Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, the Meaning of Jesus (Harper Collins, 1999)

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Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus (Harper Collins, 1999)

Schedule:

Oct. 16 - Introduction

Part I. How Do We Know About Jesus?

Oct. 23 - Chapter 1, Seeing Jesus: Sources Lenses, and Method (Borg)

Oct. 30 - No Class; Pancake Breakfast

Nov. 6 - Chapter 2, Knowing Jesus: Faith and History (Wright)

Part II. What Did Jesus Do and Teach?

Nov. 13 - Chapter 3, The Mission and Message of Jesus (Wright)

Nov. 20 - (guest lecture by Stu Irvine) Chapter 4, Jesus Before and After Easter: Jewish Mystic and Christian Messiah (Borg)

Part III. The Death of Jesus

Nov. 27 - Chapter 5, Why Was Jesus Killed? (Borg)

Dec. 4 - Chapter 6, The Crux of Faith (Wright)

Part IV. “God Raised Jesus from the Dead”

Dec. 11 - Chapter 7, The Transforming Reality of the Bodily Resurrection (Wright)

Dec. 18 - Chapter 8, The Truth of Easter (Borg)

Dec. 25 - No Class; The Reason for the Season

Part VI. The Birth of Jesus

Jan. 1 - No Class

Jan. 8 - Chapter 11, Born of a Virgin? (Wright)

Jan. 15 - Chapter 12, The Meaning of the Birth Stories (Borg)

Part V. Was Jesus God?

Jan. 22 - Chapter 9, Jesus and God (Borg)

Jan. 29 - Chapter 10, The Divinity of Jesus (Wright)

Part VII. He Will Come Again in Glory

Feb. 5 - Chapter 13, The Second Coming Then and Now (Borg)

Feb. 12 - Chapter 14, The Future of Jesus (Wright)

Part VIII. Jesus and Christian Life

Feb. 19 - Chapter 15, The Truth of the Gospel and Christian Living (Wright)

Feb. 26 - Chapter 16, A Vision of the Christian Life (Borg)

(1) Does God personally intervene in the world?

Yes___9___

No____0___

Don’t Know__3___

(2) Was Jesus’ body resurrected?

Yes__8____

No____1___

Don’t Know__4___

(3) Could one have videotaped the resurrection?

Yes___2___

No____9___

Don’t Know__2___

(4) Did Jesus actually proclaim that he was the messiah prior to the resurrection?

Yes___7___

No____2___

Don’t Know__3___

(5) Did Jesus actually predict his second coming?

Yes___6___

No____4___

Don’t Know__3___

(6) Did Jesus actually predict the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem?

Yes___7___

No____3___

Don’t Know__2___

(7) Jesus’ resurrection is most important because-

4 (a) It gives us eternal life,

3 (b) It represents the defeat of evil,

7 (c) It makes possible our own transformation into new beings,

(8) Can historical research challenge matters of faith?

Yes__7____

No____3___

Don’t Know___1__

(9) Faith is primarily

8 (a) believing in things for which there is little empirical evidence,

7 (b) being receptive to grace,

1 (c) being able to overcome innate depravity and transform oneself more closely into a being in Christ’s image.

Things to discuss: (1) Wright’s three legged stool: Reason, scripture, tradition, (2) reason as a three legged stool: revelation, philosophy, and empirical science. (3) relation to previous classes (How do We Read this Thing, and C.S. Lewis).

