Historical Jesus: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It?

"Anthony Le Donne’s Historical Jesus is among the most remarkable of recent efforts to comprehend Jesus historically. Engaging, informative, and provocative, the book is at once a brilliant portrait of the historical Jesus and a valuable contribution to social memory scholarship. Le Donne’s ‘postmodern paradigm,’ which includes an astute analysis of perception and memory, transcends postmodernism itself.… No one can read Le Donne’s book and fail to think in new ways about the historical Jesus."

Some philosophers of history have underscored how closely interwoven are history as a narrative and the meaning attached to that history by those who tell it. History is not just the record of events but is inherently a matter of perspective. Anthony Le Donne here sets out in clear and accessible terms how this critical view of history has begun to exert a dramatic impact on our assessments of Jesus.

As a rule postmodernism means historical skepticism.… Le Donne opens the door to the past again, not by refusing postmodern historiography but by applying its insights. If all reality is interpretive reality — perception, memory, and history — it is possible to make responsible statements on the past and on the historical Jesus. His book is a convincing plea against historical resignation — written with lucidity, esprit, and common sense.

© 2011 Anthony Le Donne

All rights reserved

Published 2011 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 11 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Le Donne, Anthony, 1975-

Historical Jesus: what can we know and how can we know it? /

Anthony Le Donne.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6526-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Jesus Christ — Historicity. I. Title.

BT303.2.L38 2011

232.9′08 — dc22

2010049780

www.eerdmans.com

to the Habibis,

for ten years of decadence

Contents

Foreword

I am happy to commend this volume, whose significance is greater than its slim size might intimate. Le Donne has much to teach us.

Perhaps the chief virtue of Historical Jesus is that its author fully recognizes the complexity of historical reconstruction. For far too long, New Testament scholars have operated with simplistic antitheses, such as event vs. interpretation, memory vs. legend, fact vs. fiction. They have also been overly and vainly confident in their own abilities to strip away the supposed secondary interpretations in the gospels so as to reveal the historical events beneath. But, as Origen shrewdly observed long ago, it has always been exceedingly difficult to show that a recorded event took place, even if it did take place. No less importantly, and as Le Donne patiently explains at length, recent study of human perception puts the lie to our convenient, traditional dichotomies. So too does postmodern historiography, which undoes so many of our old methods and presuppositions. It is time to rethink much.

Le Donne helps us to do this, as he explains that memories of Jesus were memories of perceptions of him, and then elucidates how all perception is — in part because it is always social — inevitably distorted and shot through with interpretation from beginning to end. One important implication is that the gospels cannot be what so many Christians have naively assumed them to be, namely, something like courtroom transcripts. At the same time, it turns out that skepticism which justifies itself by appeal to the undeniable fact that the gospels overflow with interpretation is also naive. Interpretation may always distort, but without interpretation there is no memory and so no past, no possibility of doing history at all. Le Donne effectively makes this point throughout the book, stressing that the more significant a memory is, the more interpreted it will become.

He also unveils for us the nature of history by contemplating what its custodians, that is, critical historians, really do. Although they preserve perceptions from and of the past, they do this by discussing what seems relevant to them, by imposing their own categories upon their materials, and by ignoring what they find of little or no value. So as they focus their eyes on what has gone before, they also, at least implicitly, engage the present — which is, upon reflection, not so far from what the original tradents of the Jesus tradition did. Furthermore, and again like those tradents, historians of Jesus interpret and reinterpret previous interpretations and reinterpretations.

This last point is especially important for the study of Jesus. Contemporary historians recognize that the gospel writers theologize events, that they construe Jesus typologically, and that they interpret the events in his life in terms of this scriptural text or that Jewish theologoumenon. None of this, however, entails that we cannot learn about Jesus of Nazareth from them. Within an ancient Jewish context, memories of Jesus had to be theologized, construed typologically, and interpreted in the light of religious tradition. Otherwise he would have been forgotten. Thus typology is not just a literary device but a strategy of memory. Beyond that, Jesus and those who knew him must also, while he was yet alive, have construed his ministry within a religious narrative framework, which surely ups the odds that many of the interpretive strategies of the post-Easter period go back to the pre-Easter period. Indeed, Le Donne plausibly contends that, by appealing to and mimicking Scripture, Jesus himself often defined the pattern by which … memories would be refracted. The implications of this are considerable.

