On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Keith Tankard wrote:

> Karen Jolly quotes the following from Ibn Kamm^una, in his 
> _Examination of the Three Faiths_ (a Jewish writer and thinker in 
> Baghdad c 1280:
> 
> > Furthermore, God is too exalted to be described as having dwelled in the
> >uncleanness of the menstruating womb and in the confinement of the belly and
> >darkness; or that bodily eyes looked at Him; or that He was affected by
> >slumber or sleep; or that He excremented in his clothes and urinated in his
> >bed; or that He wept or laughed;  etc, etc.
> 
> This comes back to my fundamental argument that basically we know 
> very little about the person of Jesus Christ because we are totally 
> reliant upon the Scriptures which perhaps were based upon eye-witness 
> accounts but were nevertheless subject to immense interpretation.  We 
> "know" only what the Evangelists choose to tell us.

Unfortunately, we only know anything we know about ancient or medieval 
history because of what the various reporters told us.  The question is 
how reliable the reporters, witnesses, sources, are in any given case.

In the case of the Christian NT, the most important recent trends in NT 
scholarship underscore earlier and earlier datings.  John A. T. Robinson, 
about 20 years ago, argued that all the NT was finished by 70 AD; others 
since him have argued for dates as early as the 30s and 40s for some of 
the Gospels, others for the 40s and 50s.  The classic 19thc dating well 
into the 2nd century is quite vulnerable because it depends on a 
fundamental assumption that social organizations begin with simplicity 
and move to complexity; where one sees more complexity, one assumes a 
later dating.  But what if movements generally or this one in particular 
began with complexity?  How does one prove that it did not have a highly 
developed theology of Christ's divinity from the start?  You cannot prove 
that, you can only assume it.  If one assumes the opposite, the whole 
classic 19thc dating system begins to unravel.

Or, if one wants to insist on movement from simplicity to complexity, one 
can argue quite plausibly for a "high" Christology from the start that 
was expressed very simply: Jesus is Lord, where "Lord" mean utterly 
divine, transcendent Lord of Hosts from the Jewish faith; over three 
centuries then this simple affirmation was explained in more complex 
language, but belief in Jesus of Nazareth's divinity need not have come 
into being only with a more complex explanation.  The complex theological 
explanations could simply be elaborations of an early, unarticulated belief. 

My point is that, by the normal canons of historical critical method, the 
attestations for Christianity, the gap between events reported and their 
reporting, the coherence of the testimony, the very early appearance of 
written records etc. is far better than for a huge amount of ancient and 
medieval historical events.  Sure, one can protray the evidence as 
incoherent and confused and as tampered with by later generations, if one 
wants, but I am suggesting that to do so one needs to introduce a number 
of prejudgments and interpretive biases that, if one introduced them into 
the study of the Thirty Years' War, for instance, one would be dismissed 
with scorn by other scholars.

> 
> The Early Church, in reacting to various "heresies" chose the opinion 
> that Christ was true God and true Man.  It could have gone the other 
> way:  that Christ was only true God;  or maybe that He was only true 
> Man.  Either way would have made an immense change in the way in 
> which the Scriptures would have presented Christ.

What if the heresies were simply part of the process of articulating more 
complexly the early, simple "Jesus is Lord" belief.  Some articulations 
were judged inadquate because they violated or fell short with regard to 
one or another wing of the original "Jesus is Lord" (where Jesus means an 
empirically observable and observed human character in time and place, 
attested by a credible chain of witnesses; and "Lord" means the totally 
transcendent Lord of Hosts of the Jewish faith).  If a strong enough, 
early, foundational consensus regarding full-humanity and full-divinity 
existed, it could have served as the "Rule of Faith" mentioned in many 
of the early Christian Fathers that functioned as a standard against 
which to measure various more articulated formulations.

> 
> What, for instance, would our perception have been if the "Gospel 
> According to Thomas" had been accepted by the Early Church as part of 
> the Canon of Scripture?  What, on the other hand, if the "Gospel 
> According to John" had not? 

But what if the reasons one was accepted and the other was not is that an 
early intrepretive consensus that Jesus was fully divine and fully human 
existed among his "Christian" disciples; that Gnostic denials of his 
humanity were simply, by consensus, rejected as aberrations?   The Walter 
Bauer thesis that Christianity was originally Gnostic or otherwise 
heretical in some parts of the Eastern Mediterranean has been effectively 
challenged, by, among others, Colin Roberts with regard to Egypt.
 
> 
> This in itself is problematic because of the problem of what 
> constitutes "inspiration" and, if the Church is truly inspired, then 
> to what extent does this happen.  For example, we know that Paul 
> wrote more than 2 Letters to the Corinthians but only two are found 
> in the Scriptures.  The others (am I right?) are lost.  Which raises 
> the question:  are they lost because they were not "inspired" or did 
> they not find their way into the Scriptures because they were lost?

The criterion for inclusion in the NT canon was apostolicity.  To be 
included, a letter or gospel had to apostolic in origin.  That doesn't 
mean that all apostolic writings had to be included, merely that no 
non-apostolic writings dare be included.  If some of the apostle's 
letters were not preserved by those who received them, so what?  It is 
very possible that many of the apostles wrote things down but why should 
every scrap they wrote have been taken into the canon?  The argument, as 
reflected in Eusebius and others, was whether this or that writing (e.g., 
the gospel purportedly written by Thomas) was indeed by the apostle it 
claimed to have for an author.

> 
> And so this question about Christ's humanity is unsolvable because we 
> only know what we are told.  The rest is speculation, but speculation 
> by its very nature can lead us anywhere.


Any question is insolvable, by this criterion, for we only ever know what 
we have been told--except for the infinitesimal amount of data each of us 
is able to observe with his or her own eyes, hands, tongue etc.  But even 
then, how we interpret what we see with our own eyes depends on what we 
have been told by our parents, teachers, friends, historical sources etc.

There's a lot less speculation involved in the transmission of historical 
data about early Christianity than there is in many well-known figures of 
history.  Like it or not, we are dependent on each other for most of what 
we know and believe.  It's a shame, but we are animals of the polis, 
fundamentally interdependent creatures.  What I don't understand is why 
we are expected to be so suspicious about our interdependence when it 
comes to texts and early development of Christianity but then easily 
accept as textbook-truth much less secure texts and interpretations about 
the Ostrogoths or Anglo-Saxons or Bogomils.


Dennis Martin
Loyola University Chicago



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