccio Bandinelli. Even among those who maintain it is by Michelangelo there is no consensus about the painting’s date. It was painted in Florence in his twentieth year, or in Rome when he was thirty-one, or later still when he was aged forty. This argument is often based on the fashion of the clothes or hairstyles in the painting.

This is a good example of a historical enquiry, where every conceivable clue from external and internal evidence is examined in order to ‘place’ the subject; but in the end there are at least four divergent but sustainable conclusions. It reminds one of the problems posed by the evidence of the Gospels about the dates of Jesus’ life and how old he was. Luke 3.23 held that Jesus was ‘about thirty years of age’ when his ministry began with his baptism by John. But according to John 8.57, the Jews alluded to his age as ‘not yet fifty years old’. Are both ages to be taken literally? Could both be correct? There is discrepancy here, but not necessarily incompatibility (unless, like Irenaeus you take John 8.57 to imply that Jesus was forty-nine years of age – which is the age of perfect maturity, being seven times the seven ages of man!).

According to Matthew’s Gospel (2.1, 19) Jesus was born in the final year of King Herod’s reign (4 BCE). The birth stories in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke concur in very few details; the only points of direct agreement are that Jesus was born from a virgin mother in Bethlehem, and that his parents’ names were Joseph and Mary. But Luke also says that John the Baptist was born in Herod’s reign and that Mary’s child Jesus would be born approximately six months after Elizabeth’s son John (Luke 1.5, 26). If Jesus was ‘about thirty’ (Luke 3.1, 23), in the fifteenth year of Tiberius’s reign as emperor of Rome (29/28 CE), this information is roughly compatible with a birth date in 4 BCE.

The real problem comes with Luke’s reference to the birth of Christ at the time of the census when Quirinius was governor of Syria (2.1f). In the words of Robin Lane Fox:

According to Josephus [the Jewish historian] Quirinius was governor of Syria with authority over Judaea in AD 6, when the province was brought under direct Roman control. The year was a critical moment in Jewish history, as important to its province as the year of 1972 to Northern Ireland, the start of direct rule.

(1991, p. 28)

The result of this historical investigation seems to be that Luke offers two dates for Jesus’ birth, ten years apart.

The effect is similar to the disputes about the painting in the National Gallery. One detail of the picture has caused the dating to be shifted by ten years. Has historical criticism betrayed a serious inconsistency in Luke’s Gospel? Does it mean that one cannot trust this ‘fact’ about Jesus’ birth, or the rest of the Gospel data, as in the usual sense historical? The result seems to be what Christian readers in particular have dreaded about historical criticism: that it undermines the essentials of the faith. The strange thing to observe, however, about Robin Lane Fox’s approach is that, while he demolishes Luke’s dating of the Nativity, he supports what the fourth Gospel says about Jesus’ age because (according to Fox) the author was John the Apostle and therefore a primary witness.

We need to look more closely at what historical criticism involves. Our example of Jesus’ age and date of birth has entailed comparing three New Testament Gospels and two synoptic Gospels, with one another and with John. But the critical process has also taken reference points from outside the Bible, dates of kings and emperors and the writings of ancient historians. Such external comparisons are not the easy (and definitive) matter they might seem, for several reasons.

Ancient historians (such as Tacitus, Josephus and the author of the Acts of the Apostles) do not make a practice of coordinating their data with one another, as modern historians do. Cross-references do not exist (although Luke 3.1 makes an attempt). There is also a problem with the calendar – more strictly with calendars; for there were several and they ran from different points in the year. The Jewish calendar at this period started in the spring, the Macedonian in the autumn, and the Julian (the Roman solar calendar initiated by Julius Caesar) in midwinter. Ancient dates were often given by the years of office of a monarch or governor; how do such dates intersect with calendar years, when periods of office start at different times? And finally there is an obvious difference between the inclusive and exclusive methods of reckoning intervals of time. For the Roman, the day after tomorrow, forty-eight hours’ time, would be three days away, because he counted today as day one. All of these factors must create a degree of imprecision for the historian today. There is more than one way of calculating the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius!

But the matter is more difficult still. We take a standard dating system of day/month/complete year for granted. But such dates only became common in England around 1500 CE (the Common or Christian Era). The explicitly Christian numbering of years AD (Anno Domini, or in the year of the Lord) was introduced by Dionysius Exiguus in AD 525 (or 525 CE, as we would now say, more neutrally). But it was not until the Gregorian calendar of 1582 CE that the beginning of the year on 1 January was established for all time, prospectively and retrospectively (although still not for all cultures). Then began the long process of converting older datings to the new style.

We have little problem with standard dating, so long as we remember to write it down at the time! But any retrospective dating must open up margins of error. In recollection we can lengthen or foreshorten a period of time. We may transpose the order of events, or assign them to different years, unless we can tie them securely (and accurately?) to a particularly memorable event. Robin Lane Fox obviously places trust in such a linkage when he emphasises Josephus’s evidence on the date of Quirinius. But is this Jewish/Roman association of events really any more (or less) reliable than the links made by the Christian/Graeco-Roman writer Luke?

