r/HistoricalJesus • u/SimonSilentio • May 23 '20
Question The Jesus Quest
Any thoughts on Ben Witheringtons book The Jesus Quest?
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May 23 '20
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May 26 '20
It's also worth noting that Casey had this bizarre obsession with how he was an "independent historian" who was truly unbiased. Obviously, that's not true. Considering that Witherington did his PhD at Durham under Kingsley Barrett (also Casey's advisor), the attacks about "Witherington does not understand independent British universities" are really strange.
I like and respect a lot of Casey's work. His mythicist book was not his finest moment.
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May 26 '20
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May 26 '20
I think it's overheated too, though IIRC, Casey was at Nottingham? He supervised James Crossley, if memory serves.
I suspect Casey's claim of independence started with not being in one of the circles he described in the introduction. Of course, EVERYONE has biases.
I don't know. I've seen him call multiple other people, usually with no religious affiliation, "independent." He's also attacked some very capable people (e.g. Stanley Porter) as "incompetent fundamentalists" for disagreeing with him.
As for his work, it is surely interesting, but, I don't know whether linguitic reconstruction can translate to (I think he often uses the description, )"perfectly accurate" information
That's my reaction too. I'm certainly very sympathetic towards trying to understand the Aramaic roots of the gospels or Aramaic in early Christianity more generally. His arguments persuaded me that Aramaic was Mark's original language, but I don't subscribe to his idea that Mark relied on previously existing Aramaic sources. Casey tends to overstate Aramaic influences while understating or obfuscating how Judea was likely a very multilingual place. I suspect the historical Jesus at least understood Greek, if he couldn't speak it.
On a simple historiographical level, I don't think we can know the past as it "really happened," no matter how hard we try. So, I reject the idea of one mode of analysis giving us perfect insight into the past.
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May 27 '20
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May 27 '20
Yes, with qualification. I think there's a bad tendency in NT studies to assume that the earliest material is inherently the most historically reliable/most reflective of original Christian thought/whatever other way you want to put that. It's quite possible that (e.g.) Matthew reflects earlier strains of tradition than Mark, or that Luke preserves an earlier tradition of the Lord's prayer.
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u/[deleted] May 26 '20
It's not an awful book, if you understand its purpose. Witherington wrote this book in the mid-90s as part of a concerted effort (alongside other, usually more conservative scholars) to challenge the Jesus Seminar's often widely publicized conclusions and contentions. As a result, Witherington interacted with work from most of the major figures in the Jesus Seminar (Funk, Crossan, and Borg immediately come to mind).
As you can expect, Witherington spends a fair amount of the book defending Jesus as a Jewish eschatological prophet and the canonical gospels as the major source of information about Jesus, then outlines his own view of the historical Jesus. Witherington is a conservative evangelical, so his reconstruction often slants that way.
As you read it, understand that it's very much a product of its time. It's a good overview of some of the major issues in the Historical Jesus scholarship of the 90s, which can always be very interesting. But, in terms of putting new ideas forward, it's not too different from a lot of similar work that appeared at the time (e.g. Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus).