If you have seen any of a number of ABC or PBS documentaries
on the historical Jesus question, you have certainly seen N.T. Wright. He is
one of the “usual suspects” rounded up by Peter Jennings and his producers,
along with John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredriks, Ben Witherington, and others, all of whose views are
comfortingly homogenized by the pleasant host (along with the pronouncements of
Pentecostal choir directors and Middle Eastern tour guides) to reinforce the
comfy prejudices of the audience. Wright always adopts the stance as of a
career historian in the field of ancient history, as if approaching the gospel
texts as an admiring outsider. In fact, he is a bishop of the Church of England
celebrated there for his reactionary theological opinions. He has expressed
these opinions in a number of books which seek to rehabilitate pre-critical
views of the Bible by a sophistical appeal to recent scholarly research.
Wright’s massive book on the
resurrection is, even for the garrulous bishop, an exercise in prolixity. It is
several times longer than it needs to be, as if designed to bludgeon us into
belief. One might save a lot of time and money by finding a copy of George
Eldon Ladd’s I Believe in the
Resurrection of Jesus (Eerdmans, 1975), which used most of the same
arguments at a fraction of the length, and without skimping. The arguments have
not gotten any better. They are the same old stale fundamentalist apologetics
we got in Ladd, essentially the same old stuff we used to read in Josh McDowell
and John Warwick Montgomery. The same hash reslung. Only now it is getting
pretty smelly. Perhaps that is why Wright seeks to perfume it, reminiscent of
Joseph and Nicodemus attempting to fumigate the decaying corpse of Jesus by
encasing it in an extravagant hundred pounds weight of spices (John 19:39). Wright
backs up much too far to make a running start at the resurrection, regaling us
with unoriginal, superfluous, and tedious exposition of Old Testament and
Intertestamental Jewish ideas of afterlife and resurrection, resurrection
belief in every known Christian writer up into the early third century, etc.,
etc. The mountain thus laboring is doomed to bring forth a messianic mouse,
alas. All this erudition is perhaps intended to intimidate the reader into
accepting Wright’s evangelistic pitch. But it is just a lot of fast talking. In
the end, Wright, now Bishop of Durham, is just Josh McDowell in a better suit.
His smirking smugness is everywhere evident, especially in his condescension
toward the great critics and critical methods of the last two centuries, all of
which he strives to counteract. He would lead the hapless seminary student
(whom one fears will be assigned this doorstop) backwards into the pre-critical
era with empty pretenses of post-modern sophistication, shrugging off the
Enlightenment by patently insincere attempts to wrap himself in the flag of
post-colonialism. Genuine criticism of the gospels he dismisses as the less
advanced, muddled thinking of a previous generation, as if “cutting edge”
scholarship like his were not actually pathetic nostalgia for the sparkling
Toyland of fundamentalist supernaturalism. It is a familiar bag of tricks, and
that is all it is. The tragedy is that many today are falling for it. Witness
Wright’s own prominence in the Society of Biblical Literature, to say nothing
of his ecclesiastical clout.
The weight
of this book’s argument for orthodox traditionalism is to be found, of all
places, in the acknowledgements section, where Wright thanks the hosts of the
prestigious venues where he first presented bits of this material:
Yale
Divinity School,
South-Western Theological Seminary, Duke
Divinity School,
Pontifical Gregorian
University, St. Michael’s Seminary,
etc., etc. Wright is the mouthpiece for institutional orthodoxy, a grinning
spin-doctor for the Grand Inquisitor. What credibility his book appears to have
is due to the imposing wealth, power, tradition, even architecture, of the
social-ecclesiastical world which he serves as chaplain and apologist. It is
sickening to read his phony affirmations of the allegedly political and radical
import of a literal resurrection (if you can even tell what Wright means by
this last). Does Bishop Wright espouse some form of Liberation Theology? No,
for, just as he emptily says Jesus redefined messiahship, Wright redefines
politics. When he says the early Christians were anti-imperialistic, all he has
in mind is the fact that Christians withstood Roman persecution, valiant enough
in its way, but hardly the same thing. Like a pathetic Civil War reenactment
geek, he is sparring at an enemy safely dead for centuries. In attempting to co-opt
and parody the rhetoric of his ideological foes, Wright reminds me of Francis
Schaeffer, a hidebound fundamentalist who began as a children’s evangelist
working for Carl MacIntyre. Schaeffer, posing as an intellectual and a
philosopher, used to stamp the floor speaking at fundamentalist colleges,
shouting “We are the true
Bolsheviks!” Right.
