'Prophecy Historicized', 'History Remembered' and 'History Scripturalized'

[patrick457]

I know the topic is a bit late season-wise, but nevertheless:

One of the theories the (in)famous John Dominic Crossan is known for is the concept of the Passion narratives in the Gospels being ‘prophecy historicized’. The idea goes that since all the disciples fled when Jesus was arrested (the male ones, at least), they had no clue just exactly what had happened from there up to the crucifixion; they know only the bare fact that Jesus was sentenced to death by crucifixion rather than say, beheaded or speared or some other method - mostly thanks to the women who watched “from a distance” - but beyond that, nothing. They had no idea whatever trial(s) may have occurred, if they even occurred at all, or even where (or if) Jesus had been buried. (If He was, it was most likely not by friends, but by enemies, and they would have either dug a shallow grave or thrown His body in a pit.)

What the disciples did discover was that Jesus’ message continued to work powerfully within the community that He had established. Convinced that Jesus was eventually vindicated by God, Jesus’ followers had to fill in their very hazy knowledge of the historical details about certain parts of Jesus’ life (such as His birth or death) by looking back at the Old Testament, which the authors thought would yield some information as to how Jesus must have died. In other words, the Passion narratives are an after-the-fact account of Jesus’ suffering (of an admittedly mostly ‘fictional’ nature).

According to this model, when the early Christians read various texts like Psalm 22, with passages like “All who see me mock me” or “They divide my garments among them” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” they thought that people must have mocked Jesus and divided His garments, or that He must have quoted the Psalm shortly before expiring. Hey, these are prophecies which must refer to Jesus after all, are they not?

Crossan explains the concept thus in his Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography:

My proposal is that Jesus’ first followers knew almost nothing whatsoever about the details of his crucifixion, death, or burial. What we have now in those detailed passion accounts is not history remembered but prophecy historicized. And it is necessary to be very clear on what I mean here by prophecy. I do not mean texts, events, or persons that predicted or foreshadowed the future, that projected themselves forward toward a distant fulfillment. I mean such units sought out backward, as it were, sought out after the events of Jesus’ life were already known and his followers declared that texts from the Hebrew Scriptures had been written with him in mind. Prophecy, in this sense, is known after rather than before the fact.

As one can note from the quote above, Crossan likes to contrast this theory with what he calls ‘history remembered’ (something like each and every detail in the accounts are all purely, dare I say just historical in nature), which for him is typified in the work of Fr. Raymond Brown. Needless to say, this is a rather gross, over-simplified caricature of Brown’s idea, which surmises that while the “basic incidents” of the Passion narratives are indeed derived from “early Christian memory,” also sees the whole process as involving a degree of embellishment. For Crossan and others who hold the theory, the ‘prophecy historicized’ model is plausible because the alternative model of ‘history remembered’ is weak. For them, it is just not plausible that mere memory could have so drenched the text with Scriptural quotations and allusions.

As you’d expect, there have been quite a number of people out there who disagree with Crossan’s theory, pointing out its flaws. (Wouldn’t it be gratuitous to assert that Jesus’ followers did not make any effort to find out what really happened? How come Crossan thinks that the male disciples fleeing and the women watching from afar are historical details when these themselves are clear Scriptural allusions? etc.) Of particular note is Mark Goodacre’s criticism of the idea.

He proposes an alternative model called ‘scripturalization’ (or ‘history scripturalized’): the idea being that the early Christians, when they spoke of the Passion, cannot help but retell it using language and imagery drawn from Scripture. (Goodacre compares this process to how some modern-day Christians may use Biblical language in everyday life.) The idea was that there was an intimate, dynamic interaction between event, memory, tradition and Scriptural reflection: the basic traditions about the events generated Scriptural reflection, which in turn influenced the way the traditions were remembered and retold. In other words, the tradition was ‘scripturalized’. For instance, rather than just simply saying, say, that Jesus was naked on the cross or that there were hecklers passing by, the Evangelists at this point make conscious allusions to the passages in Psalm 22: “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots” and “All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads.”

