Craig L. Blomberg,
Contagious Holiness: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners. New Studies in
Biblical Theology 19. InterVarsity Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Robert M.
Price.
Though
the series to which this volume belongs usurps the title of the
venerable SCM Press series Studies in Biblical Theology, it represents a
tragic retreat from the fearless and innovative scholarship that marked
its predecessor. As editor D. A. Carson says right up front, the books
in the series “are written within the framework of confessional
evangelicalism” (p. 9). As the bland and preachy themes of the other
volumes in the series make plain, what we are dealing with here is
in-house sectarian, parochial exegesis, abandoning the dangerous public
forum of ideas, retreating into a “safe” and comfortable community of
like-believing interpreters, all inerrantists who use the term
“criticism” as a self-esteem-building euphemism for what they are really
doing, apologetics aimed at edifying tender evangelical readers. It is
especially ironic for Blomberg to be lionizing Jesus and his supposed
fellowship with sinners when the whole point of the book is to help
insulate conservative seminarians within the safety of the pre-critical
flock, away from non-kosher ideas of genuine critics.
Blomberg’s main goal seems
to be to refute E.P. Sander’s (admittedly peculiar) thesis that Jesus
welcomed sinners, not caring whether they repented, as well as Dennis C.
Smith’s claim that Jesus’ meals as depicted in the gospels must be
understood as Greek symposia transplanted onto Jewish soil thanks to
pandemic Hellenization. To Smith’s symposium business Blomberg returns
again and again like a refrain, though it is difficult to see why it is
that important.
But by far most of the book
(as Jacob Neusner would say, the shank of the book) is a completely
pointless side-trip into every conceivable reference to meals and eating
in the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha, and the
Pseudepigrapha, plus Classical Greek and Roman references. The pregnant
mountain thus scaled brings forth a mouse of a contrast: as we already
knew, Jesus seems not to have superstitiously avoided people on the
basis of likely ritual impurity or even if they were Gentiles. Yes, yes,
Dr. Blomberg is a learned fellow, all right. It’s not that he is trying
to impress anybody. Anyone who is even mildly acquainted with him knows
better than that. But he is reinforcing the evangelical notion of what
New Testament scholarship is: a command of ancient data and being
conversant with the views of commentators. It is an essentially
uncreative enterprise of guarding the store to prevent “shrinkage” of
merchandise, lest real critics erode the stock-in-trade of Orthodox
Protestant preaching by whittling away the reliability of the Bible.
It is written plainly on
every page that Blomberg has forgotten the genuine critical axioms of
Bultmann and the form- and redaction- critics, whose methods he facilely
assures his readers are passé (“The form-critical analyses assume a
fallacious and now-outmoded kind of historical research,” p. 22). This
is like a chiropractor informing a patient that no one bothers with
“mainstream” medicine anymore.
So completely does Blomberg
(like the mutually sustaining circle of intra-Evangelical commentators
he quotes) mean “apologetics” when he says “criticism” that he deems
blatant harmonization to be a “critical” axiom: “demonstrating that a
theme is crucial to a Gospel writer’s literary purposes bears no
relation to the probability of its historical authenticity” (p. 22).
“But the two passages [the two fish stories in Luke 5 and John 21]
scarcely need to be pitted against one another. Each is intelligible in
its own context” (p. 126). As to the lampoons of John’s fasting and
Jesus’ conviviality, we need not choose between them, for as R. Stein
says, “Both are valid expressions of different aspects of God’s kingdom,
and if either is totally ignored, an unbalanced portrayal will result” (
p. 118). How nice.
Blomberg and his ilk bear
the same relation to overt, admitted apologists as today’s “Intelligent
Design” advocates do to yesterday’s Flood Geology partisans. They seek
respectability by trying to associate their efforts with an earlier
generation’s scientific consensus. In Blomberg’s case, he wants to go
back in time to the conservative critics of an earlier generation, like
T.W. Manson and Vincent Taylor. Thus they often repaired to
“epicyclical” devices to explain variant versions of a saying or story.
If there are two stories or sayings that sound significantly alike but
have equally important differences, what should we infer? It seems the
least assumption-ridden suggestion would be that oral tradition has
produced mutant, word-of-mouth versions, or that the evangelists have
simply rewritten material they thought they could improve. But either
solution disturbs apologists, so they like to say evangelist A was
following one tradition, evangelist B the other another. Or that Matthew
was using one “source” with one version, while Luke used another, with
another version. For Blomberg and company, “oral tradition” itself
becomes an additional, purely accurate “source” alongside
already-written ones. “The Lukan parallel (Luke 9:10-17) diverges from
Mark a little more than Matthew did. Even where the two texts contain
similar information, there is less verbal parallelism, suggesting
greater influence of the oral tradition on Luke’s form” (p. 107).
Matthew (in Matt. 15:32-39) “also rearranges the sequence of a few
details, so that one wonders if oral tradition has influenced his
structure” (p. 111).