Part of
Wright’s agenda of harmonizing and de-fusing the evidence is to smother
individual New Testament texts beneath a mass of theological synthesis derived
from the Old Testament and from the outlines of Pauline theology in general. He
is a victim of what James Barr long ago called the “Kittel mentality,”
referring to the approach of Kittel’s Theological
Dictionary of the New Testament, in which articles on individual New Testament
terms and words synthesized from all uses of the term an artificial and
systematic semantic structure, leading the reader to suppose that every
individual usage of the word was an iceberg tip carrying with it implied
reference to all other references. In other words, each article in the TDNT
composed a “New Testament theology,” topic by topic. In just this manner,
Wright first composes a streamlined Old Testament theology of historical and
eschatological redemption (akin to that of Von Rad, without the latter’s
understanding that much of it was based on fictive saga rather than history);
then Wright synthesizes a Pauline Theology, then a New Testament theology, then
an early Christian theology; and finally he insists that the synthetic
resurrection concept he has distilled must control our reading of all
individual gospel and Pauline texts dealing with the resurrection. In short, it
is an elaborate exercise in harmonizing disparate data. The implications of 1
Corinthians 15, for example, with its talk of spiritual resurrection, are
silenced as the text is muzzled, forbidden to say anything outside the party
line Wright has constructed as “the
biblical” teaching on the subject. Another example is his insistence on
translating the Greek “Christos”
as “the Messiah” in Pauline passages, lending them a falsely Jewish coloring
belied by their content. Wright even admits that the Pauline writings are
already pretty much using “Christ” as simply another name for Jesus, yet he
wants to tie Paul’s theology in with the grand arc of Old Testament theology,
“redemptive history,” or whatever. Similarly, he sees everything in the context
of second-temple Judaism. Again, we detect here a phony ecumenism, as if he
thought Jews were not all going to hell for rejecting Jesus as the Son of God.
The same is true with his cosmetic use of politically correct inclusive
language and ecumenical mistranslations of “Jews” as “Judeans,” etc. It is all
to butter up the reader, like a used-gospel salesman closing in for the sale. Wright
is a better-educated Anglican Zig Zigler. In reality, the only value he sees in
Judaism is the safe haven it gives him from taking into account the patent
influence on early Christianity of Hellenistic Mystery religions, which are
really all we need to account for the empty tomb legend and the resurrection
myth. For Wright “Judaism” really denotes Old Testament and rabbinic
interpretation of it. Here we spot the reason for, and the character of, the
unholy alliance between mainstream Judaism and Evangelical Protestantism in the
pages of the Journal of Biblical
Literature and Bible Review. They
are closing ranks against radical critics in both traditions: Old Testament
minimalists and Jesus Seminar-type scholars alike. It is rather like the Moral
Majority, uneasy allies with certain goals in common.
There are
three fundamental, vitiating errors running like fault lines through the
unstable continent of this book. The first is a complete unwillingness to
engage a number of specific questions or bodies of evidence that threaten to
shatter Wright’s over-optimistically orthodox assessment of the evidence. The
most striking of these blustering evasions has to do with the dying-and-rising
redeemer cults that permeated the environment of early Christianity and had for
many, many centuries. Ezekiel 8:14 bemoans
the ancient Jerusalemite women’s lamentation for Tammuz, derived from the
Dumuzi cult of ancient Mesopotamia. Ugaritic texts make
it plain that Baal’s death and resurrection and subsequent enthronement at the
side of his Father El went back centuries before Christianity and were
widespread in Israel.
