Curious History

In a special documentary, a major television network investigated the beginnings of Christianity and the influence of the apostle Paul in spreading the message of Christ. The narrator noted his fascination with the historical figure, commenting that if not for the voice of Paul, it is “unlikely that the movement Jesus founded would have survived beyond the first century.” Yet of the resurrection of Christ he also noted, “Something must have happened, otherwise it’s hard to explain how Jesus’s story endured for so long.”

Why has the story of Christ endured? Has it survived through the centuries because of effective speakers in antiquity? Has it endured, as Sigmund Freud argued, because it is a story that fulfills wishes, or as Friedrich Nietzsche attested, because it masks and medicates our disgust of life? Has the story of Christ endured because something really happened after Jesus’s body was taken down from the Cross or was it only the clever marketing of ardent followers?

We live in an age where religion is examined with the goal of finding a religion, or a combination of religions, that best suits our lives and lifestyles. We are intrigued by characters in history like Jesus and Paul, Buddha and Gandhi. We look at their lives and rightly determine their influence in history—the radical life and message of Christ, the fervor with which Paul spread the story of Christianity, the passion of Buddha, the social awareness of Gandhi. But far too often, our fascination stops there, comfortably and confidently keeping the events of history at a distance or mingling them all together as one and the same.

C.S. Lewis wrote often of “the great cataract of nonsense” that blinds us to knowledge of earlier times and keeps us content with history in pieces. He was talking about the common tendency to treat the voices of history with a certain level of incredulity and inferiority—even if with a pleasant curiosity all the same. Elsewhere, he called it chronological snobbery, a tendency to concern oneself primarily with present sources while dissecting history as we please. Yet to do so, warned Lewis, is to walk unaware of the cataracts through which we see the world today. Far better is the mind that truly considers the past, allowing its lessons to interact with the army of voices that battle for our allegiance. For a person who has lived thoroughly in many eras is far less likely to be deceived by the errors of his or her own age.

We must be wary, then, among other things, of assuming the earliest followers of Christ thought resurrection a reasonable phenomenon or miracles a natural occurrence. They didn’t. Investigating the life of Paul, we might ask why a once fearful persecutor of Christ’s followers was suddenly willing to die for the story he carried around the world, testifying to this very event that split history. Investigating the enduring story of Christ, we might ask why the once timid and frightened disciples were abruptly transformed into bold witnesses. What happened that led countless Jews and many others to dramatically change directions in life and in lifestyle? That something incredible happened is not a difficult conclusion at which to arrive. It takes far greater faith to conclude otherwise.

A friend of mine is fond of saying that truth is something you can hang your hat on. Even as we struggle to see it today, her words communicate a reality Jesus’s disciples knew well. The resurrection was shocking in its real-ness; it was an event they found dependable and enduring. It was not for them like the latest scandal that grabs our curiosity and passes with the next big thing. It is solid and it is real. The disciples and the apostle Paul were transformed by seeing Jesus alive again—a phenomenon that would be just as unthinkable to ancient minds as it would be for us today. In fact, even the most hesitant among them, and the most unlikely of followers, found the resurrected Christ an irrefutable reality. Comfort was irrelevant, it went far beyond curiosity, and personal preference was not a consideration. They could not deny who stood in front of them. Jesus was alive. And they went to their deaths talking about it.

It seems to me that the story of Christ has endured for innumerable reasons: because in the fullness of time God indeed sent his Son; because knowingly Jesus walked to the Cross and into the hands of those who didn’t know what they were doing; because something really happened after his body was laid in the tomb; and because with great power and with God’s Spirit, the apostles continued to testify of the events they saw. What if the story of Christ remains today simply because it is true?

The Curious Case of Robert Gundry

Ivan Karamazov worried that if God is dead then all things are permissible. Likewise, so evangelicals have been told, if there is no magisterial authority, then all biblical interpretations are permissible. But even if this is not the case, we could still argue that “biblicism” results in pervasive interpretive pluralism, which is a very serious problem. So goes the argument of Christian Smith in his new book The Bible Made Impossible. The conclusion in Smith’s argument seems to be that the Bible alone is not sufficient to bring us to clear, unambiguous answers on whatever topic we might want it to address.

