Breaking the K.C. dullness curse: 7-27-15
Stopping a funeral to enforce rules: 7-29-15

Did Mark and Luke fictionalize Jesus? 7-28-15

As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a biblical literalist. In fact, as I've said more than once, you can take the Bible literally or you can take it seriously, but you can't do both.

Mythologizing-JesusIt's not that you can't find real history in the Bible -- both in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament. Indeed, you can. But you must be discerning about what is history and what is metaphor, myth and allegory, to say nothing of poetry.

A new book would seem to back up my point, but I have some hesitation about accepting it, well, very literally. It's Mythologizing Jesus: From Jewish Teacher to Epic Hero, by Dennis R. MacDonald, a professor of New Testament and Christian origins at the Claremont School of Theology.

MacDonald has spent much of his career finding ways in which the writers of the Gospels have drawn from the heroic Greek stories by Homer, Vergil and others to create accounts that would make Jesus look more superhuman. It's an interesting approach, and MacDonald makes a pretty persuasive case for his claimed connections between the gospels of Mark and Luke and Homer's Odyssey and Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid.

But MacDonald strikes me has being too sure of himself. He seems to dismiss -- or at least be deeply suspicious of -- the possibility that at least some of the stories told in the gospels are based on actual deeds and sayings by Jesus without needing to be pumped up with heroic overtones.

"A Jewish teacher named Jesus actually existed," he writes, "but within a short period of time, his followers wrote fictions about him, claiming that his father was none other than the god of the Jews, that he possessed incredible powers to heal and raise the dead, that he was more powerful than 'bad guys' like the devil and his demons, and that after he was killed, he ascended, alive, into the sky."

At least MacDonald doesn't do what some marginal New Testament "scholars" do, which is to deny that Jesus ever lived. Rather, he writes this:

"The indebtedness of Mark and Luke to the Homeric epics does not call into question Jesus' existence; the Evangelists simply injected him with narrative steroids to let him compete with the mythological heroes of Greeks and Romans."

So MacDonald claims that "most of the stories discussed here are fictions -- they never happened -- but they are fictions advocating a higher ethical standards than superheroes in Homer -- or Hollywood."

As I say, I detect in such confident claims a false certitude, and I wonder whether in reaching for parallels between the Greek stories and the gospels MacDonald stretches too far, finding more than is really there.

It seems not just possible but likely that Mark and Luke "imitated and transformed several Greek mythological poems," as MacDonald claims they did. But once he found evidence of such a pattern of adaptation and adoption, it appears as if he was willing to find it everywhere he looked -- not unlike a boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail.

I will leave it to other real New Testament scholars to decide whether MacDonald has proposed something useful and insightful or whether his conclusions are overdrawn in the way that those of various proponents of "Bible codes" have been.

In any case, this book is an intriguing read and worth the time to dig through it -- even if, like me, readers wind up not quite convinced of everything the author proposes.

* * *

WELCOMING PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

The Americans with Disabilities Act just turned 25, and although houses of worship were not required to follow its mandates, many of them have, as this RNS piece reports. In my own congregation's sanctuary, several years ago we created "cut out" spaces for wheelchairs. Now my stepson can sit next to us and not crowd an aisle. As theologian Jurgen Moltmann once said, a congregation without disabled people is itself disabled.

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.