3. Lightfoot as Christian Teacher
Appendix G
Lightfoot in Retrospect
J. D. G. Dunn
1. Lightfoot—a Classic Exponent of Historical Critical Investigation
Lightfoot is probably the best example of what might be called the classical route into the study of early Christian writings. I will not elaborate the now familiar accounts of his formidable philological prowess or amazingly detailed knowledge of classical and patristic texts. His command of Greek is nicely illustrated by the magisterial rebuke delivered to the unfortunate anonymous author of Supernatural Religion, who had had the temerity to chastise his older colleague and friend B. F. Westcott for an alleged mistake in translation. The unknown author, he points out scathingly, ‘is quite unconscious of the difference between the infinitive and the indicative,’ that is, between indirect and direct speech. And he proceeds to criticize him for equal incompetencies in Latin and German. And when the latter replied with indignation that Lightfoot’s criticism ‘scarcely rises above the correction of an exercise or the conjungation of a verb,’ Lightfoot simply observes, with mild irony, ‘I cannot help thinking this language unfortunate from his own point of view.’ His chaplain, J. R. Harmer, commenting on Lightfoot’s knowledge of languages, recalls on one occasion Lightfoot saying to him ‘in the simplest manner: Does it not sometimes happen to you that when you have read a book you forget in what language it is written?’ Harmer reckoned that Lightfoot had mastery of seven languages (French, German, Italian and Spanish, as well as English, Latin and Greek), and a considerable or at least working knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic.
Such stories, however, will be familiar to any who have read the various reminiscences and lectures on Lightfoot that have appeared at infrequent intervals over the last hundred years. Here I wish to focus attention more on Lightfoot’s commitment to historical inquiry and its importance for understanding the Christian texts he handled. It was the use of his formidable linguistic and philological knowledge in the course of his historical inquiry which proved their value.
Lightfoot’s commitment to rigor of historical investigation is a feature of his work from the beginning. His earliest extant writing is the recently published essay on D. F. Strauss and Christian origins, written probably in 1853 as the Norrisian Prize Essay. There he makes it clear that the object of his attack is ‘the mythicizer (who dismisses) all search after history as hopeless (and who finds) in the biblical records merely a collection of legends, and spontaneous product of national feelings and expectations’—a not entirely accurate characterization of Strauss’s treatment of Jesus, but close enough for the purpose of his essay. His response is what we may call Lightfoot’s first attempt to demonstrate the historical basis of Christianity. His theological rationale is that if the divine has become genuinely incarnated, that is, in history, then the study of that history is fundamental for the understanding and defense of Christian origins.
In unpublished lecture notes headed ‘Greek Testament Lectures, Lent Term 1855’ he sets out his position clearly.
The timidity, which shrinks from the application of modern science or criticism to the interpretation of Holy Scripture evinces a very unworthy view of its character. If the Scriptures are indeed true, they must be in accordance with every true principle of whatever kind. It is against the wrong application of such principles, and against the presumption which pushes them too far that we must protest. It is not much knowledge but little knowledge that is the dangerous thing, here as elsewhere. From the full light of science and criticism we have nothing to fear.
Lightfoot did not depart from this claim or objective. For example, thirteen years later, in his essay on ‘The Christian Ministry’ Lightfoot makes it clear that for him the only way to deal with the disputed issue of the origin of the threefold ministry is by looking at the actual history as it has been recorded. ‘In this clamor of antagonistic opinions history is obviously the sole upright, impartial referee; and the historical mode of treatment will therefore be strictly adhered to in the following investigation.’
Let me try to illustrate what this commitment to historical inquiry meant for Lightfoot. In the first place, an obvious point, but one that nevertheless should be made: Lightfoot had no doubts as to the primacy of the original source. One cannot but be impressed, for example, by the way in which in his massive study of the Ignatian epistles he marshals nearly one hundred pages of documentation in the original languages from Polycarp (early second century) to Gregory Barhebraeus (late thirteenth century). What is particularly impressive in Lightfoot’s case, of course, is his phenomenal knowledge of these sources, and his ability to pull together all the relevant evidence on a point from a wide range of classical and early Christian texts. Where modern students seem often more concerned to demonstrate their knowledge of secondary sources, Lightfoot’s texts and notes are crammed with detailed reference to related material, inscriptional as well as literary, all marshaled with such a thoroughness that the reader is usually ready to concede the point well before the display of evidence has been completed.
Not that he ignored secondary literature. By no means. He was thoroughly familiar with the contemporary debate, and at one point makes a special note of his debt to the German scholar Neander. One of his most devastating chapters in his reply to Supernatural Religion is on Ignatius, where he examines several of the impressive lists of ‘authorities’ which the anonymous writer put together to support particular claims, and which gave that book much of its credibility. In each case, Lightfoot is able to show, from his own knowledge of these writers, that many of the said authorities had been misunderstood or misappropriated. But for the most part, Lightfoot is rightly concerned to demonstrate that claims about early Christian texts hang or fall on a proper knowledge and appreciation of these texts themselves.
In the second place, Lightfoot demonstrates the importance of setting the language of a text in its historical context if its meaning is to be understood. He would have found great difficulty with the suggestion that the words of a text somehow exist in a world of their own, the world of the text. Of course they belong in the context of the text itself, but they belong also within a world of meaning of contemporary usage that informs in greater or lesser degree their meaning in that particular text. Contemporary usage informs particular usage. It is important, as he indicates in rebuke to the writer of Supernatural Religion, that one should know how ‘men in actual life do speak and write now, and might be expected to speak and write sixteen or seventeen centuries ago.’
