The Gospel of the Second-Person Pronoun

The Gospel of John is obviously different from the Synoptic Gospels, written as if the others were already known to the reader, with long discourses and detailed dialogues. A lot of scholars of the historical Jesus variety are skeptical of John in particular as a result, but I'm reading a book by Richard Bauckham now that turns such thinking on its head. He points out that John is the only gospel that contains direct eyewitness claims by the author. It's also the only gospel with a prominent anonymous disciple, the disciple who Jesus loved, who is pretty clearly the author. One of Bauckham's claims is that the John who wrote this gospel was actually John the Elder, not John son of Zebedee, and I'll review that argument when I finish the book. But the striking thing that deserves its own blog post is Bauckham's point that, if anything, John makes more claims to eyewitness account than the supposedly more historical gospels, and beyond that, at two crucial points, the author steps out and directly addresses the reader, both at the crucifixion and near the end of the book:

³⁴ But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. ³⁵ And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you may believe. (John 19)

³⁰ And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; ³¹ but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name. (John 20)

Compare this anonymous author directly addressing the reader in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, and note how different it feels:

"Now it was the final day of the Unleavened Bread; and many went out returning to their home since the feast was over. [59] But we twelve disciples of the Lord were weeping and sorrowful; and each one, sorrowful because of what had come to pass, departed to his home. [60] But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew, having taken our nets, went off to the sea. And there was with us Levi of Alphaeus whom the Lord ... " [Raymond Brown's translation]

One of the questions is, whichever John wrote this book, why did he keep himself anonymous if speaking as an eyewitness was so important to him?

(And it was important, consider John 1: 14, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." and 1 John 1:1 "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life." From a certain angle, these verses reflect a historian's and scientist's desire for touching and knowing directly. It is integral to the message of the gospel and can’t be explained as a superficial apologetic maneuver.)

The anonymity of the author seems to be the only way to show how he was there without drawing attention away from Jesus. “He must increase, I must decrease,” put into action in the very writing of the gospel. At two crucial points John steps out and (still anonymously) emphasizes his role as witness – not to magnify himself as author, but to put the question to YOU, the reader. John is saying “He is why I'm doing this and you are why I’m doing this” without using the I (like I so clumsily did just now!). Maybe the pale-imitation gnostic gospels can get away with using “I” and “me,” but the author who wants to say “It’s all about Jesus, not me,” does so most effectively by avoiding the first person (except in plural at the beginning and end of John) and, sparingly but effectively, employing the second person to say, this is about you and Jesus. It’s not about me.

And now I will use the first person too much again.

It’s very easy as a blog post to put myself into it. After all, these are personal reflections, and it goes along with the genre to do so. There’s possibly nothing inherently wrong with that. I just want to note that it’s very easy to make it “all about me” and perhaps that is the greatest temptation of the author.

It’s not just the gospel of John. The other gospels are third person, and most of the stories in the Bible are third person. Off the top of my head, I think of prominent first-person usage (outside of quoted dialogue) in poetry (the Psalms, the Song of Solomon), and in the letters (Paul’s and others’, although I’ll have to think about 1-3 John in this light and the beginning of Revelation). First person is OK, but sometimes there’s a point to be made by avoiding it.

It looks like John did just that, and very effectively so. It’s all about Jesus, not John. “If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you? You follow Me.”

Book Review: Fabricating Jesus

Fabricating Jesus by Craig A. Evans is an interesting book that tries to take on too much. Evans is a Biblical scholar who tries to counter the recent scholarship of the "alternate gospels" variety. This is the first time I've seen The Gospel of Thomas, Peter, Mary, and others in one place, side-by-side, and it was good to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge. The book is written well, it's just trying to do too much at once. The arguments against specific scholars or ideas come down to a page or two, usually, and although I think Evans is usually right, there's no way to be sure other than to decide which way your trust goes. I'd say read this book for a good systematic example of how scholarship can be skeptical, just of the novel theories rather than the orthodox ones, but the topic's just too big for this book to convince you if you're doubtful about where Evans is coming from.

