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’d intended to review Brant Pitre’s The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ
(Image, 2016) here at Rational Rant,
but I’ve run out of time, and I’m not really that interested as things turn
out. I had thought from the title that Dr. Pitre would be dealing with the
inanities of the mythicists—those nuts who think that a reasonable case can be
made for Jesus as a purely fictional character—but it turns out not so much. He
is asking, rather, “Did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be God?”
Dr. Pitre’s answer is yes. To make his case he recycles the
arguments of Paley and McIlvaine yet another time—the gospels are reliable
because they were written either by eyewitnesses (Matthew, John) or by people
who had followed the apostles (Mark, Luke), and so it’s all just a matter of
reading what they say and applying it, and so on and so forth ad nauseam. And
yes, Dr. Pitre does hold an actual doctorate from a real university, which
makes it all the more puzzling that he writes like a clever undergrad who has
just discovered J. A. T. Robinson’s Redating
the New Testament and thinks the Bishop of Woolworth’s has a point. Yes,
the book is that bad, or that good, depending I suppose on how you look at it.
Looking at this particular glass as being half full, Dr. Pitre
conducts his flimflam with flair, and the casual reader may not notice the
bait-and-switch tactics he employs against his straw men. On the half-empty
side, none of this is particularly new, and Dr. Pitre has the annoying habit of
simply asserting things when he ought to be laying out evidence for them—for
example that the titles of the gospels necessarily imply authorship claims, or
that legendary material about Jesus was taught formally, rather than
transmitted informally.
One of the historical puzzles about the gospels—bear with me
here, this is a digression but a necessary one—is the failure of first and
second century writers to mention them by name even when apparently quoting
from them. Justin Martyr (middle of the second century) refers to them vaguely
as the memoirs of the apostles, but it is not until the end of the second
century that Irenaeus refers to them by their present names—and his description
makes it clear that he is referring to our extant gospels. This fairly
significant gap caused a number of nineteenth-century writers to infer that the
gospels themselves did not exist until late in the second century—but
manuscript discoveries, examination of the text of the gospels, and close
analysis of second century writers seem to rule that out.
Assuming these conclusions are warranted, how then do we
account for the discrepancy? One explanation is that when the gospels
circulated individually they were without distinctive titles, perhaps being
called something simple like “The Gospel” or “The Gospel of Jesus Christ” (as
in the beginning of Mark). Only when
the four were included together in the fourfold gospel canon was it necessary
to provide them with clearly distinctive names, and so it is that the first
author to clearly attest the fourfold gospel is also the first to clearly refer
to them by name.
Now Brant Pitre, for whatever reason, wishes to argue that the
gospels never circulated sans title. He seems to imagine that this would be a
point in favor of their reliability—although nothing is easier than to add a
phony claim of authenticity to a forgery, if that’s what he’s trying to
forestall. (Consider, for example, that William Henry Ireland’s Vortigern came complete with a short
preface signed by William Shakespeare.) Naturally, you’d expect him to give
some alternate explanation for the echoing silence from the first and second
centuries.
As my father used to say, you may expect anything, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. And
in this case we sure as hell don’t. Instead we’re treated to a little song and
dance about how copies of the gospels—the gospels included in the fourfold canon
to boot!—all have titles. To bulk up his list he makes a point of including Sinaiticus
and Vaticanus four times each, once
for each appearance of one of the four. The total irrelevance of this
“evidence” doesn’t seem to faze him in the least.
And the pattern continues throughout. Dr. Pitre expends a good
many pages on the “traditional” view of the authorship of the four gospels—how
Matthew the tax-collector wrote the first of them in Hebrew, and it was
translated into Greek later on; how Mark used to follow Peter around writing
down whatever he said about Jesus, not necessarily getting it in the right
order but trying to neither omit anything or add anything to the account; how
Luke was Paul’s travelling-companion and wrote his gospel while Paul was still
alive; how John dictated his gospel to somebody or other late in his life.
This is a lot of fun, needless to say, but it is also the
rankest kind of hearsay. People like Tertullian, Irenaeus, Clement of
Alexandria, writing a century or more after the gospels are supposed to have
been written, are our informants, and none of them tell us how they know. This
isn’t just a lame “were you there?” sort of thing; it’s important in evaluating
traditions to have some idea of where they came from, and how the original
informant came by them.
For two of these attributions we have a relatively early
source, sort of. A man named Papias, whose hobby was collecting traditions from
people who had known people who had known Jesus and assembling them into a
book, recorded (probably at some time during the first half of the second
century) that an unnamed elder had told him that he had heard that Matthew had
written his account in Hebrew characters, and that Mark had been Peter’s
interpreter and written down what he said. This is not especially solid, given
that Papias didn’t tell us anything useful about this elder, and this elder
gives no authority or source for his claims except a vague tradition, but for
antiquity it’s not all that bad. I mean, it’s horrible, but plenty of times we
have to hang our historical hats on flimsier hooks than this.