This approach implies what
Blomberg eventually admits: Jesus said or did it twice, and each version
is a literal, accurate report. “This much variation in wording and
sequence, even granted the verbal parallelism that remains, suggests the
possibility of two separate teachings of Jesus on two distinct
occasions” (p. 115). It seems never to occur to Blomberg and his
colleagues that the very source analysis they adopt, (Markan Priority,
Q, etc.) was made necessary only by the recognition that pure oral
transmission could never yield the degree of verbal similarity we find
when we compare the gospels. Apologists everywhere take for granted that
a tradition is a transcript, so different versions must be different,
accurate reports of different events/speeches. Blomberg doesn’t need Q;
he appeals to it only because real critics do and he wants to try to
beat them at their own game. If we were playing his game, there
would be no talk of gospel sources at all.
Blomberg will not even
admit that Mark has used two versions of the same miracle story, the
multiplication of bread and fish: “The feeding of the four thousand is
often viewed as a doublet of the multiplication of the loaves for the
five thousand. From Mark’s perspective, however, the two incidents are
clearly distinct, inasmuch as Mark 8:1 indicates that ‘another large
crowd gathered’. The Greek uses the adverb palin (‘again’). The
dialogue in 8:14-21 will also refer back to both episodes as separate”
(p. 109). Of course anyone can see that Mark means to narrate two
separate, similar miracles. The question, of which Blomberg seems to be
entirely oblivious, is whether Mark is perhaps making virtue of
necessity, being stuck with two versions of the same story, like the
Genesis redactor who was faced with three variant versions (12:10-20;
20:1-18; 26:1-17) of the patriarch (Abram/Abraham/Isaac) lying to the
king (Pharaoh/Abimelech) about his wife (Sarai/Sarah/Rebecca). Just as
the Genesis redactor decided to use all three versions of the same
story by separating them and arbitrarily positing that one took
place during another famine (26:1), so has Mark obviously
used both versions, like a pious scribe who does not dare exclude any
textual accretion lest he omit some words of God. It does not occur to
Blomberg to recognize a redactional seam. There can be none, for he is
an inerrantist: if the details of Paul’s conversion stories do not
match, he must have been converted three times.
Blomberg treats us to a
similar harmonizing spectacle when he gets to Luke 7:36-50, the Lukan
version of the Bethany anointing, or rather, as he thinks, Luke’s
account of a different anointing, as if Jesus had to expect this
sort of attention from female fans as often as Elvis had them ripping
his clothes off. “The striking similarities, most notably the use of an
alabaster jar of perfume, could suggest that the two divergent accounts
have influenced one another in some small ways, but there are no
compelling reasons for not treating Luke 7:36-50 as primarily a separate
incident” (p. 131). “Luke clearly believes it to be a separate incident”
(Ibid.). Unless Blomberg is gifted as a mind-reader or a necromancer,
the assertion is grossly circular. How do we know Luke believed he was
(merely) reporting a separate incident? We “know” it only if we are
persuaded of the inerrancy of scripture, whereby any assertion in the
text must be taken literally. Otherwise we might have to wonder if Luke
is exercising literary license and wholly rewriting Mark’s story. But we
wouldn’t want that, because then we might have to recognize that Luke
and Matthew have rewritten Mark’s Easter story, too, and in rather
drastic fashion. And then we could not pretend the gospel Easter stories
are “evidence that demands a verdict.”
How do we know that the
saying “Many will come from east and west to recline with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11-12) refers to
Gentiles? Well, Jesus says it to recognize the faith of a Gentile, so
that’s that, right? Again, inerrantism. Does it not even occur to
Blomberg that the saying circulated independently, only to have been
“framed” by the story of the Centurion? It may well have first referred
to Diaspora Jews. Blomberg’s “argument” that it doesn’t mean that
amounts to no more than a fundamentalist assertion, with stopped-up
ears, “No, it happened just like the Bible says!”
Against Dennis Smith,
Blomberg decrees that “the very literary-critical approach to which
Smith… appeals has demonstrated that one cannot strip unhistorical
layers from a historical core of Gospel pericopae, as once was thought”
(p. 22). Blomberg doesn’t get it. As Frank Kermode pointed out long ago,
the more literary a passage appears, the less likely it is to be
historical. And as D.F. Strauss (who knew what criticism was) said long
before that, once one recognizes the tendency of a pericope, the reason
it is told, and one sees its artificiality, no reason remains for trying
to salvage historical remains (as, e.g., Gerd Lüdemann still does in his
Acts commentary). For instance, Blomberg is happy to recognize that the
evangelists mean to cast Jesus as a new Moses and a new Elijah, even
that the depiction of the audience as seated in groups of fifty and a
hundred is meant to recall the arrangements of the Israelites in the
wilderness (p. 104). Doesn’t he see what that means? The whole scene is
a midrashic fiction. Or do we imagine Jesus as Schonfield’s scheming
messiah, choreographing the whole scene to make a point to future gospel
readers?