The moral is that we need to be hyper-cautious about conclusions from any ancient historical evidence, sacred or secular.

Allowances must be made for the problems of chronology, and perhaps even more so for the interpretation of events in all kinds of meaningful and symbolic ways, and overall for the essentially ideological motivations for history-writing in the ancient world (in contrast to the scientific controls on modern historiography). The harsh truth is that there is very little continuity in the idea of ‘history’ (the purposes and methods of writing history) between then and now. This is why we have problems with the lack of firm information from Luke about the time of Jesus’ birth, or for that matter about the circumstances of Paul’s death, at the opposite end of this two-volume work. We find it difficult to conceive that a history would ever have been written that did not start by recounting such essential ‘facts’ straightforwardly. But of course there is the question whether the Christian movement had any sort of ‘archives’ and how one could possibly have discovered such facts at the time. Apart from this practical reason, Luke’s outlook surely must have been much closer in chronology and ideology to the classical historians of ancient Greece and Rome than to the modern scientific historian.

The classical historians Thucydides and Livy both wrote history in the interests of moral and political causes; Tacitus did also, combining it with a critical, satirical vein. For us it is probably better to ‘enter into the spirit’ of what it meant to write a historical record in the ancient world, rather than tinker with Luke’s wording and thereby free him from the accusation of error. Although it is true that Luke 2.2 might be read as saying: ‘This census was before the one Quirinius held …’, it is much more likely that his information was either confused or inadequate by modern historical standards of evidence.

Even if this debate is pursued as far as possible, so that the issue may be resolved, in terms of what are margins of error satisfactory for ancient history, or perhaps by making improvements in the accuracy of the text, a larger question still remains. Does Luke intend to make historical statements in a matter of fact way? Or is the detail of his text intentionally symbolic?

Jesus is born at the turning point of the Roman world, when it is taking stock of itself. As his ministry begins Jesus is at the optimum age of human vigour – thirty years. In the future, some apocalyptic traditions will imagine the ideal state of the after-life when everybody is aged thirty! Is John’s tradition of Jesus being ‘not yet fifty’ a symbolic reference to the nearness of the biblical Jubilee (7 × 7 = 49) when the whole world is renewed after the ultimate sabbath rest? Or is the age range represented by the two traditions (Luke’s and John’s), that is, between thirty and fifty, an echo of the proper age-qualification in order to hold religious office, as we see this echoed in the documents of the Jewish sect at Qumran? It is very difficult to set limits to, or gauge the plausibility of, such symbolic – as opposed to historical – intentions. In an ideological style of history-writing it is actually possible that the historical and the symbolic are not mutually exclusive.

There is an inherent flexibility in the use of the term ‘history’ which should also put us on our guard. As well as the considerable differences in both concept and practice between ancient and modern history-writing, we should recognise a distinction between (a) a historical understanding of the Bible and (b) the understanding of the Bible as history.

It is inevitable that modern readers should acknowledge the Bible as essentially an antiquarian document, something which is given by history. It is therefore proper to write a history of the Bible as a collection of ancient documents. The authorisation of the text, and the setting of its limits, the canon, is the climax of that history. What follows after that climax is a further stage in the history of the interpretation of those texts. But this historical understanding of the Bible is a subject of study in its own right. Multi-volume works have been written on this subject, such as the Cambridge History of the Bible. For our present purposes we should concentrate on the second topic, the understanding of the Bible as history, or more strictly the examination of those texts which lay claim (at least in ancient terms) to be written history.

The work by Robin Lane Fox (1991) has already been mentioned. The aim of his enquiry is to ascertain whether the Bible is history, that is, whether it is true in either of two basic senses: first, is it internally coherent (logically, materially, doctrinally) and, second, does it correspond to the historical facts? Given the difficulties, which have already been acknowledged, with ‘facts’ in ancient history, a measure of agnosticism is appropriate. But Lane Fox’s is a frankly atheistic reading of the Bible by an ancient historian whose own vision of the truth is grounded in a rationalistic, post-Enlightenment view of the historian’s craft. It is almost an eighteenth-century view with echoes of the manner of Edward Gibbon. His targets are the Christian Churches, literary critics of the modern kind, liberal readers with a modernist tendency, and fundamentalists of all sorts. Perhaps the bias in ideological presuppositions needs to be acknowledged on both sides?

The Bible, as we have seen, is not one book but a whole library of ‘writings’ (as the Greeks called them). It is a heterogeneous collection, a tangled jungle of works in poetry and prose, originally composed in three different languages, and brought together over more than a millennium. It follows that one cannot judge all the component writings equally directly as works of history: some may be primary sources, others with a strictly subordinate contribution to make. But, as already discussed in the introduction, it also follows that there is an important aspect of the historical understanding of the Bible which is an account (reconstructed and some of it highly conjectural) of how the two separate collections (Old and New Testaments) were assembled, arranged, and ultimately came together.