Likewise significant, although it may prove troubling for some, is the homage Le Donne pays to imagination in historical reconstruction. The central role that our subjectivity plays means that Cartesian certainty is out the window, that objectivity is a mirage, and that our imaginations are inexorably involved in finding Jesus. Our vocation is not to emulate Sergeant Joe Friday, whose watchword was, Just the facts, ma’am — although we certainly cannot do without facts. We should rather aspire to be the best storytellers we can be; that is, our goal is to construct narratives that plausibly account for the various and sometimes conflicting interpretations in our sources. It is precisely when we come to understand and try to account for the competing agendas of the evangelists and their predecessors that we can find our way with assurance to the historical Jesus.

It follows that we do not proceed by peeling away early Christian interpretations of Jesus. Rather, we seek to gain our approximate image of the past by, first, scouring the extant interpretations for large memory patterns and then, second, trying to account for their existence. In other words, we do not construct the historical Jesus by discarding editorial agendas and theological reflections but instead by explaining those agendas and reflections.

All of this may sound a bit abstract, but Le Donne brings his points home by tackling several interesting problems having to do with Jesus. For instance, he considers John 2:1-11, where Jesus rebukes his mother after she asks him for more wine; Mark 3:21, 31-35, where Jesus insults his family, including his mother; and Luke 11:27-28, where Jesus, upon hearing someone say, Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!, responds with this: Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it! (cf. Gospel of Thomas 79). Le Donne finds a memory pattern embedded in these three seemingly independent texts. That pattern may be elaborated differently in each text, but all three presuppose that Jesus was at odds with his family, especially his mother. Le Donne then argues that whereas, on the one hand, this memory pattern would not have come into being without real mnemonic warrant, on the other hand Christians remembered the awkward circumstance precisely because it brought comfort to individuals whose faith commitments had alienated them from their families.

Now all of this makes good sense to me, but Le Donne goes a step further. He asks, Why did Jesus not get along with his immediate family? His answer is: Mary had high hopes for Jesus. She believed that her son was destined for great things. She accordingly projected her aspirations onto him: he was to be her means to social status. Jesus, however, had other things in mind.

All this could be correct. But one can tell another story, too. Mary’s husband and Jesus’ father, Joseph, never shows up during the ministry. Nor does he, unlike his wife in Acts, put in an appearance as a member of the early church. It is a very good guess, then, that he died before his son became a public figure. This matters because, if Jesus was Mary’s first-born, as the gospels assume, his family would surely have expected him to stay at home and take his father’s place, to become the new, surrogate paterfamilias. If he instead chose, because of a religious calling, to hit the road, to become an itinerant preacher, his mother and siblings might well have been displeased. And maybe this was the source of their conflict.

I do not see how to decide such an issue as this with much confidence. One story may be true, the other false. Or both stories may be false. Or perhaps both have some truth in them. Yet this only brings home one of Le Donne’s major points, which is that we have to give up old-fashioned certainty. Historians make decisions that essentially create stories; and often different historians are going to come up with different stories to explain the same memory pattern; and sometimes we are going to be hard put to judge which story among the competitors is the best. From which it follows that humility seems to be in order — but then that is exactly one of the lessons we otherwise learn from Le Donne’s exposition of postmodern historiography.

I have thus far commended the content of this book. But I cannot sign off without saying a word about its style. Historical Jesus is a pleasure to read. The writing is clear, the phrases well-turned. Beyond that, the whole is enlivened by engaging, instructive, and often personal illustrations. Plainly the author has not just labored over what he has to say: he has equally worked hard on how to say it. The result is that this volume, again and again, turns the obscure into the obvious. Would that more in the guild were as self-conscious about communicating and felt the imperative to write so well.

Le Donne has given us a good book. Let us hope it is a good book at the right time, so that it gains appreciative readers, among them historians of early Christianity, who will go and do likewise.

DALE C. ALLISON JR.

In Gratitude

This book is a very narrow slice of what others have invested in me. I offer my deepest thanks

to Sarah, who has the best laugh in the history of laughs,

to the Big Nasty and his lovely wife,

to Chad Carmichael, Kevin Foster, Chris Keith, Tara Le Donne, Ed Peacock, Christopher Simpson, and Tim Stafford; their generous critique shaped this book in helpful ways,

to the academic midwifery of James Dunn and John Barclay; I promise to