So for example when he comes to inquire what Paul might mean by the distinction between μορφῇ and σχῆμα (‘form’) in Philippians 2:6-7 he naturally makes careful inquiry of classical and Christian writings including Philo scrutinizing the usage of a total of twenty-three authors, as C. K. Barrett has noted. How else might one be able to weigh words which occur only once or twice in Paul? Similarly, when he wants to know the force of πλήρωμα (‘fullness’) in Colossians, where the survey includes particularly Gnostic writers as well. And in his ‘Notes on Romans’ he is able to shed light on Paul’s somewhat puzzling claim—‘Only rarely will someone die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man someone will dare even to die’ (Rom 5:7)—by noting that the distinction between δικαίος and ἀγαθός is well enough known in classical and Christian thought and is very much the same as the Aristotelean distinction between the ‘the man who is scrupulously just and the man who is prepared to make allowances’—an insight from historical usage which undercuts a good deal of more recent attempts to make sense of the passage.
In the third place, it is equally important for Lightfoot that a text cannot be properly understood unless it is set within and related to a particular context. Thus, in dealing with the seeming inconsistencies in the different ways Paul comports himself before others, he points out that Paul’s tone would be ‘graduated according to the temper and character of his hearers,’ and goes on to cite an apposite parallel.
Luther denouncing the Pope for idolatry and Luther rebuking Carlstadt for iconoclasm writes like two different persons. He bids the timid and gentle Melanchthon ‘sin and sin boldly’; he would cut off his right hand sooner than pen such words to the antinomian rioters of Munster. It is not that the man or his principles were changed; but the same words addressed to persons of opposite tempers would have conveyed a directly opposite meaning.
Once again a pertinent reminder that text read in neglect of context is likely to result in text misread. Likewise to be noted is the care with which Lightfoot gathers together all the available information on the destinations to which Paul wrote his letters, recognizing that occasional letters as they were, their meaning is bound to be determined in greater or lesser degree by the situations addressed—an innovation in the exegesis of the nineteenth century. So too Ignatius’s ‘intensity of passion . . . for doing and suffering’ cannot be fairly appreciated without some awareness of the atmosphere of persecution and martyrdom which the repressive policies of Domitian and Trajan engendered in the years preceding his arrest. Or again in his lectures on John he notes that the key to the meaning of the conversation in John 6, the great bread of life discourse, is contemporary Jewish expectation. The point is that
The inference is unexpressed. The expectation, which explains all, is left to be inferred, because it would be mentally supplied by men brought up among the ideas of the time. We ourselves have to get it by the aid of criticism and research from rabbinical authorities. But when we have grasped it, we can unlock the meaning of the whole chapter.
Some of the best examples of Lightfoot’s priorities and method come as usual from his reply to the author of Supernatural Religion. For example, the latter had argued that when Eusebius fails to mention an allusion to a canonical book in any of the earlier writers whom he cites, it must mean that the earlier writer himself was silent on the point. In typical fashion, Lightfoot examines what Eusebius himself says about his purpose on this matter, and then reviews the earlier writers one by one, providing another devastating rebuttal of a grossly misapplied argument from silence. What might have been arguable when Eusebius was taken on his own as regards his meaning becomes incredible when the claims of Eusebius are related to the historical evidence of the earlier writers he refers to. Or again the author of Supernatural Religion found it incredible that Ignatius could have received visitors and written letters while under close arrest on his way to Rome. And if we confined ourselves only to the letters of Ignatius, and to their world of meaning, the seeming inconsistency might carry some weight. But Lightfoot is able to provide a complete answer to the issue by referring to what we know of Roman remand and arrest at the time. By relating the text to its context the meaning becomes clear.
Finally we might simply note the care with which Lightfoot tried to avoid speculation that went beyond the available evidence. To the author of Supernatural Religion he points out: ‘In the land of the unverifiable there are no efficient critical police. When a writer expatiates amidst conjectural quotations from conjectural Apocryphal Gospels, he is beyond the reach of refutation.’ In referring to the Judean church which reformed at Pella he simply observes: ‘Its history in the ages following is a hopeless blank; and it would be vain to attempt to fill in the picture with conjecture.’ And in responding with his usual meticulously detailed examination to the hypotheses of Frankel regarding the origin of the name ‘Essenes,’ Lightfoot concludes:
It would be a reversal of all established rules of historical criticism to desert the solid standing-ground of contemporary history for the artificial combinations and shadowy hypotheses that Frankel would substitute in its place.
Complementary to this is the description by a visitor to Auckland, one Robert Barbour, ancestor of Robin Barbour, until recently NT Professor in Aberdeen, who comments on the fineness of Lightfoot’s judgment: ‘He always speaks with a pair of balances in his hands, like Justice, only he is not blindfolded like her.’
In all this Lightfoot clearly demonstrates the importance of reading a historical text within its historical context, that the meaning of the text does not arise out of the text alone, but out of the text read in context, and that the original context and intention of the author is a determinative and controlling factor in what may be read or heard from such a text. Of course one would have to qualify this observation in a number of ways. The debates in which he engaged were primarily about historical issues; were the Ignatian epistles authentic, that is, authored by Ignatius of Antioch in the circumstances indicated in the epistles, and if so, how many? And such like. He never addresses the question of whether an historical text read in a different and later context might be heard to resonate with a different meaning, because it was being read within a different context. Moreover, the texts he focused his attention most closely on were all epistles, occasional letters written to particular situations. In these cases historical context is bound to place a more substantial constraint on the meaning of the text than texts less tightly tied to particular historical contexts—for example, wisdom sayings and parables—the biblical material on which, for that very reason, modern literary criticism has been most fruitful. But Lightfoot would certainly have approved a referential theory of meaning; that that to which the language of a text refers determines and controls the meaning of that text. His absorption with historical issues and his commitment to historical inquiry is simply a particular example of that, but it surely demonstrates beyond question the importance of historical context in the case of such historical texts at least.