(Interesting PS: What do we do WHEN a topic gets to big for one person, or at least one book, to handle? How do we have a fair debate in that case?)

Let me reiterate: I think Evans is right. It's just that I think he's right from what others have written more than what's in this particular book.

Does Bauckham = Behe?

In the midst of reading Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham right now. It's a 2006 book that marshals evidence to argue that the Gospels (including you, John) were written by those who had witnessed the events, not by anonymous communities many years later. I find it interesting (and the only time I've skimmed was when he spent a chapter talking about the psychology of memory -- the irony is, that's the scientific chapter!).

Part of my difficulty in approaching this literature is a lack of current context. I poke around a little when I find a new author, to tell the NT Wrights from the Ben Witherington IIIs from the Lee Strobels (reporters, that is) from the Bible Code aficianados. So when I heard about Richard Bauckham, I assumed he was somewhere in the middle of that list (between Witherington and Strobel). Turns out he's actually more in the league of Wright, perhaps beyond, in terms of scholarly respectability. So I'm excited to read his book -- some of which is fascinating, some of which is based on scanty evidence and I don't quite buy. But he's no hack.

Last night I stumbled across a message board of scholars who had participated in the recent Society for Biblical Literature meeting, and under discussion was a panel in which Richard Bauckham discussed his work with three critics (wish I could get a transcript of that). The thread was instigated by one of the academic critics complaining about the evangelical "cheering section" for Bauckham and being worried about the fact that after the section people came up to him (the critic) and tried to persuade him to believe in miracles. He worried that the SBL is losing its objectivity and critical thinking, which set off a great back-and-forth. I mean, is believing that the resurrection happened automatically excluded from academic research? Are these "cheering sections" partisan and uncritical? (Never mind that Bauckham just deals with the subject of the writing of the Gospels in his book, not at all with the miraculous nature of what is written there!)

To me the question has extra resonance because I admire and am intrigued by the arguments of Bauckham and NT Wright, but I explicitly reject the intelligent design arguments of Michael Behe (in my opinion, the only ID arguments that are even addressable scientifically). When NT Wright talks about the the historicity of the miracle of resurrection, is that like Michael Behe talking about the (possible, although I don't buy it) historicity of the miracle of special creation of protein flagella? How is it that I buy NT Wright's arguments for the miraculous but not Michael Behe's? Am I being inconsistent?

Now, I've only had a bus ride to think about this, so I have more questions than conclusions right now (although I did also think about this topic when reading NT Wright's first volume of Christian Origins and the Question of God, where he talks about epistemology). However, here is my draft argument for why I think God physically raised Jesus from the dead, but also why I think the earth is very old and animals were created through a long, bloody development process of descent with modification:

In a sentence, the type of evidence and the mechanism of development, given the time frame, make all the difference in the world.

Biological evidence: Every animal uses the same amino acids, the same type of DNA molecules, the same DNA code, and has similar genes in similar orders. Every animal. I can't say there aren't acts of special creation out there but I can say it would be very easy to provide evidence for such acts, and we have no evidence. Also, there are old broken-down genes and old broken-down viruses all over our DNA, fitting in precisely with the long development over time. This is an ecosystem-wide conclusion based on the biochemistry, publically accessible in genomic databases across the web.

On the other hand, the evidence we have for Jesus (the Gospels + Josephus + Paul's letters + physical evidence of names on tombstones and archaelogical details) at least claims to be history written by people who saw what happened in many cases, and to argue against that you have to start from some form-critical assumptions that people very early on made very big mistakes, and then you lose that evidence because you assume it's lying. So you end up with less evidence because of your a priori assumption that, for example, 500 people couldn't have seen a physically resurrected Jesus (or been available for inquiry like Paul implies), so Paul or someone else must have developed that story within 20 years after Jesus' death, and added false evidence deliberately!

