Limitations of This Book
Limitations of This Book
Given the size of the book, I have had to defer one major topic (questions concerning Gospel reports of miracles) for a separate work. Moreover, to keep the book within its promised size constraints, I have focused on several key themes, rather than trying to treat the subject exhaustively. That is, I have neither tried to survey all that has been written (I confess this with genuine apologies to those with whose works I have failed to engage) nor tried to evaluate every incident or saying in the gospel tradition (despite offering a number of examples).3 In contrast to my more detailed work on the Gospels, I am not working pericope by pericope here.
Nor am I taking time to challenge attempts to harmonize all details in the Gospels; I am taking for granted that my readers know better. Students regularly consult synopses on the Gospels, comparing and contrasting parallel pericopes; they are thus aware that the Gospel writers both draw on a common pool of information at many points, and also exercise literary freedoms uncharacteristic of modern (though, I will argue, not ancient) writers on historical topics. To take one graphic example, whereas Mark (reflecting his Palestinian tradition) reports supplicants digging through a roof to reach Jesus, in Luke they tear off the roof tiles — an image more understandable to Luke’s northern Mediterranean audience.4 I think it is fair to surmise that those who protest the theological impossibility of such differences have never taken time to honestly and closely compare parallel texts in the Gospels.
For the sake of space, I will not seek to demonstrate such points that are self-evident in the Gospels themselves and barely ever in dispute among biblical scholars. Rather, I will argue instead that such adaptations appear within the acceptable bounds of ancient biography, historiography, and oral tradition. Yet I also wish to emphasize that the Gospels, like comparable ancient works, contain such adaptations in contrast to a novelistic, wholesale creation of events. Because works with historical interest and focused on recent events were expected to report genuine events, but had some flexibility in how they reported them, my focus is largely on events and patterns of teaching rather than on details. The clear evidence for historical tradition in the Gospels (not least being the conspicuous dependence of Luke and Matthew on sources) rules out assigning them to the genre category of novel, and thus invites us to explore the ways they used historical tradition where we can test this use.
I am not attempting to survey all works on the historical Jesus, which continue to be published at a rapid rate. While interacting with secondary literature on a subject is an important scholarly enterprise, it is not the purpose of this book. Some important works (such as A.-J. Levine’s Misunderstood Jew) came to my attention too late in the research process; many others are excluded neither for reasons of chronology nor content, but simply because interacting with further conversation partners than I already had would have taken this book in a direction different from its intended purpose.
I also do not intend to interact with Bart Ehrman’s textual objections to the reliability of the early Christian sources that include the Gospels, since these objections are not relevant to the main thrust of this book. One need not argue that the entire text of the Gospels as we have them is accurate; most scholars, in fact (including most conservative ones), will agree with most of Ehrman’s major textual decisions (e.g., the inauthenticity of Mk 16:9-20 or Jn 7:53-8:11).5 Observing that most scholars have not been driven to agnosticism by these textual issues, one scholar suggests that Ehrman’s agnostic response to them reflects his rigidly conservative background; if the text is either completely right or completely wrong, Ehrman’s skepticism is a logical conclusion. Most biblical scholars do not insist on such a forced choice, just as most historians would not.6 (Ehrman himself has more recently attributed his agnosticism to the problem of suffering in the world, which appears to me to make far more understandable sense as an objection, though not one that draws on his text-critical expertise.)
Even if the textual situation were far more muddled than it is, what we have is sufficient for general conclusions. For example, this book will later point to a number of Jewish parallels with Jesus’ teachings, parallels hardly introduced to the Gospels by later Egyptian Christian scribes!7