Lightfoot is also conspicuously free of the philosophical baggage which has so often been associated with ‘the historical critical method.’ Although a man of the nineteenth century his historical critical work was not controlled by the prevailing scientific paradigm, that the four dimensions of time and space are a closed continuum of cause and effect. On the contrary, however, there is a certain naivete or fond optimism, particularly in assessment of the historical value of John and Acts, which equally dates his work tremendously, in contrast with the perennial value and often remarkably fresh character of his exegesis of the Pauline letters. But his concern to defend Christianity is fully matched by his concern for truth, for historical truth—and that means historical and critical study of the historical data. It was Harnack who paid him the appropriate compliment by noting that ‘he never defended a tradition for the tradition’s sake.’ To this we must return later.
Nor, presumably, does it need to be said that new evidence uncovered since Lightfoot’s time requires many minor, some major revisions to his particular conclusions—for example his rather unsatisfactory note on the difficult verse Colossians 2:18, and his essays on the Essenes which were without peer prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Lightfoot would have been the first to insist that his findings, arguments and conclusions be revised in the light of the new evidence. Witness the considerable use he made of recent inscriptional evidence in shedding light on the use of names in Romans 16 and in his Ignatius. This too would have been a fundamental part of the historical method for him—the recognition that meaning of language and text derives from historical context and that our confidence regarding that meaning is in direct proportion to our knowledge of that context.
In all this I dare to hold out Lightfoot as a mentor to be followed. Christianity is a religion whose truth claims are irrevocably tied to a period of history nearly twenty centuries ago. It cannot dispense with historical inquiry and frees its foundations from that period at its peril. Whatever other contexts these constitutional documents may be read within, the period covered by Lightfoot’s researches remains their primary context, and Lightfoot’s mode of inquiry into them remains a model for all who come after him.
2. The Importance of the Jewish/Christian Debate and the Key to Understanding Earliest Christianity and Its Initial Development
If, in our threefold division, Cambridge stands for Lightfoot’s classic Engish analytical textual and historical scholarship, Tübingen speaks more of a debate about Christian origins which played a major part in shaping Lightfoot’s concerns from the beginning to the end of his career as a scholar. This dialogue of Lightfoot with Tübingen has usually been thought as solely a dialogue with F. C. Baur and the Tübingen school to which Baur gave birth. But the recent publication of Lightfoot’s Norissian Essay reveals that the first Tübingener with whom Lightfoot did battle was D. F. Strauss, stretching back his interaction with Tübingen a further ten years. What is interesting for us here, however, is the way he tackles Strauss.
Strauss’s Life of Jesus consists of a massive and very detailed analysis of the Gospel traditions, particularly the miracle stories. In it he subjects to merciless and penetrating criticism the attempts of his rationalizing predecessors to save the historical character of these accounts by rationalizing away the miraculous element in them. Strauss points out that again and again such a procedure flies in the face of what the text actually says and clearly intends. The only solution he can see is to recognize that the accounts of the miracles are myths—that is, in his definition, the clothing of an idea or religious conception in the literary form by means of which such an idea would have come to expression in those days. In this case, the idea is of Jesus as Messiah. Given the impression Jesus actually made on his disciples and the Jewish expectations regarding the Messiah, the literary form by means of which this idea came to expression in the minds of his followers included especially the miracle story.
What is striking about Lightfoot’s reply is that he makes no attempt whatsoever to meet Strauss on the ground of the Gospel traditions, the almost exclusive focus of Strauss’s work. Instead, he seeks to answer what he sees to be the central thrust of Strauss’s basic thesis—that the mythical view attributes the emergence of Christianity to natural processes and denies the character as revealed religion. Lightfoot’s response is simple: let us see whether the cause is sufficient to explain the effect. That is to say, he proposes to answer the mythical view of Christianity’s emergence by a study of the history of Christianity’s emergence. The mythicizing thesis must be brought to the bar of history and subjected to historical scrutiny. And the examination proceeds, be it noted, by a series of studies on ‘The Jews of Palestine and the Dispersion,’ ‘the Messiah’ and ‘the Judaizing Christians.’ In this early essay, the concerns which were to mark the rest of his scholarly career are already clear, and the essay is really the first draft, imperfect in many details, he would have been the first to recognize, of arguments he was to extend and deepen in his subsequent writings. And the key issue, as Lightfoot clearly indicates, is how to explain the emergence of Christianity from within its original Jewish context.
His early response to Strauss then was the first phase of a lifelong enterprise. But thereafter the principal protagonist was certainly F. C. Baur. Baur had begun to develop his own explanation of Christian origins more than twenty years earlier in his article on the Christ party in the Corinthian congregation. His central thesis is already clear in the second part of the title of that article—‘the opposition between Petrine and Pauline Christianity in the earliest church.’ That is to say, earliest Christianity was characterized by a conflict between two factions, one with marked Jewish tendencies, and the other Pauline Christianity. From this initial observation Baur’s reconstruction of earliest Christian history evolves inexorably. For example, the historical value of Acts cannot be defended, since it shows Paul and Peter are closely similar in message and conviction, that is, a Paul who is manifestly different from the Paul of the Epistles. The Acts of the Apostles must derive, therefore, from a later period in which attempts were being made to reconcile the conflicting views of the Petrine and Pauline factions. And the epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp could not be authentic simply because a date for them in the second decade of the second century did not fit within this paradigm of a sustained conflict between these factions which was reconciled only later in the second century.
