The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

As Bultmann assumed that he knew a certain amount about Jesus, so he assumed that he knew a certain amount about the early church: that it began as a kind of variant on Gnosticism, though using some Jewish language; that it developed in two strands at least, one of which carried on the Gnostic or ‘wisdom’ tradition, while another interpreted Jesus within a more Jewish-style development; that these two were combined in the writing of the first canonical gospel; that Christianity quickly spread beyond its original base, which merely happened to have been Jewish, and that it translated the language of its earliest expression into Hellenistic thought-forms as it did so, which was all the easier to do since the Jewish thought-forms had in any case been mere accidental features of a message that was more akin to Hellenism.

by itself the idea of examining the form of individual pericopae, and searching for their probable setting in the life of the early church, need not be committed to accepting one view of early Christian history rather than another.

A third misunderstanding concerns the belief of many early form-critics that the stories in the early tradition reflected the life of the early church rather than the life of Jesus, in that the early church invented (perhaps under the guidance of ‘the spirit of Jesus’) sayings of Jesus to address problems in their own day.

as is not so often noted, Paul provides evidence of all sorts of disputes which rocked the early church but left not a trace in the synoptic tradition.

From Paul, it is clear that the doctrine of justification was a vital issue which the early church had to hammer out in relation to the admission of Gentiles to the church. The only mentions of the admission of Gentiles in the synoptic tradition do not speak of justification, and the only mention of justification has nothing to do with Gentiles.8

So we could go on: slavery, idol-meat, womens’ headgear, work, widows; and, perhaps above all, the detailed doctrines of Christ and the divine spirit. The synoptic tradition shows a steadfast refusal to import ‘dominical’ answers to or comments on these issues into the retelling of stories about Jesus. This should put us firmly on our guard against the idea that the stories we do find in the synoptic tradition were invented to address current needs in the 40s, 50s, 60s or even later in the first century.

it has been shown often enough that the synoptic tradition has preserved material which is not so relevant to, or so obviously taken up by, the first-generation church.

Scholars of an older conservative stamp used to try to explain varieties in the synoptic tradition by saying cautiously that ‘maybe Jesus said it twice’. This always sounded like special pleading. Today, once a politician has made a major speech, he or she does not usually repeat it. But the analogy is thoroughly misleading. If we come to the ministry of Jesus as first-century historians, and forget our twentieth-century assumptions about mass media, the overwhelming probability is that most of what Jesus said, he said not twice but two hundred times, with (of course) a myriad of local variations.15

surprise, then, is not that we have on occasion so many (two, three, or even four) slightly different versions of the same saying. The surprise is that we have so few.

The material available would, then, have been ‘oral history’, that is, the often-repeated tales of what Jesus had said and done. This is to be distinguished from ‘oral tradition’ proper, according to which a great teacher will take pains to have his disciples commit to memory the exact words in which the teaching is given.19 If that had been Jesus’ intention, and the disciples’ practice, one might have supposed that at least the Lord’s Prayer, and the institution narrative of the eucharist, would have come out identical in the various versions (in Paul as well, in the latter case) that we now possess.20 Jesus, it seems, did not act as a rabbi, saying exactly the same thing over and over until his disciples had learned it by rote. He acted more as a prophet, saying similar things in a variety of contexts; not only his disciples, but most likely many of his wider circle of followers, would have talked about them, in their own words, for years to come.

There remains, therefore, a valid and indeed vital task for form-criticism to perform, once it has shed unnecessary assumptions. The critics of form-criticism have not, to my knowledge, offered a serious alternative model of how the early church told its stories.21

indeed, it has sometimes been pointed out that if the redaction-critics were right, that is, if the evangelists really took as much liberty with their material as they seem to have done, the chances of finding pre-literary forms in their ‘pure’ state is fairly limited.22 The revival of interest in form-criticism in recent years has taken place, perhaps not surprisingly, within the revived Bultmann school, offering updated versions of the Hellenistic hypothesis.

Subversive groups and individuals within societies tell variants on these myths as a way of advancing their modification of the worldview or, more radically, their replacement for it. It is quite clear that the stories about Jesus which circulated in the early church functioned in some such ways vis-à-vis the early Christian communities and the Jewish communities from which, initially, they sprang. Therefore, if that is what we mean by ‘myth’, that is indeed what these stories, quite manifestly, are.

There is, in fact, an essential irony to Bultmann’s analysis of the material in the gospels. He was right to see apocalyptic language as essentially ‘mythological’, in that it borrows imagery from ancient near eastern mythology to clothe its hopes and assertions, its warnings and fears, in the robes of ultimacy, seeing the action of the creator and redeemer god at work in ‘ordinary’ events. But he was wrong to imagine that Jesus and his contemporaries took such language literally, as referring to the actual end of the space-time universe, and that it is only we who can see through it and discover its ‘real’ meaning. This is the mirror-image of the mistaken idea that the stories about Jesus, which are prima facie ‘about’ Jesus himself, were really, in the sense described above, ‘foundation myths’ and nothing more. Bultmann and his followers have read metaphorical language as literal and literal language as metaphorical.

Perennial hermeneutical problem: confusing the metaphorical with the literal.

almost all language, and especially that dealing with those things in which human beings are most involved at a deep personal level, is metaphorical, or at least laden with metaphors.

Myths of the basic kind Bultmann envisaged (quasi-folk tales, articulating the worldview of a people) characteristically take a long time to develop, at least in a complex and intricate form. But the first generation of Christianity is simply too short to allow for such a process.

The gospels, then, are ‘myth’ in the sense that they are foundational stories for the early Christian worldview. They contain ‘mythological’ language which we can learn, as historians, to decode in the light of other ‘apocalyptic’ writings of the time. But they have these features because of their underlying, and basically Jewish, worldview. Monotheism of the creational and covenantal variety demands that actual history be the sphere in which Israel’s god makes himself known. But this means that the only language in which Israel can appropriately describe her history is language which, while it does indeed intend to refer to actual events in the space-time universe, simultaneously invests those events with (what we might call) trans-historical significance. Such language is called ‘mythological’, if it is, not because it describes events which did not happen, but because it shows that actual events are not separated from ultimate significance by an ugly ditch, as the whole movement of Deist and Enlightenment thought would suggest, but on the contrary carry their significance within them.

The "mythological" language of the Gospels depicts actual events with ultimate trans-historical significance within the Jewish apocalyptic worldview.

We should perhaps note that the adjective ‘critical’ in the phrase ‘critical realism’ has a different function to the same adjective in the phrase ‘critical reason’. In the latter (as e.g. in Kant) it is active: ‘reason that provides a critique’. In the former it is passive: ‘realism subject to critique’.

‘[Tillich] has added a religious term to the English language: “ultimate concern” has become a common term in secular discourse to designate “the religious dimension” as vaguely as possible’ (148).

I am among the minority who think that the opening and closing of the original are lost, and therefore unavailable for us as evidence of Mark’s intention.

On 1:1 (and possibly 1:2a?) as redactional see such diverse writers as Moule 1982 [1962], 131 n.1; Koester 1989, 370; and 1990, 13, citing also Schmithals, and arguing that the use of the word ‘gospel’ for a written account of Jesus’ life belongs to the second century at the earliest.

Hence the validity, and importance, of Aune’s comment (1991b, 240): the study of Jesus’ aphorisms leads to the conclusion that ‘the interplay between oral and written transmission of the Jesus tradition was an extraordinarily complex phenomenon which will probably never be satisfactorily unraveled’.