But there are two ways when it comes to evidence concerning
authorship: there is the way of relying on the mere word of ancient writers,
and there is the way of examining the evidence for ourselves. Ideally these
should point us in the same direction—if ancient writers say that The Birds was written by the comic
playwright Aristophanes, if collections include the play among his works, then
we should find the language, appearance, and historical situation of the piece consistent
with his authorship. If instead of a play in ancient Greek we found we were examining
a laundry list in Sanskrit, we would have reason to be skeptical—either that
the ancient writers didn’t know what they were talking about, or that what we
have isn’t what they were looking at.
And that’s the problem with the four canonical gospels. They don’t
read like eyewitness accounts, but rather like anonymous compendia of
semi-random fragments. This was noted even in antiquity by Faustus of Mileve:
But, besides this, we shall find that it is not Matthew that has
imposed upon us, but some one else under his name, as is evident from the
indirect style of the narrative. Thus we read: "As Jesus passed by, He saw
a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom, and called him; and he
immediately rose up, and followed Him." No one writing of himself would
say, “He saw a man, and called him; and he followed Him;” but, “He saw me, and
called me, and I followed Him.” Evidently this was written not by Matthew
himself, but by some one else under his name. [Augustine, Contra Faustum, XVII
1]
And in fact not only does Matthew
not appear to have been written by an eyewitness, it shows no sign of having
been written in Hebrew (or even Aramaic). Mark
could have had a Petrine source, maybe, but close analysis doesn’t suggest any
substantial contribution if so. And John
looks like a dialog created by slicing up some treatise by inserting questions,
rather in the manner that The Sophia of
Jesus Christ was created by slicing up the treatise of Eugnostos the Blessed.
So how does Dr. Pitre deal with this issue? He dismisses the
evidence we can actually see for ourselves—at least if we have the patience to
actually examine the documents in question—as speculative while elevating the
late and remote testimony of the likes of Irenaeus to a primary position.
Very well, then, if we are supposed to accept this out-and-out
hearsay from anonymous sources as definitive, what is Dr. Pitre’s explanation
for the clear contradiction between the evidence of the documents and the ancient
claims? That turns out to be simple: he makes no effort whatsoever. On page 97
he declares that the problem of the interrelationship of the gospels is insoluble,
and moves on.
This is the point where I (metaphorically) hurled the book
across the room before stamping on it and tossing it into the chipper. I mean,
if you have no solution, however tentative, to the synoptic problem then you
have no business writing jack about the historical Jesus. No business at all.
That solution is the key to writing anything of consequence—no, anything at
all—about Jesus and his place in history.
Everything of importance that we can say about the life and
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth comes from the synoptic gospels. For us to
evaluate the material appropriately we must have some notion of just what the
hell we’re looking at. Are they eye-witness accounts, or careful historical
narratives based on such accounts, or reminiscences made long after the events,
or grab-bags of traditional information, or myth disguised as history, or what?
Dr. Pitre likes to ramble on about how such things as Markan
priority or the Q hypothesis are not facts, but one thing that is a fact, no
matter how you dance around it, is the close literary relationship between Matthew and Mark. Either Mark is a
kind of peculiar reduction of Matthew,
as Augustine suggested, or Matthew is
an expansion of Mark as practically
everybody who has ever tried to come to grips with the problem has concluded.
In the first case the traditional claim about Mark following Peter around and
writing down what he said goes up in flame like gasoline-soaked newspaper on a
hot summer day. In the second case that whole little set-piece about Matthew
(an eyewitness) writing down what he remembered in Hebrew gets blown away like
a cobweb in a hurricane. And, of course, technically both gospels could be
dependent on a hypothetical third document, in which case both of them are dead
on arrival.
With a coherent explanation of the relationship among the gospels
(such as the classic two-source hypothesis) we can at least make informed
decisions about the material. In some cases we can even go behind the extant material, as is the case with Q[1], the
hypothetical second source (the first is Mark)
behind the sayings common to Matthew
and Luke. Without such an
explanation, all we can do is throw up our hands in despair, and either retreat
into a naïve Mythicism or an abject credulity, the second being apparently Dr.
Pitre’s choice.
I tried hard to come up with nice things to say about The Case for Jesus. I really like the
writing style and the breezy way he negotiates a difficult topic. And it’s
downright nostalgic revisiting these musty arguments, like taking a boat-ride
through a Disney version of nineteenth-century apologetics. It’s a useful
reminder that there is a conservative case for Jesus to be made, and it would
be nice to see a forceful statement of that case. Unfortunately, this book aint
it.
[1] Brant Pitre and I seem to have had opposite experiences
in the search for Q. He started out as a die-hard believer; I started out as a
die-hard skeptic. He was converted on reading Mark Goodacre’s book; I was
slowly convinced of its (partial) reality by years of grappling with the texts
themselves—though taking Dr. James Robinson’s class in Q back in the early
eighties shook me up considerably. In my experience any hypothesis postulating Luke’s dependence on Matthew is a non-starter, anyway.