Baur’s overarching schema is most clearly articulated in his Church History, published in the same year that Lightfoot wrote his Norrisian essay. In its simplest terms, Christianity for Baur is the highest expression of the religious consciousness of mankind, because its spirituality, expressed quintessentially in the first beatitude, is far more free than any other religion from everything merely external, sensuous or material. The characteristic feature of the Christian principle is that ‘it looks beyond the outward, or accidental, the particular and rises to the universal, the unconditioned, the essential.’ This refusal to regard true religion as a thing bound down to special ordinances and localities is at the heart of universalism. The dispute between the Petrine and Pauline parties is thus a dispute between Jewish particularism and Christian universalism. The problem was that this absolute moral and spiritual insight could only enter the stream of history in a particular form—the cramping and narrow form of the Jewish national messianic idea. It was not surprising then that one set of Jesus’ followers should hold to the national aspect of his appearance and miss the moral and spiritual universalism of the morality and spirituality that he inculcated. But Paul must have the credit for delivering Christianity from the status of a mere Jewish sect and liberating ‘the all-commanding universalism of its spirit and aims.’ The analysis also enables Baur to make a point of more contemporary polemical application: the Catholicism which became the compromise between the Petrine and Pauline factions is like Judaism in its attachment to the formal and external; whereas Protestantism is like Pauline Christianity in its attachment to the inner and ‘spiritual.’
It is the systematic tendentiousness of Baur’s development of this schema to which Lightfoot objected. There was no disagreement on the importance of the period, or the need to subject it to historical scrutiny. The difference was one of method. Baur extrapolated from the, to him, clear evidence of the undisputed Pauline letters to the whole history of Christian beginnings, read through the lenses of the overarching philosophical schema. Lightfoot replied with a rigorous historical analysis of language and context; how these terms would have been understood, given the usage as we know it in the world of the time, how these claims or episodes fit into what we know of the history of the period. Far from flying from the task of historical reconstruction, Lightfoot commits himself wholeheartedly to it, and, as we shall remind ourselves shortly, his criticism of the Tübingeners is that they have abused the principles of sound historical criticism.
It is sometimes maintained that for Lightfoot, Baur’s theory of Christian beginnings stood or fell on the issue of the genuineness of the Clementine and Ignatian epistles. And it is certainly true that Lightfoot recognized the particular importance of these documents for setthng the issue. Already in 1875, in the third of his replies to Supernatural Religion, he had noted that ‘If the Ignatian letters . . . are allowed to be genuine, the Tübingen views of early Christian history fall to the ground. It was therefore a matter of life and death to this school to condemn them wholly.’ Hence, of course, the massive expenditure of his critical energies on these epistles. But just as important for Lightfoot was the fact that other early Christian documents were being forced into an unnatural mold. The pseudo-Clementine Homilies have no right to be treated as the missing link between the Judaism of the Christian era and the Catholicism of the late second century. The genuiness of the epistle of Polycarp is equally fatal to the Tübingen school—a genuineness questioned only because it provided such strong testimony regarding Ignatius.
Hence also, as Professor Hengel reminded us, Lightfoot’s concern to argue for the authenticity, that is, apostolic authorship of the Fourth Gospel; if the Fourth Gospel is authentic, the Tübingen theory must be abandoned. Even the Apocalypse of John, Lightfoot observes in a footnote, is sufficient to furnish ample refutation of ‘the peculiar views’ of the Tübingen school. Above all it is important to realize that for Lightfoot as well as Baur, the issue hung on the interpretation of Paul. It is at the point at which Baur had his most secure basis in history for his claims that Lightfoot joins decisive battle. Hence the first Pauline letter to which Lightfoot turned his attention was Galatians—as he himself readily acknowledged: ‘it is felt by both sides that the Epistle to the Galatians is the true key to the position.’ And hence the importance of his lengthy essay in that volume on ‘St. Paul and the Three,’ in which Lightfoot deliberately set himself to undercut the central plank of Baur’s reconstruction.
At the same time it should not be assumed that Lightfoot was the polar opposite of Baur on every point or that he forced Baur to abandon the field entirely. Not only did Lightfoot accept that the crucial field of battle was the one designated by Baur—namely the Pauline literature; for though he read Acts much more straightforwardly as history, Lightfoot could not be content with an exegesis which was not scrupulously determined by what Paul actually wrote. But also when we read Paul, he could not deny some merit to Baur’s interpretation. Thus, in reading Galatians 2:3ff., Paul’s report of how Titus was not compelled to be circumcised on his visit to Jerusalem even though a Greek, Lightfoot does not resist an implication in Paul’s language that the pillar apostles (James, Peter and John) were sympathetic to the conservative or Judaizing ‘false brothers.’
On the whole it seems probable that they (the pillar apostles) recommended St. Paul to yield the point. . . . The counsels of the Apostles of the Circumcision are the hidden rock on which the grammar of the sentence is wrecked.
And in his essays on ‘St. Paul and the Three’ he does not hesitate to speak of ‘The systematic hatred of St. Paul (as) an important fact, which we are too apt to overlook, but without which the whole Apostolic age will be misread and misunderstood.’ ‘Pharisaic Ebionism’ (as he calls it) ‘was a disease in the Church of the Circumcision from the first.’ Moreover, far from elaborating the account of Acts into a portrayal of the apostolic age as one of idyllic peace and unity, Lightfoot ends the same essay with the sobering conclusion:
However great may be the theological differences and religious animosities of our time, they are far surpassed in magnitude by the distractions of an age which, closing our eyes to the facts, we are apt to invest with an ideal excellence. In the early Church was fulfilled, in its inward dissensions no less than its outward sufferings, the Master’s warning that He came ‘not to send peace on earth but a sword.’
No wonder then that Barrett can speak of Lightfoot’s ‘modified Baurian position’ and sees ‘the total effect’ of Lightfoot’s debate with Baur as the destruction of the chronology of the Tübingen school. As Lightfoot himself claimed:
The great battle with this form of error seems to have been fought out at an early date, and in the lifetime of the Apostles themselves and in the age [by which I presume he means the generation—J. D. G. D.] immediately following.
