The Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible, Volume 3: H-L by Merrill C. Tenney & Zondervan

Author:Merrill C. Tenney & Zondervan [Tenney, Merrill C. & Zondervan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Dictionaries & Encyclopedias, Reference, Encyclopedias & Subject Guides, Bible Study & Reference, Religion, Religion & Spirituality, Christian Books & Bibles, Christian
ISBN: 9780310876984
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2010-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

III. Various approaches to the life of Christ

A. The traditional approach. Although the available sources are insufficient to construct a biography of Jesus in the modern sense of the term, the traditional approach to the sources has always maintained that the historical reports in the Gospels are essentially trustworthy. It had always been assumed, until the rise of 18th-cent. rationalism challenged it. The large amount of space devoted to the passion and resurrection narratives was no problem for those who saw no discrepancy between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. Primitive Christian belief fastened on the importance of Christ’s death and resurrection, abundantly proved by Acts and the Epistles within the NT. The apparently lopsided arrangement of material in both the Synoptic Gospels and in John bears witness to the major content of the early Christian faith. It was not unreasonable to suppose that if so important an element of faith was accurately reflected in the evangelist’s arrangement, the rest of the material should be regarded as equally historical.

Certain difficulties were nonetheless recognized. Some explanation had to be given of the instances where apparent disagreements occurred within the Synoptic Gospels or between them and John. The traditional approach to such problems was harmonistic. Since it was maintained that there could be no discrepancy within the inspired records, it must be possible to reconcile apparent contradictions. Many of these harmonistic attempts were more ingenious than convincing. When, for instance, it was maintained (e.g., by the 16th-cent. theologian Andreas Osiander) that JAIRUS’S daughter must have been resurrected more than once because the incident is placed in a different sequence within the Synoptic Gospels, the improbability of such a solution becomes at once apparent. It was the weakness of much of the traditional approach to the Gospels that it tended to overstress some feature, such as the order of events, without sufficient examination of the validity of the basic assumptions. Dogmatic considerations were more important than historical, with the consequence that the older traditionalists exposed themselves to rationalistic attacks. Until that time there had been no question about the validity of the miraculous. The Christ of faith was so deeply entrenched in the religious concepts that it was perfectly reasonable to suppose that he had power over the natural world to such a degree that in his hands the abnormal became normal.

The advantage of such an approach is obvious. All the Gospels may without question be treated as historical sources, and the main preoccupation of any scholar producing an outline of the life of Jesus is to discover the best method of harmonizing the accounts. Since John’s account presupposes a longer period of ministry than the synoptics, it has been the usual procedure of traditionalists to fit the synoptic outlines as far as possible into the Johannine structure. This traditional approach to the sources has been attacked on several fronts during the last two centuries of BIBLICAL CRITICISM. It is essential to have some insight into the grounds for these attacks to appreciate the position of modern criticism in its approach to the historical Jesus.

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