Picking and Choosing
Several more popular Evangelical Christian reviewers of my book, The Jesus Dynasty, have suggested that my method of using texts, both biblical and otherwise, is based on what they call “cherry picking.” The idea seems to be that one simply takes what one likes while discarding anything unfavorable to ones outlook or portrait of Jesus. The “picking and choosing” question is one that I get quite often, even from my beginning students.
All of us who work in the field are keenly aware of Albert Schweitzer’s apt observation that work on the historical Jesus often reflects the autobiographical proclivities of the researcher–in other words, people come up with the Jesus they want to find. This makes it all the more imperative that we self-critically clarify our methods and lines of argument. What can appear at first to be a rather arbitrary process, and one that might be directed by ones own presuppositions, actually turns out to be a rather controlled and disciplined scholarly process.
What I attempt to do in The Jesus Dynasty is to take the non-specialist reader into the more technical world of the biblical scholar and “walk one through” some of the methods scholars use as we historically analyze texts. Let me make a few points about this process and then offer an illustration.
First, historians do not privilege any texts, be they in or out of the Bible, as inherently reliable based on a view of divine inspiration. This method immediately separates historical work from theological work, in that theology, at least traditional Christian theology, begins with the assumption that the texts of the Bible are inspired and thus at some level “true” or at least “more true” than other writings of the time. For the historian there is a sense in which all texts are created equal and are therefore examined with the same methods of analysis. That does not mean, however, that some are not considered more accurate historically than others. For example, when it comes to reliable history or teaching of Jesus most scholars would not give as much weight to the Gospel of Thomas as the Gospel of Mark. Often this has to do as much with dating and chronology as to whether a text is “in” the New Testament or not. Thomas, like the newly published Gospel of Judas, dates from the late 2nd or early 3rd century whereas Mark was written around 70 A.D. Older is not always better, but when we have a text as old as Mark, we surely want to give it the priority that it deserves. On the other hand, many of us have become convinced that the Q source, which is now embedded in Luke and Matthew, as I explain in my book, is even older than Mark, and likely preserves for us a layer of the teachings of Jesus that might go back as early as 50 A.D. Chronology is not everything, but at least in the beginning we want to try to arrange our sources as much as possible in a chronological fashion, thus when it comes to Jesus we have: the Q source, Mark, Matthew (and Hebrew Matthew), Luke, John, the letter of James, the Didache, and Thomas. It is true that various scholars differ on how to date and value these materials. For example, John Crossan, in his important work, The Historical Jesus puts both the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter much earlier than I or many others would.
Second, it is important to try and detect the kind of editorial development that goes on in such a trajectory of texts. It is often not strictly chronological, but often it is. On the whole we can see, within the early Christian tradition, a tendency to make Jesus more divine and less human, to downplay the role of John the Baptist, and to mute or mitigate the role of James and the family of Jesus. What we try to do is to take all our sources and compare them side by side and then to draw conclusions, as much as we can, as to what is most likely closer to Jesus and what might be a later development. I offer many examples in my book, but here are a few to illustrate.
Matthew uses Mark as a source and he consistently “edits” him at crucial points. In Mark 10:17-18 a man says to Jesus “Good teacher, what do I do to inherit eternal life?” and Jesus rebukes him replying, “Why do you call me good, there is One who is good, God.” Matthew comes to that story and alters Jesus’ answer to read: “Why do you ask me about the good.” Here you can see that given Matthew’s more divine view of Jesus, he finds the wording of Mark troubling and freely edits it. When it comes to Q there are times when the Hebrew version of Matthew appears to be less edited than the Greek versions in either Matthew or Luke. A prime example is Matthew 11:11 (Luke 7:28) where Jesus declares that “among those born of women there is none greater than John.” This startling statement stands unqualified in the Hebrew version of Matthew preserved by Ibn Shaprut, whereas in Greek, both Luke and Matthew have the qualifying addition: “but nonetheless, the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” I am convinced that the latter is an editorial gloss that was added to soften the shocking implication that John the Baptist is then greater than Jesus. In such a case we often give the more difficult, or the more “primitive” reading more weight than what appears to be a later addition. The issue of Jesus being baptized by John is one of the clearest examples one can find of the unfolding tendency to elevate Jesus above John. Mark offers a straight account of John Baptizing Jesus, Matthew adds the lines in which John objects to doing this since Jesus is greater, Luke reports Jesus’ baptism and implies John did it, but never directly says so, and John drops the entire narrative account entirely. Most of us are convinced that this kind of evidence can not be dismissed as chance and it should not be ignored but carefully analyzed.
This entire process can appear to a casual reader as “picking and choosing” at will, but it is in fact a carefully worked out process. Throughout my book I constantly bring texts into the discussion and I try my best to bring the reader into the method of analysis so it is clear as to why certain texts and traditions are thought to be more historically reliable while others are seen as secondary. It is not a perfect lab science, but there is a method to what might appear to some to be “madness.” I want to invite my readers into the process of critical evaluation and reflection; the same process that I use with my students and that is commonly followed in advanced courses in universities when one deals with the historical Jesus. Once one carefully works through the arguments I present in The Jesus Dynasty I think one might find that what seems at first glance to be “picking and choosing” is actually a rather careful methodological attempt to sort through the sources in a responsible historical manner.