Not of least importance, and this is the point I wish most to emphasize here, Baur and Lightfoot were agreed on the importance of Christianity’s emergence from Judaism as the key issue in understanding both the early history of Christianity and the character of Christianity itself. Thus Baur writes at the beginning of his Paul:
how Christianity, instead of remaining a mere form of Judaism . . . asserted itself as a separate, independent principle, broke loose from it, and took its stand as a new enfranchised form of religious thought and life, essentially different from all the national peculiarities of Judaism is the ultimate, most important point of the primitive history of Christianity.
And in his Church History he confirms:
There can be no question that the purely moral element which lies at its first source has ever been (Christianity’s) unchangable and substantial foundation. Christianity has never been removed from this foundation without denying its true and proper character.
But Lightfoot is equally convinced of the seriousness of the issues at stake:
If the primitive Gospel was, as some have represented it, merely one of many phases of Judaism, if those cherished beliefs which have been the life and light of many generations were afterthoughts, progressive accretions, having no foundation in the Person and Teaching of Christ, then indeed St. Paul’s preaching was vain and our faith is vain also.
The point I wish to make is that the issues outhned here as matters of debate between Baur and Lightfoot are still among the most fundamental issues in our understanding of Christian origins and in our understanding of Christianity itself. These issues were obscured for the next three generations of NT scholarship. This was principally because of the emergence of the history-of-religions perspective on the whole period, at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, a perspective that quickly came to dominate the debate on Christian origins. What this meant was that, on the Jewish side of the equation, apocalyptic (eschatology) became the major preoccupation, as a factor influencing Jesus, but also as a mythical clothing of his enduring message, able to be sloughed off to leave a moral core, or demythologized into existential demand for decision to authentic existence. At the same time, on the Hellenistic side of the equation, the major preoccupation became the pursuit of the phantom of a pre-Christian Gnostic Redeemer myth. One could say that the period between Lightfoot and today has been a huge parenthesis between those on either side of that parenthesis who recognize the central importance of Christianity’s Jewish matrix and the earliest phase of Christian development as the growing out of and increasing detachment from the matrix—a process fundamental to the shaping, and the shape of Christianity.
Only in the last decade or decade and a half has the issue reemerged, but it has done so with considerable force. Partly because, on the one hand, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the substantial reassessment of Jewish literature of the period and the subsequent rabbinic traditions, we are now in a position to gain a ‘fix’ on first-century Judaism in a way and to an extent which was simply not possible before. And partly because, on the other hand, the Holocaust has forced Christian scholars to a painful reassessment of Christianity’s relationship and attitude toward Judaism, its parent faith. Particularly important has been the overwhelming movement in favor of setting Jesus within the context of first-century Judaism, not least as ‘Jesus the Jew.’ What is now being designated a ‘third quest of the historical Jesus’ has as its common theme the reassertion in various ways of the Jewishness of Jesus. Equally vigorous has been the debate about Paul’s relationship with his parent faith, particularly on the question of the Jewish law.
However, the corollaries and implications of the various theses are only beginning to be faced. For example, is the Christianity which actually emerged divorced from or continuous with the Jewish Jesus? Was the earliest form of Christianity simply a form of first-century Judaism and nothing more? Is Paul the real founder of Christianity as we (Gentiles) know it? In short, is the Christianity we know today something essentially different from and at odds with the teaching of Jesus and the earliest form of Christianity? But these were the very issues which were posed by Baur and addressed by Lightfoot.
Regrettably, Lightfoot is less helpful here than we might have hoped. He never really addressed the question of the Jewishness of Jesus, not more in his subsequent work than in his earlier reply to relate the teaching of Jesus to the gospel of Paul. Nor does he betray any real appreciation of the starthng contrast between the Jesus of the Synoptics and the Jesus of John. Here we may say that his strengths as an historian betray something of his weaknesses as a theologian, a point first noted by Hort as we were reminded in [the lectures by Barrett and Hengel]. The immense knowledge and abilities which he applied so powerfully to the historical questions regarding letters addressed to and presupposing particular historical situations was much less well fitted to handling the complexities of the Gospel tradition. The nearest he comes is the brief comment in his essay on ‘St Paul and the Three’ that Jesus ‘had discredited the law, but He had not deposed or abolished it.’ And in his treatment of the continuing tensions within Christianity following Paul and between Christianity and Judaism he evidently does not see the possibility of drawing in evidence Matthew or John (or Acts), despite the fact that they were all written in that period, and despite the prominence they gave to Jewish themes.
Some of this criticism is not entirely fair; we can hardly find fault with Lightfoot for being a child of his times; critical assessment of the Gospels was still at a very early stage in the second half of the nineteenth century. The primary issue at that stage was whether the first phase of Christianity was a purely Jewish phenomenon, so that the development under Paul resulted in a fundamental breach. And on this Lightfoot’s counter to and modification of Baur is of lasting value, particularly in terms of the character and force of his exegesis.
Even more important is the underlying issue as to the character of Christianity. To what extent is its Jewish origins and heritage integral to Christianity? To what extent has the category ‘Israel’ been completely taken over by Christianity, and to what extent does it still ‘belong to the Jews’? Are Christians alone ‘the people of God,’ or Jews alone, or only Jewish Christians? Is the most fundamental schism within the people of God not that between Catholic and Protestant, or between East and West, but rather that between Christian and Jew? Can the assembly of God’s worshiping people, the qahal Israel, the ἐκκλησίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ, be complete without the (other) seed of Abraham—complete either in their worship or in their self-understanding? These are issues which have only recently reemerged on the stage and only recently been recognized by the World Council of Churches. But they are fundamental to any definition of Christianity, past, present or future. Here not least the discussion needs to go back to Baur and Lightfoot, whose debate in no little measure both clears the ground and allows the fundamental issue to emerge in sharper focus.