My point is you have to have a mechanism for the falling away from the truth and yet presenting yourself as the truth. It has to be a very fast mechanism to work over decades and be in place in 40-60 years or so, or 20 years in the case of Paul's strong check-it-out-if-you-doubt-it statements (for timescale comparison, think of The War by Ken Burns. Those vets are telling stories that are 60+ years old now, so Ken Burns is sitting down now and capturing their stories before they die. This seems similar in tone to the end of John's Gospel). For evolution there's time and a molecular mechanism that would work over millions of years, and Behe takes the most extreme case and says you have to prove it to convince him. That's not a good argument: millions of years is a lot of time, and the evidence of broken-down genes gives genetic drift a physical credibility. Not much evidence of broken-down non-canonical gospel stories: all the good ones are 200-400 years later, with the possible exception of the Gospel of Thomas, which regardless of its age is 1 witness against 4. It's nothing like the fact that there's more broken-down viruses than functional genes in your genome.

For the development of the Gospels I don't see how there is time for the drastic changes to the story that the form critics propose (this is part of Bauckham's argument so GOOOOO BAUCKHAM!! -- sorry, my evangelical cheering section just miraculously appeared out of nowehere). I simply don't see a mechanism, and the mechanism proposed by Wright and Bauckham actually makes sense within the timeframe, just with this itty-bitty catch: you have to think that Jesus walked out of the tomb and did some very strange things with a select number of people that he then left to tell everyone about it. The "experiment" is hidden by time, but we do have what claims to be the resulting written evidence. I buy that mechanism just like I buy the mechanism of genetic changes over time. It's the difference between the years in a lifetime and millions of years, and it's based on evidence.

So I don't see a miracle, or at least an abrupt now-you-see-it-now-you-don't miracle, in the development of life on this planet (I do see one in the creation of the universe, as my entry on Day 1 makes clear!). I do see a miracle in the sudden appearance of strong resurrection stories that people told as eyewitness truth and that some of these people died for. I also see a miracle in the exponential spread of an anti-imperial theology at the height of the Roman Empire's powers, without coercion or war, just by the spread of the news itself. Does that make me an a priori credulous investigator? Does it make me a "cheering section" because I hesitantly accept Bauckham's idea that the reason the gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts is because, you know, they are? That the reason Luke talks about the resurrected Jesus eating fish is because he did? (Just a side question: was it Friday or not, and was the Pope notified?)

In any case, I want to be consistent with my beliefs. I follow a God who took a step into history, necessarily kicking up dust at the time and leaving footprints. I believe his primary mode of evidence is the life of Jesus, and I want to be able to critically evaluate the possible mechanisms of who saw what, how they reacted, and what it means. Even though I have never seen a resurrection, I believe that one happened because of what history tells me (and also because of the present work of the spirit in the church and the lives around me, and I understand that such evidence is not technically peer-reviewable).

So I'm not going to go to Richard Bauckham's next talk and Do the Wave with the other evangelicals, but I will continue look at historical evidence with my best attempt at an open mind, and then commit to a conclusion as a result. It just leads me to different conclusions for the second part of Genesis 1 than it does for the first part of Genesis 1, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20. Isn't that what different evidence in different cases is supposed to do?

Judas vs. Luke

A very well-done review of the latest book on the Gospel of Judas by Elaine Pagels and Karen King: Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. I find these scholars' work interesting but unbalanced in general, preferring to focus on the Gnostic heresies against the Christian orthdoxy. (The reviewer cites NT Wright's book on Judas as the "conservative" response.) I like the quote with which the reviewer ends the article:

The Gospel of Judas will have its champions, not least Pagels and King, who laud its hero for inspiring a text that makes early Christianity look like contemporary American religion — more pluralistic, more wild and more contested than most imagine. But this gospel is not long for the world, or at least the American corner of it. Most Americans will rightly prefer Luke’s Jesus, whose heart breaks over the oppression of women and the poor, to a smart-aleck Jesus who guffaws at the stupidity of his listeners. America is supposed to be a happy place. Americans want their Jesus to channel Paula Abdul rather than Simon Cowell, Dorothy rather than the Wicked Witch of the West.