Pyramid texts tell us that Osiris’ devotees expected to share in his
resurrection. Marduk, too, rose from the dead. And then there is the Phrygian
Attis, the Syrian Adonis. The harmonistic efforts of Bruce Metzger, Edwin
Yamauchi, Ron Sider, Jonathan Z. Smith and others have been completely futile,
utterly failing either to deconstruct the dying-and–rising god mytheme (as
Smith vainly tries to do) or to claim that the Mysteries borrowed their
resurrected savior myths and rituals from Christianity. If that were so, why on
earth did early apologists admit that the pagan versions were earlier, invented
as counterfeits before the fact by
Satan? Such myths and rites were well known to Jews and Galileans, not to
mention Ephesians, Corinthians, etc., for many centuries. But all this Wright
merely brushes off, as if it has long been discredited. He merely refers us to
other books. It is all part of his bluff: “Oh, no one takes that seriously anymore! Really, it’s so passé!”
Wright
comes near to resting the whole weight of his case on the mistaken contention
that the notion of a single individual rising from the dead in advance of the
general resurrection at the end of the age was unheard of, and that therefore
it must have arisen as the result of the stubborn fact of it having occurred
one day, Easter Day. This is basically absurd for reasons we will attend to in
a moment, but the premise is false. Even leaving out the resurrections of the
savior gods, Wright even mentions that the resurrection of Alcestis by Hercules
is an exception to the rule, but he seems to think it unimportant. Worse,
though, is his utter failure to take seriously the astonishing comment of Herod
in Mark 6:14-16 to the effect that Jesus was thought to be John the Baptist already raised from the dead! Can Wright
really be oblivious of how this one text torpedoes the hull of his argument?
His evasions are so pathetic as to suggest he is being disingenuous, hoping the
reader will not notice. The disciples of Jesus, who was slain by a tyrant, may
simply have borrowed the resurrection faith of the Baptist’s disciples who
posited such a vindication for their own master who had met the same fate.
Wright should really be arguing for the resurrection of John the Baptist, if it
being unprecedented means anything!
Equally
outrageous is Wright’s contrived and harmonistic treatment of the statements
about a spiritual resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, where we read that “flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (v. 50) and that the resurrected
Jesus, the precedent for believers, accordingly possessed a “spiritual body”
(v. 44). Wright labors mightily and futilely to persuade us that all Paul meant
by “flesh and blood” was “mortal and corruptible,” not “made of flesh and
blood.” Who but a fellow apologist (like William Lane Craig who sells the same
merchandise) will agree to this? What does Wright suppose led the writer to use
a phrase like “flesh and blood” for mortal corruptibility in the first place if
it is not physical fleshiness that issues inevitably in mortal corruption? How
can the Corinthians writer have used such a phrase if he meanwhile believed the
risen Jesus still had flesh and blood?
It is no use to protest that none of the “second temple Jewish” writers
we know of had such a notion of resurrection. This supposed fact (and Ladd knew
better: he cited apocalypses that have the dead rise in angelic form, or in the
flesh which is then transformed into angelic stuff) cannot prevent us from
noticing that 1 Corinthians 15:45
has the risen Christ “become a life-giving spirit.”
Likewise,
when he gets to Luke, Wright laughs off the screaming contradiction between
Luke 24:40 (“Touch me and see: no spirit has flesh as you can see I have.”) and
1 Corinthians 15:50 and 45 (“Flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom
of God.” “The last Adam became a
life-giving spirit.”). The contexts of both passages make it quite clear that
the terms are being used in the same senses, only that one makes the risen
Jesus fleshly, while the other says the opposite. Wright’s laughable
hair-splitting is a prime example of the lengths he will go to get out of a
tight spot. Similarly, when he gets to 1 Peter 3:18 (Jesus was “put to death in
the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and made proclamation
to the spirits in prison, etc.”), Wright rewrites the text to make it say what
he wants: “he was put to death by the
flesh, and brought to life by the
Spirit.” This is just ridiculous. It is the exegesis of that faith that calls
things that are not as though they were.