3. Lightfoot as Christian Teacher
If Cambridge speaks to us of Lightfoot as the meticulous scholar, and Tübingen speaks to us of the single most sustained preoccupation of his scholarly career, then Durham speaks to us of Lightfoot the scholar of firm Christian convictions and ecclesiastical commitment. The invitation to Durham in 1879 caused him much heart searching, and while his acceptance was greeted with universal pleasure so far as the episcopal appointment was accepted, there was widespread concern expressed lest his scholarly work be cut short—as indeed was the case. But the tug of the north—his father was a Yorkshireman and his mother’s family came from Newcastle—and the challenge of the great northern diocese with its tradition of Christian scholarship in the past and its pressing industrial problems in the present together made a compelling call he could not refuse.
As bishop he threw himself into the work with characteristic vigor. He saw through the creation of the Newcastle diocese, and in ten years oversaw the building of forty-five churches and mission halls, presided at 456 confirmation services (often with 250 or three hundred candidates at a service), and trained nearly seventy ordinands at Auckland Castle at his own expense. And yet even as bishop he never ceased to be a scholar; and not merely of Christian beginnings in the first and second centuries. He was one of the first to recognize and assert the importance of Northumbria in the seventh-century evangelization of England; and he was familiar with every detail of the ecclesiastical antiquities in both Durham and Northumberland. His sermons on Leaders of the Northern Church, incomplete at his death, were the fruit of his own natural curiosity about the history of his diocese. And wholly typical is the painstaking detail with which he investigated the history of the chapel at Auckland itself, demonstrating beyond dispute that the present chapel had been converted to its present purpose from the old hall of the castle by Bishop Cosin. In the midst of such labor, the three great volumes on Ignatius were finished in 1885.
All this was possible only because of Lightfoot’s amazing memory and intense power of concentration. Regularly he would take work in hand while on holiday; and there is more than one reminiscence of Lightfoot sailing on a stormy sea or being driven down some precipitous path calmly correcting the proofs of Ignatius, albeit recalled through an ‘idealizing haze,’ in Dr. Thompson’s words. Even after a hard day he would try to find some time for study, often into the early hours of the morning. One of his ‘sons’ (the ordinands who trained at Auckland) recalls with pleasure that the preface to the Ignatius volumes is dated St. Peter’s Day 1885—a day on which it was Lightfoot’s custom to give himself fully and unstintingly to his ‘sons’ on their annual reunion. And part of the legend is the parallel with the Venerable Bede, writing to the last, till the pen fell from his fingers shortly before his death.
Such bare details and reminiscences speak volumes of the man and the impression he made, but the point I wish to develop here is one which emerges from all this: the fact that Lightfoot was able to hold together his historical critical scholarship with his firm Christian conviction, and the extent to which he was successful in doing so. I have already spoken sufficiently of Lightfoot’s commitment to critical historical scholarship. Here I want to focus attention on the other side of the dialectic in Lightfoot’s scholarship. The matter is put strongly and perhaps somewhat unwisely in his earliest work, the Norrisian Prize Essay. There in his concluding defense of revealed religion, he maintains stoutly:
There is a testimony which it is not in the power of historical criticism to grasp; the testimony of the heart which finds in Christianity its deepest aspirations realized and its fondest hopes fulfilled. . . . If then the Christian is asked whether his books are not to be tried by the same standard as all other writings, he will fearlessly answer that they are not; he will not shrink indeed in the investigation from any of the aids of philosophy or criticism, for, as the truth is, he believes that his Faith, will be found to be ever one in accordance with the strictest criticism and the highest philosophy, but he will deprecate an avowed determination on the part of those who approach this question, to divest themselves of the inward influences of Christianity.
The passage rings slightly awkwardly when we recall Lightfoot’s outspoken commitment to historical criticism, already documented in the first section of this paper. But the point is clear enough. There is a truth dimension in earliest Christian texts and traditions which is not wholly subject to historical criticism, a truth, we might say, whose perception involves a personal engagement with the subject matter of the text. Lightfoot had no fear of historical criticism because he saw truth as undivided. The truth of the Christian faith was attested both by personal experience and by a critical study of history. He did not see faith and criticism as incompatible. He did not fall into the trap of thinking that a wholly objective assessment of historical data was possible. He did not think criticism was possible without presuppositions. His fiercest criticisms, indeed, were leveled at those who seemed to him to be imposing their ideas or faith uncritically on the text. ‘We Christians,’ he comments in one place, in a passage also cited by Professor Hengel,
are constanstly told that we must expect to have our records tested by the same standards which are applied to other writings. That is exactly what we desire, and what we do not get. It is not easy to imagine the havoc which would ensue, if the critical principles of the Tübingen school and their admirers were let loose on the classical literature of Greek and Rome.
And while he did not hesitate to bring his own faith presuppositions into play, he was more than ready to let his findings react back critically on his presuppositions—even if we judge that he did not always do so successfully. So in the preface to Galatians he recalls the words of Hooker—‘A number there are who think they canot admire, as they ought, the power of the Word of God, if in things divine they should attribute any force to man’s reason’ and continues:
The caution is equally needed (in the present day). The abnegation of reason is not the evidence of faith but the confession of despair. Reason and reverence are natural allies, though untoward circumstances may sometimes interpose and divorce them.
As John Robinson justifiably notes in his Cathedral Lecture on Lightfoot: ‘Lightfoot would have been horrified to think that serious scholarship could by-pass the historical questions or suppose they could be settled a priori by the theological.’
The extent to which Lightfoot was successful in holding together his faith commitment and his critical scholarship in fruitful interaction is probably nowhere more clearly illustrated than in his lengthy essay on ‘The Christian Ministry’ in his commentary on Philippians—the Christian teacher writing ten years after his own ordination as priest and nine years before he became bishop, and looking, appropriately, at the historical roots and origin of his own office and ministry.
He begins with a remarkable description of ‘the Kingdom of Christ,’ which Professor Barrett also cited.
