Hugh J. Schonfield, Jesus: Man - Mystic - Messiah.
London:
Open Gate Press.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
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.