Chapter 1, Seeing Jesus: Sources Lenses, and Method (Borg)

This way of seeing the gospels [as unproblematic historical narratives] led to a common Christian image of who Jesus was and why he mattered. Who was he? The only Son of God, born of the virgin Mary. His purpose? To die for the sins of the world. His message? About many things, but most centrally about the importance of believing in him, for what was at stake was eternal life (p. 3)

THE NATURE OF THE GOSPELS (pp. 4-6)

Two statements about the nature of the gospels are crucial for grasping the historical task: (1) They are a devloping tradition. (2) They are a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized (p. 4)

The Gospels as a Developing Tradition (pp. 4-5)

Borg dates written gospels to experiences of Jesus groups from 70-100 AD who dealt with two realities: (a) new settings and issues, and (b) the experience of the living Christ. When we read the gospels we need to try to differentiate the material that plausibly goes back to Jesus and the material that does not. To do this we analyze the texts themselves and compare them with other sources of historical knowledge of the era (including Acts, various epistles, non-canonical gospels, and non-Christian sources). An astonishing amount has been discovered about the gospels following this method, the consensus being that Mark was written first with Matthew and Luke being arrived at by combining and adding to the Mark community’s account of Jesus’ ministry while working in the material from the lost sayings gospel Q as well as information relevant to their own communities. John is dated much later and much more reflective of the John community (it contradicts the three synoptic gospels radically, for example presenting Jesus ministry as taking four years, as opposed to one).

As we study what Jesus looks like with this understanding of the composition of the gospels, then the above picture changes quite a bit.

History Remembered and History Metaphorized (pp. 5-6)

Metaphor involves seeing something as something else. Sometimes this is clear. Jesus isn’t literally “the light of the world.” Sometimes this is less clear. According to Borg, Jesus probably did restore sight to people. So this act is both literal history and a powerful metaphor. Borg thinks that turning water into wine, the circumstances concerning the delivery of the Sermon on the Mount, and the feeding of the multitudes are almost certainly literally false yet metaphorically true. The latter was inserted later to get the reader to see Jesus as Moses, delivering us from captivity and also as “the bread of life.” Again, not literally bread, but metaphorically so.

A CRUCIAL DISTINCTION (pp. 6-8)

Here Borg makes his strangest claim, that there is in a sense two Jesuses, the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus, which is what Jesus became after he died and who we continue to experience. For Borg the biggest claim here is that the pre-Easter Jesus did not realize that he was “Son of God, Word of God, Wisdom of God, messiah; very God of very God, begotten before all worlds, of one substance with God, the second person of the Trinity” (p. 7) etc.

The way he defends this (and we will study this in detail) is the way these properties accrete in the material written after Mark and the lost Q gospel. In addition Borg does not consider the traditional view of Jesus as a credible human being. For Borg, traditional Christianity recognizes the divinity of Jesus at the expense of his humanity.

MY LENSES FOR SEEING JESUS (pp. 8-9)

(1) Historical research into gospels as developing tradition, (2) historical study of ancient Judaism, (3) historical research into the culture of Jesus’ time, and (4) cross cultural study of religion. (examples- monks versus theologians, recent neurological work)

THE IMPORTANCE OF WORLDVIEW (pp. 9-11)

Fifth lens. Extent to which we can we bring our own religious perspective to the study versus positivistic secularism. (examples- Kant on suppressing reason to make room for faith. Danger of this. But also Davidson on principle of charity to argue this is unavoidable, and confidence that reason and faith are mutually supporting, consider apologetics such as C.S. Lewis’).

Weirdly, Borg does not address how our worldview must be different (i.e. Jesus didn’t have computers). Consider biblical literalists and constitutional originalists.

METHOD: EARLY LAYERS PLUS CONTEXT (pp. 11-14)

Really fine discussion here of how we discern the order of the writings, and then how historical context matters. Some of the most important evidence on ordering involves how the Matthew and Luke communities take material from Mark or proto-Mark and then add stuff to it. Here’s Robert Price with just a few examples of Matthew adding to or changing Mark.