It has no sacred days or seasons, no special sanctuaries, because every time and every place alike are holy. Above all it has no sacerdotal system. It interposes no sacrificial tribe or class between God and man, by whose intervention alone God is reconciled and man forgiven. Each individual member holds personal communion with the Divine Head. To Him immediately he is responsible, and from Him directly he obtains pardon and draws strength.
Having thus stated what appears to him as the ideal, he goes on at once to qualify it.
Yet the broad statement, if allowed to stand alone, would suggest a false impression, or at least would convey only a half-truth. It must be evident that no society of men could hold together without officers, without rules, without institutions of any kind; and the Church of Christ is not exempt from this universal law. The conception in short is strictly an ideal, which we must ever hold before our eyes, which should inspire and interpret ecclesiastical polity, but which nevertheless cannot supersede the necessary wants of human society, and, if crudely and hastily applied, will lead only to signal failure. As appointed days and set places are indispensable to her efficiency, so also the Church could not fulfil the purposes for which she exists, without rulers and teachers, without a ministry of reconciliation, in short, without an order of men who may in some sense be designated a priesthood.
Here indeed is a striking vision: the kingdom of God as a society without hierarchy and priesthood; an ideal that should inspire and interpret ecclesiastical polity; ecclesiastical orders and priesthood as a social rather than a theological necessity.
This two-handed emphasis—on the necessity of the historical development, and the distinction from that of the theological ideal—is illustrated on what follows. The main section of the essay is given over to tracing the emergence of the threefold order of ministry—deacon, presbyter, bishop, with particular attention paid to the latter. In a wide geographical and historical sweep he observes clear ‘evidence for the early and wide extension of episcopacy throughout proconsular Asia’ in the second century; but he also notes that the striking silence of Ignatius and Polycarp on the subject so far as Philippi and Rome itself are concerned. He goes on to argue that the episcopate emerged out of the presbyterate, a progressive development slower in the West and faster in the East, and concludes:
Though something must be attributed to the frailty of human pride and love of power, it will nevertheless appear that the pressing needs of the Church were mainly instrumental in bringing about the result, and that this development of the episcopal office was a providential safeguard amid the confusion of speculative opinion, the distracting effects of persecution, and the growing anarchy of social life, which threatened not only the extension but the very existence of the Church of Christ.
To be noted again is his clear distinction of episcopacy as of the bene esse (the well-being) of the church, and not of the esse (the essence) of the church.
Having thus traced the historical development, Lightfoot proceeds to measure this historical reality against the theological ideal sketched out in the opening paragraph. He reserves some particularly critical comments for Ignatius: ‘Throughout the whole range of Christian literature, no more uncompromising advocacy of the episcopate can be found than appears in his writings.’ He speaks of ‘this extravagant exaltation of the episcopal office,’ and adds:
It need hardly be remarked how subversive of the true spirit of Christianity, in the negation of individual freedom and the consequent suppression of direct responsibility to God in Christ, is the crushing despotism with which this language, if taken literally, would invest the episcopal office.
The heresy of Montanus, he suggests was:
A rebound from the aggressive tyranny of hierarchial assumption—Wildly fanatical as were its manifestation, this reaction nevertheless issued from a true instinct which rebelled against the oppressive yoke of external tradition and did battle for the freedom of the individual spirit.
Such words, from one who was hardly a low churchman or pietest, reveal the striking ability of genuine Christian scholarship to be self-critical about its roots and tradition. His final conclusion on the subject demonstrates a marvelous ecumenical openness that is heartening to hear from one who was himself to become a bishop within the historic episcopate: ‘If the facts do not allow us to unchurch other Christian communities differently organized, they may at least justify our jealous adhesion to a polity derived from this source’ (divine sanction).
Lightfoot’s other main preoccupation in the essay is a sustained polemic against the ideal of sacerdotal priesthood. He had already sketched out the Christian ideal—‘as individuals, all Christians are priests alike.’
The Apostles never lost sight of (this idea) in their teaching. . . . For communicating instruction and for preserving public order, for conducting religious worship and for dispensing social charities, it became necessary to appoint special officers. But the priestly functions and privileges of the Christian people are never regarded as transferred or even delegated to these officers . . . the sacerdotal title is never once conferred upon them. The only priests in the Gospel, designated as such in the New Testament, are the saints, the members of the Christian brotherhood.
The subsequent emergence of the sacerdotal view of ministry he attributes to Gentile and heathen influence and, within the Christian community, particularly to the influence of Cyprian.
The only High Priest under the Gospel recognized by the apostolic writings is our Lord Himself. . . . (But) by the union of Gentile sentiment with the ordinances of the Old Dispensation, the doctrine of an exclusive priesthood found its way into the Church of Christ.
As a New Testament specialist myself, I can find nothing to fault in these statements. It remains something of a wonder to me, as evidently also to Lightfoot, that the successors of the NT Christians could so easily go back on the firm conviction of the NT writers that the old distinction between priest and people had been left behind once and for all—a failure, it would appear, of eschatological perspective and spiritual nerve.
As already noted, however, Lightfoot had also recognized the historical and social inevitability of the emergence of ‘an order of men who may in some sense be designated a priesthood.’ The way Lightfoot saw to resolve the resulting tension between apostolic ideal and historical outworking was for the minister to be regarded as a priest only:
As the mouthpiece, the representative, of a priestly race. . . . So long as this important aspect is kept in view, so long as the priesthood of the ministry is regarded as springing from the priesthood of the whole body, the teaching of the Apostles has not been directly violated.
Nor does he hesitate to draw the appropriate corollary in the closing paragraphs:
the minster’s function is representative without being vicarial. He is a priest, as the mouthpiece, the delegate, of a priestly race. His acts are not his own, but the acts of the congregation. Hence too it will follow that . . . his function cannot be absolute and indispensable. It may be a general rule . . . that the highest acts of congregational worship shall be performed through the principal officers of the congregation. But an emergency may arise when the spirit and not the letter must decide. The Christian ideal will then interpose and interpret our duty. The higher ordinance of the universal priesthood will overrule all special limitations. The layman will assume functions which are otherwise restricted to the ordained minister.
