Date: Mon, 04 Mar 1996 15:40:12 -0800 From: "Marcus J. Borg" To: Jesus2000@info.harpercollins.com, Luke_Johnson@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Primary Message Week 2 (Johnson) -Reply Dear Luke and Dom: This is my "primary message" for week three. I apologize for it being several hours late. I was at a professional meeting from Wednesday through Sunday, and so I am playing "ctach up" today. By the way, Tom Wright phoned me last night. He has been watching our interchanges, and he sends his greetings to both of you. Thus far our conversation has been primarily about one of the two main points in Luke's book, namely, whether the historical Jesus(understood as the historian's Jesus) matters for Christian theology and life. I have already briefly stated my own position. Namely, I reject the "either-or" which says that EITHER the historical Jesus is of primary and normative significance, OR "the canonical Jesus" is of primary and normative significance. Instead, I affirm a both/and, a point I shall return to at the end of this message. For now, I simply want to add that I am both a Jesus scholar and a Christian, both a historian and one who is interested in the theological implications of my work as a historical scholar. And I am convinced that how we think of Jesus matters, because images of Jesus are correlated with images of the Christian life. What we think Jesus was about will affect what we think the Christian life is most centrally about. In my message this week, I want to make some comments more directly related to the other focal point, namely the task of historical reconstruction of Jesus and what might be at stake in that. And rather than write a unified essay on a single topic, I will make a series of numbered observations, some of them statements, some of them questions. 1. A question to Dom. Do you think God was important to Jesus? Do you see him as "a God-intoxicated Jew"? I know that you see the religious/economic/political/social as closely intertwined, so that it is not really possible to separate them out from each other. Nevertheless, how much did the religion component of that mix matter to Jesus? And let me change that question to the form in which it interests me most: Do you think God mattered to Jesus? 2. A second question to Dom. In your treatment of Jesus as healer, you emphasize the distinction made by some medical anthropologists between "curing disease" and "healing illness." To explain for others, "disease" refers to the physical condition, "illness" to the social meaning of the physical condition. Thus a person could "heal an illness" (remove the social stigma attached to the condition), without curing the disease). I know that your emphasis is on Jesus as one who healed illness; but do you think he also sometimes cured disease? And to what extent does what Van Harvey (and others) calls "the principle of analogy" inform your judgment? (Principle of analogy = a historian can seriously entertain the "happenedness" of an event reported in the past only to the extent that something analogous is thought to be possible in the present). And what shapes or gives content to your understanding of what is possible in the present? 3. A question to Luke. Granted that you think the quest for the historical Jesus is a mistake - - that it is theologically irrelevant, and therefore not only a waste of time but potentially misleading, for it wrongly suggests that Christian understandings of Jesus should be affected what historians can say - - granted all of that, I nevertheless want to ask you if you have formed any perceptions or hunches about the historical figure of Jesus in your decades of working with the New Testament? Granted that they don't matter, and that they're tentative and subjective, have you formed any that you would be willing to share? I would find that very interesting. 4. My fourth observation concerns one of the stages or steps involved in the historical reconstruction of Jesus. I believe it is the third step mentioned by Luke in his earlier entery, namely, the use of "models" derived from elsewhere as a way of illuminating the traditions about Jesus. As readers will recall, Luke objected to this. I want to suggest the opposite - that the use of "models" derived from outside of the texts is not only appropriate, but can be very illuminating. As one example, I mention the use of the model of "peasant society" as a way of seeing the social world of Jesus. Both Crossan and Richard Horsley have used this with great effect, it seem to me. To explain to others, "peasant society" is shorthand for Gerhard Lenski's model of "the pre-industrial agrarian society," a form of social organization widespread across cultures and throughout human history from the development of "advanced" agriculture (use of the plow instead of the planting stick and hoe) until the dawn of the industrial revolution. For this message, details do not matter greatly, but a generalization will do: these are societies sharply divided between "wealthy urban ruling elites" and "impoverished rural peasants." The wealthiest 1 to 2 per cent of the population get their wealth from agricultural production (there is no other major source of wealth in such societies), and they do so by acquiring one-half to two-thirds of peasant production through taxation and various forms of land rent. The latter (typically around 90% of the population) are left with perhaps 1/3 of their own production, whichis barely subsistence. Such societies are social worlds with remarakbly sharp social boundaries. Now, SEEING this, it seems to me, greatly illuminates the message and activity of Jesus: his teachings about poverty and wealth, his critcisms of Jerusalem and the temple (not as the center of Judaism, but as the center of the urban ruling elites), as well as the reasons for his arrest and excecution. My point: it does not seem to me a mistake to import models from elsewhere, but powerfully illuminating. Or, in my own case, I use "models" derived from the cross-cultural study of religious personality types. They include "Spirit person" (roughly corresponding to Rudolf Otto's "holy man"), "healer", "wisdom teacher," "social prophet," and "movement initiator." Not only are these types known cross-culturally, they are also known within Jesus' own Jewish tradition. Using them enables one to "gestalt" the traditions about Jesus into meaningful patterns. Now, I am wondering what is wrong with this. These models seem illuminating. It does not seem enough to say that it's illegitimate because they come from elsewhere. The reason, for example, that I do not find Burton Mack's model of hellenistic-type Cynic sage persuasive is not because "it comes from elsewhere," but because it seems to me to be inadequate to account for what we find in very early layers of the Jesus tradition. So this point ends up being a question addressed to Luke: what's wrong with using models as a way of gestalting the Jesus traditions? 5. My fifth observation brings me back to the both/and issue. Let me explain my point this way. I see all the "titles" of Jesus as post-Easter developments - that it is in the post-Easter situation that Jesus is called or named "Son of God," Wisdom of God," "Word of God," "light of the world," etc. All of these are part of "the narratival Jesus" or "canonical Jesus." Moreover, for me, as language about the post-Easter Jesus, I see all of these titles as true - that is, they express what Jesus became in the experience and tradition of his followers in the decades after Easter (I also see them all as metaphorical, of course; their multiplicity points to metaphoricity; and meatphorical language can, of course, be true). Now, to say something about the pre-Easter Jesus. Suppose that Dom and I are basically correct when we say that Jesus had an alternative social vision, one that was significantly egalitarian and challenging to the hierarchical world of his day? (Dom says this with the languge of "free healing" and "open commensality," I with the language of subversive wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator). Suppose that Dom and I are right that Jesus was (among other things) a God-intoxicated voice of peasant social protest. Now, is it significant that it is precisely one such as this who is named "Son of God, "Wisdom of God," "Word of God," etc,? It seems to me that it is. For this language is saying, "We find in THIS person, who was this-and-this way, a manifestation of the sacred, the Word made flesh." In short, I find meaningful and truthful the movement's canonical language about the narratival Jesus, even as I think what we can know historically about Jesus helps to give content to the person who is being named in all of these ways. And that is one of the things I mean by affirming "both/and." Best wishes to you both. And I hope this segmented message gets through all right. I am still learning the mysteries of E-Mail.