What of the correspondence of individual books of the Bible to the facts of history? It is somewhat surprising that Robin Lane Fox concedes the invention of history as a genre to that court historian whom he sees as providing the narrative of King David’s reign in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings. This writer is said to have a good case for being the ‘world’s first historian’, long before the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides. He may well have drawn on an earlier memoir, since he wrote in the reign of Solomon; thus he is very close to a primary source. Lane Fox, for whom the model historian is the Greek Thucydides, is not too grudging in his praise of this Hebrew historian. Ironically much Old Testament scholarship now questions his existence as an individual historian rather than a much later school of thought about David.

A great German historian of the 1920s, Eduard Meyer, referred to Luke as the one great historian between Polybius (the last of the classical Greek historians) and Eusebius (the first great ecclesiastical historian of Christianity). Is it possible to catch a glimpse of what it meant to be a historian in the first century CE, when Luke would have been writing, by the use of a few comparative examples from Greek and Latin, Jewish and Christian history?

The Hellenistic writer Lucian in the second century CE produced a tract On Writing History in which he declared: ‘The one aim and goal of history is to be useful; and this can result only from its truth. The one task of the historian is to describe things exactly as they happened.’ Lucian has learnt his lesson, and acquired his passion for truth, from the much earlier example of Thucydides, who aimed to write history not for passing entertainment but for permanent usefulness. The historian must aim at accuracy and usefulness, in order that, when situations recur (as it was believed they must, according to a cyclic theory of history), people have the example of the past to teach them how to act in the present. This is the realm of lofty ideals, but Lucian does not mislead his readers into thinking that all historians work this way. Instead he attacks his contemporaries who emphasise the agreeable at the expense of the useful – ‘such are the majority of historians who serve the present moment, their own interest, and the profit they hope to get from history.’

It is not just a simple distinction between historians who write to please their readers (and make money), and historians who write for the sake of truth. Few historians from the ancient world are uninfluenced by some doctrine of history. As we have seen, both Thucydides and Lucian imply a cyclic view of history, according to which ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ and events recur according to some elliptical continuum. It is also possible to write history to promote a cause. Does this only become propaganda when events are written up to exemplify the message, or history is rewritten periodically to account for ideological change? The celebrated Roman historian Livy (59 BCE-17 CE) commended the nationalist cause in these terms:

Whatever may come of my work, I shall at least have the joy of having played my part in perpetuating the memory of the finest people in the world; and if in the midst of so great a multitude of writers my fame remains in obscurity, I shall console myself with the glory and the greatness of those who shall eclipse my repute.

Livy also expressed the essentially moral purpose in writing (and in reading) history:

This is the most wholesome and fruitful effect of the study of history: you have in front of you real examples of every kind of behaviour, real examples embodied in most conspicuous form; from these you can take, both for yourself and for the state, ideals at which to aim; you can learn also what to avoid because it is infamous either in its conception or in its issue.

Because Livy’s primary concern is for these two causes (the moral and the national) he does not distinguish too nicely between history and legend in presenting his case.

Luke’s work may also call to mind the Jewish and Old Testament traditions of writing history, which involve looking at the course of events from a particular religious standpoint. The God of Israel is dynamic and active in historical events, leading his chosen people and rescuing them from calamity. Such a tradition may go back to the court historian, appreciated by Robin Lane Fox for his chronicles of King David and the succession of King Solomon. It is certainly reflected in the long sweep of the history of Israel’s judges and kings, appraised by the Deuteronomistic historians in accordance with the theological principles of the religious law encapsulated in the book of Deuteronomy. The tradition persisted in the Greek dress of the books of the Maccabees, right at the end of the Old Testament era and not very long before the time of Luke.

Josephus was a Jewish historian writing in the first century CE. His account of the Jewish War against Rome (66–70 CE) contains much eye-witness material. In his introduction he promises to be impartial, but it becomes clear that his work is written from the standpoint of a Jew trying to restore his standing and gain the sympathy of the Roman public. He minimises, reinterprets, or omits all that might offend Roman susceptibilities. As a Jew he is also affected by the models of history in the Hebrew Bible that we have just noted. The success of the Roman siege of Jerusalem is attributed to two factors: ‘the power of God over unholy men’ (that is, the dynamic activity of God to punish the Jewish rebels) and ‘the fortune of the Romans’ (the idea of benevolent fate, Fortuna, derived from Italian paganism). Josephus’s other works, such as the Antiquities of the Jews have clearly apologetic motives. His aim is to demonstrate the antiquity of the Jewish faith and to try to prove the unique validity of Jewish conceptions of history.

An adequate comparison with Christian traditions of writing history would take us several centuries later than Luke, probably as far as Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century CE. It has been said that Luke’s work (as illustrated by attempts at coordination such as Luke 3.1) ‘antiquated the apologetically intentioned portrayals of Church history in the second century, even before they appeared’, and ‘drew the author of Acts intellectually closer to Eusebius’ in the fourth century. For a long time Christian history and classical h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Bible riddle
• Introduction: On reading the Bible
• 1. Historical reading
• 2. Narrative theology
• 3. Short stories and their structure
• 4. Intertextuality
• 5. Rhetoric
• 6. The text in a social context
• 7. Psychological readings
• 8. Allegory or spiritual reading
• 9. Texts as slogans
• 10. Reading in action: John 21
• Postscript: Ariadne’s thread – an essay in deconstruction
• Select bibliography
• Index