Such were Lightfoot’s views on Christian ministry. His essay caused much unhappiness in those of a more Catholic persuasion. His friend Hort could find little to fault in the historical account, but as ‘a staunch sacerdotalist’ could not agree on the doctrinal. And as late as July 1889, on a visit to Auckland, H. P. Liddon tried ‘to get him to reconsider his position regarding the Christian Ministry in his celebrated Essay,’ without apparent success, though Lightfoot evidently regretted some of the ‘inferences which Dissenters and others drew from his Essay.’ But Lightfoot himself had allowed the essay to remain unaltered through repeated editions of Philippians, explicitly denying in the preface to the sixth edition that he had abandoned the main opinions expressed therein, and reaffirming, both explicitly that the threefold ministry was of divine sanction, the point on which he evidently felt he had been misrepresented, and implicitly that his views on sacerdotal priesthood and lay ministry remained the same.
Lightfoot, then, would have questioned sharply the prevailing Catholic view, expressed in the Second Vatican Council, that ‘there is an essential difference between the faithful’s priesthood in common and the priesthood of the ministry or the hierarchy, and not just a difference of degree,’ with its clear echo in the ARCIC statement on Ministry and Ordination. Contrast Lightfoot commenting on Clement: ‘The Minister is a priest in the same sense only in which each individual member of the congregation is a priest.’ On the other hand, he would almost certainly have welcomed the Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx’s study of ecclesiastical ministry which, in effect, takes up from Lightfoot to show that in the early centuries priesthood was thought to be vested primarily in the community and only secondarily and derivatively in the ordained. And he would have welcomed too, no doubt, those within his own tradition, like Anthony Harvey, who take up the same question as to whether presidency of the Eucharist need always be confined to the priestly ordained, with a clear negative answer. We should note also that during his time as bishop, Lightfoot was a pioneer in the advocacy and promotion of lay ministry—giving lay people a new and effective voice in the church councils and calling into being a trained body of lay readers, lay preachers and lay evangelists. In 1885 he was calling for a generative representative assembly in the Church of England. To similar effect John Robinson notes Lightfoot’s commendation of women deacons—‘As I read my New Testament—Phoebe is as much a deacon as Stephen or Philip is a deacon—and he gave her a place in the window of Trinity Chapel a century before the College admitted women!’
In all this Lightfoot was a hundred years ahead of his time. The emphases which characterized his teaching on the Christian ministry have only recently come to general prominence in the rediscovery of the ministry of the whole people of God. But the attempts to relate that to the much more deeply established concepts of ordained ministerial priesthood have so far proved singularly unsuccessful, undermined, it would appear, by a combination of appeal to tradition, professional pride and vested interest. But Lightfoot’s resolution of the conflict between NT Scripture and subsequent tradition, in terms of a priestly ministry which is competent as such only insofar as it is representative of the priestly people, seems to provide a way forward on issues like lay presidency and women ministry which respects both Scripture and tradition. For if the priesthood of the individual is a function of the priesthood of the congregation, then it would seem to follow that those who are recognized as representative of the congregation need no further justification in essence in order to exercise a priestly ministry on behalf of the congregation. And even if that observation might be regarded as overhasty by some, at the very least, it would seem desirable for the church, and the Church of England in particular, to go back to one of its most distinguished writers on the subject of Christian ministry and sit once again at his feet. He being dead, yet speaketh.
With such thoughts these all too personal reflections on Lightfoot come to an end. Having returned to Lightfoot after many years it has been fascinating to begin to realize how much of my own concerns, a century later, have mirrored his and no doubt have been influenced by him. It is a debt I am more than happy to own. How could one who has written on Unity and Diversity in the New Testament not warm to the words of Lightfoot’s sermon on Paul’s idea of unity, cited by Dr. Thompson: ‘A moment’s reflection will show, that uniformity is impoverishment, and that diversity is absolutely necessary, if there is to be anything like fullness in the final result.’ Lightfoot as critical historian and Lightfoot as Christian teacher is a model I cherish. And his debate with Baur takes us to the heart of the question, more pertinent than ever, regarding the relation of Christianity and Judaism and the emergence of Christianity’s distinctive features. I find also that I have followed his advice given to the future dean of Wells: ‘Begin to write as soon as you possibly can. That was what Prince Lee always said to us. That is the way to learn. Almost all I have learnt has come from writing books. If you write a book on a subject, you have to read everything that has been written about it.’ Good advice still for postgraduate and aspiring scholar, even if, as Professor Hengel reminded us, it is less realistic in the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth.
But let me close with the description of Lightfoot’s funeral, on 26th December 1889, by his lifelong friend, Edward Benson, then archbishop of Canterbury, which I first discovered written out in the flyleaf of Lightfoot’s Galatians, a volume which I bought from the library of a Church of Scotland minister living next door in 1960, to become one of the foundation stones of my own library. Benson recalls:
The rite at Durham and Auckland most beautiful. Late yestreen he was brought and laid eastward in the middle of the Chapel of the Nine Altars with tapers at head and foot, and the red Cross overlying him on the purple pall. Clergy watched through the night in relays. Next morning the choir perfectly filled with clergy and the nave with people. I was on the North side of the Sanctuary and his coffin now before the Altar. It was borne by Auckland students in relays. The great people of the County and all manner of ‘representatives’ followed him—and poor miners are getting confirmed because ‘he told them and they didn’t mind, but now that he is gone they must.’ There is no class of men that the scholar has not touched. The simple, the sincere, unpretending heart of him was greater than his greatest criticism.