Judas, NT Wright, Paula Abdul, and Judy Garland all mentioned in the same short review. I don't think that's ever occurred in the history of the universe.

So it's patriotic to prefer Luke to Judas, or orthodoxy to gnosticism. Hey, that sounds happy. I'll take it.

I'm curious as to where the reviewer thinks the Gospel of Judas would actually "sell" well: the country where everyone likes to be sad all the time?

And of course I am not one to speak, as a person headed for the "Happiest Place on Earth" within the next week or two!

Tomb of Star Trek

One last Talpiot-Tomb related link before this whole thing rightfully subsides into academic oblivion:

http://targuman.org/blog/?p=589

Science and the Tomb of Jesus

Apology from the start: I don't mean to sound like a typical Christian talking head in covering this issue, but there's so many things wrong with this Tomb of Jesus story that I have to lay out what I've seen. I do talk about this from the perspective of a Christian scientist ... well, no, not a Christian Scientist, but you know ... I'll just write what I think and move on!

Well, the days are getting longer, the weather's shifting from snow and cold rain to just cold rain, we've entered the Lenten season and there's a new unfounded Gnostic speculation on the rise. Welcome to March, everybody.

It seems there's nothing more reliable than the annual news cycles. Last year it was Luigi Cascioli and his theory that Jesus was really based on John of Gamela, a revolutionary from the Jewish War period of the late first century. What made him different is he sued an old priest friend of his in Italian courts to make his point and was summarily dismissed. And our cup flowed over last year -- because that's when the National Geographic Channel unveiled the previously unknown Gospel of Judas. That was cool if you're into second-century angelology and the Gnostic tendency to invert Biblical characters, like that guy who wrote "Wicked." But if you're interested in something to actually help your needy spirit ... keep looking. Judas isn't much good.

This year it's another recycled news story based more on a bestseller published in 2003 than on the ancient texts themselves. I don't have too much time to read the first-century history that I want to, but even I could tell at first blush that this was more "Al Capone's vault" than a genuine paradigm shift. The "Last Tomb of Jesus" in question was unearthed in 1980, publicized by the BBC (during Easter!) in 1996, and I first found about it through NT Wright, who used it as an illustration to open an article on the resurrection titled "Grave Matters," which I passed out to my Sunday School class at the time. The theologians I've been able to introduce this story to so far said, "That tomb again? I thought we were past that." But, since gnostic tendencies have been around for 1900 years, and we aren't past those yet, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

If you haven't heard much about this story, do a Google search on "tomb of jesus review." The piece of information relevant to my previous post is that moviemaker James Cameron signed on as executive producer for the Discovery Channel documentary, to show tonight (and, ironically, James Cameron is a common enough name to have several James Camerons in the world). However, all the information has been out since 1980, and even the infamous "600:1" "conservative" statistical analysis details were (finally) published today, so there are no more stones to be overturned, rolled away, or DNA-analyzed. And yet, nobody is convinced.

What I have, in proper time-honored blog form, is analysis and reaction to the situation as a whole. As for critique of the science and statistics here, I personally like Mark Goodacre's NT Gateway blog for a fair but still properly critical response: http://www.ntgateway.com/weblog/

So I see the problems with this as being problems with the science. (The problems with the gnostic religion that science is being used to promote are inherent to that religion and can't be helped, so I won't harp on those, though, by the way, I think gnosticism is a bad parody of what Jesus was all about, so don't expect much sympathy from me on that account either.)

1.) Peer review
Keeping "the greatest archaeological finding" under wraps and revealing it through a press conference one week before the airing of a television special is not scientific. I have a paper out for review right now and I'm looking forward to hearing from the three anonymous expert critical reviewers on how I can make it better. If I just thought my findings were so huge I could just skip that stage I would not be a scientist anymore. The code word for that kind of process is "cold fusion" (Google "Pons and Fleischmann" for more info on that debacle).