Wright’s
second mortal sin is his desire to have his Eucharistic wafer and eat it too. He
takes refuge in either side of an ambiguity when it suits him, hopping back and
forth from one foot to the other, and hoping the reader will not notice. For
instance, Wright is desperate to break down the “flesh/spirit” dichotomy in
Paul and Luke (not to mention that between
Paul and Luke!), but he builds the same wall higher outside the texts. That is,
he wants to say “resurrection” always meant bodily, not merely spiritual,
resurrection. The latter would mean just “going to heaven,” and that will not
do. But Wright confesses he has no clear idea of what sort of physical presence
the risen Jesus might have had. He calls it “transphysical” and admits he
cannot define it. What then is he arguing? He just knows he wants a bodily
resurrection, but it has to be a body capable of passing through locked doors
and teleporting, appearing and disappearing at will. Yet he despises the notion
that the risen Jesus was docetic, a spiritual entity that could take on the
false semblance of physicality. Wright doesn’t want any early Christians to
have believed this. He doesn’t want it even to have existed as an heretical
option that the evangelists were trying to refute! Because that would mean that
a spiritual resurrection was one form of early Christian belief, which Wright
is trying to rule out. Most scholars rightly see the business about the risen
Jesus requesting a fish sandwich (Luke ) as demonstrating, against Gnostic
docetists, that Jesus had a fleshly body. But Wright will have none of this. He
is right to point out, as A.J.M. Wedderburn does in Beyond Resurrection (1999), that anti-docetism is inconsistent with the same narratives’
depicting Jesus walking through locked doors like Jacob Marley. But why cannot
Wright see this simply attests the inconsistent piecemeal nature of the redactional
attempts to “anti-docetize” the very same narratives?
But Wright is stuck with both contradictory features as “eye-witness testimony”
or “early tradition” which he seems to think mean the same thing. So his
“transphysical” Jesus must be the equivalent to a comic book superhero like the
Vision or the Martian Manhunter, possessing a physical body but able to vary
physical density at will. But wait a
minute… if this is not docetism, what does docetism mean?
The third
strike against Wright is by far the most important. He loathes Enlightenment
modernity because it will not let him believe in miracles. So he must change
the rules of the game. Like all apologist swindlers, Wright makes a fundamental
confusion. He thinks it an arbitrary philosophical bias that historiography
should be “methodologically atheistic.” Why not admit that miracles might have
occurred? It may be that a miracle turns out to be the most simple and
economical explanation of the data. If we are unalterably opposed to that
possibility, Wright says, we are bigots and arbitrary dogmatists. Freud would
readily peg Wright as a victim of reaction formation. Long ago, the Ionian
philosopher Thales understood that it explains nothing if we piously say that
it rains because Zeus turned the faucet on. No, even if there is a God, it is
to short circuit the process of scientific explanation to invoke divine fiat.
The same point is made in the cartoon where a lab-coated scientist is
expounding his theory with a chalkboard full of figures. He points his pencil
to a gap in the long equation and says, “Right here a miracle occurs.” It is
funny for a reason Wright apparently does not understand.
To say that
the rise of Christian resurrection faith requires a divine intervention is
tantamount to saying we just do not know how it arose. One resorts to such
tactics of desperation when all else fails, as Wright thinks mundane
explanations have failed. But in that moment one has not found an alternate
explanation at all. It is like the fundamentalists who say God must have
ignited the Big Bang since scientists cannot yet account for what chain of
causation led to it. How is “God” an explanation, even if there is a God? God
is a mystery, unless one is an idolater. And to claim one has “explained” a
problem by invoking a mystery is no advance at all. You are trying to invoke a
bigger enigma to explain a smaller one. “I have the answer to X! The answer is
XX!” Erudite Bishop Wright reveals himself to be on the same level with
evangelical cartoonist Jack Chick who “explains” that the unknown Strong
Nuclear Force is really Jesus Christ
because scripture says “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). What’s
the difference? The instant one invokes the wildcard of divine miracles, the
game of science and scientific history comes to a sudden halt. But then that is
just what Wright, unsuccessfully disguising himself as a humble historian,
wants to do. The good bishop would reassure the faithful that superstition is
really science, harmonization is criticism, fideism is evidence.
And why
does Wright think a miracle is necessary? Only a real space-time resurrection,
he insists, can account for the birth and spread of resurrection faith. Of
course there are many viable explanations, not least Festinger’s theory of
cognitive dissonance reduction, whereby more than one disappointed sect has
turned defeat into zeal by means of face-saving denial. Wright suicidally
mentions this theory, only to dismiss it, as usual, with no serious attempt at
refutation. So totally does his predisposition to orthodox faith blind him that
he cannot see how lame a gesture he makes. No argument against his faith can
penetrate his will to believe. Every argument against his evangelical orthodoxy
seems ipso facto futile simply because he cannot bring himself to take it
seriously.
