Yesus Menurut Sejarah
ISNET Homepage | MEDIA Homepage | Program Kerja | Koleksi | Anggota
Internet Infidel Supporter Gerd Lüdemann Defends Book Daniel O'Hara A most intriguing event took place at the University of London Institute of Education on 18 November under the auspices of the SCM Press. The occasion was the recent publication of The Great Deception, the latest book from the prolific German specialist in New Testament and early Christianity, Gerd Lüdemann, who was there to outline and defend his views. The debate was chaired by the television producer and presenter, Roger Bolton, whose two programmes about Lüdemann's views will shortly be screened by Channel 5. The other participants included three British theological veterans; Morna D. Hooker, a former London and Cambridge professor; Dennis Nineham, distinguished Oxford scholar and author of the groundbreaking Penguin commentary on Mark's Gospel; and Geza Vermes, the former Catholic priest and a Dead Sea Scrolls expert who returned to his Jewish roots and wrote three important books on the Jewishness of Jesus. Also on the panel was A.N.Wilson , the biographer, novelist and author of best-selling books on Jesus and Paul. Lüdemann outlined the "criteria of authenticity and inauthenticity" he adopts when analysing the NT data for genuine and later traditions. he set aside: sayings and acts of Jesus which refer to events after the resurrection; incidents where natural laws are broken; and material clearly addressed to a later community or a Gentile audience. Several others agreed these were useful guides, but if used inflexibly became too like a straitjacket. It was important to remember, they stressed, that the data had been processed and recombined over a long period before reaching its present state, so one could not confidently extract single strands and label them 'early' or 'late' in simplistic fashion. Lüdemann argued that Jesus did not see himself as a "saviour," nor did he rise from the dead: these were later claims made on his behalf by his followers. There are thus essential dichotomies between the Church and scholarship, faith and reason, revelation and history. How, them is the teacher of theology to deal wit this dilemma? Bultmann, he said, believed much the same as he does about historicity, but had resolved the dilemma by claiming that Jesus did indeed rise: not physically, but into the Kerygma, the proclamation of the Church. Lüdemann finds this evasive and unsatisfactory. he wants to know what really happened between Good Friday and Easter Day. Did the disciples steal the body--a view associated with the eighteenth-century rationalist, H.S.Reimarus? Not very likely, but much more so than Mark's story of the empty tomb. Matthew, indeed, further claims that the authorities knew Jesus had risen from the dead, and been seen by the soldiers placed as guards over the tomb who were then bribed to deny it. A fantastic story, indeed: but this, says Lüdemann, is "the great deception," and it is one perpetrated by the Church. Lüdemann has what some would call a touching faith that the truth can be recovered by a careful, scientific study of the sources. Several of his critics retorted that 'the truth; is not to be located solely in what Jesus actually did, said and thought--even if that could be recovered--but also in what the Church made of him. This form of "critical orthodoxy" as we might call it, which was well exemplified at the debate by Morna Hooker and to a lesser extent by Nineham, considered that after criticism has done its best (or its worst) there is still a considerable feather-bed of faith for the Christian to sink back into. Nineham, now in his anecdotage, quoted approvingly from the end of a work by his mentor, R.H.Lightfoot, in which, like Schweitzer in the final paragraph of The Quest for the Historical Jesus, he sets aside scholarship to embrace piety. This just will not do for Lüdemann, any more than it would do for D.F. Strauss, or - with due modesty - for me. Vermes stressed that the material had gone through many stages, including linguistic and cultural translation, and that a better criterion for historicity is: would the material have made sense to a first-century Jewish audience? If not, we can consider it inauthentic. He regards Jesus as a charismatic exorcist healer, a preacher, a teacher and eschatological enthusiast, of which several are known in first-century Judea and Galilee. He considers Paul, not Jesus, the inventor of Christianity. A.N. Wilson confessed he now feels much less concerned about questions of historicity than when he wrote his Jesus book. He now believes we should stop looking for the chimerical Jesus of history, and accept that Jesus is above all a cultural icon, "a collective work of art" forged through the centuries of Christian devotion and imagination. Naturally, Lüdemann is not impressed by this approach. He wants to know historical truth. he regards Jesus as an exorcist, citing Luke 11:14-20 and parallels as authentic confirming evidence. he does not go quite as far as Morton Smith, who frankly designates Jesus as a magician and provides massive supporting evidence for this view. But even "exorcist" was too much for Morna Hooker, who prefers to think of Jesus as a "prophet," an epithet blissfully free of any suggestion of trickery or other distasteful connotations. She regards the faith of the evangelists as part of the evidence that NT scholars should take seriously. She refused to write off the possibility that Jesus had truly risen from the dead, claiming that we cannot know that he didn't. At this point I interjected that, by the same coin, we cannot know that Pinnochio did not come to life, or that Elvis is not still alive; but most of us agree that in rejecting both possibilities we have reason on our side. In the light of Morna Hooker's persistent evasions, I suggested that she had sidestepped the question of whether the resurrection was something that happened to Jesus or to the disciples. While me might reasonably accept that some, at least, of the first disciples genuinely believed that they had experiences of the risen Jesus, they may well have been deluded. This seemed to me rather more likely than that they had all engaged in deliberate deception. A further question raised in the debate concerned the disparity between what critical scholars know and what clergy are expected to preach. Most it seems feel that they must maintain a deception, or at least be economical with the truth, when addressing "the faithful" Morna Hooker dissented, saying that preachers could use what scholarship had delivered without fear: but it was pointed out that when the West Sussex clergyman, Anthony Freeman, had done just this a few years ago, he had been sacked for his trouble by the Bishop of Chichester. Others recalled that in earlier times both the Catholic Loisy and Protestant Strauss had been virtually destroyed by the Church for their candour. It was a pity that time ran out before the issue of whether one needs to be a believer to teach theology could be debated. Lüdemann has just been dismissed for his post at Goettingen for his outspokenness, and several American and German publishers have dropped him like a hot potato. It is greatly to the credit of the SCM Press, and its Managing Editor John Bowden, who received a round of well-deserved applause at the end of the evening, that they have stuck with him throughout. Judging from the enthusiastic audience of around 200, there are still many who value pioneering scholarship and fearless debate on the origins of Christianity, and who are rightly alarmed at the recrudescence of a militant fundamentalism. But surely they are a dwindling minority. My hunch is that there will be an increasing polarisation among the few who can still be bother with such things - between blinkered credulity and clear-eyed atheism. And I suspect that Lüdemann still has a further step to take. At least, the sort of critical orthodoxy represented by Morna Hooker, for which nothing of real significance appears to have happened in theology in the last thirty years, no longer seems a valid option. [Reprinted with permission of the New Humanist edited by Jim Herrick]
ISNET Homepage | MEDIA Homepage | Program Kerja | Koleksi | Anggota