There are a few reputable or semi-reputable scholars involved. Unfortunately, most of them, like the DNA analyst or the guy who read the names off the ossuaries, just did their bit well and repudiated the way their findings were used in the overall scheme. Two scholars who in my opinion should know better actually support this work: James Tabor, whose "Dynasty of Jesus" research walks the thin line between scholarship and sensationalism (but whose blog is very evenhanded and worth reading), and James H. Charlesworth, who seems supportive on the Discovery Channel site but hasn't put his side of the story forth yet. Pretty much everyone else talking about the evidence doesn't buy it.

There's a sense in which the "Christian talking heads" are out in force against this but are being ignored. Don't be too upset by that -- some of those talking heads have politicized themselves so much they've lost credibility on these matters with the general public. So be it -- the rank and file New Testament scholars will provide more than enough rebuttal for this all by themselves. The louder the "official church" complains the more the rebuttals seem like a DaVinci-Code-style cover-up, so I think the standard talking heads should lay low, renounce their rights in this case, and let the scholars fight it out. Science is on your side here.

Another comment on peer review: The conventional wisdom on the original 1980 findings, that the names are so common it's ridiculous to suggest the cluster of names is meaningful -- have already been peer reviewed in a sense. NT scholars who study these centuries and know the names backwards and forwards knew about this for 25 years and nobody outside of the press gave it a second thought. In every scholar's head there were subconcious statistics going on right there, in a big community, for everyone to see, and it just got a shrug. Now that enthusiasm (the docu-director) and money (Cameron) have found it, they don't have that database of first-century common names in their heads and they set about cherry picking their data. This is a recipe for cold fusion, or the Gospel of Judas, all over again.

2.) Do your science right in the first place.

I can evaluate the evidence myself, so I can act as a peer reviewer. My own view agrees with the community-at-large's. A letter from that era is written by a "Jesus," to a second "Jesus," as witnessed by a third "Jesus." Josephus talked about several "Jesus"es, including one who tried to act as a Messiah before the fall of the Temple! There is even a second Jesus son of Joseph box (why isn't anyone chasing that down yet? Wait till next Easter to find out!).

Also, the other names are common. So, out of 10 cards, you drew two Marys (25% chance of any card being a Mary), one Josh son of Joe, one Judas son of Josh, a Joe, and a Matt. To truly calculate the probability of this we have to include all Biblically connected names, including Elizabeth, John the Baptist, John the Apostle, Peter, etc. in the first circle and Peter, Mark, Cleopas, etc. in the "connected to the family" circle that Matthew and Magdalen (not blood relations) would fall into. The statistics were done on cherry-picked names that treated negative evidence as neutral.

The "Odds are 600 to 1 that this is Jesus' family tomb" is reminiscent of Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict odds, although I'd argue that at least McDowell had the temerity to make his odds of prophecies coming true utterly astronomical. Again, we've had scholarly brains running unconscious odds on these names for 25 years now and nobody has cared, until the money came along.

What's scary is the number of blogs that misapply these statistics in calculating the odds of a connection. One blog takes the frequency for Joseph and multiplies it by the frequency for Mary and concludes that a Joseph-Mary combination is less frequent, so the filmmakers may have a point. These are amateur statistics that are not thought through, and do not include all the possibilities, only the specific set that occured, when other arrangements would have also been thought "significant." What if we found a Luke and a Simon? If they were buried next to each other would that prove a relationship?

Also, note the name "Miriamne": a rare, diminutive form of Mary. This "smoking gun" is connected to Mary Magdalen through a fourth-century text "Acts of Phillip" and a third-century comment. Before that we have several references to a "Miriamme" instead, which also appears to be derivative from the "Miriam" of the gospel accounts or their sources. If this is the real ossuary I'd expect the second-century form, not the fourth-century form. It just makes more sense that the m-to-n change is a spelling mistake accumulated hundreds of years later than that the "truth was concealed" for hundreds of years ... with "m" instead of "n"!