But suppose
a miracle were required. What sort of a miracle might it be? Wright maintains
that the earliest evangelists must have been galvanized, electrified, by
something mighty convincing! Set aside the fact that all manner of supposed
eyewitness enthusiasts, not least UFO abductees, have equal and equally sincere
zeal. This is not nearly enough; Wright needs to account for the spread of this
improbable-seeming belief among those who had not themselves seen the risen
Christ, if he thinks the spread of
the faith requires a miracle. He himself is at pains to show how resurrection
seemed absurd and distasteful to nearly everyone. If that were so, and I am not
convinced it was, what Wright needs to posit is something like the Calvinist
notion of the effectual call, a supernatural mesmerism whereby God makes the
gospel attractive to sinners. The miracle is needed at a later stage if it is
necessary at all, not that I think it is.
Wright (though by this time one is tempted to
start calling him “Wrong”) uses sneer quotes, dismissing with no argument at
all Crossan’s claim (which I deem undoubtedly and even obviously correct) that
the empty tomb traditions stem from women’s lament traditions like those
mentioned in Ezekiel 8 and attested for the Osiris cult and others. Having ignored
rather than refuted this contention, Wright insists that the empty tomb
narratives are eyewitness evidence, evidence that is all the stronger for the
supposed fact that ancient Jews did not admit legal testimony from women. How’s
that? Wright’s early evangelical Anglican Christians in togas just felt they
had no choice but to include this vital eyewitness testimony even though it
would surely invite ridicule by Celsus and his ilk. They were stuck with it.
But why? Wright himself imagines that the framers of the 1 Corinthians 15 list
of resurrection appearances knew the empty tomb tale but omitted it so as not
to invite ridicule. It was thinkable to do so. But the unwitting logic of Wright’s
whole argument presses ineluctably toward saying that the empty tomb story is
not even supposed to be evidence and
is not offered as such. It must be there for an entirely different reason. Crossan
had it right. He made sense of it. Wright doesn’t, because he does not want
anything to link the Easter story to the Mystery Religions.
Wright’s
insistence on limiting himself to the canonical Judeo-Christian continuity
blinds him to other crucial parallels to the Easter stories. The Emmaus story
is cut from the same cloth as numerous ancient “angels unawares” myths, but it
bears a striking resemblance to a demonstrably earlier Asclepius story where a
couple returns home dejectedly after failing to receive the desired healing
miracle at Epidauros. They are intercepted by a curious and concerned stranger,
the divine savior incognito, who ferrets out the reason for their sadness,
reveals himself, performs the hoped-for healing after all, then vanishes. The
miraculous catch of fish in John 21 is patently based on an earlier Pythagoras
story in which the no-longer relevant detail of the number of the fish made
some sense. As Charles L. Talbert pointed out years ago (What Is a Gospel? 1977), the abrupt ending of Mark (as it seems to
readers familiar with the other gospels) fits quite naturally as a typical
apotheosis story, where the absence of the body combined with a heavenly voice
is sufficient to attest the hero’s exaltation to heaven. Talbert showed how an
empty tomb story made sense by itself, and how the gospel tomb scene may have
originated as window-dressing for an apotheosis narrative. We are not stuck
with the empty tomb as a stubborn historical fact as Wright would like us to
think.
These
Hellenistic parallels tell us that we hardly require eyewitness testimony of
miracles to explain the origin of the gospel Easter stories. Occam’s Razor
makes that altogether unnecessary. But they also explain something else Wright
thinks explicable only by miracles: the absence of scriptural allusions in
these stories. Wright throws down the gauntlet to Crossan, who says that the gospel
Passion Narratives are historicized prophecies from the Old Testament,
rewritten as New Testament stories. Why, then, is there so little scripture
reflected in the burial and Easter stories? Well, there is a good bit. Matthew
has supplemented Mark with Daniel, as Randel Helms shows in Gospel Fictions (1988)—and as Wright
himself eventually admits! But Crossan has also shown how similar Mark’s burial
and resurrection stories are to the entombment alive and subsequent crucifixion
of the enemy kings in Joshua 10:16-27. Helms also shows how John 20:17 is based on Tobit 12:16-21. But there is a good bit of the gospel story
that is not derived from scripture—and that is because it comes from pagan
mythology and novels where prematurely entombed heroines are inadvertently
rescued by tomb robbers and heroes survive crucifixion (another body of highly
relevant textual evidence that Wright haughtily laughs off).