Naturally, evangelicals have been resistant to Smith’s conclusion. The most prominent piece of criticism of Smith’s new book comes from Robert Gundry, which has been cited as a helpful defense of “biblicism” by a number of evangelical blogs. One scholar even goes so far to say Gundry’s article is a “superb review” from “a senior evangelical statesmen.” But it seems that not everyone shares such a high view of Gundry’s evangelical credentials.

Gundry was ousted from the Evangelical Theological Society, the closest thing evangelicals have that resembles a magisterium, in 1983. The reason: the method deployed in a 1982 commentary on Matthew reached conclusions that were judged to be incompatible with the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

Normal Geisler recounted the history of Gundry’s transgressions in a recent open letter that charges Michael Licona with the same sins. Apparently, Licona made an interpretive move in his recent book defending the historicity of the resurrection that lead him to conclude Matthew 27:51-54 was composed for literary reasons; not for the purposes of recording history. Al Mohler agrees that Licona has made the same interpretive blunder as Gundry and that Licona ought to recant his position.

The central premise in Mohler and Geisler’s argument is that the doctrine of inerrancy entails the historicity of Matthew 27:51-54. Thus any exegetical method that results in “dehistoricizing” the passage is unacceptable. Article XVIII of the Chicago Statement if Biblical Inerrancy is taken to make this clear:

WE AFFIRM that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.
WE DENY the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship.

All I will say about how the Chicago Statement is being deployed is that taking account of a text’s literary forms and devices seems compatible with the conclusion that a given text may not have been intended as history. I am not qualified to judge whether or not this is the case in the disputed Matthew text, but it is clear to me that there is a noticeable irony in that this text seems to result in the problematic “interpretive pluralism” that Smith highlighted in his book. By all accounts Gundry and Licona are reputable evangelical scholars who are at home in the “biblicist” tradition. Yet at the same time, voices in this same tradition name them as rogues, or at least proprietors of rogue methods of biblical interpretation.

As to what we should think about the issues raised by the controversy between Licona and Geisler/Mohler, William Lane Craig offers a helpful strategy for approaching these issues from an apologetic standpoint. If views like Craig’s are deemed to be wrongly accommodating of Licona, then it seems we need a magisterium, some authoritative interpretive community, to make these calls. Does the ETS play that role? If so, then what do we make of Gundry and the status of “biblicism?” It seems evangelicals are faced with what may be a tough choice: jettison biblicism or the authority of ETS-like institutions as a boundary-setting entities. The curious case of Robert Gundry makes it difficult to accept both.

UPDATE:

I was curious to see what Gundry’s 1982 commentary had to say about the Matthew 27:53. He writes:

Hence, Matthew probably means that the resurrected saints entered Jerusalem only after Jesus’ resurrection. It is unclear whether they came out of their tombs only after Jesus’ resurrection, or came out earlier but stayed in the countryside till Jesus had risen. The doctrine that he is “the first-born from the dead ” (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5) and “the first fruits of those who are asleep” (1 Cor 15:20) favors the former view because a delayed exit from the realm of death would seem less liable to contradict that doctrine.” Thus Matthew probably means that the saints stayed in their tombs for several days even though their bodies had been raised to life. Then they came out and “entered into the holy city and appeared to many.” [Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1982), 576.]

So when Mohler says

In 1983, the Evangelical Theological Society voted to request that Robert Gundry resign from its membership. The arguments for his expulsion from the ETS are exactly those that are now directly relevant to the argument that Michael Licona makes about Matthew 27:51-54. The suggestions that these events reported by Matthew are “special effects” and a “poetic device” are exactly the kind of dehistoricizing that led to Gundry’s removal from the ETS. Gundry’s argument concerning Matthew’s use of midrash is virtually parallel to Licona’s argument from classical references and Jewish apocalyptic sources.

We should not take him to be making the impression that Licona’s interpretation mimics Gundry’s. It seems that Mohler and Geisler would be inclined to agree with Gundry here, making the Gundry/Licona connection less pronounced. It would be a matter of using the right hermeneutical method, not the necessarily getting the right results.