The most damning objection
to there having been two distinct bread miracles is the impossible
obtuseness of the disciples who, having seen such a miracle once, could
not conceivably be stumped at how to feed the crowd when the exact same
circumstance arose again. But Blomberg has an “answer”: “the point may
be that they think Jesus is asking them to replicate the earlier
miracle” (p. 109). This is worthy of Gleason Archer and his encyclopedia
of apparent Bible contradictions.
But the most comical cases
of Blomberg’s “criticism” amounting to apologetics of the most contrived
sort concern the spectacular character of the miracles. The fact of
their enormity phases him not in the least. “The distinction in the
locations of the two feeding miracles, combined with the obscurity of
the geographical references, supports the conviction that both were
separate events in which Jesus was actually involved” (p. 110). You
mean, these throat-clearing attempts to make the stories seem to
be those of different events outweigh the likelihood that both versions
are merely rewrites of the Elisha story in 2 Kings 4:42-44, where that
prophet does the same thing? What would William of Ockham say? Is it
more likely that a man magically increased the mass of some fish and
barley rolls one day (or two days)? Or is it more likely that the teller
of such a tale has merely copied it from a well-known prototype? A
stubborn refusal to countenance the possibility of genuine miracles
(which Blomberg ascribes to historical critics) has nothing to do with
such a judgment. Just because God can do anything doesn’t mean he
in fact did everything every ancient (or even every biblical)
writer says he did. Unless, of course, there is good prior reason to
believe in biblical inerrancy. That is the issue. Blomberg and his
coreligionists do not just want us to admit miracles might happen; what
they want is for us to believe in biblical inerrancy as they do. When
they say this or that consideration vindicates a miracle story as
“likely,” they do not mean this is why they have come to accept it with
more or less provisional confidence. No, they already believe it as a
point of doctrinal duty. They are just engaging in apologetics to defend
what they already believe.
If anyone needed more
evidence, look at Blomberg’s treatment of the water-into-wine miracle
(John 2:1-11). “The miracle thus admirably satisfies the criterion of
coherence with teaching generally recognized to be authentic elsewhere”
(p. 122). Was Blomberg absent on the day they explained that such
criteria are relevant only to sayings? To make “coherence” with a
teaching theme the deciding factor whether a man magically changed one
chemical substance into another is just perverse. It is not coherence
but analogy that is the relevant criterion here: is this miracle,
so similar to that of Dionysus and so unparalleled in all creditable
history, to be judged more probably a myth like the Dionysus version, or
as a credible historical report? Again, even the pious believer in
miracles (if piety even requires such) can, even must, decide:
no, insofar as we can judge, not having been there, it is surely more
likely to be a fiction, a legend, told for theological reasons. “The
clearest redactional or theological overlay in the passage comes at the
end, when John describes this miracle as the first of Jesus’ signs (semeia)
- the standard expression in the Fourth Gospel for Jesus’ mighty deeds
– but the historicity of the core miracle itself is unaffected by this
label” (p. 123). Oh dear.
The Emmaus story strikingly
parallels the story (attested for the fourth century BCE) of Asclepius
in disguise, catching up with two crestfallen believers who sought his
healing in the holy shrine at Epidauros but left disappointed. Coaxing
out the reason for their glumness, he reveals himself, performing the
healing on the spot. When we read a very similar story about the Risen
Jesus, what are we to conclude? I suppose an omnipotent deity could rise
from the dead. No dogmatic bias to the contrary can allow me to
disqualify the Emmaus tale as an historical report. But neither can I
discount the possibility that poor Sostrata may have actually been
healed by the power of a very real Asclepius, son of Apollo. What
business have I, as a historian, “presupposing” that Asclepius did not
exist and perform miracles? But if we feel pretty safe in classifying
the one story as a legend (and the earlier one at that), why do we not
assess the other as likely to be a holy legend, too? That is the way the
historian reasons. But this is the way the covert apologist for biblical
inerrancy reasons: “The generally restrained nature of the narrative…
particularly surrounding the meal, and the ambiguity created by Jesus’
immediate disappearance after the disciples recognized him, all support
authenticity. A purely legendary story would disclose Christ far more
clearly and fill in the obvious gaps Luke has left in his narrative (as
in fact the apocryphal Gospel accounts regularly do)” (p. 160). There is
no ambiguity. There are no gaps. There could be no clearer revelation of
the Risen Christ. And the restrained character of the narrative is
simply the mark of better writing, not necessarily of reporting. And
just because there may be even grosser legends, wilder fictions, does
not mean more subtle ones are to be judged historical.
Very little of
Contagious Holiness is spent demonstrating that Jesus probably did
seek the company of sinners so as to influence them for good. But then
the book is not really about that. As with all such monographs by
Evangelical scholars, the book is a mass of historical apologetics.