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And does it matter? asks Walter Houston Forty-four years ago, when I started training for the ministry at Mansfield College, the high points of the week were the two weekly lectures on the New Testament by George Caird.
The lecture room was filled to bursting, when each series started, and when it finished. I remember to this day the electric thrill when he started his lectures on the ministry of Jesus by asking, “What was the political meaning of the mission of John the Baptist?” Paradoxically, to ask questions about the meaning of Jesus’ ministry in the Jewish world of the first century, brought it right up to date. Something of the same thrill comes across in a book I have just been reading, The Meaning of Jesus, by Marcus Borg and Tom Wright. Like me, though at somewhat later dates, Borg, a professor at Oregon State University in the USA, and Wright, now bishop of Durham, were students of George Caird’s, and share his concern to see Jesus in the history of his day. But they have come to very different conclusions about what is often called in shorthand “the Jesus of history”, and set their views side by side in alternating chapters of this book, which they published in 1999 (Harper One, £9.99 from the URC Bookshop). Many Christians would say, “The Gospels are good enough for me.” Is there a difference between the “Jesus of history” and Jesus as he appears in the Gospels? And if there is, does it matter?
christian views Tom Wright’s answer to this question, put crudely, is: “On the whole, the Gospels are reliable guides, both to what happened in the life of Jesus and to what it means.”
Marcus Borg’s answer is: “A lot of what is in the Gospels did not really happen, but is the result of reflection by Christians on the meaning of Jesus. That does not make it any less true, just true in a different way” - rather like the way in which most Christians in this country now think about the stories of creation in Genesis. Both views are the views of believing Christians, so does it matter which of them is right? I think it depends what you mean by “matter”. As we approach Holy Week and Easter we can think about the question in a more specific way. Why did Jesus die, and how should we understand his resurrection? Did Jesus intend to offer himself as a martyr or a sacrifice? Or was his death solely the consequence of his challenge to the authorities who wanted rid of him, after which Jesus’ followers began to work out what it might mean in the purpose of God?
Did Jesus’ body leave the tomb transformed into a glorious but still physical body, or did the earliest Christians, who spoke of having “seen the Lord”, experience his presence in just the same way as many later Christians have done, down to the present day?
Which way we answer these questions will make a difference to the way we use and think about the Gospels, and also to the way in which we worship. Does Easter commemorate a transforming event, or remind us of an eternal presence?
Most of us, if we have thought about these questions at all, will be inclined one way or the other, but where scholars like these are a help to us is in pointing us to actual evidence. There is no point in simply saying which we prefer. These are historical questions which we need historical evidence to answer.
On the other hand, all historical accounts, including the Gospels, give interpretation as well as facts. They tell us not only what happened, but why, and what it means. We may have different opinions about the factuality of the Gospels. But the interpretation of Jesus’ life that we find in them, as we hear them read Sunday by Sunday in church, or privately day by day, is at the centre of what we believe as Christians.
We believe in Jesus as the Word of God, whose life was given for the sin of the world and who is alive and present to his believers today. On those points Tom Wright and Marcus Borg are at one. The Revd Dr Walter Houston was until recently director of ministerial training at Mansfield College, Oxford and a fellow in theology
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