Wright
piously tells us that, faced with the resurrection narratives, we ought to bow
in awe and wonder. That may or may not be so, but we must blink in astonishment
at Wright’s comments upon them! In another case of his “both/and”
harmonizations (one found frequently with Evangelical scholars, i.e.,
apologists) Wright both claims that the resurrection narratives lack artifice
(hence must be authentic “raw footage”) and that they have been thoroughly
worked over by each evangelist so as to function as consistent extensions of
themes and even narrative structures running through each gospel. This sort of analysis,
demonstrating the thorough permeation of Mark’s Passion story by themes
ubiquitous throughout the previous chapters led the contributors to Werner H.
Kelber’s symposium The Passion in Mark
(1976) to conclude that Mark had no preexistent passion tradition but composed
the whole thing. Such an obvious conclusion never occurs to Wright. For him,
each narrative is both early unadorned tradition and thoroughly modified. It is
either one as he needs it to be.
He throws
source criticism out the window when he needs to, claiming, astonishingly, that
there is so little apparent interdependence between the tomb tales of Mark,
Matthew, and Luke that we cannot be sure they are not independent tellings of
the same story, learned by each evangelist via different channels. This is a
way of discounting the great degree to which Luke and Mathew have rewritten
Mark, maintaining they are all separate collectors of “early traditions,” a
slippery repristination of the old Sunday School notion that the four
evangelists are independent witnesses, as if to the same auto accident. Again,
there is no stale crust of apologetical sleight-of-hand that Wright will not
claim as a “critical advance” upon Enlightenment scholarship.
For Wright,
Matthew’s accuracy is demonstrated by the fact that he seems to have added no
new stories to the resurrection plot-line. What about the repeated earthquakes,
the descent of the angel, the guards at the tomb, the embassy of the Sanhedrin
to Pilate, the rising of the dead saints on Good Friday? Without a word as to
the improbability of other evangelists omitting it if it had happened, Wright
confesses himself ready to swallow the historical accuracy of the guards.
Wright thinks it makes sound sense that the guards are to tell that the
disciples stole the body while the guards
were asleep? How did they know what happened while they were snoozing?
Wright seems not to recognize comedy if there is no laugh track.
Wright
insists that the gospel writers must have believed in a literal resurrection
(whatever that would be: Jesus becoming the Martian Manhunter again?). But can
we be so sure of that, given certain elements of their narratives? Luke’s
Emmaus scene is transparently symbolic of the invisible presence of Christ
among his followers every Sunday at the breaking of the bread. (Wright finally
admits this, but he insists that it also really happened, more of his
both/and-ism.) Matthew ends not with an ascension to get Jesus off the stage of
history (as in Acts), but with Jesus assuring the readers (at whom the Great
Commission must be aimed) that he will continue with them until the end of the
age. Does this not imply that the resurrection was after all the inauguration
of the metaphorical/spiritual sense in which Matthew’s readers, like modern
Christians, sense Jesus intangibly with them? John’s story of Doubting Thomas
concludes with Jesus making an overt aside to the reader: “Blessed are those
who have not seen yet have believed.” Can this writer have seriously intended
his readers to think they were reading history? Such asides to the audience are
a blatant and overt sign of the fictive character of the whole enterprise. As
Barr pointed out long ago (Fundamentalism,
1977), the fact that Luke has the ascension occur on Easter evening in Luke 24
but forty days later in Acts chapter 1 (something Wright thinks utterly
insignificant!) shows about as clearly as one could ask that Luke was not even
trying to relate “the facts” and didn’t expect the reader to think so.
One could
easily go on and on and on, even as Wright does, and because Wright does. What
we have in this book is not a contribution to New Testament scholarship, any
more than Creationist “Intelligent Design” screeds are contributions to
biological science. Both alike are pseudo-scholarly attempts to pull the wool
over the eyes of readers, most of whom will be happy enough for the sedation.