As we find ourselves emerging from fundamentalism, we begin to see that a straightforwardly historical way of reading divine Scripture is fraught with problems. Yet we still hang on to the assumption that the Scriptures’ main purpose is to provide historical information about the persons and events narrated.
That’s just not the case. For instance, as I’ve already pointed out, in his story of Jesus’ transfiguration, we find that Mark has fashioned a powerful version of a literary trope that everyone in the ancient world would have recognized— the apotheosis of a hero. Only in Mark’s usage, just at the moment his reader would have expected Jesus to ascend to the heavens, there to be forever enshrined as a constellation like Heracles, or as a star like Caesar, Jesus refuses his apotheosis. And if he refuses to go up to the sky, then he will have to come back down the mountain to the valley below. And if he does that, it can only mean he really will die, just as he’s been telling his disciples. But now we know that he will do so willingly; and that he’s entirely in charge of what’s going to unfold.
So, did the transfiguration “really happen”? There is no way of telling, one way or the other. We have only this story— which as we’ve seen is deeply literary— and we have nothing more— to tell us about it. So we have to find the meaning inside the story, not outside it, in history. We have no access to the history.
Scholars have come to appreciate that our sacred texts are literary through and through— and that only in the most rare of instances can they really be resolved to “history” in any sense that we think of “history”. This means they were never intended to “prove” anything historically. Archaeology simply doesn’t back up the OT as we once assumed; and in fact for much of both Testaments, the nature of the story itself pretty much denies us any independent corroboration. Look at how much of the narrative is concerned with private, interpersonal conversations between historically insignificant people. Can anyone prove that Saul’s father told him to go looking for his father’s asses? (1Sm 9.3). Was the woman who came to Jesus in Sidon a Syro-Phoenician Greek (Mk 7.26), or a Canaanitess (Mt 15.22)? Did the events in Jerusalem before Jesus’ arrest take two days (Matthew), or three (Mark)? Did the Transfiguration even happen?— there’s just no evidence on which we could build a case, one way or the other. So apparently building that case is not the point. And that’s the point we forget.
For modern persons, whether something is “true” or not is often treated as a question about scientific verifiability. Do we have external evidence? Supporting documentation? Can modern devices and methods verify it? Yet even where we have mountains of documentation, we’ve come to realize that any historical account entails point of view and a choice. Choose a different vantage point, or different key moments, and we’d understand the whole “history” differently. We all know how black people, and women, and gays, and Nikola Tesla were written out of the histories we tell, and we’ve begun to realize that those voices need to be restored.
The Scriptures aren’t even trying to give us “history”. Rather, they seek to communicate an experience. Of the OT, the subject is not “ancient history”, but what Israel experienced in her walk with her Creator God through the desert of Empire (to paraphrase Ezekiel 20.35). The OT is definitely not a report of events in the Ancient Middle East, but Israel’s own huge, sprawling story of the meaning of the history of Empire(s) in which she was caught up. For the narrative, a few examples were selected and curated, from a certain point or points of view, in order to highlight and convey that experience of God. In telling about this, the Bible aims to communicate the meaning of history— but the meaning of history is not the same thing as history itself!
When it comes to Jesus, the Gospel of Mark is our earliest and only source. Oh (perhaps) there’s another source, which scholars call “Q”— Q being an abbreviation for the German word Quelle, meaning “source”; but we have no evidence of any actual source document; the term “Q” simply designates those stories and sayings that are common to both Matthew and Luke, but which are not found in Mark. Whether this material existed as a separate written or oral source, or whether Luke just used Matthew in the same way that both he and Matthew used Mark, is an issue of debate. But Mark and “Q” together comprise 90% of the content of the Synoptic Gospels— and Q is not a narrative, but a collection. So it’s Mark who supplies the narrative— that is, the basic Gospel story. And— we have no outside corroboration for any of it.