For Goodacre, a possible location for this process of scripturalization was the liturgy: the first generations Christians may have had, from a very early date, commemorated the Passion at a fixed time period (possibly the Jewish Passover), when they would retell and relive the events surrounding Jesus’ arrest and death, in a liturgical context. This then would have left its own mark on the Gospel accounts.

 

[TimothyH]

To which do you ascribe, Patrick?

-Tim-

 

[fhansen]

There would’ve been plenty of witnesses who followed Jesus along the way, the women disciples for one, perhaps Simon of Cyrene would’ve given a testimony, other, lesser known followers as well. It makes more sense to think that actual, witnessed, history was reported and that history was “scripturalized” in the accounts, that it was noted with awe how well certain OT prophesies meshed with the actual events.

 

[Dave_Noonan]

I know the topic is a bit late season-wise, but nevertheless:

I think this process would probably require a good deal more textuality than Goodacre allows for in his thesis. I’m also of the opinion that thinking about the Gospels and even the person of Jesus as midrash has the potential for being helpful here.

 

[patrick457]

There would’ve been plenty of witnesses who followed Jesus along the way, the women disciples for one, perhaps Simon of Cyrene would’ve given a testimony, other, lesser known followers as well. It makes more sense to think that actual, witnessed, history was reported and that history was “scripturalized” in the accounts, that it was noted with awe how well certain OT prophesies meshed with the actual events.

There is actually one criticism levelled Crossan’s idea: there are elements within the narrative itself that do not have any direct Scriptural warrant (such as the presence of characters like Simon of Cyrene) and thus are rather unlikely to have been literary creations based on OT prophecies. In other words, they have too much the ring of factuality (or at least, historical verisimilitude) into them to be the mere products of ‘prophecy historicized’.

 

[patrick457]

To which do you ascribe, Patrick?

-Tim-

I actually find Goodacre’s idea of ‘scripturalization’ to be a quite convincing explanation of the data, though Dave above also seems to have a point.

Goodacre borrows the term from Judith H. Newman (Praying by the Book: The Scripturalization of Prayer in Second Temple Judaism, 1999), who in turn had derived it from her teacher James L. Kugel. Kugel originally used the term (“Topics in the History of the Spirituality of the Psalms” in Jewish Spirituality from the Bible Through the Middle Ages, 1986) with reference to the increasing perception of the Psalms as Scripture. Newman takes the term in a different direction entirely in her monograph: she uses the term to describe the process which occurred during the Second Temple period of Jewish prayers increasingly adopting Scriptural models, precedents and language. Increasing devotion to developing Jewish Scriptures (in a time when the whole notion of a ‘canon of Scripture’ is still very vague), in a liturgical context in which such the Scriptures were getting used more and more, led inexorably to the intermingling of Scripture with prayer. Goodacre adopts and adapts Newman’s usage to describe the intimate interaction between Scripture and historical tradition which might have occurred in the Passion narratives (more specifically, that of Mark’s).

 

[patrick457]

Just to explain Crossan’s theory further:

Crossan believes that the non-canonical Gospel of Peter, which is regarded by the mainstream as dating from the 2nd century and secondary to the canonical gospels, in fact preserves the earliest Christian attempt to transform Old Testament prophecies into history about Jesus. He calls this underlying kernel the Cross Gospel and assigns it to a date preceding the synoptic gospels - somewhere before AD 70, at the earliest somewhere during the 40s. According to Crossan, the gospel of Mark (which he thinks is the earliest of the four) elected not to use the fantastic elements found in Peter as such, but deliberately disassembled and relocated fantastic elements of the story to other, pre-death scenes; the other three Evangelists followed suit. The rather odd thing in this hypothesis is, that if this theory is correct, then the tradition apparently began with the blatantly fantastic and the overtly anti-Jewish and increasingly moved in the direction of the historically restrained and sober!

 

[patrick457]

Dale C. Allison in his work Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History has a rather nice summary of it all (pp. 387-389). Footnotes have not been included.