He [the author of Matthew] amends Jesus’ teaching about divorce (Matthew 5:32; 19:9) as he read it in Mark 10:11-12. He lifts the blame from James and John (Mark 10:35) for jockeying for the chief thrones in the kingdom by having their pushy stage-mother ask Jesus instead (Matthew 20:20)

Where Mark had Jesus rebuke the disciples for failing to understand the parables (4:13), Matthew has him congratulate them for understanding them (13:51-52). Where Mark had Jesus unable to cure those who lacked faith (6:5), Matthew says he merely withheld the healing to punish them (13:58). Mark had Jesusexorcize a single demoniac (5:1 ff), where Matthew makes it a matched pair (8:28). Where Mark (11:2-7) has Jesus ride a single beast into Jerusalem, Matthew puts him on two, rodeo-style (21:2, 7). Mark had Jesus deflect the praise of the seeker who called him “good master” (10:17-18), whereas Matthew, apparently from Christological anxiety, rewords both the question and the answer so that the seeker no longer addresses Jesus as ‘good,’ and Jesus no longer comments on it, but on the Torah instead (19:16-17). Mark has the women flatly disobey the young man’s command to tell the disciples to meet the risen Jesus in Galilee (16:8), but Matthew has them relay the message after all (28:8). Jesus appeared to the women in Matthew 28:9-10, but he hadn’t in Mark. Matthew had Roman troops guarding the tomb (27:65-66; 28:4, 11-15); Mark didn’t. Mark had Jesus declare all food henceforth kosher (7:19), a point Matthew conspicuously omits (15:1-20).

As for Matthew gratefully yielding to the superior inside information from Peter via Mark, we only have to look at the only three places Mark says Peter (with James and John) saw things the others did not-and we find Matthew ‘corrects’ them, too! The private revelation on the Mount of Olives in Mark 13 grows to twice its length in Matthew 24-25. The Transfiguration in Mark 9 has Jesus’ clothing glow eerily (9:3), but Matthew makes Jesus’ face (17:2) to shine like the sun as well, in order to make him like Moses in Exodus 34:29-35. Mark has Jairus ask Jesus to heal his daughter while she yet lingers this side of the grave (5:23), only to be subsequently told she has died in the meantime (5:35) while the old woman healed of her menstrual flood has been detailing her whole, long story (5:33). But Matthew has Jairus approach Jesus only once the girl has died (9:18). (Robert Price, The Case Against the Case for Christ, pp.35-36)

An awful lot of Borg’s interpretation rest on taking Mark and the Q sayings gospel to be more authoritative than the material in Matthew, Luke, and John that are inconsistent with Mark and Q. The rest hinges on his comparative study of religions and broader ethical and metaphysical views. Wright is actually more frustrating to read because he is less explicit than Borg about how his broader ethical and metaphysical presuppositions influence his understanding of Jesus.

Food for thought. Did the original Jesus communities believe in the bodily resurrection?

Here is the penultimate paragraph of Robert Price’s critique of Wright.

Wright insists that the gospel writers must have believed in a literal resurrection. But can we be so sure of that, given certain elements of their narratives? Luke’s Emmaus scene is transparently symbolic of the invisible presence of Christ among his followers every Sunday at the breaking of the bread. (Wright finally admits this, but he insists that it also really happened, more of his both/and-ism.) Matthew ends not with an ascension to get Jesus off the stage of history (as in Acts), but with Jesus assuring the readers (at whom the Great Commission must be aimed) that he will continue with them until the end of the age. Does this not imply that the resurrection was after all the inauguration of the metaphorical/spiritual sense in which Matthew’s readers, like modern Christians, sense Jesus intangibly with them? John’s story of Doubting Thomas concludes with Jesus making an overt aside to the reader: “Blessed are those who have not seen yet have believed.” Can this writer have seriously intended his readers to think they were reading history? Such asides to the audience are a blatant and overt sign of the fictive character of the whole enterprise. As Barr pointed out long ago (Fundamentalism, 1977), the fact that Luke has the ascension occur on Easter evening in Luke 24 but forty days later in Acts chapter 1 (something Wright thinks utterly insignificant!) shows about as clearly as one could ask that Luke was not even trying to relate “the facts” and didn’t expect the reader to think so. ( )

As we dig into the debate between Wright and Borg we’ll have a chance to explore these passages.