And as to Mark— it’s already a highly elaborate, carefully constructed narrative in which events happen in formal series, for instance in A-B-C-B-A order (“chiasm”) or in matching sets of five, four, and three episodes— all of them told in a very carefully crafted manner, with microscopic attention to wording, and so on. History doesn’t happen in ABCBA order— certainly not again and again and again— and not in ways that can be expressed only by loading the account with careful allusions to the Greek translation of the Old Testament! From both structure and content, it’s obvious that Mark is a literary work from its very conception.
This highly literary work is our earliest and only source for “what happened”— we simply can’t get behind it. We have no outside information about the “historical Jesus”. We have no choice but to take the story we have on its own terms and to see what Mark is attempting to convey by it— and he conveys something other than a “blow-by-blow account” of Jesus’ “ministry”. He tells a story of Jesus. He gives us a literary account in order to convey an experience of Jesus.
Of course every literary work seeks to convey an experience of some kind— not primarily objective knowledge, even if it uses objective data in telling its story. Mark wants to communicate something other than “objective data”— as any writer of narrative does. But what Mark seeks to give us is the apostles’ own experience of Jesus. I hope to show you at length another time how the original ending of the Gospel— Mark 16.8— shows that he is perfectly aware of what he’s doing, and in fact is astonishingly brilliant at it. But when it comes to “objective facts”, we have no other source from which we could corroborate ANY of the “data” in Mark. So the “history” of Jesus, as such, is mostly indeterminable. We can of course make very interesting observations about how Matthew and Luke each treat Mark’s episodes in their own ways, in view of their own audiences and literary goals— and why they, and Mark, treated the common stories the ways they did. But none of this tells us “what happened”, for its own sake. Each is trying to convey the apostolic experience of Jesus, in terms they deem important for their own distinct and particular 1st-century audiences to get. And each is doing so on the basis of Mark, which is already a literary work, not a straightforward historical chronicle.
So if we want to find out “who Jesus was, and how much we can even really know about him”, as one of my friends puts it— we have no choice but to take the only path available to us, which is this literary one. But we are not left in the dark; precisely this literary work conveys the apostles’ own experience of Jesus!
As to whether Mark’s main figure (Jesus) really existed (people have often asked me this question), well, we can read Ehrman or NT Wright or just about any other reputable scholar on that question; they will all tell you that we have more evidence for the (mere) “existence” of Jesus than we do for Caesar or Alexander the Great. And yet nobody has any problem with Caesar’s “existence”; we simply take it for granted. But of Jesus, it is claimed that he was the Messiah, Savior, Incarnate Son, and so forth, and our attitude toward him has to do with how we think of the ultimate meaning and destination of our lives. So, denying Caesar’s existence would be a meaningless waste of time, but denying Jesus’ existence would mean we refuse to accept that he embodies the ultimate meaning and destination of our lives. Well, let the arguments rage— why not?— but let’s be aware of what we’re doing, when we argue passionately against an existence for which we have more evidence than for any other in antiquity.
At the end of the day, the Gospels aren’t interested in the mere history or activities of a historical figure named Jesus, but in the apostles’ own earth-shattering experience of one whom they recognized as the Lord of their faith. They aim to show us why and how they recognized him as God’s unique Anointed One, and what that turned out to mean for them. And they seek to convey this in such a way that confronts us with the same choice they faced: Do I align myself with this Jesus? Are his priorities, my priorities? Was he right about the nature of the world, of religion, of Empire?— or was the High Priest right, or Pilate, or ultimately, Caesar the one who got it right?
It would of course be exceedingly foolish, even insane, to align ourselves with a crucified failure. Except for one thing— this crucified failure was “declared Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Rm 1.4). In other words, God backed him up, and not Caesar. If you can believe it. And Mark has a really interesting way of showing that you do, in the last verse of his story (16.8). In a future post, I’ll explain that.
But that’s the meaning we are confronted with, in the Gospels. Their one and only purpose is to convey a challenge. And it’s a very practical one, with practical consequences:
“You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But— It. Is. Not. Thus among you” (Mk 10.42-43; the Greek is quite emphatic).
We have read the story as a story, and the story communicates the apostles’ experience of Jesus. And in entering into the story, we find ourselves asking, Do I trust this? Do I align myself with this “Jesus”?