I recall how my eighth grade Physics professor responded to
my teen-age fundamentalist zeal by recommending Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot. At that time I did
not know that this was neither the first nor the last book the indefatigable
Schonfield would have written on the subject of Jesus the Nazorean. All I knew
then was that here was the voice of doubt. I recall how a fellow fideist warned
me, “Don’t read that book—it’s poison!” That is, the book was inimical to a
faith fortified with ignorance. Many years later, teaching a freshman New
Testament course at Drew
University,
I assigned the book. It duly shocked many of the students, though by this time
I recognized how essentially conservative was Schonfield’s treatment of the
gospels and their historical value.
In the meantime I had read many
more works by other scholars on the search for the Jesus of history, and I had
come to espouse alternative theories, far to the left of Hugh Schonfield’s. And
yet it was only after these many years, having read much of the scholarship
Schonfield himself appealed to (e.g., the similarly underrated Robert Eisler)
that I fully appreciated what vast and deep erudition Schonfield had brought to
his task. Among his other books, According
to the Hebrews, Those Incredible
Christians, The Authentic New
Testament, and The Essene Odyssey top
my list, though I have to admit I love them all. The author was always able to
dredge up some eye-popping piece of esoterica no other scholar had considered.
I soon learned how little it mattered that the serious student agree with every
point, even the main point, of a book. The thing is to find fresh food for
thought and to encounter new perspectives not presented in the stale tomes of
the orthodox and conventional.
Even in
this, his last (and posthumously published) manuscript, Hugh Schonfield manages
to stir the pot anew. Out came my underlining pen. Never looked at it that way before! And this is so, even
though the book is his most basic one on Jesus. He devotes a succinct passage
or two to the accuracy of the gospels, the principles to be employed in cutting
away mythical accretions, and the great gulf that lies between the original
Jewishness of Jesus and his gospel and the Gentile Christian reinterpretation
of it. Schonfield’s work is rooted firmly in a particular generation of New
Testament criticism, that of Rendel Harris, R.H. Strachan, R.H. Charles, and
others. On the whole, his estimate of the gospels recalls that of Adolf
Harnack: even after you subtract the legendary and Hellenistic distortions, you
have enough left to reconstruct a striking historical figure. But when it comes
to the teaching and mission of Jesus, Schonfield was much closer to Albert
Schweitzer. Both rejected Harnack’s view that apocalyptic belief was merely
window-dressing for an essentially moral message. Both Schweitzer and
Schonfield, apparently independently, came to understand Jesus as a preacher of
national renewal and restoration.
This is
still a viable position held by many scholars. But one misses in this, as in
many of Schonfield’s books, any discussion or even awareness, of whole
generations of gospel scholarship. So much has happened in the field that one
burns with curiosity to know how Schonfield’s own theories might have been
affected had he taken seriously the work of other and more recent writers,
including Bultmann, Bornkamm, Robert M. Fowler, G.A. Wells, and Burton L. Mack.
Like Schonfield, G.A Wells has written many sequels to his original book on
Jesus, but unlike Schonfield, each one is considerably updated, interacting
with contemporary scholarship in general and his critics in particular. We are the
poorer for Schonfield’s self-imposed isolation.
One
surprising absence from this book, yet one that might make it a good one to
recommend to the new reader of Schonfield, is the omission of any discussion of
the notorious “Passover plot” itself. Schonfield had imbibed from the
eighteenth-century Rationalists the notion that Jesus set about his messianic
career with a detailed game plan, engineering “prophetic fulfillments” to
establish his messianic credentials. This theory scandalized many orthodox readers,
who were only too happy to misunderstand Schonfield. They supposed he was
casting Jesus in the role of a charlatan and a hoaxer. Of course, Schonfield
only meant that, if Jesus inferred aspects of the messianic role from his study
of scripture, he cannot have helped marching forward into his appointed
destiny, intentionally seeking and taking the opportunities he found to fulfill
scripture. How is the orthodox view much different? Do they think Jesus only
accidentally fulfilled prophecy?
Of course, the major point of
objection is another bit of Schonfield’s debt to the old Protestant
Rationalism, his near embrace of the Swoon Theory. Schonfield posited that
Jesus sought to be crucified and to cheat death, appearing alive again after a
rescue from the cross. In fact, it is not uncommon to read that Schonfield
simply subscribed to the Swoon Theory pure and simple. He did not. He admitted
Jesus died, killed by the unanticipated spear thrust of the soldier (John 19:34). The resurrection appearances were cases
of mistaken identity, a theory based on the repeated emphasis in the texts
(Luke 24:16; John 20:14; Mark 16:12) that the Risen Jesus was at first
unrecognized.
But of all this Jesus: Man – Mystic – Messiah is
innocent, as if Schonfield was tired of fighting that battle. But the omission
also makes it clear that, for Schonfield, these elements were never central to
his consideration of Jesus anyway. His goal was to delineate a Jewish prophet
dedicated to the renewal of his people and to their leavening influence on the
rest of humanity. This last book focuses on what Schonfield always thought most
significant about Jesus, his dedication to the will of God, not some clever
agenda of scheming and manipulation.
No reader of this book can fail to
notice the remarkable parallel between Hugh Schonfield’s own religious
explorations and those he hypothesizes for Jesus. Schonfield recalls how his
interest in the historical Jesus was kindled by his early acquaintance with
Christians (first Christadelphian sectarians, then evangelical revivalists)
during the apocalyptic days of World War One. The world was exploding around
him, pregnant with both new and unimagined dangers and possibilities. These
factors pushed him into studying the apocalyptic inheritance of his native
Judaism as well as an inquiry into a Man whom Christians but not Jews venerated
as the Jewish Messiah. We have a sense of deja
vue when Schonfield describes Jesus as a youth soaking up the influences of
the apocalyptic movement and earth-shaking events of his own century. Has
Schonfield, like so many historical Jesus questers, merely remade Jesus in his
own image? Or has he rather followed the principle of analogy so absolutely
central to historical research: understanding the past on analogy with present
experience? Do we end up with a Jesus modeled after Schonfield, or a Schonfield
modeled after Jesus? There is much to learn either way.