Nov. 6 - Chapter 2, Knowing Jesus: Faith and History (N.T. Wright)

[Note: Syllabi and lecture notes are on-line at:

[Opening apology: The other chapters by Wright in this book specifically concern his wonderful view of the meaning of Jesus. This chapter is just his philosophical musings prior to that. But as such it is much more open to philosophical criticism/hairsplitting.]

Though Wright does not formally divide this short chapter, there are three main sections, containing: (1) some meditations on the connection between history and faith that suggest that all empirical knowledge must be grounded in non-empirical assumptions (pp. 15-19), (2) a discussion of what we can historically know about Jesus (pp. 19-24), (3) a very brief discussion of how faith can help the historian (pp. 24-27).

Though his discussion is nuanced, it is not nuanced enough (full disclosure: this is the kind of thing a philosophy professor is probably always bound to think), and this lack of nuance is the source of one of his main disagreements with Wright. Importantly, the way Wright presents the dichotomy between faith and history leads him to leave out the contributions that a priori apologetics and anthropological study of religion make to our quest for the historical Jesus. The absence of apologetics is extremely problematic. If Wright took into account the excellent a priori apologetics of his very own Simply Christian and C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity he would (like Borg) be less likely to restrain Jesus’ political message to being about Rome and Israel. If Wright took seriously the broader anthropological study of religion he would better thematize the manner in which the historical Jesus was a “spirit person” in Borg’s sense. But instead he opens himself up to the charge that he is overselling Jesus’ uniqueness.

1 Faith, History, and the Post-Modern Predicament (pp. 15-19)

Wright mentions “postmodernism” here as he inveighs against modernism and the enlightenment, but he never really explains what any of these come to.

In his classic book, The Postmodern Condition Jean Francois Lyotard explicitly characterized postmodernism as a distrust of meta-narratives, where meta-narratives are supposed to be overarching explanatory stories such as the communist’s historical materialism, or the capitalist’s combination of social contract theory with the pretense that “the invisible hand” of the market is connected to a brain. Unfortunately, in describing postmodernism, Lyotard of course constructed his very own meta-narrative. In this manner, philosophy always buries its own undertakers.

In most texts, “postmodernism” is something less innocent than Lyotard’s skepticism. It almost always combines (1) a healthy appreciation for the ubiquity of normative presuppositions (cf. Wright’s claim that “All historians have theological presuppositions” (p. 15-16), (2) with an unhealthy inability to take norms seriously (cf. “Faith prevents history from becoming mere antiquarianism” (p. 27)). Strangely, this very inability to make sense of objective norms is one of the founding moments of modernism, first diagnosed by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in terms of Weber’s account of how instrumental rationality concerning means and ends was crowding out all other forms of rationality, for example those concerning the desirability of the ends in question.

There are two ways this argument usually goes, the first as a critique of the objective pretensions of any kind of science, and the second as a critique of “human sciences” such as history.

First postmodern argument, against objective pretensions of science-

(1) Science is primarily concerned with describing the world in a way that maximizes our ability to predict (determining how systems will evolve) and retrodict (determining how systems did evolve).

(2) But in practicing science, scientists must compare theories on a wide variety of normative components, such as simplicity, fit with other theories, and elegance.

(3) In practicing science, scientists must be able to assess each other’s evidence normatively, as being more or less reasonable.

(4) Anyone who takes science to be a guide to what the world is really like is metaphysically privileging prediction and retrodiction.

(5) Theory comparison, rational assessment, and privileging prediction and retrodiction are all normative phenomena, concerning how people ought to behave.

(6) But then the ideal of a science which merely describes the world the way it is chimerical, and the pretense that there are “facts of the matter” that the scientist can describe are false. For communities with different norms will arrive at completely different scientific theories, and there will be no fact of the matter about which theory is better or worse than another.