Reading
the Gospels
From St.
John's Eagle, December 2000
Writing
history is never just setting down "what really happened." Much of the relevant
data may have been lost forever. The historian must select from what little has
survived---and then determine what details are important and which less so. But
facts do not announce themselves as "important" or "less important." These are
judgments which the historian makes out of a personal scale of values. What a
Marxist historian may consider significant will be quite different from what a
history great-men enthusiast might react to. Any beyond sorting out and arranging
the facts lie all the far more difficult questions of interpretation, motive-hunting,
and the rest. The "really" in what "really happened" is the crucial word; itıs
the historians who decides what for them is really real.
When
we turn to the gospels, the problem is made even more complex by the fact that
the evangelists did not set out to write history in the first place. Each of them
was compiling a faith-testimony for the encouragement of the persecuted Christian
community of which he was a member. In such an enterprise, his criteria for selecting
and organizing his material had little in common with the methodologies taught
in an American graduate school (a fact not necessarily to the disadvantage of
the first-century writer.)
The evangelists' major problem
was all the blank spaces in the record. Apart from the nativity legends and a
few stories relating to his childhood, quite literally nothing is known of Jesus
until the last year or so of his life. For the period of this active ministry,
we have a passion-narrative that took shape quite early, a collection of "sayings" used by the gospel writers but no longer extant, and assorted reminiscences passed
on for decades before being written down. And when they were, it was in a different
language, a different place, by and for people raised in a culture far removed
from that a Jesus's lifetime.
But somehow the blank spaces—some
of them anyway—had to be filled in.
"Has not the scripture
said . . . ?" (John 7:42). Phrases like this occur in all the gospels and suggest
a way of recording past events that is altogether alien to us. The two centuries
before the birth of Jesus were times of mounting expectancy that the arrival of
Messiah was imminent. The scriptures had indeed been searched, and a number of
Old Testament texts had been singled out as predictive of the shape of things
to come. These messianic "Prophecies" were well known, and once the identification
of Jesus with Messiah was made, what could be more natural than to use this material
to flesh out the missing details in Jesus's life? If it had been "prophesied," than it could be assumed to have happened, without the need of any further corroboration.
Matthew 21 provides an amusing example of this method is action: "Go into the
village opposite you, and immediately you will find an ass ties, and a colt with
her; untie them and bring them to me"
Matthew was remembering
Zechariah 9:9, which he paraphrases: "Tell the daughter of Zion Behold,. your
king is coming to you, humbles, and mounted on an ass, and on a colt the foal
of an ass."
But he missed an important point about Hebrew
poetry---its use of parallelism, the repetition of an idea is slightly different
words, In Zechariah, only one animal is referred to (Colt=ass); there is no and.
Why, when we read this passage on Palm Sunday, do we not sense the utter absurdity
of Jesus's entering Jerusalem somehow straddling two animals? Matthew could not
swallow the grotesqueness of this image. For him, Zechariah's prophecy, even misunderstood,
provided the details he needed for his narrative.
Examples
can be extended almost indefinitely. Did the story about Jesus's conception arise
from a reading (misreading) of Isaiah 7:14? Does "a little child shall lead them" (Isaiah 11:6) lie behind the charming vignette of Jesus instructing the elders
in the temple? The crucifixion scenes are full of Old Testament echoes. Matthew
27:43 quotes Psalm 22:8; both Matthew and Mark recall Psalm 69:21; John 19:23--24
is based on Psalm 22:18. The footnotes in most edition of the New Testament will
identify many other instances of this technique.
What then
do we make of this method of reconstructing the past as "Prophecies fulfilled"?
The fundamentalists have a ready answer: the Old Testament writers really did
foresee, centuries before the events in question, their precise details. In some
cases Jesus may himself have consciously drawn upon the earlier images as he worked
his way toward an understanding of himself and of his mission., But in many passages,
we are surely entitled to conclude that the evangelists have filled up the gaps
in the record solely by expanding certain hints found in earlier "prophetic" writings.
For them, this was a perfectly legitimate way of writing,
It is not so for us. We can best understand this aspect of their work as a movingly
imaginative effort to express their sense of Jesusıs significance for them by
drawing upon those earlier texts in which the hope of Israel had been enshrined.
John B. Harcourt