For John Dominic Crossan, the canonical accounts of Jesus’ passion are less “history remembered” than they are “prophecy historicized.” Jesus did not climd the Mount of Olives and there, in his distress, pray for deliverance. Someone, in order to make a theological point, fabricated this poignant episode by borrowing from 2 Sam 15, where King David flees to the Mount of Olives after learning that he has been betrayed. Nor did the sky go dark at noon when Jesus hung from his cross. A Christian concocted this marvel on the basis of Amos 8:9-10: “On that day, says the Lord GOD, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.” Mark’s darkness is not memory but myth, not prophecy come to pass but prophecy turned into story.

Jesus did, on Crossan’s view, create a disturbance in Jerusalem’s temple, and a sympathizer did betray him; and he did come to grief on a Roman cross. Yet the individual paragraphs that make up the passion narratives “are so linked to prophetic fulfillment” that subtracting the latter “leaves nothing but the barest facts.” Prophetic proof texts, not veridical recollections, were the chief inspiration for Mark 14-16 and its canonical and extracanonical counterparts.

Crossan’s position is familiar music to those acquainted with the history of critical scholarship. Rudolf Bultmann was, regarding the historicity of the episodes in Mark 14-15 and its parallels, almost as reserved as is Crossan; and long before both of them, David Friedrich Strauss gave the passion narratives a very critical going-over.

Those who have read the secondary literature will also know of scholars who have been less skeptical. Crossan’s Who Killed Jesus? is largely a response to Raymond Brown’s The Death of the Messiah, a massive and massively informed two-volume work that represents a scholarship much more sanguine about finding history in the passion narratives. Crossan put the difference between himself and Brown this way: “Ray Brown is 80 percent in the direction of history remembered. I’m 80 percent in the opposite direction.”

If Crossan has rejected what is, to his mind, Brown’s excessive confidence, Mark Goodacre has in turn criticized what he regards as Crossan’s undue skepticism. Goodacre contents that Crossan cannot plausibly explain why so many items in the passion narratives—Golgotha, Simon of Cyrene, and the inscription over the cross, for instance—were not manufactured from the Tanak. Beyond that, “history remembered” and “prophecy historicized” are not, according to Goodacre, mutually exclusive categories, as though we much dub each episode one or the other. Such a contrast is too stark. The untidy truth is that “traditions generated scriptural reflection, which in turn influenced the way the traditions were recast.”

To illustrate: Goodacre believes (as does Crossan) that some female followers of Jesus witnessed his crucifixion. Yet the account of this in Mark 15:40—“There were also women looking on from a distance ἀπὸ μακρόθεν]; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome”—seems to take up the language of LXX Ps 37:12: “My friends and companions drew near before me and stoo, and those closest to me from a distance ἀπὸ μακρόθεν].” Here, then, we cannot say that the Second Gospel gives us nothing but “history remembered” or nothing but “prophecy historicized.” Mark 15:40 is rather, to use Goodacre’s apt term, “history scripturalized”—that is, memory written up in the language of the Jewish Bible. As Goodacre finds this to be the case elsewhere and indeed often in the passion narratives, he sees things differently than does Crossan. Memories and biblical phrasing need not be indirectly proportional, as though when one increases, the other must decrease.

Who has the better of the argument? Although Crossan’s analysis of the wide-ranging intertextuality of the passion traditions is largely persuasive, those traditions likely contain more memory than he supposes. The Qumran pesharim show us that the ancient Jews could move from history to Scripture as well as from Scripture to history; and it requires no imagination but only knowledge of Matthew’s use of Mark to grasp how almost effortlessly a scripturally learned mind can infuse inherited materials with biblical idioms and phrases.

To biblicize is not necessarily to invent. Eusebius, when recounting Constantine’s victory over Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian bridge, cast the latter in the role of Pharaoh, the former in the role of Moses, which does not mean that they fought no such battle; and John Bunyan, writing of his own conversion, drew heavily upon the New Testament account of Paul’s becoming a Christian, which scarcely entails that Bunyan’s recollections are free of facts. So Goodacre is correct on one crucial point: that a story is scripturally indebted or lays implicit or explicit claim to fulfill prophecy does not, in and of itself, tell us whether it has an anchor in history. A memory can be told in many languages, including the language of Scripture.