3.) Science must include all the data

The Gospel accounts are data. The second-century writings are data. The location of the tombs in Jerusalem, not Nazareth, is data. The fact that a body most decompose for six months before being placed into the ossuary is data. None of these add up with the filmmaker's story, but they, like the collaborator's objections, are written off as conspiracy.

If you include Acts of Phillip, a fourth-century source, you must somehow include most of the others or you invoke a massive conspiracy theory where the truth was lost but the lies are all that remains. Conspiracy theories can be fun, but even in the X-Files they had to be plausible. The Da Vinci Code, quoted favorably by the filmmakers, implies that the Dead Sea Scrolls were about Jesus -- I just went to a museum exhibit at the Pacific Science Center that showed me the actual scrolls, and they're solidly Jewish. More Jewish than the Temple, the Essenes would say. Just because people bought the book doesn't mean it happened. But it does mean those people will probably watch your show and buy the stuff on the commercials.

Worst of all is the director's attempt at reconciliation, stating that if Jesus died and rose again once, maybe he did so a second time. He has a theory that the Exodus happened, with the Red Sea parting, and all, but the commonly accepted date is ~100 years off. He's trying the same thing here but there's a big difference: there are huge problems with understanding how the gospel and Pauline theology could have happened without a specific bodily resurrection. It's just too integral to each and every argument. Why would James not become a de facto leader, the new messiah, as would usually happen to the brother of a martyr? Why would Jesus be always referred to as Lord in Paul and inserted into the daily Jewish prayer (the Shema) a la Daniel 7 without resurrection? This is NT Wright's case, but I find it so compelling because it makes the development of the New Testatment make sense, all springing from this weird Easter-Morning-and-40-days-following experince, detailed twenty years later in 1 Cornithians 15. Trying to kick that out, to make the resurrection a spritual experience, and ascribe everything after the crucifixion (including the explosive growth of the church) to fantasy requires faith in several apostles' creativity and consistency across generations within a matter of decades that I just don't have. To posit that the "real church" was the gnostic heresy and that "The Truth" really shows up as an inverted, accommodationist faith 2-4 centuries later does not make sense to me.

Speaking as a scientist, it takes more than two Marys, a Josh, and a Joe to change my mind.

What this is really about is not science vs. faith, but a gospel of accommodation and gnosticism vs. one of resurrection. If Jesus had a son and decomposed, then he himself said some great stuff and was a heroic martyr (although for what purpose?) but he ultimately was only that -- a teacher who got mixed reviews and mixed results. What he was really about, then, was information, education. It's neutered theology relative to the alternative, that he really did get out of that tomb, eat fish and honeycomb, etc. and that the Creator and Father of all really did pass his judgment for Jesus, giving him the verdict of Not Guilty, and by the way, Lord of Creation. That's the question: did the creator restore that man or not? That's also why this discussion goes to the very heart of the faith, and why Jacobovici's dismissal is wrong.

The stakes are high, the matters are profound, and this debate is actually kind of fun, which is I spend so much time on it. The problem is the people who don't have the interest in Josephus and first century history. There are people out there who will just read the headline, or the superficial evidence uncritically. I heard a story today of children repeating this headline, from exactly that perspective. Recycling a story just because there's money behind it is a form a bribery all too common to the press; I know, I have a B.S. in P.R. Little ones are being offended here, and it reminds me of statements from some great teacher once about millstones and the sea. If that doesn't sound like the Titanic itself, I don't know what does.

An Exclusive Interview with James Cameron

I'm withholding my full comments on this James-Cameron-produced "Last Tomb of Jesus" story until after the "documentary" comes out, but in the meantime, this is the best response I've seen so far:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/februaryweb-only/109-42.0.html